Online thomas jefferson biography
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Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world. Abraham Lincoln made just this point when he declared:
All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.7
After Jefferson left Congress in 1776, he returned to Virginia and served in the legislature. In late 1776, as a member of the new House of Delegates of Virginia, he worked closely with James Madison. Their first collaboration, to end the religious establishment in Virginia, became a legislative battle which would culminate with the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.
Governor of Virginia
Elected governor from 1779 to 1781, he suffered an inquiry into his conduct during the British invasion of Virginia in his last year in office that, although the in
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Thomas Jefferson alongside Henry Childs Merwin
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Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Early Years
Jefferson was born on April 2, 1743 (after the change in 1752 from the Julian, or Old Style, Calendar, the date was adjusted to April 13, which became common usage). He was the son of Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph Jefferson and was born at Shadwell, on the Rivanna River in a part of Goochland County that became Albemarle County in 1744. His father was a founding member of the Albemarle County Court, a prominent frontier surveyor, and creator with Joshua Fry of the 1751 Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia. His mother was a member of one of the most politically influential families in eighteenth-century Virginia. Shadwell was well stocked in refined material goods consistent with gentry culture, despite its situation near the Virginia frontier.
After his father died on August 17, 1757, Jefferson inherited more than 5,000 acres of land, half of it in the environs of Shadwell, about twenty slaves, and his father’s books and mathematical instruments. He boarded at the small schools of two Anglican clergymen, with William Douglas from 1752 to 1757 and with James Maury from 1758 until Jefferson’s departure in 1760 for the College of William and Mary. Maury grounded him well in Latin and Greek, and in Williamsburg Jefferson pursue