Jefferson in Time: Perspectives through His Eyes

Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to understanding Thomas Jefferson today is a lack of context. Jefferson has always been complex and difficult to fathom, always been fiercely—even irrationally—loved (or hated) by those who read his words and study his politics, and who find him hypocritical, dangerous, or inspirational. But as time marches on, and American society undergoes sweeping changes, it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss Jefferson’s more controversial actions and opinions, because we lack historical literacy regarding the sorts of cultural and political obstacles Jefferson was up against in his quests for liberty in his own time. It is almost impossible to evaluate Jefferson fairly, in other words, without immersing oneself within the culture of 18th and 19th century Virginia—a place almost as foreign to modern Americans as Mars.

Nowhere is this more evident than the current emphasis on Jefferson’s identity as a slaveholder. Visitors to Monticello today may hear more about the enslaved workforce, and Jefferson’s role in their enslavement, than about Jefferson’s work to free individuals in Virginia, first through private legal aid and then through legislative efforts, an emancipation amendment, a new state constitution, a book published in part to influence college students to oppose slavery, and finally a detailed freedom-through-tenant-farming plan that never came to fruition.

Modern audiences will likely not hear about these antislavery measures partly because most of them failed, and partly because they are not well known even among scholars. But another reason for the lack of discussion about Jefferson’s antislavery beliefs is that the mental gymnastics involved in reconciling these antislavery measures with Jefferson’s well-known ownership of human beings demand of contemporary Americans that we try to put ourselves into Jefferson’s own shoes and see matters from his perspective. There are few harder tasks, even for historians, to undertake. There are also few more worthwhile, for only by seeking to understand others within the context of their own times and circumstances can we hope to truly understand the possibilities, and the limits, of human action. Indeed, we cannot hope to truly understand ourselves, let alone our neighbors, without developing the ability to see life through other people’s eyes.

Thomas Jefferson was born in the backwoods of Virginia in 1743. When young Thomas was fourteen years old, his father died. As the eldest son, the gangly, redhaired teenager inherited hundreds of acres of land—and several dozen enslaved human beings.[1] At the time, much of the world accepted slavery as part of the human condition: it existed, in varying forms, from Asia to eastern Europe to Africa to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. (For that matter, slavery is still a massive global problem, though it is technically illegal.[2]) In 1743, no organized antislavery society yet existed; no plans for large-scale emancipation had yet been proposed.

Although western Europeans had stopped enslaving one another, primarily due to Christianity’s influence, their use of enslaved Native and African workers in the New World was accepted as one among many societal inequalities, a seemingly natural consequence of life in an empire in which the king sat atop a pyramid of hierarchical relationships. Nor were the English colonies unique; English planters borrowed elements of their race-based system of chattel slavery from earlier models developed by Spanish and Portuguese slave societies in the New World. For their part, the Iberian enslavers borrowed elements of racial justification from the Islamic societies who utilized African enslaved laborers during the Middle Ages.[3] It was only in the 18th century that certain western European philosophers and religious groups began to question racialized human bondage, applying notions of natural law, equal rights, and the “Golden Rule” to the labor systems that brought tremendous wealth to owners and empires alike.

Jefferson was one of the earliest Virginians to develop concerns about the immorality of slavery. While at the College of William and Mary, he was most fortuitously mentored by several antislavery men—including his law professor, George Wythe. Jefferson’s college writings indicate a growing awareness of Enlightenment principles, and particularly a belief in the barbarity of slavery and the need for nations to progress in their morals.[4]

Jefferson soon attempted to put his newfound principles into practice. In colonial Virginia, it was illegal to free enslaved people unless an owner first petitioned the legislature and gained special permission.[5] One of Jefferson’s first acts upon being elected to the House of Burgesses at age twenty-six was to co-sponsor a bill that would have allowed masters to manumit their slaves for any reason. However, Jefferson later recalled that this bill was defeated so soundly that his older co-sponsor was “denounced as an enemy to his country, & was treated with the grossest indecorum.”[6] As the younger member, Jefferson was spared from similar humiliation, but he retained a valuable lesson about the political capital that was expended whenever the issue of slavery was raised.

This lesson was perhaps reinforced by Jefferson’s earliest efforts to use natural law arguments on behalf of enslaved people: during his seven years of legal practice, Jefferson took on six freedom suits pro bono, having concluded during his studies that slavery had no legitimate basis in either common law or statutory law.[7] In a 1770 case, Jefferson argued that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and every one comes into the world with a right to his own person.”[8] The court did not even wait to hear opposing counsel’s argument before throwing out Jefferson’s suit; he met with similar obstacles in each of his other attempts to use the law to free slaves.

In 1778, the Virginia legislature did at least end its participation in the transatlantic slave trade; Jefferson wrote in his 1821 Autobiography that he was the author of that anti-trade bill, though he was not present when the Assembly finally approved it. Jefferson viewed a ban on the importation of slaves as an important step toward the “final eradication” of the “evil” of slavery—something that antislavery Quakers in the northern colonies had been arguing since the early 1700s.[9] However, other Virginians may have approved the ban simply to inflate the prices of their existing human property, and Jefferson would not find the legislature amenable to any of his other antislavery efforts.

