Politics
1743 to 1826, Virginia
The Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the paradox of a slaveholding apostle of liberty.
Start learning Thomas →In a few hundred words drafted in a Philadelphia summer, Jefferson distilled the Enlightenment theory of rights into a charter that justified one revolution and seeded countless others.
Jefferson counted his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom among the three achievements he wished carved on his tomb - the law that made conscience free and severed the state from the church.
Jefferson trusted ordinary people to govern themselves more than any founder - through an educated citizenry, small self-governing wards, and a vision of a republic of independent farmers.
The author of human equality owned hundreds of enslaved people and freed almost none. Jefferson’s tortured, contradictory relationship with slavery is the deepest fault line in the American founding.
Jefferson was the Enlightenment made flesh - a statesman who believed reason, science, and free inquiry could remake politics, and who swore eternal hostility against every tyranny over the human mind.
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