Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was a Virginia planter, lawyer and architect who drafted the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three, in a rented room in Philadelphia, and who asked that his tombstone record that, the Virginia statute for religious freedom and the founding of the University of Virginia, and not that he had been president. He was minister to France, the first secretary of state, and president for two terms, during which he bought Louisiana. He owned some six hundred people over his life and freed a handful, and the contradiction between the Declaration’s sentence and his conduct has been the American argument ever since.