Instead, Jefferson kept encountering racism and resistance to any attempts at wholesale emancipation: at first, he hoped that banning the trade would at least “in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.”[10] But the minds of many of Virginia’s citizens were too prejudiced to consider the possibility of a multiracial future. One anonymous essayist in 1773 argued that Africans were not “the same Species of Man with the White People,” but rather were “formed in common with Horses, Oxen, Dogs &c, for the Benefit of the white People alone, to be used [by] them either for Pleasure, or to labour with their other Beasts.”[11]

By 1782, writers in the Virginia Gazette were considering with horror the idea that their racially distinct workforce could ever live as equals among the white citizens: if freed, they would “war [against] their former masters,” and if allowed to remain in the same neighborhoods, they would be “ravishing and cohabitating with our white women, and in a century or less, our offspring would be a mixed mongrel of mulattoes, of whites and blacks, bays, chestnuts, sorrels, and skewbalds”—terms normally reserved for horses, and implying that mixed-race children would be less than human. Moreover, a Gazette essayist continued, enslaved labor freed white men to cultivate their own minds. Half a century before John C. Calhoun developed his “positive good” argument, Virginians were already arguing that civilization depended on slavery.[12]

Jefferson made two more legislative efforts to end slavery in Virginia: In 1777, while working to bring Virginia’s legal code into line with the revolutionary state’s newly republican principles, Jefferson collaborated with his mentor, George Wythe, to write an emancipation amendment. This amendment contained three elements: emancipation, education, and colonization for the freed slaves. These elements were designed to balance justice with an appeal to the prejudiced, tight-fisted Virginia slaveholders: emancipation applied only to babies born after the passage of the bill, ensuring that slaveholders would not lose any of their current property. The freed children would be educated at the state’s expense, indicating Jefferson’s concern that the race so viciously wronged by the injustice of slavery would receive the best chance to succeed in life. Finally, in a move designed to appeal both to racism and justice, once educated the youths would be colonized to some yet-to-be-determined destination, receiving state-sponsored aid, in addition to “alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength” to exist as an independent black nation.[13] The racial prejudices and fears of white Virginians were overcome, in this Wythe/Jefferson plan, by a process of gradual emancipation and separation. However, as Jefferson recalled in his Autobiography, this emancipation amendment was never presented to the legislature, because “it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition.”[14]

In 1784, Jefferson wrote a constitution for the newly independent state, including a proviso that would have abolished slavery in the state after the year 1800. His constitution was not adopted.[15] As James Madison reported to George Washington a few months later, the legislature at that time was so hostile to emancipation proposals that any petitions to that effect were “rejected without dissent.”[16]

In 1785, Jefferson printed copies of his book Notes on the State of Virginia to send specifically to students at the College of William and Mary, telling several correspondents of his hope that the “rising generation” would be the one to have the boldness and firmness of conviction to enact the “great reformations” Virginia needed. Under the leadership of Professor George Wythe—“whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are unequivocal”—the students could be persuaded by Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments, including his famous lines prophesying divine judgment on Virginians if they refused to free their slaves (“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…”) and his account of the antislavery amendment.[17] This plan did actually bear some antislavery fruit: in his memoirs, Union General Winfield Scott recalled that he and “most, if not all, my companions” at William and Mary developed antislavery views while reading Jefferson’s Notes as students.[18] But by the 1830s, the College had taken a decidedly proslavery turn.

One final addition to Jefferson’s Virginia antislavery efforts consists of his little-known plan to import German workers and set them up as tenant farmers, working side-by-side with enslaved individuals from Jefferson’s plantations, in order to transition the enslaved workers to life as free farmers. While he worried that some of the older enslaved people would struggle, “Their children shall be brought up,” he wrote, “as others are, in habits of property and foresight, and I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens.”[19]

Not mentioned in Jefferson’s writings on this plan is any hint of colonization: at all other points in his life, Jefferson’s concern about his fellow Virginians’ prejudices, and indeed his own racism, pushed him toward expatriation for free slaves. But it seems that while he lived in Europe during the 1780s, Jefferson was able to imagine a multiracial future for Virginia. Upon his return in 1789, though, Jefferson found the white inhabitants of the state just as fearful as ever of freeing their racially distinct workforce; by 1806 the legislature passed a bill banning freed people from living in the state for longer than one year. And by the end of his life, Jefferson could not have freed all his enslaved property, even if he had tried. The law dictated that freed people could be seized and re-enslaved to pay off their old master’s debts, and Jefferson died deeply in debt.[20]

Looking back, it is tempting to see Jefferson’s failure to free all his enslaved workers as hypocritical, overshadowing all his successes. But hypocrites are pretenders—people who attempt to fool others with lofty rhetoric while embracing the very behavior they outwardly condemn. Jefferson did not embrace slavery. He questioned it; he denounced it; he tried—in several different ways, at different times—to free his state from what he described in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence as a system that violated the “most sacred rights of life & liberty.”[21]

Could Jefferson have done more—risked his political capital or his financial profits—on more occasions? Absolutely. And, if he had, we might look more favorably on him today than we do—that is, if his risk-taking did not scuttle his political career before he was able to become president, sending him home to the backwoods. For Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was a place extremely hostile to emancipators, viewing them as threats to the settled racial order. Jefferson attempted to act within the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, doing less than some, and more than most. We should question and condemn and praise and re-evaluate this complex man’s words and actions, particularly when it comes to his influence on racist discourse and his relationship with Sally Hemings—but only after putting Jefferson into his proper context.[Editor's Note: Readers may also wish to hear Stevens' recent discussion about Jefferson on The Great Antidote podcast.]

[1] Will of Peter Jefferson, 13 July 1757, Albemarle County Will Book 2:32-4, transcribed at Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters, Monticello.org, https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1797.

[2] Despite a relative absence of hereditary chattel slavery (in which one person legally owns the life and labor of another person and that person’s descendants) in most nations, the current number of unfree laborers worldwide is estimated to be above thirty million. See for example the research published at http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/.

[3] James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 143–66.

[4] Cara Rogers Stevens, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2024), 37–42; 49.

[5] Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 3.

[6] Thomas Jefferson (hereafter “TJ”), Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790: Together with a Summary of the Chief Events in Jefferson’s Life, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 7.

[7] David T. Konig, "Thomas Jefferson and the Practice of Law," in Encyclopedia Virginia Dec. 7, 2020, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/jefferson-thomas-and-the-practice-of-law/#:~:text=Though%20he%20had%20seen%20the,strict%20construction%20of%20their%20language.

[8] “Argument in the Case of Howell v. Netherland,” April 1770, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols., ed. Paul Leichester Ford (New York and London, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5), I: 376.

[9] TJ, Autobiography, 60–61. For the authorship of the bill see editorial note, Papers, “Bill to Prevent the Importation of Slaves &c.,” 16 June 1777, and my discussion of the controversy surrounding its authorship in Stevens, Jefferson, 60–61. For northern antislavery, see Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 28.

[10] TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York and other cities: Penguin Group, 1999), 94.

[11] Anonymous author, Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Purdie & Dixon), 2 Dec. 1773; quoted in Wolf, Race and Liberty, 17.

[12] See John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good” (speech before the U.S. Senate, 6 Feb. 1837), available online at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/.

[13] TJ, Notes, ed. Shuffelton, 135.

[14] TJ, Autobiography, ed. Ford, 77.

[15] “Jefferson’s Draft of a Constitution for Virginia [May–June 1783],” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN. Unless otherwise noted, all Jefferson correspondence is from this collection.

[16] Madison to Washington, 11 Nov. 1785, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov.

[17] TJ to Chastellux, 7 June 1785; TJ to Richard Price, 7 Aug. 1785; TJ, Notes, ed. Shuffelton, 169.

[18] Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, vol. 2, (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1864; reprinted Bedford: Applewood Books., n.d.), 372.

[19] TJ to Edward Bancroft, 26 Jan. 1789.

[20] Wolf, 122; 116-118. See also Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

[21] Jefferson, “original Rough draught” of the Declaration, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html.

“How do you like our new constitution?” Thomas Jefferson wrote inquisitively to John Adams from Paris in November 1787.[1] Recently, just two months after the Constitutional Convention adjourned in Philadelphia, Jefferson had received copies of the new Constitution from multiple sources including George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Adams, via Adams’s son-in-law William Smith. As he sought Adams’s opinion, he shared his own views with a variety of correspondents over the next several months. Eventually, Jefferson’s views of the Constitution evolved. But not until his famous conflict with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the proposal for a Bank of the United States in 1791 did Jefferson begin to study closely and think about a mode of interpreting the Constitution. In short, his Constitutional thinking moved from general dissatisfaction from afar, to a more mixed, ambivalent (and seemingly uninterested) view, and then finally toward his doctrine of strict construction.

Jefferson was lukewarm toward the Constitution initially. In his letter to Adams, he confessed “there are things in it which stagger all my dispositions to subscribe to what such an assembly has proposed.” He thought the House of Representatives would be inadequate and that “Their President seems a bad edition of a Polish king” who, through reelection “is an officer for life.” In short, Jefferson believed the Convention had overstepped. “I think all the good of this new constitution might have been couched in three or four new articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabric, which should have been preserved even as a religious relique.”[2] That same day, November 13, 1787, Jefferson wrote also to William Smith thanking him for enclosing a copy of the Constitution since he was not sure if it came through Smith or Adams and asked him “to place them where due.” As to the document itself, Jefferson acknowledged “There are very good articles in it: & very bad. I do not know which preponderate.” From that point Jefferson went on to make comments that his opponents seized on for years as evidence of his alleged radicalism: “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” a reference to Shays’s Rebellion. Jefferson thought the Convention “has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order.”[3]

These were Jefferson’s first impressions. In December 1787, upon further reflection and having received a detailed report on the Constitution and the Convention’s work from James Madison in late October, Jefferson offered more considered objections and reservations. He liked the separation of government into branches and thought it would aid in maintaining a national government without regular references to the state legislatures. “I am captivated by the compromise of the opposite claims of the great & little states,” he wrote, and declared he was “much pleased” by the adoption of voting by persons rather than voting by states. “There are other good things of less moment. I will now add what I do not like,” as he shared his familiar litany of items with Madison. Chief among his objections was the lack of a bill or rights “providing clearly & without sophisms” for fundamental rights. He rejected James Wilson’s arguments that a bill of rights was unnecessary to protect against powers that were not specifically reserved to the new government. After all, “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.” Jefferson’s second main objection—a “feature I dislike, and greatly dislike,” should Madison miss the message—was the wholesale abandonment of rotation in office, particularly as it concerned the presidency. Jefferson believed that experience showed “that the first magistrate will always be re-elected if the Constitution permits it. He is then an officer for life.” After providing additional discussion and examples of Polish kings, he admitted to Madison that he could “not pretend to decide what would be the best method of procuring the establishment of the manifold good things in this constitution, and of getting rid of the bad.”[4] He named future amendments and a reconsideration by another convention—after determining during ratification what the people disliked and what they approved generally in the Constitution—as two possibilities.

Perhaps aware that Madison might not share his views, and that events across the ocean might have overtaken his ability to follow them in a timely way, Jefferson told his friend that he had shared his list of likes and dislikes “merely as a matter of curiosity, for I know your own judgment has been formed on all those points after having heard everything which could be urged on them.” After sharing with Madison a version of his belief that Americans had overreacted to Shays’s Rebellion, a self-aware Jefferson apologized: “I have tired you by this time with my disquisitions.”[5]

Jefferson wrote a fourth letter, in February 1788, to Alexander Donald, in which he proposed a novel means of both ratifying and securing his desired amendments. Jefferson wished that “the nine first conventions may accept the new constitution, because this will secure to us the good it contains, which I think great and important. But I equally wish, that the four latest conventions, which ever they be, may refuse to accede to it, till a declaration of rights be annexed.” Jefferson believed “This would probably command the offers of such a declaration, and thus give to the whole fabric, perhaps as much perfection as any one of that kind ever had.”[6] As was his custom, Jefferson rehearsed for Donald his dissatisfaction with the absence of a bill of rights and the re-eligibility of the president.

