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This article traces the life and historical record of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third President of the United States, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the principal architects of the early American republic. For broader context, see United States of America - History.

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 (N.S.), at Shadwell plantation in Goochland County (later Albemarle County), Virginia, to Peter Jefferson, a planter and surveyor, and Jane Randolph Jefferson, a member of one of Virginia's prominent planter families. Peter Jefferson died in 1757, leaving Thomas, then fourteen, as the eldest male heir and eventual master of a plantation worked by enslaved people.

Jefferson began his formal education under the Reverend James Maury, a classical scholar, and in 1760 enrolled at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. There he studied under William Small, a Scottish professor of natural philosophy whose influence Jefferson later credited as formative. Small introduced Jefferson to the Enlightenment intellectual tradition, including the works of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton - figures Jefferson would later call his “trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.”

After two years at William & Mary, Jefferson read law under George Wythe, one of Virginia's most distinguished lawyers and later a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767.

Jefferson practiced law in Virginia from 1767 until the courts closed in 1774 on the eve of the Revolution. He built Monticello, his mountaintop home in Albemarle County, beginning in 1768, a project that continued in various phases for decades and which he never considered fully complete. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow; the couple had six children, of whom two daughters survived to adulthood. Martha Jefferson died in 1782 after a prolonged illness following childbirth.

Jefferson was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 and quickly aligned himself with those opposing British parliamentary authority over the colonies. He contributed to the non-importation associations organized in response to the Townshend Acts and developed a reputation as a skilled draftsman of political documents, if not a notable public speaker.

In 1774 Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a pamphlet arguing that Parliament had no legitimate authority over the colonies and that the king's role was contractual rather than sovereign. The pamphlet exceeded what most colonial leaders were prepared to assert at the time but established Jefferson's standing as a constitutional theorist.

Jefferson was elected to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. After the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord and Congress's decision to move toward independence, Jefferson was appointed to the Committee of Five tasked with drafting a declaration. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin made revisions, and Congress made further alterations, but the document as adopted on July 4, 1776 (N.S.) was substantially Jefferson's draft. Its opening declaration that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” became the most cited passage in American political history.

Jefferson returned to Virginia in 1776 and served in the state legislature, where he worked to reform Virginia's legal code. His efforts produced bills disestablishing the Anglican Church, establishing religious freedom, and revising the criminal code. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777, was not enacted until 1786.

Jefferson was elected Governor of Virginia in 1779 and served two one-year terms. His tenure coincided with the most difficult phase of the Revolutionary War in the South. British forces under General Benedict Arnold raided Richmond in January 1781, and Jefferson evacuated the capital. In June 1781, British cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton raided Charlottesville and nearly captured Jefferson at Monticello. Jefferson escaped with little time to spare. The Virginia legislature later investigated his conduct, though he was formally exonerated.

Jefferson declined reelection and retired to Monticello. The death of his wife Martha in September 1782 deepened what Jefferson described as a prolonged depression, from which he emerged only when Congress offered him a diplomatic appointment to France.

Jefferson sailed for France in 1784 as a trade commissioner and succeeded Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France in 1785. He remained in Paris until 1789, observing the final years of the Ancien Régime and the opening stages of the French Revolution. Jefferson attended the early sessions of the Estates-General and maintained contact with French reformers, including the Marquis de Lafayette, whom he assisted in drafting a proposed declaration of rights.

In France, Jefferson encountered continental philosophy, architecture, agriculture, and cuisine, all of which influenced his later thinking and tastes. He also engaged in extensive correspondence with James Madison during the debates over the new American Constitution, advocating for a bill of rights, which he considered essential.

Jefferson returned to Virginia in September 1789, intending to return to France, but accepted President Washington's offer to serve as the first Secretary of State.

Jefferson served as Secretary of State from 1790 to 1793. His tenure was defined largely by his conflict with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton over the direction of federal economic and constitutional policy. Hamilton's program - federal assumption of state war debts, a national bank, and encouragement of manufacturing - Jefferson opposed as an overreach of federal power and a corruption of republican government in favor of moneyed interests.

Jefferson and Madison worked to organize political opposition to Hamilton's program, fostering what became the Democratic-Republican Party in contrast to Hamilton's Federalists. Jefferson also clashed with Hamilton over foreign policy, particularly regarding relations with Britain and revolutionary France. Jefferson generally favored France, with whom the United States had a 1778 alliance, while Hamilton favored accommodation with Britain.

Jefferson resigned at the end of 1793 and returned to Monticello.

Under the original Constitution, the candidate with the second-highest number of electoral votes became Vice President. Jefferson, who had received the second-most votes in the 1796 election, became Vice President to John Adams, his former colleague and now political rival. The arrangement produced an executive branch divided between two hostile factions.

