Thomas Jefferson: Perhaps, the Greatest American Thinker

With thanks to “Founding Fathers…a nation is born.”

Note: As this column was completed this afternoon, Saturday, July 13, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The former President appeared on his feet with blood, apparently superficial, on one side of his face. There should be no tolerance for violence of any kind at a political rally in the United States. We wish former President Trump well and hope there is no further disruption to his Presidential campaign.

It has long fascinated me that approximately two hundred and fifty years ago, providence provided the most remarkable assemblage of American thinkers to contemplate a new nation with a new kind of governance that changed how much the world has thought of itself ever since. While, as the saying goes, success has many parents, and failure is always an orphan, no one had a more significant impact on the American experiment than Thomas Jefferson. John F. Kennedy once quipped while hosting a White House dinner for Nobel laureates that the occasion represented the greatest gathering of intellect except, possibly, when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but not too far off the mark. Without taking anything away from that magnificent assembly of great American thinkers, let’s pause to consider one in particular…Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was both a great American thinker and, sadly, a slave-owning racist who believed that white Americans were superior in intellect to Africans whom he knew primarily as slaves. Given that most of the Africans he knew were slaves, his opinion regarding their intellectual inferiority was not uncommon, nor did it interfere with his fathering at least one child with his slave Sally Hemmings.

In 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles, Skelton, with whom he was in love and quite devoted. Martha gave birth to six children, but only two lived into adulthood. Martha sadly, died in 1782, plunging Thomas into what has been described as inconsolable grief. It was during these years that Thomas Jefferson distinguished himself to the cause of American independence. It fell to Thomas Jefferson to pen the American Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson leaned toward an agrarian centrist society, other prominent founders, including George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, believed that a strong centrist government was essential to binding the new nation into a single cohesive nation.

When Jefferson became President, he set out to reduce the size of the government as he promised he would and the public seemed to approve. Some of his popularity was likely the result of a booming American economy. The two signature acts of Jefferson’s first term were his commissioning of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the American continent all the way to the west coast, followed by the Louisiana Purchase. The war between Britain and France was far less popular. His second term as President left him anxious to return to private life in 1809.

His later years in Monticello were largely happy ones. He rose early and often spent much of the day writing letters to his many distinguished correspondents. His interest in architecture and education found fortunate confluence in the construction of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, primarily designedy by Jefferson in keeping neoclassical principles, still an elegant memorial to his exceptional talents. Jefferson never remarried but remained exceptionally close with his daughter, Martha, known to most as Patsy, whom Jefferson described as the cherished companion of his youth and the nurse of his old age.

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