Thomas Jefferson was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at Shadwell in Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 2, 1743. He would spend most of his life at Monticello, though his work as a U.S. minister afforded him the opportunity to live in Paris, France, from 1784 to 1789, where he absorbed the Enlightenment culture, architecture, cuisine, and political theory as the French Revolution gathered steam. He studied agriculture, manufacturing, and constitutional practice in England.
Jefferson studied finance and republican traditions in the Netherlands. He toured Milan and Turin in Italy, turning his attention to architecture, irrigation, and viticulture. In southern France, he examined Roman ruins, canal systems, and the wine region through his agrarian lens. And as a life fulfilled by his studies and the achievement, he passed on July 4, 1826, at the age of eighty-three — a fitting end for one of America’s original patriots.
His father, Peter Jefferson, of Welsh descent, was a man who made his own way in the world by sheer force of character. He married Jane Randolph, of Scotch descent, a daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families of colonial Virginia. Peter Jefferson became a surveyor, held the most important county offices, and was a man of the people — forceful, capable, and sociable in business. His death on August 17, 1757, when Thomas was fourteen, would profoundly shape the younger Jefferson.
Thomas was the eldest son and inherited the greater part of his father’s property. He had been encouraged from boyhood to live much outdoors and was fond of shooting and fox-hunting. He became an expert horseman, even for a Virginian. At nineteen, he graduated from the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia. He read law under George Wythe of Williamsburg, a man eminent in his profession and notable as the instructor of James Madison, and a formative influence on Patrick Henry, and John Marshall, afterward Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States.
At Williamsburg, Jefferson associated with men much older than himself, but men of ability and of great liberality in matters of thought and religion. From his father, he inherited 1,900 acres of land and slave laborers, though the bulk of his enslaved workforce came later through marriage. During his few years of legal practice before public life claimed him, he substantially expanded his landholdings.
At the age of twenty-eight, he married Mrs. Martha Skelton, a charming young widow of twenty-three. Upon her father’s death soon after the marriage, she inherited thousands of acres and more than one hundred slaves. With the estate, however, came heavy indebtedness, for Jefferson was still paying off old obligations twenty years later.
He was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in 1767. Two years later, he was elected to the House of Burgesses from his native county of Albemarle, and in 1773, he was re-elected. His next advance was to a seat in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, which he took in June two years later. He served through the following winter and spring, took a keen interest in its deliberations, and sat on several important committees.
According to Jefferson’s own account, on June 10, 1776, John Adams, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Jefferson were appointed to a committee to prepare a declaration of independence. The committee requested Jefferson to draft the document. In the discharge of this trust, he prepared what has been widely regarded as the most profound public document ever written — the Declaration of Independence. Approved by the committee, it was reported to Congress by its author on Friday, June twenty-eighth.
Elected for the third time to the Virginia Legislature from Albemarle County, Jefferson resigned his seat in Congress on September second and took his place in the Legislature early in October of the same eventful year.
In 1779, he was chosen Governor of Virginia. Jefferson served two one-year terms (1779–1781) and was again elected to Congress. He next succeeded Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France in 1785 and remained in Paris for the four following years. Upon his resignation and return, he became the first Secretary of State. His republican views brought him into sharp conflict with Alexander Hamilton, leading to his resignation from the Secretaryship on the last day of December, near the end of Washington’s first administration.
In the election that placed John Adams in the presidential chair at the end of Washington’s second term, Jefferson received the next-highest number of votes and became Vice President, and thus the presiding officer of the Senate. Public sentiment had steadily grown more favorable toward his ideas of government and the so-called Jeffersonian principles, and in 1801, he was elected President after an ugly campaign. He was re-elected four years later, and at the close of his second term, on March 4, 1809, he retired to his estate of Monticello, two miles from Charlottesville, adjoining Shadwell, the place of his birth. He never again journeyed far from Monticello and the state of Virginia.
The remaining years of his life were far from idle. His views on education were as far in advance of his age as his ideas of republican government had been a quarter century earlier. The establishment of a thoroughly equipped university for Virginia became the darling hope of his later years and the goal of his ambition. He gave to it his means, his time, and his personal supervision, and lived to see the legislature pass the act in 1819, founding the University of Virginia. He was chosen as one of the Board of Overseers, made its first rector, and lived to see the institution formally opened in the spring of 1825, with an able corps of professors and a promising body of students.
In March of the following year, his physical powers began to fail. The great clock was running down. And as the fiftieth anniversary of American independence arrived, the sun of his life — serene, peaceful, and beautiful — sank beyond the clouds near midday on July 4, 1826. Over his grave was erected a modest obelisk of his own design, bearing an epitaph written by himself:
“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”
Jefferson’s manner of life, while not ostentatious for his time and place, was elegant. He maintained his coach-and-four, his French cook, and his French dishes, except during the first two years of his presidency, and he dressed neatly and with taste.
Jefferson possessed a profound belief in the common people. He believed that an uneducated plowman was as likely to judge rightly in matters of morals as a philosopher, and that the mass of the people were fitted to take a full part in government. At the same time, he kept his slaves, loved a good table and good wines, and thoroughly enjoyed the society of his aristocratic neighbors and friends. His connection with the masses was, in truth, at arm’s length. He craved popularity, was acutely sensitive to criticism, and dreaded — even shunned — any situation involving personal contumacy or direct contest.
An elegant writer, he produced but one book, and that not originally intended for publication. He frequently asserted that he never wrote for the newspapers, though he occasionally influenced them indirectly. Though a fine conversationalist in small company, he never made public speeches. Perhaps no man ever read and judged public sentiment with greater instinctive accuracy than Jefferson.
Estimates of his character differ so widely and appear so irreconcilable that it is best to allow his biographers to speak for themselves — and to leave the final judgment to the reader.
Bibliography | Notes
Sawvel, Franklin B., ed. The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson. New York: The Round Table Press, 1903.
Looney, J. Jefferson. “Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/jefferson-thomas-1743-1826/.