Thomas Jefferson

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams's last words, spoken without knowing Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier, were: "Thomas Jefferson survives." He was wrong, and the symmetry of that shared date has haunted American memory ever since.

  Jefferson was born on the 13th of April, 1743, at Shadwell Plantation in colonial Virginia, the third of ten children. He died $100,000 in debt, unable to leave much to his heirs, after a life that included drafting the Declaration of Independence, doubling the size of the United States, and founding a university. He was the third president, the first secretary of state, a minister to France, a governor, a lawyer, an architect, a violinist, and the owner of hundreds of enslaved people.

  How does one man become the primary author of "the most potent and consequential words in American history" while spending his entire adult life contradicting those words by holding other human beings in bondage? What drove Jefferson from the mountaintop estate he spent decades building to the corridors of a new nation's capital? And what did it mean that his closest intellectual friend was also his most dangerous political rival? Those are the questions this documentary will spend time with.

• 2. The World He Inherited

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  Peter Jefferson died in 1757, leaving his fourteen-year-old son roughly 5,000 acres and a father's unfulfilled longing for education. Peter was self-taught and regretted it. He had placed Thomas in an English school at age five, then in 1752 sent him to a local school run by a Presbyterian minister. The lesson was clear: formal learning was the inheritance a planter father could give that land alone could not.

  At seventeen, Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where a Scottish professor named William Small introduced him to the ideas of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. Small also introduced Jefferson to lawyer George Wythe and colonial governor Francis Fauquier. These three men, recognizing Jefferson's ability, folded him into their inner circle and invited him to their Friday dinner parties. Jefferson later wrote that there he "heard more common good sense, more rational and philosophical conversations than in all the rest of my life."

  In his first year at William and Mary, Jefferson spent money freely and attended parties. In his second year, regretting it, he committed to studying fifteen hours a day. That capacity for sudden, total self-correction would define him. After concluding his formal studies in April 1762, he read law under Wythe's tutorship while clerking in Wythe's office. He became a member of the Flat Hat Club, the nation's oldest secret society, and kept two commonplace books: one assembling quotations from roughly age fifteen to thirty, and another recording legal, historical, and philosophical notes that he maintained until the end of his life. Both were published in the twentieth century.

  Jefferson treasured books the way others treasured land. He assembled three separate libraries across his lifetime. His first, which grew to 200 volumes, was destroyed in a fire at Shadwell in 1770. His second grew to nearly 6,500 volumes by 1814. After British forces burned the Library of Congress that same year, he sold that second library to the U.S. government for $23,950, used part of the proceeds to pay debts, and immediately began assembling a third. In a letter to John Adams, he wrote simply: "I cannot live without books."

• 3. The Mountain and the Marriage

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  In 1768, Jefferson began building Monticello on a hilltop overlooking his 5,000-acre plantation near present-day Charlottesville, Virginia. He would spend most of his adult life designing and redesigning it. He once described architecture as "my delight, and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements." The house's Italian name means "little mountain." Its Palladian neoclassical style became his lifelong project.

  On the 1st of January, 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, a 23-year-old widow and skilled pianist whom historian Dumas Malone described as representing the happiest period of Jefferson's life. Jefferson accompanied her on violin or cello. During their ten-year marriage, Martha bore six children; only two, Martha and Mary, survived to adulthood. Martha's father died in 1773, and the couple inherited 135 enslaved people, 11,000 acres, and a substantial load of debt that took Jefferson years to work through.

  Martha suffered from ill health, including diabetes, and repeated pregnancies weakened her further. She died on the 6th of September, 1782, with Jefferson at her side. Shortly before she died, she made him promise never to remarry, telling him she could not bear to have another mother raise her children. Jefferson spent the following weeks pacing relentlessly and taking long solitary rides with his daughter Martha, who said she was "a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief."

  Monticello was always more than a residence. Jefferson thought of it as an intellectual gathering place for James Madison, James Monroe, and other friends. He kept there what he called the largest collection of books in the world on the geography and natural history of the North American continent. When Meriwether Lewis was preparing to lead the Corps of Discovery westward, Jefferson gave him unlimited access to that Monticello library.

