thomas jefferson university essay

Thomas Jefferson University

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Want to see your chances of admission at Thomas Jefferson University?

We take every aspect of your personal profile into consideration when calculating your admissions chances.

Thomas Jefferson University’s 2023-24 Essay Prompts

Common app personal essay.

The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don‘t feel obligated to do so.

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you‘ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

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Thomas Jefferson University Requirements for Admission

Choose your test.

What are Thomas Jefferson University's admission requirements? While there are a lot of pieces that go into a college application, you should focus on only a few critical things:

• GPA requirements
• Testing requirements, including SAT and ACT requirements
• Application requirements

In this guide we'll cover what you need to get into Thomas Jefferson University and build a strong application.

School location: Philadelphia, PA

Admissions Rate: 87.5%

If you want to get in, the first thing to look at is the acceptance rate. This tells you how competitive the school is and how serious their requirements are.

The acceptance rate at Thomas Jefferson University is 87.5% . For every 100 applicants, 88 are admitted.

This means the school is lightly selective . The school will have their expected requirements for GPA and SAT/ACT scores. If you meet their requirements, you're almost certain to get an offer of admission. But if you don't meet Thomas Jefferson University's requirements, you'll be one of the unlucky few people who gets rejected.

We can help. PrepScholar Admissions is the world's best admissions consulting service. We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions strategies . We've overseen thousands of students get into their top choice schools , from state colleges to the Ivy League.

We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools.

Learn more about PrepScholar Admissions to maximize your chance of getting in.

Thomas Jefferson University GPA Requirements

Many schools specify a minimum GPA requirement, but this is often just the bare minimum to submit an application without immediately getting rejected.

The GPA requirement that really matters is the GPA you need for a real chance of getting in. For this, we look at the school's average GPA for its current students.

Average GPA: 3.74

The average GPA at Thomas Jefferson University is 3.74 .

(Most schools use a weighted GPA out of 4.0, though some report an unweighted GPA.

With a GPA of 3.74, Thomas Jefferson University requires you to be above average in your high school class. You'll need at least a mix of A's and B's, with more A's than B's. You can compensate for a lower GPA with harder classes, like AP or IB classes. This will show that you're able to handle more difficult academics than the average high school student.

SAT and ACT Requirements

Each school has different requirements for standardized testing. Only a few schools require the SAT or ACT, but many consider your scores if you choose to submit them.

Thomas Jefferson University hasn't explicitly named a policy on SAT/ACT requirements, but because it's published average SAT or ACT scores (we'll cover this next), it's likely test flexible. Typically, these schools say, "if you feel your SAT or ACT score represents you well as a student, submit them. Otherwise, don't."

Despite this policy, the truth is that most students still take the SAT or ACT, and most applicants to Thomas Jefferson University will submit their scores. If you don't submit scores, you'll have one fewer dimension to show that you're worthy of being admitted, compared to other students. We therefore recommend that you consider taking the SAT or ACT, and doing well.

Thomas Jefferson University ACT Requirements

Many schools say they have no ACT score cutoff, but the truth is that there is a hidden ACT requirement. This is based on the school's average score.

Average ACT: 29

The average ACT score at Thomas Jefferson University is 29. This score makes Thomas Jefferson University Moderately Competitive for ACT scores.

The 25th percentile ACT score is 26, and the 75th percentile ACT score is 31. In other words, a 26 places you below average, while a 31 will move you up to above average.

ACT Score Sending Policy

If you're taking the ACT as opposed to the SAT, you have a huge advantage in how you send scores, and this dramatically affects your testing strategy.

Here it is: when you send ACT scores to colleges, you have absolute control over which tests you send. You could take 10 tests, and only send your highest one. This is unlike the SAT, where many schools require you to send all your tests ever taken.

This means that you have more chances than you think to improve your ACT score. To try to aim for the school's ACT requirement of 26 and above, you should try to take the ACT as many times as you can. When you have the final score that you're happy with, you can then send only that score to all your schools.

ACT Superscore Policy

By and large, most colleges do not superscore the ACT. (Superscore means that the school takes your best section scores from all the test dates you submit, and then combines them into the best possible composite score). Thus, most schools will just take your highest ACT score from a single sitting.

We weren't able to find the school's exact ACT policy, which most likely means that it does not Superscore. Regardless, you can choose your single best ACT score to send in to Thomas Jefferson University, so you should prep until you reach our recommended target ACT score of 26.

Download our free guide on the top 5 strategies you must be using to improve your score. This guide was written by Harvard graduates and ACT perfect scorers. If you apply the strategies in this guide, you'll study smarter and make huge score improvements.

SAT/ACT Writing Section Requirements

Currently, only the ACT has an optional essay section that all students can take. The SAT used to also have an optional Essay section, but since June 2021, this has been discontinued unless you are taking the test as part of school-day testing in a few states. Because of this, no school requires the SAT Essay or ACT Writing section, but some schools do recommend certain students submit their results if they have them.

Thomas Jefferson University considers the SAT Essay/ACT Writing section optional and may not include it as part of their admissions consideration. You don't need to worry too much about Writing for this school, but other schools you're applying to may require it.

Final Admissions Verdict

Because this school is lightly selective, you have a great shot at getting in, as long as you don't fall well below average . Aim for a 26 ACT or higher, and you'll almost certainly get an offer of admission. As long as you meet the rest of the application requirements below, you'll be a shoo-in.

But if you score below our recommended target score, you may be one of the very few unlucky people to get rejected.

Admissions Calculator

Here's our custom admissions calculator. Plug in your numbers to see what your chances of getting in are. Pick your test: ACT

• 80-100%: Safety school: Strong chance of getting in
• 50-80%: More likely than not getting in
• 20-50%: Lower but still good chance of getting in
• 5-20%: Reach school: Unlikely to get in, but still have a shot
• 0-5%: Hard reach school: Very difficult to get in

How would your chances improve with a better score?

Take your current SAT score and add 160 points (or take your ACT score and add 4 points) to the calculator above. See how much your chances improve?

At PrepScholar, we've created the leading online SAT/ACT prep program . We guarantee an improvement of 160 SAT points or 4 ACT points on your score, or your money back.

Here's a summary of why we're so much more effective than other prep programs:

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Application Requirements

Every school requires an application with the bare essentials - high school transcript and GPA, application form, and other core information. Many schools, as explained above, also require SAT and ACT scores, as well as letters of recommendation, application essays, and interviews. We'll cover the exact requirements of Thomas Jefferson University here.

Application Requirements Overview

• Common Application Not accepted
• Electronic Application Not available
• Essay or Personal Statement Required for all freshmen
• Letters of Recommendation 2
• Interview Not required
• Application Fee $50
• Fee Waiver Available? Available
• Other Notes

Testing Requirements

• SAT or ACT Considered if submitted
• SAT Essay or ACT Writing Optional
• SAT Subject Tests
• Scores Due in Office July 1

Coursework Requirements

• Subject Required Years
• Foreign Language
• Social Studies

Deadlines and Early Admissions

• Offered? Deadline Notification
• Yes July 31 December 3
• Yes November 1 December 3

Admissions Office Information

• Address: 1020 Philadelphia, PA 19107
• Phone: (215) 955-6000
• Fax: (215) 951-2907
• Email: [email protected]

Other Schools For You

If you're interested in Thomas Jefferson University, you'll probably be interested in these schools as well. We've divided them into 3 categories depending on how hard they are to get into, relative to Thomas Jefferson University.

Data on this page is sourced from Peterson's Databases © 2023 (Peterson's LLC. All rights reserved.) as well as additional publicly available sources.

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About the Papers of Thomas Jefferson

Begun in 1943 as a partnership between Princeton University and Princeton University Press, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson was the first modern historical documentary edition. The project includes not only the letters and other documents that Jefferson wrote, but also those he received. Founding editor Julian P. Boyd designed an edition that would provide accurate texts with accompanying historical context. With the publication of the first volume in 1950 and the first volume of the Retirement Series in 2004, these volumes print, summarize, note, or otherwise account for virtually every document Jefferson wrote and received. Today, the project regularly publishes two volumes a year under the leadership of General Editor James P. McClure at Princeton University and J. Jefferson Looney, the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of the Jefferson Retirement Series at Monticello. A team of historians at each location transcribes, verifies, annotates, and indexes documents copied from over nine hundred repositories and collections worldwide, maintaining the high standards crafted by Boyd and continued by his successors Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, and Barbara B. Oberg. The edition includes a topically arranged Second Series of volumes arranged by topic, one title of which, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826, edited by James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, is available through Founders Online. Distinguished advisory committees assist both the Princeton group and the editors at Monticello .

The Jefferson Papers at Princeton received its initial funding from the New York Times. Since then, support has been provided by Princeton University, private donors, major foundations, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Retirement Series, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and located at Monticello, began with a generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, and has been supported by leading gifts from Richard Gilder, Mrs. Martin S. Davis, and Thomas A. Saunders III, as well as subsequent generous gifts from Janemarie D. and Donald A. King, Jr., Alice Handy and Peter Stoudt, Harlan Crow, Mr. and Mrs. E. Charles Longley, Jr., and the Abby S. and Howard P. Milstein Foundation.

