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given only to waste itself, as it were, on an im mense desert of space glitter- ing with shows.

It is only by contemplating what he calls the starry heavens, as the book and school of science, that he discovers any use in their being vis i ble to him, or any advantage resulting from his immensity of vision. But when he con- templates the subject in this light, he sees an additional motive for saying, that nothing was made in vain; for in vain would be this power of vision if it taught man nothing.

1793 1794

THOM AS JEFFER SON 1743–1826

In June 1776, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to consider whether to declare their alliance of colonies in de pen dent of Great Britain. The delegates turned to a thirty- two- year- old representative from Virginia, Thomas Jef- ferson, to be the principal drafter of a statement that the full congress would then debate, amend, and vote to either accept or reject. Jefferson was an awkward speaker but a talented prose stylist, and his reputation as a writer had preceded him to Phil- adelphia. While serving in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1774, he had written an induential and daring pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British Amer- i ca, which denied all parliamentary authority over Amer i ca and argued that ties to the British monarchy were voluntary and not irrevocable. On June 11, 1776, after some maneuvering by John Adams, Jefferson was chosen to head the committee charged with drafting a declaration of in de pen dence. The other members of the com- mittee who helped Jefferson re"ne his draft were Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. On June 28, the draft declaration was presented to Congress, where it underwent some further modi"cations before it could pass unanimously, as it did on July 4. These alterations were a source of regret to Jef- ferson. In his Autobiography (1829), he included the original draft and indicated changes made by the Congress.

One of the omitted passages speaks to a central tension of Jefferson’s legacy. Admired as a prophet of equality and liberty, he is also widely recognized as an owner of some two hundred slaves, including several men and women who were most likely his children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings. This paradox in Jefferson’s personal life resonates with a larger circumstance memorably captured by the En glish writer Samuel Johnson in his 1775 pamphlet “Taxation No Tyranny.” “Why is it,” Johnson asked, “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” In his draft declaration, Jefferson seeks to turn the tables by blaming George III, “the christian king of Great Britain,” for refusing to allow the colonists to limit the slave trade and inciting enslaved people “to rise in arms among us, . . . thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” In this formulation, Jefferson proposes an equivalence between the colonists, who are said to be resisting “slavery” to Great Britain, and those subjected to race- based chattel

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slavery. At the same time, he invokes the specter of racial warfare—of whites against the “merciless Indian savages” as well as black slaves—to unite the colonists against the Crown.

Jefferson wrote his Autobiography in 1821, and he may have been prompted to restore this passage of the draft declaration by a national crisis regarding whether to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. On March  3, 1820, the Missouri Compromise legislated a balance between free and slave states. Writing of the slave system in April 1820, he observed that “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self- preservation in the other.” As the restored text of the Declara- tion shows, Jefferson’s fear of race war had long been a power ful—and powerfully distorting— factor in his thought. In the 1780s, it led him in Notes on the State of Virginia to support the colonization movement that sought to remove people of African descent from the United States.

Jefferson’s complex stance is related to his roots in the Virginia planter society that had developed over the eigh teenth century. He was born at the Shadwell plantation, in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. His mother, Jane Ran- dolph, came from one of the state’s most prominent families. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a county of"cial and surveyor. When Thomas was fourteen, his father died, and he inherited twenty- seven hundred acres of land and slaves to work it. Over the years he added to this expanse of property, which reached a peak of almost ten thousand acres.

In 1760 Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia. There Jefferson met three men who strongly induenced his life: Governor Francis Fauquier, a fellow of the Royal Society, a famous scienti"c organ- ization based in Eng land; George Wythe, one of the best teachers of law in the colonies; and Dr. William Small, an emigrant from Scotland who introduced Jef- ferson to the Scottish Enlightenment, including the work of Francis Hutcheson, author of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and Henry Home, Lord Kames, author of Essays on the Princi ples of Morality and Natu- ral Religion (1751), whose ideas shaped his aesthetic and po liti cal thought. Jeffer- son remained in Williamsburg to study law after graduation and was admitted to the bar in 1765.

