More importantly, through these three accomplishments he had made an enormous contribution to the aspirations of a new America and to the dawning hopes of repressed people around the world. He had dedicated his life to meeting the challenges of his age: political freedom, religious freedom, and educational opportunity. He never wavered from his belief in the American experiment. I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, 2 July He spent much of his life laying the groundwork to insure that the great experiment would continue. If you can't bring your class to Monticello, we'll bring it to you! The virtual field trip lasts about 45 minutes, during which time a Monticello educator will talk to your class about Monticello using images, props, and an online virtual tour.
When Jefferson was fourteen, his father died, and he inherited a sizeable estate of approximately 5, acres. That inheritance included the house at Shadwell, but Jefferson dreamed of living on a mountain. In he contracted for the clearing of a feet square site on the topmost point of the foot mountain that rose above Shadwell and where he played as a boy. This would eventually be referred to as the South Pavilion and was where he lived first alone and then with his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, following their marriage in January Along with the land Jefferson inherited slaves from his father and even more slaves from his father-in-law, John Wayles ; he also bought and sold enslaved people.
In a typical year, he owned about , almost half of them under the age of sixteen. About eighty of these enslaved individuals lived at Monticello; the others lived on his adjacent Albemarle County farms, and on his Poplar Forest estate in Bedford County, Virginia. Over the course of his life, he owned over enslaved people. These men, women and children were integral to the running of his farms and building and maintaining his home at Monticello.
Some were given training in various trades, others worked the fields, and some worked inside the main house. Many of the enslaved house servants were members of the Hemings family. Jefferson gave the Hemingses special positions, and the only slaves Jefferson freed in his lifetime and in his will were all Hemingses, giving credence to the oral history.
The Declaration has been regarded as a charter of American and universal liberties. The document proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status; that those rights are inherent in each human, a gift of the creator, not a gift of government, and that government is the servant and not the master of the people.
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.
After Jefferson left Congress in , he returned to Virginia and served in the legislature. Jefferson, the astronomer. Jefferson loved stargazing almost as much as he liked books. He made sure astronomy was taught at the University of Virginia, and he designed what may have been the first observatory in the United States. Jefferson, the writer. He was a prolific writer during his lifetime, with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom included in his epitaph instead of his two terms as president.
The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress includes about 27, documents, including his extensive correspondence with key historical figures. Jefferson, the musician. He took violin lessons as a child and played the violin as he courted his future wife, Martha Skelton. Toggle navigation. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Foreign affairs dominated his day-to-day attentions while President, often pushing him toward Federalist policies that contrasted with his political philosophy.
To ensure the safety of American ships on the high seas, Jefferson attempted to put an end to the bribes that the United States had been paying to the Barbary states for many years. This resulted in a war with Tripoli, in which Jefferson was forced to use his navy and to rethink his policy of reducing the U. While the United States at first enjoyed an economic boom due to the war between England and France, the British navy's practice of forcing American sailors into British service led to Jefferson's disastrous suspension of trade with both France and England.
This trade war devastated the economy, alienated the hard-hit mercantile Northeast, and propelled America into war with England. Nonetheless, the deal troubled Jefferson, who did not wish to overstep the central government's powers as outlined by the Constitution, which made no mention of the power to acquire new territory.
It was Jefferson who authorized the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition , led by Meriwether Lewis, a military officer who was Jefferson's clerk at the White House. Jefferson preferred to live a simple lifestyle during his time in office, often greeting his dinner guests in old homespun clothes and a pair of worn bedroom slippers.
Having lost his beloved wife, Martha Wayles Skelton, in to childbirth, Jefferson relied on his two married daughters and the wife of his secretary of state, Dolley Madison, as his official hostesses.
In , Jefferson retired to his Virginia plantation home, Monticello, where he continued pursuing his widely diverse interests in science, natural history, philosophy, and the classics. Jefferson also devoted himself to founding the University of Virginia.
Contemporary debates continue to rage—as they did during Jefferson's own lifetime—concerning his relationship with Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson's slaves, after Martha's death. Recent DNA evidence presents a convincing case that Jefferson was indeed the biological father of Heming's children, and most historians now believe that Jefferson and Hemings had a long-term sexual relationship. Jefferson was ambivalent about slavery throughout his career. As a young politician, he argued for the prohibition of slavery in new American territories, yet he never freed his own slaves.
How could a man responsible for writing the sacred words "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" have been a slave owner? He never resolved his internal conflict on this issue.
After carrying on a long and fascinating correspondence with John Adams while both men were in the twilight of their lives, Jefferson died on July 4, —exactly fifty years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F.
0コメント