The volumes published by Princeton University Press provide the foundation of the Jefferson electronic edition sponsored by the University of Virginia Press and appearing through Founders Online. For more information, visit the websites for the  main series  and the  Retirement Series .

See a complete list of Jefferson Papers volumes included in Founders Online, with links to the documents.

The letterpress edition of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson is available from Princeton University Press .

Copyright © by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.

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The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University

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Darcy R Fryer, The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University, Journal of American History , Volume 107, Issue 3, December 2020, Pages 747–748, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa382

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Late in life, Thomas Jefferson turned his thoughts to the role of education in a young republic—and he was sufficiently proud of his insights and innovations to make “father of the University of Virginia” the culmination of his epitaph. But how distinctive was Jefferson's university? The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University , which sprang from a pair of conferences held by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and the American Philosophical Society in the spring of 2018, commemorates the bicentenary of the University of Virginia with essays that explore Jefferson's educational thought, the University of Virginia's architecture, curriculum, and student body, and the wider culture of pedagogy in the early republic.

The volume is ambitiously envisioned but awkwardly constructed, perhaps a bit like the young University of Virginia. Readers will long for a fuller initial description of the university's structure, curriculum, and academic culture; the most academically oriented essays, Carolyn Eastman's on oratory and Johann N. Neem's on Jefferson's philosophy of liberal education, stand at the end of the book. Intriguingly, the collection features among its contributors a diverse array of experts, including librarians, architects, and a professor of medicine, as well as historians. One section of the book explores the values embedded in the university's architecture and layout of the campus. Two essays on libraries, and a third essay on legal education that deals extensively with the books from which students “read” law, offer some of the freshest and most vivid insights into how early University of Virginia students learned. At the same time, they highlight how rigid and controlling Jefferson could be in pursuit of republican ideals. As Endrina Tay recounts, the library was originally open for only one hour per week, and students were permitted to check out library books only with the specific permission of faculty members.

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Help inform the discussion

U.S. Presidents / Thomas Jefferson

1743 - 1826

Thomas jefferson.

…some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot…abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm…? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. First Inaugural Address

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, spent his childhood roaming the woods and studying his books on a remote plantation in the Virginia Piedmont. Thanks to the prosperity of his father, Jefferson had an excellent education. After years in boarding school, where he excelled in classical languages, Jefferson enrolled in William and Mary College in his home state of Virginia, taking classes in science, mathematics, rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. He also studied law, and by the time he was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1767, many considered him to have one of the nation's best legal minds.

Life In Depth Essays

• Life in Brief
• Life Before the Presidency
• Campaigns and Elections
• Domestic Affairs
• Foreign Affairs
• Life After the Presidency
• Family Life
• The American Franchise
• Impact and Legacy

Chicago Style

Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “Thomas Jefferson.” Accessed May 31, 2024. https://millercenter.org/president/jefferson.

Professor of History

Professor Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

• -The Mind of Thomas Jefferson
• -Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
• -Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (editor…

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Featured Publications

• Secondary Essay Prompts

Secondary Essay Prompts – Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College

Secondary Essay Prompts for the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University

Below are the secondary essay prompts for the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA.

2020 – 2021

• Do you have any additional information that hasn’t been covered? (4000 Characters)
• Explain any impact that COVID-19 may have had on your educational/research/volunteering or employment plans. (2500 characters)
• Jefferson is also asking for SAT/ACT scores.

2019 – 2020

• If there is any additional information you would like to provide please include it in the box below.
• Limit to 4000 characters.

2016 – 2017

Secondary essay webcast with Dr. Jessica Freedman, founder and president of MedEdits Medical Admissions.   Read more about Dr. Freedman.

Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College

Topics covered in this presentation:

• When should I submit my secondary essays?
• Pay attention to the word/character limits.
• Can I recycle secondary essay prompts for multiple schools?
• Identify topics that you left out of your primary application.
• And, much more.

Below are the secondary essay prompts for the Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

2017 – 2018.

• The Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College strives to ensure that its students become respectful physicians who embrace all dimensions of caring for the whole person. Please describe how your personal characteristics or life experiences will contribute to the Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College community and bring educational benefits to our student body. (1000 characters)
• Is there any further information that you would like the Committee on Admissions to be aware of when reviewing your file that you were not able to notate in another section of this or the AMCAS Application? (1000 characters)
• Why have you chosen to apply to the Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College and how do you think your education at Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College will prepare you to become a physician for the future? (1 page, formatted at your discretion, upload as PDF)

Thomas Jefferson University Sidney Kimmel Medical College Admissions Requirements

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National Historical Publications & Records Commission

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

Miniature of Thomas Jefferson, 1788 by John Trumbull. Courtesy Monticello.

Princeton University and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello

Additional information at: https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/

The Rotunda site contains a searchable database of all thirty-six volumes published through 2009 into one searchable online resource. In addition, it includes the first four volumes of the Retirement Series sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which documents the time between Jefferson’s return to private life and his death in 1826. The Retirement Series is creating the definitive edition of Thomas Jefferson’s letters and papers covering the period from 1809 to 1826 in both letterpress and digital form. More information is available at https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/project-description and via Rotunda at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN.html

The Jefferson Papers are also part of Founders Online at founders.archives.gov

A comprehensive edition of the papers of Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), third President of the United States. Jefferson was a lawyer, delegate to the Virginia House of Burgesses, and landowner, before beginning his political career in 1775. At age 33, he was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. At the beginning of the American Revolution he served in the Continental Congress representing Virginia and then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris. Under President Washington, Jefferson was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) and was elected Vice President in 1796. Elected president in 1800, he oversaw the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory from France (1803), and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) to explore the new west. He was the founder of the University of Virginia. The NHPRC also supported a microfilm edition of Jefferson’s Papers at the University of Virginia, 1732-1828. Ten reels.

Forty-three completed volumes of a planned 60-volume edition.

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Collection Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827

American sphinx: the contradictions of thomas jefferson.

An essay by historian Joseph Ellis from the November-December 1994 issue of Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress .

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. This essay was originally published in the November-December 1994 issue of Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress and bears a slightly different title from the book that followed it. This essay may not be reprinted in any other form or by any other source. For more recent writings by Ellis and others, see the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation's Jefferson Web site, Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson External , including discussion of Sally Hemings and the Hemings family External .

A Reincarnated Jefferson

The idea clicked into full consciousness one cold evening in November of 1993, in a large brick church in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was election night, and the streets of Worcester were clotted with drivers heading for the polls. The occasion that lured me into this morass was the public appearance of Thomas Jefferson. Or rather, the performance of an impersonator named Clay Jenkinson, who portrayed a reincarnated Jefferson, alive among us in the late 20th century.

I figured that a maximum of 40 or 50 hardy souls would show up. After all, this was a semischolarly affair, designed to bring Jefferson to life without fanfare or patriotic pageantry. Maybe down in Charlottesville or Richmond you could pack them in by murmuring, "Jefferson lives," but this was New England, which has a long outstanding suspicion of Virginia grandees.

As it turned out, about 400 enthusiastic New Englanders crowded into the church. Jenkinson began talking in the languid cadence of the Tidewater about Jefferson's early days at the College of William and Mary, his thoughts on the American Revolution, his love of French wine and French ideas, his accomplishments and frustrations as a political leader and president, his obsession with education, his elegiac correspondence with John Adams, his bottomless hope in America's democratic prospects. Jenkinson obviously knew his stuff. He was delivering an elegantly disguised history lecture that drew upon modern Jefferson scholarship quite deftly. The audience was entranced.

At the end, still in character and costume, Jenkinson took questions. What would you do about the health-care problem, Mr. Jefferson. Who is your favorite modern-day American president? Should we do something about the atrocities in Bosnia? Sprinkled into this mixture were several questions about American history and Jefferson's life: Why did you never remarry? What did you mean by "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? Why did you own slaves? This last question was the only one with a sharp edge, and Jenkinson handled it carefully. Slavery was a moral travesty, he said, an institution clearly at odds with the values of the American Revolution. He has tried his best to persuade his countrymen to end the slave trade and gradually end slavery itself. But he had failed. As for his own slaves, he treated them benevolently, as the fellow human beings they were. He concluded with a question of his own: What else would you have wanted me to do?

This seemed to satisfy the audience. But I was struck by the fact that when Jenkinson-as- Jefferson volunteered information on his less admirable features--his accommodation with slavery, his stiffbacked formality toward women, his tendency to gloss over complex social problems with felicitous language--the audience did not follow up. That's not what they had come to hear. If Jefferson was America's Mona Lisa, they had come to see him smiling.

Even so, I was surprised that no one asked a question about Sally Hemings, the young mulatto slave who was reputed to be Jefferson's lover and the mother of four of his children. My own experience as a college teacher suggested that most students could be counted on to know two things about Jefferson--that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he had been accused of an affair with Sally Hemings. This piece of scandalous gossip first surfaced when Jefferson was president, in 1802, and subsequently affixed itself to his reputation like a tin can that then rattled through the pages of history. A best-selling biography of Jefferson by Fawn Brodie, published in 1974, revived the old rumor for the modern generation, although in Brodie's version Jefferson and Sally loved each other, transforming the story of rape and subjugation (itself probably untrue) into a tragic but touching romance (an utter fabrication).