More than a year later—with Jefferson still serving in Paris and the Constitution ratified across the nation—he replied to his old friend Francis Hopkinson who wanted to ascertain Jefferson’s politics in the ratification struggle. At considerable length, Jefferson reflected on how his position had been formed early and held consistently despite his being always out of step with events on the ground, owing to the months of delay in receiving and conveying letters. To Hopkinson, Jefferson expressed some ambivalence and stated emphatically that he was not aligned with either the Federalists nor the Anti-Federalists, despite what Hopkinson had apparently been told. “You say that I have been dished up to you as an antifederalist, and ask me if it be just.” He derided the notion that his own allegiance was “worthy enough of notice to merit citing,” but then happily explained himself to Hopkinson.[7]

“I am not a Federalist,” he asserted, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself.” Then he penned what became an oft-quoted line: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Thus, “I protest to you that I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists,” he wrote. Jefferson proceeded to suggest how neither of these “parties” properly captured his full views on the Constitution and thus why neither label was accurate. “I approved, from the first moment, of the great mass of what is in the new constitution,” he continued, and then listed the positives he had laid out for Madison and other correspondents. “What I disapproved of from the first moment also was the want of a bill of rights to guard liberty against the legislative as well as executive branches of the government.” In addition, Jefferson reiterated his objection to executive re-eligibility. Recapping his letter to Alexander Donald, he exclaimed that his “first wish was that the 9. first conventions might accept the constitution….and that the 4. last might reject it.” Here, Jefferson remarked that he “was corrected in this wish the moment I saw the much better plan of Massachusetts and which had never occurred to me,” a reference to the practice first utilized by the Massachusetts Convention of voting to ratify and also recommending a list of amendments to the first new congress. Jefferson believed that of his two great objections to the Constitution, most Americans shared his displeasure at the absence of a bill of rights, but that he was in the minority when it came to concern over Presidents being able to serve repeated terms. And given his respect for Washington, he would not wish to see that clause changed since “our great leader, whose executive talents are superior to those I believe of any man in the world…But having derived from our error all the good there was in it I hope we shall correct it the moment we can no longer have [Washington] at the helm.”[8]

“These…are my sentiments, by which you will see I was right in saying I am neither federalist nor antifederalist; that I am of neither party, nor yet a trimmer between parties.” Jefferson also was proud that he made his assessment of the Constitution early and stuck to it. He had expressed “my opinions within a few hours after I had read the constitution, to one or two friends in America. I had not then read one single word printed on the subject. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own,” he told Hopkinson, and then closed with a self-deprecating apology for having written “an egotistical dissertation.”[9]

Each of these letters was written from France where he faced the challenges of distance and the time-lag of communication. In fact, Jefferson did not return to Virginia until November 1789, at which point he learned he had been nominated by George Washington as Secretary of State and approved by the Senate. s He was being overtaken by the fast-moving events of the French Revolution as he was departing Europe. Upon his arrival in the United States he was quickly pressed into service in Washington’s cabinet and besieged by the duties of the job, caught up in his return to a country changed dramatically since he last lived there in 1784. As Jefferson suggested to Hopkinson, it seems he formed his opinion of the Constitution very quickly, repeated those views consistently, and left his mind unchanged—not that the Constitution took up much of his mental space. Not directly involved in the drafting or ratification of the Constitution, it may not have been as interesting to Jefferson as were other matters at hand. As Mary Sarah Bilder notes, “His perspective had been dominated by French political rhetoric…He came to the Constitution as a reader. His information about American constitutional politics had been filtered by correspondents and visitors.” Upon his return other matters grabbed his attention and he was “uninterested in the Constitution.” When asked about studying the law Jefferson referred inquirers to local laws in Virginia. He tended to cite natural rights or the broader American legal tradition as justification for laws, ignoring the Constitution which he rarely referenced. Furthermore, “Jefferson did not interpret the Constitution as supplanting the pre-1787 constitutional structure with which he was familiar.”[10]

In fact, the first time a constitutional issue arose in the new government—over Hamilton’s funding and assumption programs—Jefferson famously played peacemaker, giving Hamilton a full hearing as the Treasury secretary “walked him back and forth for two hours in front of the President’s house” and then he brought Hamilton and Madison together for the dinner table bargain that exchanged southern votes for Hamilton’s program in return for locating the permanent capital on the Potomac.[11]  Not until the debate over Hamilton’s national bank bill in 1791 did things change. Mary Bilder suggests that this was the first time Jefferson, increasingly concerned over Hamilton’s actions, intrigues, and influence, showed real interest in the Constitution and the first time he really began to dig into Madison’s manuscript notes on the work of the Convention. Only then, and from that point forward, did Jefferson—now in the throes of the great party struggles of the 1790s—show real interest and curiosity in the Constitution and its creation. For him, “the bank bill hinted at potential contemporary political usefulness of the Notes,” writes Mary Bilder.[12]

Jefferson’s constitutional thinking started late and was marred by distance and distraction initially. But he got up to speed quickly and his eventual advocacy of strict construction of the Constitution fit seamlessly into his emerging political vision and became a crucial component of the party ideology that separated Jeffersonians from Hamiltonians.

[1] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, November 13, 1787 in Merrill Peterson (ed.), Jefferson Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 913. For excellent overviews of this subject see the works by R.B. Bernstein cited in note 11 below. For a broader treatment see Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison and the Making of the Constitution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[2] Jefferson to Adams, pp. 213-214.

[3] Jefferson to William Smith, November 13, 1787 in Jefferson Writings, pp. 910-911.

[4] Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787 in Jefferson Writings, pp. 915-917.

[5] Jefferson to Madison, p. 917.

[6] Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, Jefferson Writings, p. 919.

[7] Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, Jefferson Writings, p. 940.

[8] Jefferson to Hopkinson, pp. 941-942.

[9] Jefferson to Hopkinson, p. 942.

[10] Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 202-204.

[11] R. B. Bernstein, “Thomas Jefferson and Constitutionalism,” in Francis D. Cogliano (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Jefferson (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 427. See also R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 70-76 and p. 86-88.

