| Bio |

Who they were

Thomas Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 (New Style) at Shadwell, his father's plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia^[3][4]. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a self-made planter and surveyor known for his great physical strength^[5][3]. Jefferson grew up in a household of considerable wealth built on enslaved labour and land, and received a classical education. In 1770 the house at Shadwell burned down, destroying his childhood home and many of his books^{[2, p. 354]}. He went on to study at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg^[4].

After William and Mary, Jefferson trained as a lawyer and was elected to Virginia's colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses^[6]. He built a reputation as a clear, persuasive writer rather than a forceful public speaker. Sent to the Continental Congress in 1775, he impressed colleagues with his prose. In 1776, at just 33, he was chosen for the five-man committee tasked with drafting a declaration explaining the colonies' break with Britain, alongside John Adams and Benjamin Franklin^[7]. He later served as Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War^{[6, p. 99]}, then as a diplomat in France, and as the new nation's first Secretary of State under George Washington^[8].

Jefferson is best remembered as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, adopted on 4 July 1776, with its enduring claim that "all men are created equal"^{[9][2, p. 212]}. After defeating John Adams in the bitterly fought election of 1800, Jefferson became the third President in 1801^{[10, p. 87]}. His presidency is defined by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which roughly doubled the size of the United States through a single deal with France^[11]. He also founded the University of Virginia in 1819^[12] and personally designed his mountaintop home, Monticello, having taught himself architecture largely from books^[13].

Jefferson left the presidency in 1809 and retired to Monticello, where he spent his final years deeply in debt^[14]. He died on 4 July 1826, aged 83, just hours before his old friend and rival John Adams — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence^{[2, p. 401][15]}. Jefferson had written his own epitaph, choosing to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence, of Virginia's statute for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia — leaving the presidency itself off the list^[16].

The Declaration's language of natural rights and equality became a touchstone for later reform movements, even though Jefferson did not extend it to the people he enslaved. The Louisiana Purchase reshaped the map of North America, and the University of Virginia he founded remains a major public university today^[12]. His decades-long, sometimes bitter rivalry with John Adams — followed by a remarkable reconciliation carried out almost entirely through letters between 1812 and 1826 — is now seen as one of the defining relationships of the founding era^[17].

Jefferson was as much a hobbyist as a statesman. Family tradition holds that he liked to bring out his violin and play music with visitors at Monticello^[3], and his interest in architecture and mechanical invention ran through his letters and his design work at Monticello for decades^{[6, p. 55]}.

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