OPINION:
Two hundred eighty years ago. on April 13, 1743, Thomas Jefferson was born on the Shadwell Plantation of the British Virginia Colony, the third of 10 children. Jefferson’s passion for liberty started at a young age while interacting with Native Americans, including Cherokee Chief Ostenaco. He fell in love with libraries while studying philosophy at the College of William and Mary. where he became an admirer of Patrick Henry, who later coined the phrase “give me liberty or give me death.”
In 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia Bar, and from 1769 to 1775, he represented Albemarle County as a delegate in the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he pushed legislation enabling slaveholders to free their slaves without approval from the royal governor and General Court. While practicing law, he took seven cases for slaves seeking freedom, arguing that the institution was against “natural law.” When one judge ruled against him, he gave his client money to escape bondage.
Jefferson began building Monticello in Charlottesville in 1768, and he married 23-year-old Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. After the British passed the Intolerable Acts In 1774, Jefferson wrote a “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” an argument for self-governance that became the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In 1775, at age 32 amid the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Jefferson was one of the youngest delegates to serve in the Second Continental Congress.
Inspired by Locke and Montesquieu’s views on freedom, Jefferson befriended John Adams, a leading voice for independence from the British crown, and a staunch abolitionist against slavery. Adams supported Jefferson’s appointment to the Committee of Five, charged with writing the Declaration of Independence. As the primary author, Jefferson added a passage condemning slavery, but it was omitted by other legislators. Fortunately, Jefferson’s preamble survived, immortalizing one the most profound sentences in history, the assertion that “all men are created equal.”
During the Revolutionary War, Jefferson helped work on the Constitution, and spent three years unsuccessfully trying to pass a bill for establishing religious freedom. From 1778 to 1781, Jefferson drafted 126 bills, many supporting education and “republican government.” The following year, in 1782, tragedy struck when Martha died at age 33. Leaving behind six children, she asked her husband to never remarry, a promise Jefferson kept. His daughter later wrote that her mother’s passing left Jefferson heartbroken.
In 1783, after the British surrender and Treaty of Paris, Jefferson chaired a committee charged with developing a framework for the new republican government and U.S. westward expansion. Jefferson plotted borders for nine new states, all with ordinances banning slavery. While many of his cartographic proposals were accepted, Congress rejected his ban on slavery.
In 1784, Congress sent Jefferson to join fellow abolitionists Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris as a U.S. minister. He spent five years there, helping to shape U.S. foreign policy and supporting Marquis de Lafayette, a French officer and hero in the American War of Independence. Jefferson lent Lafayette and others his residence for strategy sessions during the French Revolution.
At this time, Jefferson developed a romantic relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, whose children he later freed. His greatest mistake was not freeing his other slaves, a decision that has understandably drawn criticism from historians.
Deeply entrenched in the French Revolution, Jefferson supported the 1787 Constitutional Convention from abroad. His previous bills for religious freedom were revived by James Madison, who incorporated their ideas into the First Amendment as the establishment clause and free exercise clause.
Upon his return to America in 1789, Jefferson was appointed secretary of state by President George Washington, and from 1796 to 1800 he served as vice president under John Adams. Despite their political rivalry, historians have described Jefferson’s defeat of Adams in 1800 as one the first elections that resulted in the peaceful transfer of power. That same year, Jefferson sent Dr. Benjamin Rush a letter, in which he wrote the words inscribed on his memorial, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
During his presidency from 1801 to 1808, Jefferson secured the Louisiana Purchase from France, worked to assimilate Native American tribes in the new America, and as one of his last acts, outlawed the international slave trade. With the help of Abigail Adams, Jefferson and John Adams rekindled their friendship, and in 1812, the two began what historian David McCullough calls “one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.”
Perhaps fatefully, on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence, Jefferson and Adams both died. While two of America’s greatest forefathers passed that day, their legacies have lived on, immortalizing the eternal power of the United States as what Jefferson once called an “Empire of Liberty.”
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and senior U.S. official who now serves on the editorial board of The Washington Times.
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