Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson wrote the Declaration in a little over two weeks in June 1776, drawing on Locke and on the language of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Its central claim is that all men are created equal and are endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The Congress cut about a quarter of the draft, including a passage blaming the king for the slave trade, and adopted the rest on July 4. The document was a declaration of war as much as a statement of philosophy, but its argument outlived the conflict and became the standard against which the republic's own failures would be measured.

When Napoleon offered to sell France's North American claim for fifteen million dollars, Jefferson faced a dilemma: the Constitution granted no explicit power to acquire territory. He drafted an amendment, then let it drop when his advisers warned that delay would lose the deal.

The purchase added some 828,000 square miles between the Mississippi and the Rockies and made the United States a continental power. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore it, and the question of whether the new states would permit slavery made the acquisition the beginning of a long political crisis.

In Virginia the Anglican Church was established by law, and dissenters were taxed to support it. Jefferson drafted a statute in 1777 declaring that no one should be compelled to attend or support any religious worship, and that the mind cannot be forced.

Madison guided it through the legislature in 1786 after a long campaign against a general assessment for religion. The statute ended establishment in Virginia and became the model for the First Amendment's religion clauses. Jefferson was prouder of it than of his presidency and asked that it, along with the Declaration and the University of Virginia, be inscribed on his tomb.