[12] Bilder, Madison’s Hand, p. 208.

“Oh God!” he exclaimed with his pulse weakening and his family surrounding his bedside.  Thomas Jefferson was dying and everyone, including the elderly statesman, knew it.  His daughter and some of the family were present, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, known to the family as “Jeff,” grandson-in-law, Nicholas P. Trist, the youngest grandchildren including eight-year-old George Wythe Randolph, who “seeming not to comprehend the scene” asked his older brother “what all this means.”  Possibly it was because his grandfather was drifting back in his remembrances to days long before he was born as he “spoke of the Committee of Safety” and how “it ought to be warned.”  Discomfort came occasionally and was usually remedied with laudanum, a pain medication of opium.[2]

Awaking on the afternoon of the 3rd of July, 1826, Jefferson thought he heard Mr. Hatch’s name mentioned in the parlor next door and then asked to see him.  Fredrick W. Hatch was his clergyman and a “kind and good neighbor” who lived two miles from Monticello.  His grandson Jefferson decided this request was a mistake as his grandfather’s “religious opinions having been formed upon mature study and reflection,” were firm and set and therefore he indeed “did not desire the attendance of a clergyman.”  What Jefferson would or would not have said to Mr. Hatch during those last hours remains a mystery.[3]

Jefferson during the night asked Dr. Dunglison “Is it the fourth?”  The doctor replied, “It soon will be.” Confused, he then repeated the question to Trist, and he shook his head yes, falsely in the affirmative.  Thus, believing it to be the fourth he was ready to die.  In his impatience for the end at 9:00 p.m. then called out to God and refused any further medication remarking to Dr. Dunglison “No!  Nothing more!”[4]

On July fourth his last moments were at hand.  At 4:00 a.m. he “called the servants” in with a reported “strong and clear voice.”  What he said to them, Thomas Jefferson’s true last words, regrettably were not recorded.  At about 10:00 a.m. Jefferson was visibly uncomfortable and although his immediate family “painfully… could not understand” how to remedy the situation Burwell Colbert, ever present, did.  Burwell, his enslaved house servant, elevated his head “restoring it to its usual position” and Jefferson “seemed satisfied.”[5]

Still at “his bed side” Trist wrote to his brother-in-law that “there is no longer any doubt” as “the machine was worn out in some of its essential parts, and therefore could not go on.”  Jefferson had yearned to live to see “his own glorious fourth” and although many thought it might not happen, he had made it.  At fifty minutes past noon “he ceased to breathe, without a struggle” and his grandson Jeff closed his eyes.[6]

He was buried late in the afternoon of July 6th, “without any pomp or procession, in compliance with his dying request” beneath a favorite oak at Monticello. Reverend Frederick Hatch presided over the ceremony, with thirty to forty family, friends, and admires in attendance. The first to be buried there was his “dearest friend he possessed on earth” and brother-in-law, Dabney Carr in 1773.[7]

To understand what honestly transpired at Monticello that summer day in 1826, we must delve deeper into events throughout Jefferson’s life. We do so to discover how Jefferson’s beliefs evolved, what truly is religious freedom, and how his descendants, who inherited Jefferson’s legacy, safeguarded his personal spiritual journey from that of the public persona.

Jefferson met Dabney Carr as boys studying with the “correct and classical scholar” Reverend James Maury.  Maury, who was struggling financially, had opened a school to supplement his income.  Maury focused his lessons with those that would be “of daily use to them as long as they live.”  Practicality was key in educating Virginia gentlemen and this included literature, an “acquaintance with History” a “smattering…in Geography & Chronology” and “a general Knowledge of the Laws, Constitution, Interests & Religion of his Country.” For two years the boys lived with Maury and his family.  During those two years the Maury’s financial situation, already “loaded with debt and taxes,” worsened.  In 1758 the colonial government passed the “emergency act” to allow clergy to be paid in deflated currency rather than tobacco. “Slaves” Maury said, referencing British colonists, “have never yet been found as industrious as the sons of liberty.” His situation would in fact worsen in the coming years. Maury would win a court battle the “Parson’s Cause”, a suit for the reimbursement of his salary, but lose the war by being rewarded a penny.  This legal battle played out in Williamsburg where Jefferson had newly enrolled in the College of William & Mary and laid the foundation of “de-establishing of churches as part of government in Virginia” and was hotly contested especially by his college’s professors.[8]

When Jefferson arrived at the College of William & Mary it had six professorships, one for mathematics, moral philosophy, Greek and Latin, two for divinity, and one the “Brafferton professorship” for “the instruction of the Indians, and their conversion to Christianity.”  All professors came “recommended by the bishop of London and were generally ministers of the gospel…and licensed champions of orthodoxy” John Daly Burk noted in his History of Virginia. “Now and then, however…some unbeliever would steal into the fold… this was the case particularly in the mathematical department, for which the divines were generally incompetent.” Jefferson studied with only one professor: mathematics professor William Small.  Small was a man of “an enlarged & liberal mind” and from his conversations Jefferson received his “first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.” It was during his two years with Small that Jefferson began to question traditional religion.  As Jefferson transitioned to the study of law in 1762 with George Wythe, Small left Virginia feeling exceedingly disenfranchised from the Anglican college order.[9]

Jefferson passed the bar under Wythe’s tutelage, and both would serve as delegates to the Second Continental Congress, it was there that Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence.  He left the Congress in late 1776 to join the “first republican legislature” in Virginia and to take up the fight to abolish “spiritual tyranny.”  Passing the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was, he said, “the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged.”  It was debated at “every session from 76 to 79.”  As the bill reached passage an amendment was proposed that “Jesus Christ” be added to the preamble, to specify Christ as the “holy author of our religion.”  The “insertion was rejected by a great majority” Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, “in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”[10]