Jenkinson surprised me. He was neither historian nor an actor. A late-thirty-ish Midwesterner somewhat shorter than Jefferson's 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, he had graduated from the University of Minnesota and gone on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar to study English literature. Currently on the faculty of the University of Nevada at Reno, he began assuming Jefferson's identity in 1984, when he helped found "the Great Plains Chautauqua," which was described as "a traveling humanities tent show" based in Bismark, North Dakota.

Jenkinson, who called himself a "scholar-impersonator," had somehow made Jefferson his own. Several state legislatures, scores of college and university audiences, and an even larger number of public gatherings like the one at Worcester had found his renderings of Jefferson impressive. A few months after I saw him, Jenkinson was the star attraction at a gala Jefferson celebration hosted by President Clinton, where he won the hearts of the White House staff by saying that Jefferson would have dismissed the entire Whitewater investigation as "absolutely nobody's business."

I met Jenkinson earlier that evening at a dinner put on by the American Antiquarian Society. The room was full of local business leaders, school superintendents and state politicians. Also present were two filmmaking groups. From Florentine Films came Camilla Rockwell, who told me that Ken Burns, the leading documentary filmmaker in the country, was planning to do a major project on Jefferson for public television. And from the Jefferson Legacy Foundation came Bud Leeds and Chip Stokes, who had recently launched a campaign to raise funds for a big-budget commercial film on Jefferson. Leeds and Stokes were flying out to Los Angeles the next morning to confer with Francis Ford Coppola and other Hollywood luminaries about scripts and actors. Their entourage also included an Iranian millionaire who told me that he had fallen in love with Jefferson soon after escaping the persecution of Islamic fundamentalists, an experience that made him appreciate the Jeffersonian belief in religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

I found myself wondering what other prominent historical figure could generate this kind of turnout. Certainly not George Washington. He has the biggest monument on the Mall, and the capital city itself carries his name, but he is just too patriarchal, too distant. Jefferson is Jesus, who came to live among us. Washington is Jehovah, aloof and alone in heaven.

Maybe Lincoln, usually the winner whenever polls try to measure public opinion on great American presidents, would draw such a crowd. Ordinary citizens tend to know as much about the Gettysburg Address as about the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln is magical too, but his is a different kind of magic, a more somber magic with a tragic dimension. Jefferson is light, graceful, inspiring. Lincoln is heavy, biblical, burdened. Lincoln is more respected, but Jefferson more loved.

That, at least, was what I was thinking as I drove home from Worcester that November evening. I even conjured up a picture of Jefferson atop some American version of Mount Olympus, dismissing competitors for the summit with a flick of that famous wrist, the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence--and that never healed properly after he broke it vaulting over a fountain in Paris while rushing to meet Maria Cosway, the object of his affections.

A silly thought, to be sure, but just the kind of extravagant enthusiasm that seemed to flower in the popular imagination wherever and whenever the Jefferson myth got planted. At the center of the silliness, however, is an idea that I had half-known but never fully appreciated until that night: Jefferson is America's special addiction, and something is going on out there in the minds and hearts of ordinary Americans at this moment in our national history to make that addiction particularly powerful. It is as if the American citizenry harbors some worrisome questions about the state of the republic and looks to him as America's oracle to provide reassuring answers.

Jefferson as "America's Everyman"

Once such an interpretive pattern lodges itself in the mind, of course, it quickly pulls half-forgotten odds and ends of one's memory and aligns them within the new grid-work. What came to my mind was a thesis advanced 30 years ago by Merrill Peterson in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind .

Peterson discovered that Jefferson had become America's Everyman, the cult hero for wildly divergent and often antagonistic political movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The term Peterson used was "Protean Jefferson," which gave a respectably classical sound to what others might regard as Jefferson's disarming ideological promiscuity. Southern secessionists loved him; Northern abolitionists worshiped him; Gilded Age moguls echoed his warnings about federal power; Populists adored his advice about the evils of a banking conspiracy and the superiority of agrarian values. In the 1925 Scopes trial, both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were sure that Jefferson agreed with their positions on evolution. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both claimed him as their guide to the problems of the Great Depression. In the 1930s isolationists and interventionists cited him as their spiritual mentor.

At some point, as this Jeffersonian procession passed by, I began to wonder whether there was anything Jefferson did not stand for. Was he a real historical person who once lived "back there" in time? Or was he a free-floating Rorschach test we carried around with us "up here" in the present?

These questions had ominous implication for anyone who harbored the traditional assumption that the quest to understand historical figures was a scholarly affair that would, albeit incrementally and gradually, contribute to the popular understanding of who they were and what they stood for. It seemed that Jefferson was simply too resonant, too interactive, too inherently elusive for that. The people who had gathered in Worcester carried assumptions about what Jefferson stood for that were infinitely more powerful than any set of historical facts. America's greatest historians and biographers could labor for decades to produce the most authoritative and sophisticated studies of Thomas Jefferson--Peterson, in fact, had proceeded to do precisely that--and their findings would bounce off the popular image of Jefferson without making a dent. Jefferson was not just a uniquely powerful touchstone, not just a seductively enigmatic historical hero. He was the Great Sphinx of American history. Coming to terms with Jefferson meant coming to terms with the most cherished convictions and contested truths in contemporary American culture.

My emerging hypothesis--that we are in the midst of a resurgent love affair with Jefferson that speaks, in some mysterious way, to our current ideological condition--evidently was shared by the political maestros at the White House, whose overnight polls provided up-to-the-minute readings of the American pulse. The week of his inauguration, Bill Clinton retraced Jefferson's trip from Monticello to Washington. And the White House staff made a point of apprizing the press that the new president was reading an advance copy of a soon-to-be-published popular biography of Jefferson by Willard Sterne Randall.

Clinton had also contributed, if unintentionally, to this interest in Jefferson during the presidential campaign. Allegations that Clinton was a womanizer prompted a flurry of newspaper and television reports on the sexual improprieties of past presidents, especially John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the very month of the presidential election, The Atlantic Monthly put Thomas Jefferson on its cover and featured an essay by Douglas Wilson, a distinguished Jeffersonian scholar, titled "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue."

A month or two later, I received a letter from Mary Jo Salter, a good friend who also happens to be one of America's most respected poets. Mary Jo was in Paris, where she was continuing to perform her duties as poetry editor of The New Republic and completing a volume of new poems. The longest poem in the collection, it turned out, focused on none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Jefferson.

This seemed too coincidental. Could it be that politicians, propagandists, poets and impersonators were all plugged into the same cultural grid, which somehow had its main power source buried beneath the mountain at Monticello? Mary Jo said that she wanted me to suggest some books and articles about Jefferson and his time. I responded with a list of books, most of which she had already read. What I wanted in return was an answer to the simple question: Why Jefferson?

For a poet of Mary Jo's sensibility, it was clearly not a question of politics, at least in the customary sense of the term. She is not one to slide her mind into comfortable ideological grooves or sing patriotic hymns about freedom and democracy. Like any serious poet, she tends to defy trends, listen to her own internal voice, make her own music.

And that was just the kind of answer she gave to my question. "I knew I had the first part of a poem when I ran across a mention somewhere of TJ buying a thermometer on July 4, 1776--and recording a peak temperature of 76 degrees," Mary Jo recalled in a letter. It was a coincidence that caught her eye, a detail with poetic possibilities. Then she encountered one of history's eeriest coincidences--the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For Mary Jo, it was perfect springboard for her imagination. As she put it, these coincidences were "poignant and eminently visual events."

Finally, she said that she was attracted to Jefferson's accessible complexity, what she called his "variousness." This was quite similar to Merrill Peterson's image of Protean Jefferson, but with a difference. Peterson emphasized the many meanings that posterity has imposed on Jefferson. Mary Jo was emphasizing the various and varied personae that actually existed inside Jefferson. "We love the fact that our favorite politician was a writer and a farmer and a scientists and an aesthete and a violinist," she wrote, "partly because we all wish to squeeze more out of our own 24-hour days...." Her Jefferson was a fascinating bundle of selves that beckoned to our modern sense of multiple identities. The poet, so it seemed to me, was getting closer to the essential appeal of Jefferson than were the biographers and historians.

The 250th Anniversary of Jefferson's Birth: Evocations

Meanwhile, the Jeffersonian flood was reaching new heights. During the year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, it seemed that every publishing house in America brought out a book on some aspect of his career or character. In addition to the full-length biography by Willard Sterne Randall, there were 17 new books with Jefferson's name in the title published in 1993. One of them, a novel by Max Byrd ( Jefferson ), offered an utterly captivating depiction of Jefferson's French phase and an evocation of his layered personality that rivaled Mary Jo's account in its imaginative power. (Byrd's novel supported my hunch that one needed the leeway provided by fiction or poetry to handle Jefferson's character compellingly.) Meanwhile, a major exhibition on "The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello" attracted upwards of 600,000 visitors to Monticello last year (Elvis' Graceland just barely surpassed this figure.) And from Paris, Mary Jo wrote to say that James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had set up production there for a film called "Jefferson in Paris," focusing on the romantic interlude with Maria Cosway and, so I learned later, starring Nick Nolte in the title role.

Nothing like this had accompanied the 250th birthday of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams. Nor had Lincoln's 150th birthday generated anything like this popular outpouring. It was as if one had attended a Fourth of July fireworks display and, instead of the usual rockets and sparklers, witnessed the detonation of a 2-megaton bomb.

As a cultural phenomenon, the Jeffersonian explosion was not a movement controlled or shaped by scholars or professional historians. Jefferson was part of the public domain, with daring power outside the academic world. The folks who ran publishing houses, produced films and mounted exhibitions, as well as the foundation directors who gave away money for worthy causes, obviously regarded Jefferson as a sure bet. The market for things Jeffersonian was wide and deep and strikingly diverse. It was--well, what other word fit so nicely?--democratic, in the Jeffersonian sense of the term.

The admiration for Jefferson was as much a psychological as a political phenomenon. In the hands of a poet like Salter or a novelist like Byrd, Jefferson became not Everyman but Postmodern Man, a series of overlapping and interacting personae that talked to us but not to each other. He could walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello without qualms or guilt while daydreaming about the rights of man with utter sincerity. He could purchase the finest and most expensive art and furniture for his many residences, all the while idealizing the pastoral virtues of the sturdy farmer. He could fall in love with beautiful women in fits of rhapsodic passion but never allow the deepest secrets of his soul to be shared with any living creature. He was, like us, layered and conflicted but, as we wish to be, always in control, the perfect model for his beloved ideal of "self-government."

Historians Rethink Jefferson

In the academic world, the winds were gusting in a different direction. Not that scholars had ignored Jefferson or consigned him to some second tier of historical significance. Far from it. The number of scholarly books and articles focusing on Jefferson or some aspect of his long career continued to grow at a geometric rate; it requires two full volumes just to list all the Jefferson scholarship, much of it coming in the last quarter century. The central scholarly project, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson , continues to appear from Princeton University Press at the stately pace of one volume every two years or so (25 volumes had appeared by 1993). And Dumas Malone's authoritative biography, Jefferson and His Time , is an equally stately six-volume behemoth that, thanks to introductory offers from the Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club, graces the libraries and coffee tables of countless American homes.

The problem, then, was not a lack of academic interest or scholarly attention. The problem was a lowered academic opinion of the man and his accomplishments. Jefferson's captivating contradictions had come to be seen by many historians as massive hypocrisies, his elegant articulations of the American creed as platitudinous nonsense. The love affair with Jefferson that flourishes in the public domain had finally turned sour in the academic world. Once the symbol of all that is right with America, Jefferson had become the symbol of much that is wrong.

You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight--which is, after all, the historian's crucial intellectual asset--locate the moment when the tide began to turn. In 1968 Winthrop Jordan published White over Black , a magisterial reappraisal of race relations in early America that featured a section on Jefferson. Jordan's book, which won the major prizes, offered a subtle and psychologically sophisticated assessment of Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery and blacks, suggesting that he was emblematic of white American society in the way his deep-seated racist values were hidden within folds of his personality.

White over Black was hardly a heavy-handed indictment of Jefferson. Jordan's major point was that racism had infiltrated the American soul very early in our history and that Jefferson simply provided the most resonant example of the virulence of racist values and the commingling of racial and sexual drives. Jordan's interpretation adopted an agnostic attitude toward the allegations of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. It is one of those intriguing pieces of gossip that can never be proved or disproved. Regardless of his relationship with Hemings, Jordan argued, Jefferson's deepest feelings toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came from deep within his subconscious. Many other scholarly books and articles soon took up related themes, but Jordan's account set the terms of the debate about the centrality of race and slavery in any appraisal of Jefferson. And once that became a chief measure of Jefferson's character, his stock was fated to fall.

Another symptom of imminent decline--again, all this in retrospect--was a 1970 essay by Eric McKitrick, a professor of history at Columbia University, in the New York Review of Books . McKitrick was reviewing the recent biographies of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, who were not only experts on Jefferson but the avowed ringleaders of what has been called the "Charlottesville Mafia," scholarly keepers of the Jefferson flame. In the course of a fair-minded assessment, McKitrick had the temerity to ask whether it might not be time to declare a moratorium on the generally benign and gentlemanly posture toward Monticello Man that was the hallmark of Malone's and Peterson's works. "What about those traits of character that aren't heroic from an angle?" asked McKitrick, mentioning Jefferson's accommodation and dependence upon slavery as well as "the frequent smugness, the covert vindictiveness, ...the hand-washing, the downright hypocrisy." What about his very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British army? What about the fiasco of his American Embargo in 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war with England, even after it was clear that they only devastated the American economy?

The list of critical questions went on, effectively making the general point that interpretations of the man guided by Jefferson's own world view, what McKitrick called "the view from Jefferson's camp," had just about exhausted their explanatory power. What we obviously needed from the next generation of Jeffersonian scholars were some less fastidious and less friendly biographers who did not have their hearts or headquarters at Charlottesville.

The 1992 "Jeffersonian Legacies" Conference

Rather amazingly, it was in Charlottesville that the scholarly reassessment of Jefferson reached a crescendo. It happened in October 1992, when the University of Virginia convened a conference to commemorate its founder under the apparently harmless rubric of "Jeffersonian Legacies." The result was an intellectual free-for-all that went on for six days and nights. The conference spawned a collection of 15 essays published in record time by the University Press of Virginia, an hour-long videotape of the proceedings shown on PBS, and a series of newspaper stories in the Richmond papers and The Washington Post . Advertised as a scholarly version of a birthday party, the conference assumed the character of a public trial, with Jefferson--and the version of American history he symbolized--cast in the role of defendant.

The chief argument for the prosecution was delivered by Paul Finkelman, a hard-charging historian from Virginia Tech. "Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence," said Finkelman, "the test of Jefferson's position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best." The answer had the clear ring of an indictment: "Jefferson fails the test." For Finkelman, historians like Malone and Peterson had been mesmerized by the "d-word," Jefferson as the apostle of democracy. The more appropriate d-words were dissimulation, duplicity and denial.

According to Finkelman, Jefferson was an out-and-out racist who believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and who rejected the possibility that blacks and whites could ever live together on an equal basis. Moreover, his several attempts to end the slave trade or restrict the expansion of slavery beyond the South were halfhearted, as was his contemplation of a program of gradual emancipation. His beloved Monticello and personal extravagances were possible only because of slave labor. Finkelman argued that it was misguided--worse, it was positively sickening--to celebrate Jefferson as the father of freedom. In Finkelman's view, Jefferson was the ultimate symbol of the discrepancy (another d-word) between American rhetoric and American reality.

If Finkelman was the chief prosecutor, the star witness for the prosecution was Robert Cooley, a middle-aged black man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Cooley offered himself as "living proof" that the story of Jefferson's sexual relationship with one of his slaves was true. No matter what the Charlottesville Mafia or the tour guides at Monticello said, several generations of blacks living in Ohio and Illinois were certain they had Jefferson's blood in their veins. Scholars always talk about the absence of documentation and hard evidence, but how could such evidence exist? "We couldn't write then," Cooley explained. "We were slaves." And Jefferson's white children had destroyed all written records of the relationship soon after his death. Cooley essentially pitted the oral tradition of the black community against the scholarly tradition of professional historians. Cooley's version of history might not have had the bulk of the hard evidence on its side, but it clearly had the political leverage. Whether or not Jefferson had an affair with Sally Hemings, he was guilty of so many other moral crimes that it hardly made any difference. The Hemings story was either true literally or true metaphorically. The Washington Post reporter covering the conference caught the mood: "What tough times these are for icons!"

If the historical profession had any final words of wisdom to offer in the wake of what was being called "the cacophony at Charlottesville," they came from Gordon Wood, generally regarded as the leading historian of the Revolutionary era. Wood, a conference participant, was asked to review the published collection of essays for The New York Review of Books .

Wood called for a halt to the appropriation of prominent historical figures like Jefferson to serve as rallying points for modern-day political constituencies on the left or right. "We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing...and making symbols of authentic historical figures," warned Wood, "who cannot and should not be ripped out of their own time and place." And Jefferson had been especially abused: "By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder." In effect, the canonization of Jefferson as our preeminent political saint, Wood was suggesting, virtually assured his eventual slide into the status of villain. Why? Because we know too much about him. And what we know would always undercut his saintly and heroic status, leaving us disappointed and then angry, much like a starry-eyed fan who makes the mistake of actually getting to know his idol. We invested too much in Jefferson. The core of the problem is not his inevitable flaws but our unrealistic expectations.

Coming from a historian of Wood's reputation, who had no special affection for Jefferson and no special ties with the Charlottesville Mafia, the assessment had the realistic ring of common sense, a welcome note of sobriety amid a band of shrill partisans. It was rooted in the sound scholarly recognition that the late 18th century is a foreign country with a separate culture of its own. The historian's job is not so much to protect Jefferson's reputation as to protect the integrity of the past from modern-day raiding parties with obvious ideological agendas.

All of which makes complete scholarly sense but absolutely no practical difference. Jefferson is not like most other historical subjects--dead, forgotten and nonchalantly entrusted to historians, who presumably serve as the gravekeepers for buried memories no one really cares about anymore. Jefferson has risen from the dead. Lots of Americans care about the meaning of his memory. Historians could not control his legacy because it has escaped from the past, which they oversee, and is living in the present, a foreign country for most of them.

Evidence of Jefferson's natural tendency to surge out of the past and into the present kept popping up in the press in the months after the Charlottesville conference. In The New York Review of Books , Garry Wills used his review of the exhibition at Monticello to paint an unflattering portrait of Jefferson as a compulsive consumer of expensive French wines, art and furniture, an indulged aristocrat whose exorbitant tastes belied his rustic rhetoric about yeoman farmers and republican virtue. A few months later, The New York Times reported on a mock trial of Jefferson by the Bar Association of New York City, presided over by none other than Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The indictment consisted of the following three counts: that he subverted the independence of the federal judiciary; that he lived in the lavish manner of Louis XIV (Wills' charge); and that he frequently violated the Bill of Rights. Though Jefferson was found not guilty on all charges, the salient fact was that he had been moved off his pedestal and into the witness box.

The "Jeffersonian Surge"

Whether the most appropriate command was "back to the future" or "forward to the past," many of the professional historians with whom I spoke were relieved when the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth was over. It meant that they could reclaim the historical Jefferson and "get on with their own work," free of the anachronistic questions about relevance and legacies. When I asked my academic colleagues about the phenomenon I was now calling the Jeffersonian Surge, most of them expressed bemused indifference. It was all hype, they observed, like one of the feeding frenzies in the contemporary talk-show culture--Jefferson as the historical equivalent of Michael Jackson or Tonya Harding. Or it could be explained pragmatically: Jefferson had managed to get himself institutionalized with a mansion at Monticello, a university at Charlottesville and a memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington, so there were several permanent constituencies poised to plug his birthday for self-interested reasons. For a professional historian, the thing to do when confronted with this kind of loony sensationalism is to stand still, close one's eyes and wait for it to pass.

One exception to this general pattern was Peter Onuf, the successor to Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia. Onuf predicted that scholarly criticism of Jefferson would seep into popular thinking, as the idealization of racial and ethnic diversity became an essential measure of America's dedication to equality. In effect, the democratic revolution Jefferson helped launch had now expanded to include a form of human equality--racial equality and integration--that Jefferson clearly could never have countenanced or even imagined. The next generation of Americans was not likely to raze the Jefferson Memorial or chip his face off Mount Rushmore, but the scholarly trend boded badly for Jefferson's reputation with posterity. As more Americans became aware of Jefferson as a slave-owning white racist, Onuf suggested, this flaw had the potential to trump all his virtues. The critical, even hostile, judgement of scholars was a preview of coming attractions in the larger popular culture.

In the October 1993 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly , the leading journal of early-American historians, Onuf suggested that the fascination with Jefferson's psychological complexity was gradually changing to frustration. The famous paradoxes that so intrigued poets, novelists and devotees of the "postmodern Jefferson" were beginning to look more like outright contradictions. The most glaring contradiction, his words in the Declaration of Independence as opposed to his lifelong ownership of slaves, was merely the most obvious disjunction between Jeffersonian rhetoric and Jeffersonian reality. Onuf described the emerging scholarly portrait of Jefferson as "a monster of self-deception," a man whose felicitous style was a bit too felicitous, concealing often incompatible ideals or dressing up platitudes as pieces of political wisdom that, as Onuf put it,"now circulate as the debased coin of our democratic culture." For Onuf, the multiple personalities of Jefferson were looking less like different facets of a Renaissance man and more like the artful disguises of a confidence man.

It occurred to me that the scholarly frustration Onuf described might derive from the realization that Jefferson's enigmatic character was never going to yield to conventional biographical or historical techniques (if, after all this time and effort, he remained the American Sphinx, well then, to hell with him). Onuf's point, on the other hand, was that a deconstructed Jefferson, a Jefferson divided into several disjoined selves that flickered into focus whenever convenient, then faded away whenever accountability was required, was hardly the stuff of a national hero. At some point, obliviousness stops looking like serenity and starts looking like hypocrisy.

With Jefferson, however, just when you think you have him cornered in an escape-proof room and are about to make an arrest, a trapdoor always seems to appear out of nowhere and he slips away to another adventure. The same week that I wrote the preceding paragraph, my eye came upon the following statement in boldface type in The New York Times Book Review : "Is your self shattered, your life riddled with inconsistency? Cheer up. That means you are resilient, postmodern."

This tongue-in-cheek observation was part of a serious review of a new book by Robert Jay Lifton called The Protean Self . The title echoed Merrill Peterson's description of Protean Jefferson, but with a new twist on its positive implications. Apparently Lifton, a prominent psychiatrist, was announcing that the new psychological ideal for the postmodern world was, in the reviewer's words, "a shapeshifter capable of assuming multiple identities without pathological fragmentation." In a world of jarring, unpredictable change, a world lacking clear borders between illusion and reality, with no shared sense of truth or morality, a premium was put on the ability to keep on the move inside yourself. The emerging psychological model was the "willful eclectic" who could live comfortably with contradictions.

This, of course, is a perfect description of Jefferson, or at least the version of Jefferson that scholars find so frustrating and, if Onuf is right, so reprehensible. But if Lifton is right, hypocrisy is an outmoded concept and Jefferson's disjointed personality is becoming the role model for postmodern society. (The trapdoor was opening again.) At any rate, I was grateful for Lifton's intriguing thesis because it helped me to understand what I meant when I used the term "postmodern." It also helped explain why poets, novelists and filmmakers are more favorably disposed toward Jefferson than scholars. They are more patient with and fascinated by Protean Jefferson because as artists they are more attuned to the interchangeable identities of the postmodern world.

Jefferson Today, A "Free-Floating Icon"

In the end, however, my thoughts returned to the faces of those ordinary Americans who had gathered at Worcester to celebrate Jefferson as their favorite Founding Father. They had absolutely no interest in deconstructing Jefferson or worshiping the disassembled parts of some engagingly incoherent hero. They were somewhat vulnerable, I suspect, to criticism of their idol as a racist. If the mounting scholarly case against Jefferson did filter down to the broader populace, it could do damage. But it seems clear to me that the deep reservoir of instinctive affection for Jefferson will probably remain intact. In its own way, the apparently unconditional love for Jefferson is every bit as mysterious as the enigmatic character of the man himself. Like a splendid sunset or a woman's beauty, it is simply there. It is the ultimate energy source for the Jeffersonian Surge.

Grass-roots Jeffersonianism, what we might also call Jeffersonian fundamentalism, has a long history of its own, but for our purposes its most instructive feature is the change in its character over the past 50 years. For most of American history, Jefferson was cast in the lead role in the dramatic clash between democracy and aristocracy, with Alexander Hamilton usually playing the opposite lead. If this dramatic formulation often had the suspicious odor of a soap opera, it also had the decided advantage of fitting neatly into the mainstream political categories and parties: It was the people against the interests, agrarians against the industrialists, the West against the East, Democrats against Republicans. Jefferson was one-half the American political dialogue, the liberal voice of "the many" holding forth against the conservative voice of "the few."

This version of American history always had the semifictional quality of an imposed plot line, but it stopped making much sense at all by the New Deal era, when Franklin Roosevelt invoked Hamiltonian methods (i.e., government intervention) to achieve Jeffersonians goals (i.e., economic equality). After the New Deal, most historians abandoned the Jefferson-Hamilton distinction altogether and most politicians stopped yearning for a Jeffersonian utopia free of all government influence. The disintegration of the old categories meant the demise of Jefferson as the symbolic leader of liberal partisans fighting valiantly against the entrenched interests. In a sense, what happened was that Jefferson ceased to function as the liberal half of the American political dialogue and became instead the presiding presence who stood above all political conflicts and parties.

And this, of course, is where he resides today, a kind of free-floating icon who hovers over the American political scene much like one of those dirigibles cruising above the Super Bowl, flashing words of encouragement to both teams. Formerly the property of liberal crusaders, he is now claimed by Democrats and Republicans alike. In fact, the most effective articulator of Jeffersonian rhetoric in the last half of the 20th century has been Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge, whose belief in less government, individual freedoms and American destiny came straight out of the Jeffersonian lexicon. Jefferson is not just an essential ingredient in the American political tradition, but the essence itself.

If you really press the issue, if you edit out all the extraneous voices and get to the core of Jefferson's thinking, the primal stuff consists of a single sentence of 35 simple words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .

These are the magic words of American history. To question them is to commit some combination of sacrilege and treason. Actually, they are not quite the words Jefferson first composed in June of 1776. His original draft, the pure Jeffersonian version of the message before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, makes it even clearer that Jefferson intended to express an essentially moral or spiritual vision:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness .

Two monumental claims are being made here, one explicit and the other implicit. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society. His natural state is freedom and equality with all other individuals. This is the natural order of things. All restrictions on this natural order are illegal and immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended. The implicit claim is that the removal of those artificial and arbitrary restraints on individual freedom will release unprecedented amounts of energy into the world. The liberated individual will, in effect, interact with his fellows in a harmonious scheme that recovers the natural order and allows for the fullest realization of human potential.

Now if you say that these claims are wildly unrealistic and utopian, the kind of news that is just too good to be true, you would be completely correct. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. As John Adams and James Madison sometimes tried to tell him, his efforts at political philosophy were often embarrassingly superficial and sometimes downright juvenile. But Jefferson was less a cogent or logical political thinker than a brilliant political theologian and visionary. The genius of his vision is first to propose that our deepest personal yearnings are in fact achievable, then to articulate opposing principles in a way that conceals their irreconcilability. Jefferson guards the American creed at an inspirational level, where all of us can congregate as individual Americans regardless of race, class or gender and speak the magic words together.

Here is the point where being a scholar and being an American divide. The natural instinct of the scholar is to pull Jefferson down from the high ground, to document the many ways that Jefferson himself failed to accept the full implications of his vision--slavery, racism and sexism are chief offenses--and to expose the inherent contradictions embedded within the creed.

The overwhelming feeling of ordinary Americans, however, is quite the opposite. That gathering of citizens in the Worcester church is illustrative. As they sat together in Jefferson's presence, they could simultaneously embrace the following propositions: that abortion is a woman's right, and than an unborn child cannot be killed; that health care for all Americans is a moral imperative, and that the government bureaucracies required to oversee health care (or welfare, or environmental protection) stifle individual freedom; that blacks and women (and gays and lesbians) cannot be denied their rights as citizens, and that affirmative-action programs are misguided violations of the egalitarian principle.

The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied rhetorical level where real-world choices do not have to be made. As we segregate ourselves into a bewildering variety of racial, ethnic, gender and class categories, all defending our respective territories under the multicultural banner, there are precious few plots of common ground on which we can come together as Americans. Jefferson provides that space, which is actually not common ground at all, but a midair location floating above all the battle lines. In this Jefferson space we become, at least for a moment, an American chorus instead of an American cacophony.

What William James said about religious experience is also true for the Jeffersonian experience: If you have not had it, no one can explain it to you. But you do not need to be an American to feel the spirit move. In fact, the Jeffersonian Surge is probably stronger in parts of Central Europe than anywhere else. You could give a party for Jefferson in contemporary Gdansk, Prague or St. Petersburg and be pretty certain that an enthusiastic band of celebrants would show up seeking the same inspiration as those Worcester residents.

At the end of August, The Washington Post published a long story on a wealthy Iranian named Bahman Batmanghelidj. His picture looked familiar, and then I recognized him as the philanthropist I met in Worcester. It turned out that Batmanghelidj was rallying opposition to the Merchant and Ivory film on Jefferson, which supposedly sanctions the story of Jefferson's liaison with Sally Hemings.

"Americans don't realize," Batmanghelidj warned, "how profoundly Jefferson and his ideas live on in the hopes and dreams of people in other countries. This movie will undercut all that. People around the world will view it as the defining truth about Jefferson. And of course it is a lie."

Well, yes, it almost certainly is. But then so is a hefty portion of the more attractive sources of Jefferson's image. Batmanghelidj's crusade was just the latest skirmish in the escalating struggle over Jefferson's legacy. The stakes are high, as can be seen in the stark formulation of James Parton, one of Jefferson's earliest biographers: "If Jefferson is wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right."

The ongoing debate about Jefferson is less an argument about the man himself than about what he stands for. It is not even an argument about whether what he stands for is a viable idea or a seductive illusion. After all, every great nation draws inspiration from illusions. The debate is about whether those illusions still work for us and whether the abiding Jeffersonian optimism that underlies them is still justified.

by Joseph J. Ellis

Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay

Fawn Brodie. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History . New York: Norton, 1974. LC Call Number: E332 .B787

Merrill Peterson. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind . New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. LC Call Number: E332.2 .P4

Douglas L. Wilson, "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue," The Atlantic Monthly , 270:5 (November 1992), 57-74. LC Call Number: AP2 .A8

Willard Sterne Randall. Thomas Jefferson: A Life . New York: H. Holt, 1993. LC Call Number: E332 .R196 1993

Max Byrd. Jefferson: A Novel . New York: Bantam Books, c1993. LC Call Number: PS3552 .Y675 J44 1993

Garry Wills, "The Aesthete," The New York Review of Books , August 12, 1993. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Susan R. Stein. The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello . New York: H. N. Abrams, in association with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1993. LC Call Number: E332.2 .S84 1993

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Ed., Julian P. Boyd. Vols. 1-. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950- LC Call Number: E 302 .J442 1950a

Dumas Malone. Jefferson and His Time . 6 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1981. LC Call Number: E332 .M25

Wintrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; New York: Norton, 1977. LC Call Numbers: E185 .J69; E446 .J68, 1977

Eric McKitrick, "The View from Jefferson's Camp," The New York Review of Books , December 17, 1970. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Peter S. Onuf, ed. Jeffersonian Legacies . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. LC Call Number: E332.2 .J48 1993

Gordon S. Wood, "Jefferson at Home," New York Review of Books , 1993. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Peter Onuf, "The Scholars' Jefferson," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series, L:4 (October 1993), 671-699. LC Call Number: F221 .W71

James Parton. Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States . Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1874; New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. LC Call Number: E322 .P27 1971

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Albert and Shirley Small Special Collectons Library Special Collections Library

The Thomas Jefferson Papers

Guide to the papers.

The University’s collection of Jefferson papers comprises some 3,650 items. Most are original documents or contemporary transcripts made by secretaries and family members, but some are more recent transcripts and photographic or electrostatic copies of documents which remain in private hands or in less readily accessible institutional repositories. Of the total, 1610 are written by Jefferson, the rest of the correspondence is to Jefferson or bears a direct relationship to him.

All of the Jefferson material has been indexed and described in A Calendar of The Jefferson Papers of the University of Virginia .

Architectural Drawings

The collection includes numerous architectural drawings by Jefferson, most of them relating to the building of the University of Virginia. The drawings have been digitized and are available online. Please use the links below to learn more.

• Information and description of architectural drawings

Overview of the Collection

(Much of the following description is taken from A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Jefferson Papers of the University of Virginia 1732-1828 edited by Douglas W. Tanner.)

Rich in information on Jefferson’s private life, the University’s holdings reveal the constancy of his attachment to family and friends as well as the great diversity of his intellectual interests. They testify to his unflagging efforts in his later years to found the University of Virginia and to establish it on a firm footing. These holdings complement the larger collections of mainly official papers at the Library of Congress and of mainly private papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society , as well as somewhat smaller collections at a number of institutions around the United States. The steady growth of its holdings in recent years confirms the University of Virginia as the principal present day institutional collector of Jefferson manuscripts.

Jefferson’s manifest interest in the preservation of his own papers and of historical records generally has been the inspiration for the Library’s efforts to contribute to the reconstruction of his extant correspondence by all possible means. He and his nineteenth century contemporaries and descendants might have difficulty understanding the curatorial zeal with which every jotted scrap of itinerary or grocery receipt is grasped after and catalogued, and the editorial compulsion to assemble the whole of this material for scholarly scrutiny. Only by these means, however, may posterity be assured of a firm documentary basis for a full understanding of Jefferson’s life and times.

Arrangement

The order in which Jefferson maintained his papers at Monticello survived only a few years after his death. Disarrangement by biographers, editors, and the institutions and family members upon whom care of the papers devolved during the nineteenth century resulted in the destruction of almost every vestige of the original order. That order may only be surmised from scattered evidence and approximated, never reconstructed in detail, no matter how great the editorial diligence with which the original order might be pursued.

Jefferson is known to have placed his papers in order by categories of the divisions of his affairs to which they pertained. An incomplete listing exists of the contents of six of his “presses” or filing cabinets, in the hand of his secretary, Nicholas Trist, presumably made in Trist’s capacity as trustee of Jefferson’s estate after his death. This listing shows that Jefferson kept his papers in drawers or bundles on shelves, dividing them into those public in nature and those private. His public correspondence was in combined chronological and alphabetical arrangement by the periods of his public service, while his private correspondence was alphabetical by correspondent. Numerous separate categories existed for reports, opinions, drafts, notes, accounts, deed papers, and trust papers.

This arrangement apparently survived virtually intact until the first major skewing of the papers at the hands of the Congressional library committee and its agent, Henry A. Washington, after purchase by Congress of the bulk of the papers in 1848. Later ministrations only worsened the division and disarrangement. Presently, most institutional orderings of the papers from that original fond are rigidly chronological, sometimes within series more or less artificial in nature. That situation is likely to prevail, because it probably suits the convenience of librarians, historians, and editors better than the more personal but irrecoverable arrangement that Jefferson had worked out.

