In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.Īs a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington’s Cabinet. Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. As the “silent member” of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.įreckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing.
In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson, a spokesman for democracy, was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801–1809).
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