For Thomas Jefferson his personal faith came on alleged “full” display in the Election of 1800. In his first and only book Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson openly affirmed his belief in the “right of conscience” as “answerable only to God.” “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  This belief, at the turn of the nineteenth century where most U.S. citizens were evangelical protestants, was blasphemous as best. Early in the campaign, Alexander Hamilton wrote to John Jay that we must “prevent an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of the State.” Citizens were asked by The Federal Gazette if there was an “enemy to the religion of Christ” in America, implying yes, it was Jefferson.  Attacks in 1800 can be summarized as “GOD – AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT or impiously declare for JEFFERSON – AND NO GOD.” During the campaign, Jefferson suffered in silence the categorical and repeatedly offensive charges by the Federalists that he was an atheist.[11]

Once the battle was won, he held firm to his belief in the separation between church and state as he balanced the “duties of his station.”  Jefferson attended church services and even welcomed a 1,235 pound “Mammoth Cheese” engraved “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” from Baptist minister, Elder John Leland and the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts in celebration of Jefferson’s support for religious liberty. On the same day as the arrival of the cheese, Jefferson penned this letter to the Danbury Baptists pronouncing “a wall of separation between church and state” and proclaiming, “religious rights shall never be infringed by any act of mine.” He remained firm in his political convictions and his personal beliefs. Jefferson’s faith was between him and his God, it was he said, “a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved.”[12]

“I was a hard student until I entered on the business of life” Jefferson wrote in 1819, and now in retirement was once again. A “zealous advocate” for learning, he guided friends and family alike in their educational pursuits. “Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear” he wrote his nephew Peter Carr. Understanding scripture captivated Jefferson and he hoped all would embark on such a journey, for “human understanding” he said was “revelation from its maker….”  For Jefferson, this spiritual examination resulted in the creation of “The Morals of Christ.” It embodied “the very words only of Jesus” and in them Jefferson found “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” He did it “by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter” and said it was “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill,” and in doing so restored the Bible “to the primitive simplicity of it’s founder.”  Jefferson spoke of its creation to John Adams and William Short, had the volume bound, and kept it to read, and reread. It was his.

Religion was to Jefferson his property of conscience and although it evolved over time with reflection and research it remained his alone, it was, he said, a matter between “our Maker and ourselves.” He professed to friends a belief in heaven where we would have “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”  Lovingly in 1825 he wrote to a namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith to “adore God. reverence and cherish your parents.  love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. be just. be true. murmur not at the ways of Providence.  So shall the shall the life into which you have entered be the Portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”  Jefferson attached Psalm XV and his ten Canons and ended the note, “and if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. farewell.” Jefferson died the next year.[14]

His grandson Jeff Randolph was made executor of the estate. A week after his death, writing to Dabney S. Carr, Jefferson’s nephew and his father’s namesake, he disclosed that he furnished the account of his grandfather’s death to The Enquirer but in it had “two little anecdotes omitted” both were religious in content.  First the public would not know that Jefferson had thought he heard his clergyman Mr. Hatch and asked to see him.  The second was that after he had received a “kind message from the N.York committee he observed that ‘he cheerfully committed his soul to his god.  His child to his country.’” He justified his actions stating he never “doubted the correctness” of this decision.  Jeff had also inherited Jefferson’s library and papers.  The library he deposited at the University of Virginia to save it from “injury.”  When Jefferson’s “Morals of Christ” was accidentally sent for sale to Washington in 1829, Jeff Randolph had it immediately retrieved. His papers, he would retain and, in the years to come, he would be the first editor of Jefferson’s collected writings.  The publication would be for the “benefit of” Jefferson’s “creditors and secondly his family.”  Editing the three volumes, he reviewed his grandfather’s thousands of letters to select those worthy of inclusion with his sisters “constantly employed in copying” them.  Nothing would be more important in cementing Thomas Jefferson’s “legacy” than to bring “the (manuscripts) in to the market.”[15]

His monument, Jeff said, was “the mountain itself in whose bosom he is entombed”.  There he placed over his grave an obelisk with what Jefferson “himself wished:

His grandfather noting, “…by these as testimonial that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.”

Jeff Randolph did everything to protect his grandfather’s memory and legacy, respecting in life and then death that there was a second “wall of separation,” this one between the public and private man.  To the end he was the gatekeeper.  When admirers visited the gravesite and repeatedly desecrated and destroyed the memorial in attempts to obtain tokens of remembrance he built “a high wall, iron gratings, and locks” however, in the end nothing he could do would “protect” his grave or Thomas Jefferson’s legacy from the picklocks.[16]

[1] Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, Monticello, June 24, 1826, Published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.

[2] There are three accounts of Thomas Jefferson’s death from those who were present, Nicholas P. Trist’s, Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s, and Dr. Dunglison.  See “Jefferson’s Last Words, Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-last-words, 2025.  Nicholas P. Trist’s account written to Joseph Coolidge on July 4th at Jefferson’s bed side mentions Jefferson’s “tone of impatience” and call of “Oh God!” along with his comment to Dr. Dunglison of “No! nothing more!” See Nicholas P. Trist to Joseph Coolidge, July 4th 1826 (9:15 a.m.) (ViU: Family Letters). Published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.  Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s Account of Thomas Jefferson’s Death, written sometime between 1856 and 1858, mentions George Wythe Randolph’s reaction along with Jefferson’s desire for no more medication from Dr. Dunglison. Published in Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1858), 3:543-4 and available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.,https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025. Dr. Dunglison’s account likewise is mentioned in the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia and can be found Samuel X. Radbill, ed., The Autobiographical Ana of Robley Dunglison, M.D. (Philadelphia: American Philosopical Society, 1963), 32-33 and available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39076006462142;view=1up;seq=38.

[3] Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s Account of Thomas Jefferson’s Death, written sometime between 1856 and 1858, Published in Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1858), 3:543-4 and available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.  References to Dr. Hatch’s residence being two miles from Monticello can be found on Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Hatch

[4] See Nicholas P. Trist to Joseph Coolidge, July 4th 1826 (9:15 a.m.) (ViU: Family Letters). Published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.  See also Samuel X. Radbill, ed., The Autobiographical Ana of Robley Dunglison, M.D. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1963), 32-33 and available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39076006462142;view=1up;seq=38.

