Thomas Jefferson

As principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia planter, lawyer, diplomat and architect Thomas Jefferson gave the American Revolution its most famous statement of natural rights; as the third president of the United States, from 1801 to 1809, he doubled the country's size with the Louisiana Purchase. He also owned more than 600 enslaved people over his lifetime, and most historians accept that he fathered children with one of them, Sally Hemings.

Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 at Shadwell, his family's plantation in the Colony of Virginia, the son of Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and planter, and Jane Randolph, from one of the colony's leading families. When his father died in 1757 he inherited around 5,000 acres of land and the enslaved people who worked it. At Williamsburg he studied at the College of William & Mary, where the mathematician William Small introduced him to the works of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, and then read law with George Wythe. He was admitted to the bar in 1767.

In 1768 he began building Monticello, the hilltop house near Charlottesville that he designed and redesigned for the rest of his life. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow. Her father's death in 1773 brought the couple 135 more enslaved people, thousands of acres and heavy debts. Among those inherited were members of the Hemings family, including the infant Sally Hemings, who was almost certainly Martha's half-sister, the daughter of John Wayles by an enslaved woman, Betty Hemings. Martha bore six children, only two of whom reached adulthood, and died in 1782 after the birth of the last. Jefferson never remarried.

Jefferson entered the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 and became known for his writing on colonial rights, especially A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). In 1775 Virginia sent him to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where in June 1776 he was placed on a committee of five, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin among the others, to draft a declaration of independence. He wrote the draft largely alone. Congress cut and revised it, removing a passage that blamed George III for the slave trade, and adopted it on 4 July 1776. Its claim that all men are created equal and have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness became the founding statement of the American Revolution.

Back in Virginia he worked to reform the state's laws. His Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777 and passed in 1786 with James Madison's help, separated church and state in Virginia. As governor from 1779 to 1781 he had a difficult time: British forces raided Richmond and Charlottesville, and he narrowly escaped capture at Monticello. In these years he also wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, which contains both his criticism of slavery and his speculation that Black people were inferior to white people.

In 1784 Congress sent Jefferson to France, and from 1785 to 1789 he was minister there, succeeding Franklin. He lived in Paris as the French Revolution began and sympathised with its early stages, advising his friend Lafayette. In 1787 his younger daughter Polly joined him, accompanied by the fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings, whose brother James was already in Paris training as a chef. According to the later account of her son Madison Hemings, she became pregnant by Jefferson in France and agreed to return to Virginia only after he promised that her children would be freed once they reached adulthood.

George Washington made Jefferson the first secretary of state in 1790. He soon clashed with the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, over the national bank, federal debt, commerce and relations with Britain and France. Jefferson wanted a republic of independent farmers and a limited central government, and he and Madison organised the opposition that became the Democratic-Republican Party. He resigned at the end of 1793. In 1796 he came second to John Adams and, under the rules of the time, became vice president. In 1798 he secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolutions against the Federalists' Alien and Sedition Acts.

The election of 1800 ended in a tie in the electoral college between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, and the House of Representatives chose Jefferson only on the 36th ballot in February 1801. He was the first president inaugurated in the new capital, Washington. His government cut taxes, the army and navy, and the national debt, and fought the First Barbary War against the corsair states of North Africa.

His greatest achievement in office was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Spain had returned Louisiana to France in 1800, and Jefferson's envoys, sent to buy New Orleans, were offered the whole territory by Napoleon for $15 million. The purchase roughly doubled the size of the United States, although Jefferson doubted that the Constitution allowed it. He then sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark across the continent to the Pacific between 1804 and 1806.

His second term went less well. Burr, who had killed Hamilton in a duel, was tried for treason in 1807 and acquitted. To keep the country out of the war between Britain and Napoleonic France, which were both seizing American ships, Jefferson persuaded Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807, banning American exports. It damaged the economy, was widely evaded and was repealed just before he left office. In 1807 he also signed the law banning the import of enslaved Africans from 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed.

Jefferson called slavery a moral evil and proposed limits on it, including a 1784 plan to ban it from the western territories that failed by one vote. Yet he depended on enslaved labour throughout his life, bought and sold people, and freed very few: two men in the 1790s, and five more in his will. About a hundred people were enslaved at Monticello at any one time.

Sally Hemings had six children, four of whom survived to adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston. The journalist James Callender made the relationship public in 1802, and Jefferson's white descendants denied it for generations. A DNA study in 1998 found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Eston Hemings, and in 2000 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, concluded that Jefferson was very probably the father of all six. A minority of scholars still argue that another Jefferson male could have been the father. Beverly and Harriet left Monticello in 1822, and Madison and Eston were freed by his will. Sally Hemings herself was never formally freed, but lived in Charlottesville as a free woman until her death in 1835.

In retirement at Monticello Jefferson corresponded widely, renewed his friendship with John Adams, sold his library to Congress in 1815 after the British burned the Capitol, and founded the University of Virginia, which he designed and which opened in 1825. He died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, a few hours before Adams. He left such large debts that Monticello and around 130 enslaved people were sold. He chose his own epitaph, naming the Declaration, the Virginia statute for religious freedom and the university, but not his presidency.

Jefferson remains one of the most admired and most argued-over figures in the History of the United States. His words about equality and liberty were taken up by abolitionists, by Abraham Lincoln and by later civil rights movements, while his life as a slaveholder has made him a central example of the contradiction between the country's founding ideals and its practice.