Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was born into the Virginia planter elite of colonial America. He graduated from the College of William and Mary and studied law in Williamsburg, where he was also a member of the House of Burgesses. A delegate to the Second Continental Congress, he drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when he was just 33 years old, and for more than three decades served his country. Returning to the Virginia legislature, he drafted a bill for religious freedom and in 1779 was elected governor. In 1783 he returned to Congress, where he helped develop plans for incorporating new lands ceded by Britain in the Treaty of Paris, called the Northwest Territory. His time there was brief, since Congress, recognizing the importance of commercial treaties, sent him to Paris on a diplomatic mission. While there Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin and was appointed minister to France, where he witnessed the beginnings of the French Revolution.
In 1789 the newly inaugurated President George Washington called Jefferson home to make him the nation’s first secretary of state under the new Constitution, which had been ratified the previous year. Jefferson was shortly at odds with Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury whose economic policies aimed at consolidating national power and favored commercial interests over agriculture. When Britain and France went to war in 1793, Jefferson and Hamilton clashed again. While President Washington declared that the United States would remain neutral, Jefferson favored closer ties to France, which had supported the United States during the Revolution, while Hamilton favored Britain as the nation’s most important trading power. Tension within Washington’s cabinet prompted the emergence of early political parties, Jefferson’s allies as the Democratic-Republicans and Hamilton’s as the Federalists. In 1793, Jefferson resigned.
A candidate for president in 1796, Jefferson came in second and so—according to the constitutional arrangement of the time—served as President John Adams’s vice president. In 1800 Jefferson ran again and won. From 1801 to 1809, his two terms were marked by domestic accomplishments, notably the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, which secured navigation rights on the Mississippi River and doubled the size of the country. The three-year Lewis and Clark Expedition mapped the new lands and brought back specimens of plants and animals that Jefferson delighted in. In foreign affairs, Jefferson sent U.S. warships to the Barbary States on the coast of North Africa to protect American ships from seizure and hostage-taking. But the president had little success in sustaining neutrality in the ongoing war between Britain and France. Both sides seized American ships and even its citizens and the 1807 Embargo Act, which sought to apply economic pressure by prohibiting trade with either, was a failure. It crippled the U.S. economy and left the nation ill-prepared for the war against Great Britain that began in 1812.
In 1809 Jefferson retired to Monticello, the mansion of his own design near Charlottesville, and spent most of his remaining years planning the University of Virginia. It was what he said he wanted to be remembered for, together with the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.