National Thomas Jefferson Day

At 33, in summer 1776, he drafted the Declaration of Independence, 17 days of writing in a Philadelphia rooming house. The document borrowed from John Locke, from George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, and from the English political tradition. But the synthesis, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal', was Jefferson's. It remains the most influential American sentence ever written.

After the Revolution, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, Washington's Secretary of State, Adams' Vice President, and finally the third President (1801-1809). The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the country's size; the Lewis & Clark expedition mapped it. He founded the University of Virginia, designed the buildings himself, and pushed public education long before it was a mainstream American cause.

Jefferson was also, throughout all of this, a slaveholder. He enslaved 607 people across his lifetime at Monticello. He had a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved, that produced six children. He wrote about the evils of slavery while living by its profits. For two centuries this was minimized; over the last thirty years, scholars and institutions (including Monticello itself) have reckoned with it fully. The result is a more honest, and more American, picture. Jefferson is the country's great paradox. He remains essential reading.

Four careers Jefferson held, any one of which would have made a normal man famous:

Six pilgrimage sites for the Jefferson-curious: