Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was born in 1743 at Shadwell, Virginia, into a family of planters, and studied law at the College of William and Mary. He entered the Virginia House of Burgesses young and wrote early in his career a pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, that made him known as a bold defender of colonial rights.

In 1776 the Continental Congress asked him to draft the Declaration of Independence, whose argument that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed became the founding statement of the republic. Back in Virginia he wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom and worked to reform the laws of inheritance and education along republican lines.

He served as governor of Virginia, as minister to France, and as Washington's first secretary of state before becoming president in 1801. His administration completed the Louisiana Purchase, sent Lewis and Clark westward, and kept the country out of the Napoleonic wars. He founded the University of Virginia in retirement and died at Monticello on the Fourth of July, 1826.

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