[5] Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s Account of Thomas Jefferson’s Death, written sometime between 1856 and 1858, Published in Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1858), 3:543-4 and available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.

[6] See Nicholas P. Trist to Joseph Coolidge, July 4th 1826 (9:15 a.m.) (ViU: Family Letters). Published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2019.  Thomas Jefferson Randolph mentions closing Jefferson’s eyes.  See Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s Account of Henry S. Randall’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1858), 3:543-4 and available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.

[7] “Extract of a letter from the University of Virginia, dated the 6th instant,” Richmond Enquirer, July 14, 1826, pg 2; Andrew K Smith, available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org., 2025.and “Jefferson,” Charlottesville Weekly Chronicle, October 1875 from www.monticello.org “Jefferson’s Funeral” 2025.  For Jefferson's quote regarding Carr see Jefferson to Thomas Stone, 16 March 1782.

[8] Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography Jefferson Writings, Library of America Edition, pg. 4. Reverend James Maury; A Dissertation on Education in the Form of a Letter from James Maury to Robert Jackson, July 17, 1762; Ed. By Helen Duprey Bullock, Papers Albemarle Historical Society, II 1942. James Maury 9 August 1755, available in Memoirs of a Huguenot Family by Ann Maury, 1852.  For a summary of the Parson’s Clause see “The “Parson’s Cause:” Thomas Jefferson’ Teacher, Patrick Henry, and Religious Freedom by John Grady, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/04/the-parsons-cause-thomas-jeffersons-teacher-patrick-henry-and-religious-freedom, 2025.

[9]  For information on the College of William & Mary’s professorships see Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XV, Jefferson’s Writings, The Library of America Edition, page 276.  For Jefferson’s views on Small see Jefferson’s Autobiography, ibid.,  pg. 4.; John Daly Burk, The History of Virginia, 1804, pgs. 399-400.

[10] Ibid, Jefferson’s Autobiography pgs. 35, 40.

[11] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, Religion, published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.  Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, New York, May 7, 1800; Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, September 8, 1800, Volume: XIII, Issue 2118, pg. 3. John Ragosta “U.S. Presidential Election of 1800” https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entires/u-s-presidential-election-of-1800, 2025.

[12] Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptist – Timeline Event from https://www.thearda.com/, 2025. To Richard Rush, M, 1813.

[13] “Thomas Jefferson to Vine Utley, 21 March 1819” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-14-02-0144. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, vol. 14, 1 February to 31 August 1819, ed J. Jefferson Looney.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 20217, pp. 156-158] TJ to Thomas Cooper, March 1814. For the retrieval of “The Morals of Christ” see Mary J. Randolph to Nicholas P. Trist, Edgehill Feb. 24, 1829, found in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.

[14] Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson Smith, 21 February 1825, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4987. [This is an Early Access document from The papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series.  It is not an authoritative final version.]

[15] Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Dabney S. Carr, Tufton July 11, 1826, available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.,https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025. Thomas Jefferson Randolph to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors [before 7 Oct 1726] ibid., Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ann C. Morris, Boston, May 16, 1827, ibid.

[16] Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Charles Wirtenbaker January 1, 1856, to December 31, 1860 available in the “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., https://tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.

How did Thomas Jefferson perceive himself? This question has a foot in the subject of historical method as well as philosophic orientation. On his headstone at Monticello, Jefferson set out the three things for which he hoped he would be most remembered:

Each of these encompassed a grand philosophic principle aimed at the freedom of the person in both rights and thought. For an older historiography going back to the fifties and sixties, this was consonant with the view of Jefferson as the philosopher of the American Revolution.[2] Much has happened since those days to divert attention from that way of interpreting Jefferson’s legacy, but to my mind, it remains the correct reading both in terms of how Jefferson understood himself and in terms of how historical context is best interpreted.

A considerable amount of current scholarship seems to go to the question of why Jefferson compromised on his most fundamental philosophical premises, especially as they related to his moral opposition to slavery. This is certainly the case with Alan Taylor’s recent descriptions of master, servant and slave relations in Virginia in his Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).[3]

Taylor presents a vivid portrayal of Virginia aristocratic society right down to its architecture and geography. He presents a convincing case of all the reasons why Jefferson compromised those ideals. But it deepens the mystery of why Jefferson held his original commitments to begin with. Afterall, the thesis of slavery as a positive good, was already well established in the New World, most especially in the Caribbean. Wouldn’t the path of least resistance for Jefferson and most of his contemporary planters on the continent, have been to follow this same route?

But Taylor’s narrative really focuses on Jefferson’s life after 1780. More specifically his analysis begins with Notes on the State of Virginia.[4] But that’s too late and provides no explanation for Jefferson’s initial thoughts on rights, liberty and slavery leading up to the Summary View and the Declaration. If context really matters, it matters as much in the micro-details of his early education as the macro structures impinging on him. Here is where the force of ideas really comes into play.

Like their continental counterparts, colonial leaders in the sugar islands protested against Parliamentary intrusion into their internal affairs. This often encourages scholars to assume a similitude in thought and action between the communities that is in actuality more nominal than real.

Prior to the Somerset Case in 1772 in which chief justice Lord Mansfield found no precedents in favor of slavery in the laws of England, the greatest colonial planters were especially keen to ensure control over their personal servants when traveling through the realm. This was a point of considerable agitation to a great many reformers who took special pains to argue the incompatibility of slavery with English laws.