Jefferson used the vice presidency largely to organize opposition to the Adams administration. When Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions, which argued that states possessed the authority to judge the constitutionality of federal legislation and to nullify acts they found unconstitutional. Madison drafted parallel Virginia Resolutions. The resolutions were adopted by those states' legislatures and became a foundational document in debates over states' rights for decades afterward.

The 1800 election produced an electoral tie between Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr, both having received 73 electoral votes. The House of Representatives, as required by the Constitution, chose between them in a prolonged deadlock resolved only when Hamilton, despite his enmity toward Jefferson, supported Jefferson over Burr, whom he considered more dangerous. Jefferson was elected on the thirty-sixth ballot.

Jefferson described his election as “the revolution of 1800,” framing it as a restoration of republican principles after Federalist excess. His inaugural address, however, was conciliatory: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” He reduced the size and cost of the federal government, cut the national debt, repealed the Alien and Sedition Acts' successor provisions, and pardoned those convicted under them.

The most significant act of Jefferson's first term was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Napoleon Bonaparte, facing war with Britain and a failed effort to suppress the Haitian Revolution, offered to sell the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States. Jefferson's envoys James Monroe and Robert Livingston concluded the purchase for approximately $15 million, doubling the size of the country. Jefferson had doubts about the constitutional authority for the purchase but concluded that the national interest overrode a strict constructionist objection.

Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1803, dispatching Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the newly acquired territory and find a route to the Pacific. The expedition departed in 1804 and returned in 1806.

Jefferson won reelection in 1804 by a wide margin. His second term was dominated by the deteriorating international situation caused by the Napoleonic Wars. Both Britain and France preyed on American shipping; Britain additionally impressed American sailors into the Royal Navy, claiming the right to seize British subjects serving on American vessels.

Jefferson sought to coerce the belligerents through economic pressure rather than military force. In 1807, following the Chesapeake-Leopard affair, in which a British warship fired on and boarded an American frigate off the Virginia coast, Jefferson obtained passage of the Embargo Act, prohibiting American ships from trading with foreign nations. The embargo proved largely ineffective at changing British or French policy and was deeply unpopular in New England, where trade was the economic foundation. It was repealed in the final days of Jefferson's presidency in 1809, replaced by the Non-Intercourse Act.

Jefferson also contended with the Burr Conspiracy, in which former Vice President Aaron Burr allegedly plotted either to separate the western states from the Union or to seize Spanish territory in the southwest. Burr was tried for treason in 1807; Chief Justice John Marshall's narrow interpretation of the constitutional definition of treason resulted in acquittal. Jefferson, who had personally directed the prosecution, was openly furious with Marshall's ruling.

Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1809 and did not leave Virginia again. He maintained an extensive correspondence with figures throughout the Atlantic world and undertook the founding of the University of Virginia, which he regarded as among his most important achievements. He designed the university's buildings, planned its curriculum, recruited its faculty from Europe, and was involved in its operations until his death. The university opened in 1825.

Jefferson's retirement years were marked by financial difficulty. His debts, accumulated over decades of building projects, hospitality, and chronic shortfalls in plantation income, were never resolved. He was forced to sell his library - the largest private library in the country - to Congress in 1815, a sale that formed the nucleus of the Library of Congress. He died at Monticello on July 4, 1826 (N.S.), the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams died the same day; his reported last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Jefferson freed two enslaved people in his will. The remaining approximately 130 enslaved people at Monticello were sold to settle his debts.

Some historians argue that Jefferson's authorship of the Declaration of Independence was fundamentally contradicted by his lifelong practice of slaveholding, raising questions about the sincerity or coherence of his egalitarian declarations; see Thomas Jefferson - Slavery Debate.

The question of whether Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello, was long disputed; DNA evidence published in 1998 established that a Jefferson male was the father of at least one of Hemings's children, though historians continue to debate the precise interpretation; see Thomas Jefferson - Hemings Debate.

The Kentucky Resolutions and Jefferson's doctrine of nullification have been interpreted variously as a principled defense of constitutional limits, a dangerous precedent later exploited to defend slavery and secession, and an instance of political opportunism; see Nullification Doctrine - Debate.

Jefferson's embargo policy has been characterized both as a principled attempt at peaceful coercion consistent with republican values and as an economically disastrous overreach that damaged the country far more than the British depredations it was meant to counter; see Embargo Act 1807 - Debate.

Jefferson's stated views on race, expressed most systematically in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), have been the subject of sustained historical debate regarding the degree to which they reflected personal conviction, contemporary scientific consensus, or rhetorical necessity; see Thomas Jefferson - Race Debate-viewpoint.

1. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1981). The standard scholarly biography.
2. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
3. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997).
4. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
5. E.M. Halliday, Understanding Thomas Jefferson (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
6. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale, 1787).
7. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg: Clementina Rind, 1774).
8. Foster et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child,” Nature, vol. 396 (November 5, 1998), pp. 27-28.
9. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1981).
10. Frank L. Owsley and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800-1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).