• 4. Writing the Declaration

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  At age thirty-three, Jefferson was one of the youngest delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia after the Battles of Lexington and Concord launched the American Revolutionary War in 1775. John Adams sought him out and supported his appointment to the Committee of Five, which Congress charged with authoring a declaration of independence. The committee consisted of Adams, Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman.

  Adams persuaded the committee to choose Jefferson as the primary author on three grounds: Jefferson was Virginian, popular, and a good writer. Jefferson consulted his colleagues but mostly wrote the Declaration in isolation between June 11 and 28 of 1776. He drew on his own proposed draft of the Virginia Constitution, George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Enlightenment writings of Locke and Montesquieu.

  Congress began debating the draft on the 1st of July, and removed roughly a fourth of Jefferson's original text. Jefferson resented the changes but did not speak publicly about them. On the 4th of July, 1776, Congress voted unanimously to ratify the Declaration; delegates signed it on the 2nd of August. Jefferson and his fellow delegates understood they were committing high treason against the Crown, punishable by torture and death.

  On the 6th of July, The Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to publish the Declaration. On the 8th of July at noon, it was read publicly and simultaneously for the first time at three locations: Trenton, New Jersey; Easton, Pennsylvania; and Philadelphia. Historian David Armitage, chairman of Harvard University's history department, wrote that "no American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence." Jefferson's phrase "all men are created equal" has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language" , words written by a man who at that moment owned more than a hundred human beings.

• 5. Paris and the World Beyond Virginia

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  In May 1784, Congress appointed Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris as Minister Plenipotentiary for negotiating treaties of commerce with Great Britain and other nations. He arrived the following month with his daughter Patsy and two servants, enrolled Patsy at Pentemont Abbey, and within a year was assigned the additional role of succeeding Franklin as Minister to France. When French foreign minister Count de Vergennes remarked, "You replace Monsieur Franklin, I hear," Jefferson replied: "I succeed. No man can replace him."

  In 1786, Jefferson met Maria Cosway, a married 27-year-old Italian-English musician. She returned to Great Britain after six weeks, but the two maintained a lifelong correspondence. That same summer, Jefferson visited London to meet Adams, who arranged a meeting with George III. Jefferson later described the king's reception as "ungracious." According to Adams's grandson, George III turned his back on both men as a deliberate public insult.

  In June 1787, Jefferson sent for his youngest surviving child, nine-year-old Polly, who was accompanied by a young enslaved woman from Monticello named Sally Hemings. Jefferson had already brought Sally's brother James to Paris and had him trained in French cuisine. According to Sally's son Madison Hemings, a sexual relationship began between the sixteen-year-old Sally and Jefferson in Paris, where she became pregnant. Madison Hemings stated that his mother agreed to return to the United States only after Jefferson promised to free her children when they came of age.

  Jefferson was present in Paris during the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July, 1789. He allowed his residence at Hotel de Langeac to be used for meetings by the Marquis de Lafayette and other revolutionary leaders, and he consulted with Lafayette as Lafayette drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Because postmasters routinely opened his mail, Jefferson invented his own enciphering device, the "Wheel Cipher," and wrote important communications in code for the rest of his career.

• 6. The Louisiana Gamble

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  Spain ceded the Louisiana territory to France in 1800, and Jefferson immediately recognized the threat. He wrote that the transfer "works most sorely on the U.S. It completely reverses all the political relations of the U.S." In 1802, he instructed James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and adjacent coastal areas. He offered Napoleon nearly $10 million for roughly 40,000 square miles of tropical territory.

  Napoleon, recognizing that military control of a remote continent was impractical and needing funds for his European wars, responded with a counter-offer: all 827,987 square miles of French territory in North America for $15 million. U.S. negotiators accepted and signed the treaty on the 30th of April, 1803. Word of the purchase did not reach Jefferson until the 3rd of July, 1803.

  The Senate ratified the purchase treaty on the 20th of October, 1803, by a vote of 24 to 7. Jefferson had initially believed a Constitutional amendment was necessary to acquire new territory; he changed his mind, fearing that insisting on an amendment would give opponents cause to block the purchase. He urged speedy ratification instead. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner called the Louisiana Purchase the most formative event in American history.

  To map and understand what had been acquired, Jefferson appointed his secretary Meriwether Lewis and acquaintance William Clark to lead the Corps of Discovery. The expedition lasted from May 1804 to September 1806 and gathered knowledge of dozens of Indian tribes, together with extensive scientific and geographic data. Jefferson also organized three other western expeditions simultaneously: the William Dunbar and George Hunter Expedition on the Ouachita River in 1804-1805, the Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis Expedition on the Red River in 1806, and the Zebulon Pike Expedition into the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest in 1806-1807. In June 1804, Jefferson met the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt several times to inquire about New Spain's natural resources, economic prospects, and demographic development.

• 7. Slavery and the Contradictions He Carried

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  In 1769, while serving in Virginia's House of Burgesses, Jefferson wrote and sponsored legislation designed to give slaveholders the discretion to emancipate their enslaved people. The bill faced strong opposition in a state whose economy was largely agrarian. As a lawyer, Jefferson took on seven freedom-seeking enslaved people as clients and waived his fee for at least one of them. Arguing for a client's freedom before a judge, he invoked natural law: "everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will... This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance." The judge cut him off and ruled against his client.

  In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included a passage condemning the slave trade. Congress removed it. In his annual message to Congress in December 1806, Jefferson denounced the international slave trade as "violations of human rights" and called on Congress to criminalize it immediately. The following year, Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which Jefferson signed. The act established severe punishment for participation in the international trade but did not address slavery within the United States.

  In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, published first in French in 1785 and in English in 1787, Jefferson articulated his belief that Black and white people could not live together as free people in one society because of what he described as justified resentments held by the enslaved. He also wrote about American Indians, equating their stage of development to that of European settlers. He owned large numbers of enslaved people throughout his life, inherited 135 more when his father-in-law died in 1773, and the debt he inherited with them contributed to the financial distress that followed him to his grave.

  Presidential scholars acknowledge Jefferson's lifelong ownership of enslaved people while offering varying interpretations of his views. The tension between his language of universal natural rights and his practice of human ownership is the defining contradiction of his public life, and it has never been resolved by historians, only documented.

• 8. The Long Friendship with Adams

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  Jefferson and John Adams first met as delegates to the Continental Congress in the 1770s and served together in Europe in the 1780s. The political fracture of the 1790s split them apart. Adams felt betrayed by Jefferson's sponsorship of partisan attacks, including those written by James Callender. Jefferson was angered by Adams's appointment of what he called "midnight judges" in the final days of Adams's administration.

  After Jefferson succeeded Adams as president, the two men did not correspond directly for more than a decade. A brief exchange of letters between Abigail Adams and Jefferson after Jefferson's daughter Polly died in 1804 was an attempt at reconciliation that Adams himself did not know about. That correspondence, however, reopened old wounds rather than healing them.

  As early as 1809, the physician Benjamin Rush began prodding both men through letters to reconnect. In 1812, Adams wrote a short New Year's greeting to Jefferson, prompted by Rush, and Jefferson responded warmly. Over the next fourteen years, Jefferson and Adams exchanged 158 letters. Historian David McCullough described this correspondence as "one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history." The two men argued about their political differences, justified their respective roles in events, and debated what the revolution had meant to the world.

  Adams died on the 4th of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. His final acknowledged words were: "Thomas Jefferson survives." Jefferson had died a few hours earlier that same day. The two men who had written and championed the founding document of the United States died on its anniversary, within hours of each other, without knowing it. Jefferson was eighty-two years old. When the Marquis de Lafayette had visited Monticello in November 1824 for an eleven-day reunion, Jefferson's voice had already grown too weak to carry his own prepared speech; he had someone else read it aloud for him.