Three years later he began clearing the mountaintop at his plantation, named Monticello, Italian for “ little mountain.” There, he eventually built the neoclassical mansion of his own design, completing the proj ect in 1808. The year after he started his building proj ect, he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and began a prominent career in the legislature. After serving in the Continental Con- gress during the catalytic summer of 1776, he left to take up a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates that September. He was elected governor in 1779 and reelected the following year. Jefferson’s term of of"ce came to an ignominious end after the British captured Richmond in 1781. Jefferson and the legislature moved to Charlot- tesville, and he and the legislators barely escaped imprisonment when the pursuing British Army descended on them at Monticello. Jefferson’s ensuing resignation and the lack of preparations for the defense of the city were held against him, and it was some time before he regained the con"dence of Virginians.

From 1781 to 1784, Jefferson withdrew from public life and remained at Monti- cello, completing his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, a work of natu ral and social history that also pres ents Jefferson’s thinking on a range of volatile issues, including slavery and race, religious liberty, and the economic basis of the future United States. He was appointed minister to France in 1784 and served with Benjamin Franklin on the commission that signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He returned to Monticello in 1789, and the follow- ing year George Washington appointed him to be the "rst secretary of state under the newly adopted Constitution. After three years, Jefferson retired once again and

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1. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, that “ these united Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and in de pen dent states.” Lee’s resolution was passed on July 2, and the Declaration was adopted on July 4 with the changes noted by Jef-

ferson in this text, taken from his Autobiography. On August 2, a copy on parchment was signed by all the delegates but three, who signed later. The text is from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1903), edited by  A.  A. Lipscomb and  A.  E. Bergh.

temporarily withdrew to Monticello. He ran for president in 1796, losing to John Adams and taking the of"ce of vice president instead, as was then the practice. However, he won the watershed election of 1800, becoming the nation’s third pres- ident and the "rst to be inaugurated in Washington,  D.C. He named Benjamin Latrobe surveyor of public buildings and worked with Latrobe in planning a great city to be the new nation’s capital.

When Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1809, his public life was over. In his later years, he kept up a copious correspondence. His exchanges with John Adams offer a study in contrasting personalities as well as fascinating insights into revolu- tionary history. On the Fourth of July, 1826—the "ftieth anniversary of the Dec- laration of In de pen dence—Jefferson died a few hours before Adams, his longtime collaborator, rival, and correspondent. At the time of his death, he was deeply in debt, and his family was forced to sell Monticello. Despite the discomfort with the slave system that he frequently expressed, Jefferson ultimately freed a total of just seven of the people he held in bondage, all members of the extended Hemings family.

President of the United States, "rst secretary of state, minister to France, gover- nor of Virginia, and congressman, Thomas Jefferson once said that he wished to be remembered for only three things: drafting the Declaration of In de pen dence, writ- ing and supporting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), and founding the University of Virginia (1819). Jefferson might well have included a number of other accomplishments in this list: a remarkable architect, he designed not just Monticello but also the Virginia state capitol and the original buildings for the University of Virginia; he had a library of some ten thousand volumes, which served as the basis for the Library of Congress, and a collection of paintings and sculpture that made him the greatest patron of the arts in the early United States; and he was known the world over for his spirit of scienti"c inquiry and as the creator of several remarkable inventions.

The three acts for which he wished to be remembered testify to Jefferson’s life- long passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed by the state, the Church, or human ignorance. The fact that he was unable to liberate his own mind from the tyranny of racialist thought remains part of his ambiguous leg- acy. The Declaration of In de pen dence has directly induenced in de pen dence move- ments around the world, from Haiti to India and from Venezuela to Rhodesia. It offers an im por tant argument for viewing “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as “unalienable Rights” best achieved through the exercise of popular government.

From The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson1

From The Declaration of In de pen dence

* * * It appearing in the course of these debates, that the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Mary land, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast