Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), is best remembered as a great President and as the author of the Declaration of Independence. He also won lasting fame as a diplomat, a political thinker, and a founder of the Democratic party.

Jefferson's interests and talents covered an amazing range. He became the foremost American architect of his time. He designed the Virginia Capitol, the University of Virginia, and his own home, Monticello. As a scientific farmer, he cultivated the finest gardens in America. His many inventions included the swivel chair and the dumb-waiter. Jefferson's excellent library became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. He drafted Virginia's civil code, and founded its state university. He devised the convenient decimal system of coinage that allows Americans to keep accounts in dollars and cents. He also found time to write a Manual of Parliamentary Practice, to prepare written vocabularies of Indian languages, and to play the violin in chamber music concerts.

Jefferson regarded himself as a public-spirited citizen and a broad-minded, practical thinker, rather than as a professional politician. He once wrote: "I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give." Yet his country needed his talents, and he contributed them. Jefferson cherished liberty in every form, and was largely responsible for the Bill of Rights that guarantees the basic American freedoms.

The tall red-haired Virginian believed that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." The term Jeffersonian Democracy refers to his ideal of a nation of landowning farmers living under as little government as possible.

Jefferson molded the American spirit and mind. Every later generation has turned to him for inspiration. Through 60 years of public service, he remained faithful to his vow of "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

During Jefferson's two terms as President, the United States doubled in area with the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory. America preserved its hard-won neutrality while Napolean's armies battled most of Europe. Congress passed a law banning the slave trade. A trip from New York City to Philadelphia took two days by stagecoach. But the first successful voyage of Robert Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, signalled a new era in transportation. Washington Irving, one of the first American authors to gain recognition abroad, was writing his Knickerbocker's History of New York. And Noah Webster published his first dictionary.