The University Collects

The University of Virginia entered upon the deliberate collection of Jefferson papers only in the 20th century, long after some other institutions and individuals had taken an interest in their preservation. A small collection, mainly archival in nature, had accumulated in the Rotunda, the central University of Virginia building which Jefferson had designed as the library. This collection was reasonably well housed after 1913, when special cases were secured for that purpose. An inventory in 1928-1929 showed that the University’s Jefferson collection then amounted to only 175 manuscripts and 111 photostatic copies. By 1934 the Jefferson collection numbered 634 items, and growth thereafter was steady as items were located in previously unorganized collections, and new collections were secured by the University.

The University Library Collects

The official University Archives form the core collection of around fourteen percent of the total Jefferson holdings. It is not known when and how most of these items passed into the keeping of the Library, although it is surmised that many were transferred at some point from the Board of Visitors , and that many others were among the Proctor’s Papers (the University’s chief financial officer in the early years) transferred from the Bursar’s Office. A rough sort of provenance has been established retrospectively over some 350 such items, clearly archival in nature but not otherwise accounted for. These were divided by office of origin into some 240 items from the Board of Visitors (MSS 211-1) and some 110 items from the bursar’s office (MSS 2737-a). Most of the remainder are known definitely to have been among the proctor’s papers (MSS 2737). Remaining items of unknown provenance are included in MSS 38-183-a, 38-628, 38-740, 38-754, 38-755, 38-756, 38-757.

The Edgehill-Randolph Family Papers

The greatest single jump in the size of the collection came in 1942, with the deposit of a large group of Edgehill-Randolph family papers (MSS 1397). Subsequently purchased by the University, this collection was augmented in 1957 by another deposit from the same source (MSS 5533). Together with a host of ancillary collections which may be traced back to the same fond, given or deposited over the years by family members and others, the Edgehill- Randolph papers today make up more than a third of the University’s Jefferson holdings. Not all of these were among Jefferson’s own papers; many are transcripts later made by secretaries and various family members from the original documents, some of which are presently in other collections. But their bulk constitutes the residue of the great collection amassed by Jefferson himself, and subsequently dispersed among the Library of Congress , the Massachusetts Historical Society , and other institutions including the University of Virginia.

Jeffersoniana

Other collections of papers have yielded numbers of Jefferson documents varying from a single item to a score, chiefly copies that Jefferson sent to various recipients. These donations and deposits began with the Lee family papers (MSS 38-112) , the University’s first known manuscript collection, given around 1832. Numerous items of Jeffersoniana have been contributed by institutional and individual collectors, and are also drawn from other collections of family papers. A special category of printed Jeffersoniana has been included from the rare books collections , comprising works dedicated to Jefferson by hand, and those inscribed or annotated by him (MSS 10193 and various other numbers). Many of the above items were purchased through dealers, and their original provenance is uncertain.

Our Jefferson Papers have been microfilmed and may be borrowed through the Interlibrary Loan system.

Additional Resources

• Microfilm Series of the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the UVA
• Bibliography of Sources on Jefferson and the Hemings Family
• Thomas Jefferson’s Music

Crucial to our nation’s history as author of the Declaration of Independence and third president, Thomas Jefferson was also a major figure in the Enlightenment, representing for Europeans the embodiment of the early nineteenth-century American mind. Since 1950, his writings have been compiled in two ongoing projects, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University, and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which documents the time between Jefferson’s return to private life and his death in 1826. Rotunda’s digital edition brings together the content of the published volumes into one searchable online resource. This XML-based edition includes all the illustrations and bibliographical content of the print edition, with the added convenience of linked cross-references and indexes.

Rotunda editions were established by generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office of the University of Virginia

These documents explore the value of education in an informed citizenry. Topics include Jefferson’s instruction as a young college student and lawyer, and his interest in recommending reading lists, purchasing books for libraries, supporting local academies, and developing a rigorous curriculum at the military academy, planting the seeds for his later foundation of the University of Virginia.

To William G. Munford, 18 June 1799

Jefferson expresses his opinions on education and the improvability of the human mind in this letter to a young student who asked his advice on a proper course of study.

To Joseph Priestley, 18 Jan. 1800

Jefferson critiques changes to the College of William and Mary and solicits thoughts on a secular and modern university.

From Anne Cary Randolph, [before 24 February 1803]

Jefferson's 12 year old granddaughter accepts his invitation to become a correspondent, requests he send a French dictionary, and updates him on the schooling of her siblings.

To Anne Cary Randolph, 26 February 1803

Jefferson responds to his granddaughter's request for a French dictionary and his grandson's wish for a book of geography.

To Littleton Tazewell, 5 January 1805

Jefferson, believing that education is necessary to sustain liberty, encourages the Virginia legislature to take steps to charter a public university.

• America on a Global Stage (8)
• Childhood and Family (10)
• Education (5)
• Elections and the Development of Political Parties (16)
• National Expansion (9)
• National Identity (14)
• Native Americans (6)
• Punishments and Pardons (3)
• Religion (6)
• Science and Technology (11)
• Slavery and Race (11)
• Society and Social Identity (1)
• The Business of Government (10)

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 48

A definitive scholarly edition of the correspondence and papers of Thomas Jefferson

After the congressional session ends, Jefferson leaves Washington and goes home to Monticello, where his ailing daughter Mary dies on 17 April. Among the letters of condolence he receives is one from Abigail Adams that initiates a brief...

Confessing that he may be acting "with more boldness than wisdom," Jefferson in November 1803 drafts a bill to create Orleans Territory, which he entrusts to John Breckinridge for introduction in the Senate. The administration sends...

The Louisiana Purchase dominates the months covered in this volume. Jefferson departs for Monticello to enjoy a needed respite after the busy three and a half months he has just spent in the nation's capital. Shortly before leaving...

This volume opens on 4 March 1803, the first day of Jefferson's third year as president. Still shaken by the closing of the right of deposit at New Orleans, he confronts the potential political consequences of a cession of Louisiana to...

This volume opens on 13 November 1802, when Jefferson is in Washington, and closes on 3 March 1803, the final day of his second year as president. The central issue of these months is the closing of the right of deposit at New Orleans...

Volume 38 opens on 1 July 1802, when Jefferson is in Washington, and closes on 12 November, when he is again there. For the last week of July and all of August and September, he resides at Monticello. Frequent correspondence with his...

This volume opens on 4 March 1802, the first anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's inauguration as the nation's third president, and closes on 30 June. In March, a delegation of Seneca Indians comes to Washington to discuss their tribe's...

The period covered by this volume brings to a conclusion Thomas Jefferson's first year as president. On 8 December he communicates his first annual message to Congress: peace between France and England is restored; a rise in population...

For the first two months covered by this volume, Thomas Jefferson is residing at Monticello, avoiding the "rather sickly" season in the nation's capital. His mountaintop house finally has a roof and both daughters and their families...

In Volume 34, covering May through July 1801, the story of Thomas Jefferson's first presidential administration continues to unfold. He quickly begins to implement his objectives of economy and efficiency in government. Requesting the...

Under normal circumstances, Thomas Jefferson would have had more than two months to prepare for his presidency. However, since the House of Representatives finally settled a tied electoral vote only on 17 February 1801, he had two...

"I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all?" Jefferson muses in this volume. His answer: "I do not know that it is." Required by custom to be "entirely passive" during the presidential...

As this volume opens, partisan politics in the United States are building to a crescendo with the approach of the presidential election. Working for a Republican victory, Jefferson consults frequently with Madison, Monroe, and others to...

During the thirteen months covered by this volume, Thomas Jefferson spent more than half of his time in Philadelphia serving as vice president under President John Adams and presiding over a Senate that was dominated by his political...

In the twenty-two months covered by this volume, Jefferson spent most of his time at Monticello, where in his short-lived retirement from office he turned in earnest to the renovation of his residence and described himself as a...

This volume brings Jefferson into retirement after his tenure as Secretary of State and returns him to private life at Monticello. He professes his desire to be free of public responsibilities and live the life of a farmer, spending his...

This volume brings to a close Jefferson's increasingly stormy tenure as Secretary of State, documenting, among many things, his epochal duel with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the conduct of American foreign policy. Against...

This volume documents exhaustively for the first time Edmond Charles Genet's dramatic challenges to American neutrality and Jefferson's diplomatic and political responses. After welcoming Genet's arrival as the harbinger of closer...

The dramatic escalation in the conflict between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to determine the future course of the new American nation is the main theme of this volume. Under pressure from other Republicans, Jefferson decides...

This volume finds Thomas Jefferson grappling with problems arising from the radicalization of the French Revolution in Europe and the polarization of domestic politics in the United States. The overthrow of the French monarchy leads the...

This volume deals with an unusually active, dramatic period during Thomas Jefferson's tenure as Secretary of State.

The months covered by this volume illustrate the variety of topics characteristic of the Jefferson Papers. Subjects range from Jefferson's continued overseeing of the planning of the Federal District that became Washington, D.C., to his...

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 21: Index, Vols. 1-20, will be forthcoming.

Volume 19, covering the final critical weeks of the First Congress, reveals Washington and Jefferson in the closest and most confidential relationship that existed at any time during their official careers. It opens with the...

Volume 18, covering part of the final session of the First Congress, shows Jefferson as Secretary of State continuing his effective collaboration with James Madison in seeking commercial reciprocity with Great Britain by...

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 17: July 1790 to November 1790, will be forthcoming.

This volume brings Jefferson back to the U.S. from France, to become the first American Secretary of State, and marks the beginning of Jefferson's work in the Cabinet with Alexander Hamilton.

In Volume 15 Jefferson, a veteran of the councils of his own country's revolution, becomes an eyewitness of the opening events of the great upheaval in France in 1789.

Volume 14, from October 1788 through April 1789, continues and almost completes Jefferson's stay in France as American minister.

From 1784 to 1789 Jefferson was in France, first as commissioner to negotiate peace treaties and then as American minister. Volume 13 continues the account of these years (which are covered in Volumes 7 to 14) and includes material on...

Volumes 11 and 12 cover the period from January 1787 through March 1788 and deal with Jefferson's stay in France, as American Minister there.

Volumes 11 and 12, cover the period from January 1787 through March 1788 and deal with Jefferson's stay in France, as American Minister there.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 10: June 1786 to December 1786, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 9: November 1785 to June 1786, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 8: February 1785 to October 1785, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 7: March 1784 to February 1785, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 5: February 1781 to May 1781, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 6: May 1781 to March 1784, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4: October 1780 to February 1781, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3: June 1779 to September 1780, will be forthcoming.

The second volume in this series, dealing with 1777-1779.

includes the almost incredible volume of Jefferson's writings on practically every aspect of human life-from politics and diplomacy to architecture, philosophy, agriculture, and music. The series includes 18,000 letters written by...

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Home » Articles » Topic » Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Written by Carol Walker, published on July 30, 2023 , last updated on February 18, 2024

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, articulated and perpetuated the American ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, press, and conscience. He supported the Bill of Rights and even wrote a precursor to the First Amendment. (Painting by Rembrandt Peale, Public domain)

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the  Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, articulated and perpetuated the American ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, press and conscience.

Jefferson had law and political background

Jefferson was born in Goochland (now Albemarle) County, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, died in 1757 when Thomas was only 14. Thomas inherited 5,000 acres and many slaves. He attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from 1760 to 1762, but left without a degree.

After studying law under prominent Virginia lawyer and judge George Wythe, Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. In 1769 he began a six-year tenure in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.

Jefferson wrote Declaration of Independence in three days

In 1776, one year after he entered the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson, now 33, was one of five members selected to draft the Declaration of Independence . Following the lead of John Adams , the committee unanimously selected Jefferson to write the document, which he did over the course of three days. The Continental Congress then amended the Declaration and ratified it on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration of Independence is best known for articulating the  natural rights philosophy that all people (“men”) are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that they have the right to reject any government that does not secure such rights.

As he did throughout his life, Jefferson strongly believed that every American should have the right to prevent the government from infringing on the liberties of its citizens. Certain liberties, including those of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, should be sacred to everyone.

Thomas Jefferson wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written “bill of rights” to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus. Jefferson’s correspondence with James Madison helped to convince Madison to introduce a bill of rights into the First Congress. After ratification by the requisite number of states, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, went into effect in 1791. (Image via Cliff on Flickr, CC BY 2.0, painted in 1786)

Jefferson wanted Bill of Rights for Constitution

Jefferson was serving as ambassador to France when the  Constitutional Convention  met in 1787 to replace the Articles of Confederation, but he remained well informed about events in America, largely because of his correspondence with his good friend  James Madison .

Jefferson recognized that a stronger federal government would make the country more secure economically and militarily, but he feared that a strong central government might become too powerful, restricting citizens’ rights.

He therefore wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written “bill of rights” to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus. Jefferson’s correspondence with James Madison helped to convince Madison to introduce a bill of rights into the First Congress . After ratification by the requisite number of states, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights , went into effect in 1791.

Jefferson drafted a precursor bill to the First Amendent

In  Everson v. Board of Education (1947) ,  Justice Hugo L. Black  and some of his colleagues on the Supreme Court traced the origins of the First Amendment to a bill establishing religious freedom that Jefferson drafted and introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. The bill was not passed until 1786, when, through the efforts of James Madison, it was adopted as the  Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom .

The statute, which had three main sections, explained why compulsory religion requirements were wrong, stated that men were free to express their opinions on religion and choose how or if to worship without having their rights as citizens diminished, and explained how the right of freedom of religion was a natural right of mankind.

Justices on the Supreme Court traced the origins of the First Amendment to a bill establishing religious freedom that Jefferson drafted and introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. The bill was not passed until 1786, when, through the efforts of James Madison, it was adopted as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. (Image via Independence National Historical Park on Wikimedia Commons, public domain, painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1791)

Jefferson was a defender of freedom of conscience

Meanwhile, Jefferson’s own religious views appear to have been fairly unorthodox (for example, he attempted to edit references to miracles out of the Bible), and he was a strong defender of freedom of conscience.

During his presidency, Jefferson wrote a much-quoted letter to Baptists  in Danbury, Connecticut, arguing that the First Amendment had created a  wall of separation  between church and state.

Jefferson opposed punishing speech through Sedition Act

Jefferson demonstrated his strong support for the First Amendment during the presidency of  John Adams , a member of the  Federalist Party . Jefferson belonged to the rival party, known variously as the Republican Party, Democratic-Republican Party, or Jeffersonian-Republican Party.

In 1798 the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien Act, which allowed the president to deport any noncitizens he considered to be a threat to national security . That same year, Congress also passed the Sedition Act , which allowed the imposition of fines or imprisonment for anyone convicted of publishing false or malicious statements against Congress, the president, or any other part of the government.

Thomas Jefferson thought the Alien and Sedition Acts to be clear violations of the freedoms of speech and the press guaranteed in the First Amendment.(Image via the New York Historical Society on Wikimedia Commons, public domain, painted by Rembrandt Peale in 1805)

Jefferson thought the Alien and Sedition Acts to be clear violations of the freedoms of speech and the press guaranteed in the First Amendment. In his mind, the acts were created simply to undermine his political party.

In response, he and Madison anonymously wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 , strongly suggesting that the federal government was overstepping the boundaries set forth not only in the First Amendment but also in the 10th Amendment, which reserved certain powers to the states.

In part because of these arguments, Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800 (resolved in 1801) and became the third chief executive of the United States. As president, Jefferson pardoned all those persons who had been convicted under the Sedition Act.

Before ascending to the presidency, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, from 1779 to 1781, and secretary of state under  President George Washington , from 1789 to 1793. As secretary of state, he often feuded with  Alexander Hamilton , the first Secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson, who preferred to use the pen as his primary means of attack, was quite sensitive to criticism.

In 1796, Jefferson lost the presidential election to Adams by three electoral votes, an outcome that under the Constitution earned him the vice presidency. In the election of 1800, Jefferson tied in electoral votes with fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr, thereby forcing the House of Representatives to decide the outcome of the election. Hamilton disliked both men, but he supported Jefferson as the lesser of the two evils. In the end, Burr became Jefferson’s vice president.

After he left the presidency, Jefferson returned to his Virginia home, Monticello (pictured here), to pursue his numerous intellectual passions. On July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello. (Image via Martin Falbisoner on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

As president, Jefferson tried to keep a weak national government 

During his two terms in office, Jefferson sought to stay true to his principles of a weak national government by cutting the federal budget and taxes while still reducing the national debt. However, the most notable events of Jefferson’s presidency may seem to be at odds with these values.

They included:

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 in which Jefferson, in a constitutionally questionable act, approved the purchase before Congress authorized payment; 
• The Jefferson-supported Embargo Act of 1807, which effectively prohibited all U.S. trade with other nations; and
• The Lewis and Clark expedition, which made many scientific discoveries while exploring the Louisiana Territory, which the nation had just purchased. 

Critics charged that Jefferson exceeded the powers granted to him in the Constitution by engaging in these activities.

Jefferson dies on July 4, 1826 — 50 years after Declaration

After he left the presidency, Jefferson returned to his Virginia home, Monticello, to pursue his numerous intellectual passions. On July 4, 1826, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello. His former adversary and friend John Adams died the same day. After his death, Jefferson’s possessions were sold at auction at Monticello to cover his many debts.

At his request, Jefferson’s proudest accomplishments were listed on his gravestone: author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. Each was tied to his conception of freedom. The most lasting legacies of this complex man are the contributions he made to articulating American ideals and leading the nation during its early years.

This article was originally published in 2009. Carol Walker is an adjunct professor at George Mason University where she teaches about the First Amendment in courses on civil liberties, civil rights, and the Constitution. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science with concentrations in American Government, Public Law, and Research Methods from Georgia State University.

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