To counter such arguments, men like Edward Long of Jamaica explicitly contended in support of slave ownership in England itself. Much of this was based upon their understanding of earlier feudal practices, especially the laws of villeinage. Conceding that such practices had receded in England, it had nonetheless, Long insisted, “sprung up once more in the remoter parts of the English dominion,” and was still recognized in certain sources of authority on the English common law.[5]

But there were other sources as well, many from the same philosophical tradition of which Jefferson’s first mentor, Professor William Small of William and Mary College, was himself a product.[6] These authorities disputed the legitimacy of feudalism and argued that the most illiberal aspects of medieval England could be traced back to the corruptions of Norman tyranny imposed on the Saxons after the Conquest of 1066. And these were, in fact, the very sources Jefferson apparently favored in his first years of study.

Since the new edition of Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book edited by David Konig and Michael Zuckert, it is now recognized that the legal entries copied up through item number 556, likely occurred much earlier than historian Gilbert Chinard had originally estimated. What do these entries reveal? Jefferson had at first followed one of the more frequently cited legal sources, William Salkeld, on the ancient feudal precedents of common law, but when he reached the passages on villeinage, he suddenly did an about face and turned to Salkeld’s critics.

Salkeld had been one of those early authorities to argue on behalf of retaining bound servitude in England, contending “vigorously for the owner’s property interest in the slave’s person.” But Jefferson rejected the basis of Salkeld’s interpretation and turned to another source, Lord Raymond’s reporting of the very same cases, and here he “omitted Salkeld” and his commentary, and substituted Raymond’s denial of those precedents that appeared to support any “property classification for the person of the slave.”[7]

Other authorities were then later added by Jefferson to his earlier notations. These sources challenged the very validity of Salkeld as a source, contending instead for a more liberal interpretation of the more ancient Saxon laws that supposedly preceded the Norman impositions of feudalism.

Among these authorities were Lord Kames and Sir David Dalrymple both of Scotland who strengthened the young Jefferson’s “belief in the purity of Saxon legal institutions” and the degradation of those institutions “by the Norman yoke of feudalism.”[8]  Such sources formed much of the basis for the decision that would eventually be reached years later in Somerset and its Scottish counterpart Wedderburn v. Knight (1777), but Jefferson had apparently already arrived at that conclusion on the ultimate illegality and injustice of slavery.

The time spent on these matters and the depths to which Jefferson’s researches took him in law, politics and philosophy can thus be seen in great detail. These formed the foundation of his immediate interests and formed the basis of his first cases as a young attorney in which he sought the manumission of enslaved persons and entered into the sponsorship of legislation with Richard Bland to limit and eventually curtail slavery in Virginia.[9]

Ultimately, Jefferson did not follow through with those early commitments in his own life, but he also never wavered from the conviction that enslavement in all forms was an evil. Having been born to the life of the mind in a way that few other Americans of his day were, it is perhaps not surprising that he was especially drawn to freedom of thought even above other liberties. He articulated this inclination in bold strokes to his friend Benjamin Rush in 1800 when asserted, “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (emphasis added).[10]

That contemporaries as well as later generations continued to raise the Declaration as a counter to human bondage is testimony to the power of the synthesis of ideas that Jefferson referred to as the harmonizing sentiments of the day. It remains to Jefferson’s credit that he never repudiated that part of his philosophic labors. But why he did not relinquish the conviction that slavery in all forms is an evil, would surely be as interesting a topic for discussion as to why he went no further than he did.

[1] “Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, “Jefferson's Grave and Tombstone,” Monticello.org, March 5, 2025, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/jeffersons-gravestone/

[2] Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (1950); Merril D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (1970).

[3] Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).

[4] See Taylor, p. 133.

[5] Edward Long, “Candid Reflections,” in Greene and Yirush, ed.s, Exploring the Bounds of Liberty, vol 3 (2018), p. 2154.

[6] Martin Clagett, A Spark of Revolution: William Small, Thomas Jefferson, and James Watt; The Curious Connection Between the American and the Industrial Revolution (2022).

[7] See “Introduction,” in Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, ed.s, (2019), pp. 14-18.

[8] Ibid. p. 17.

[9] Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary (2017), 128-129.

[10] From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800 at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0102

In my initial essay, I argued that understanding Jefferson is made more difficult by lack of context—specifically, lack of awareness regarding the ways Jefferson and his contemporaries thought about the world. Hans Eicholz’s essay offers an outstanding road into Jefferson’s perspective by offering insight into Jefferson’s early years. As he studied the law, Jefferson found in the distant, pre-Norman conquest era of English history an inspirational society: democratic, self-governing, and free. Those who have read Jefferson’s 1774 Summary View will recall Jefferson’s appeals to the example of the Saxon ancestors in order to establish American dominion over their lands and to challenge examples of feudalism in King George’s actions. Eicholz argues that we must look earlier than 1774 to see the genesis of Jefferson’s admiration for the Saxon past: in notes Jefferson wrote in his Legal Commonplace Book as a young lawyer, he came to emphasize an interpretation of history which privileged Saxon freedoms over the corruptions of Norman feudalism, particularly when it came to opposing holding property in humans. Jefferson, and many other revolutionary-era Americans, truly believed that they were reaching back to an ancient legacy of freedom by appealing to the Saxons.[1]

Jefferson’s appreciation for the Saxon legacy endured throughout his life, offering a common thread linking many of his seemingly odd or radical positions. In 1777, while serving in the Virginia legislature, Jefferson was asked to chair a committee assigned with revising the legal code. He had argued against feudal (Norman) land practices in the Summary View; now he argued for a return, as far as possible, to Saxon land policies and the purity of the pre-Norman common law in Virginia. Among other things, Jefferson proposed abolishing the practice of entailing lands, which kept property within the aristocratic families; this bill, along with measures to abolish quitrents, end primogeniture, and to dispose of unappropriated lands, ensured that “the individualistic system of freehold tenure” would prevail over the remnants of a feudal land system.[2]

When Edmund Pendleton raised doubts regarding the wisdom of abolishing the feudal system in Virginia, Jefferson replied:

Time did not alter Jefferson’s opinion of his proposed changes; when in 1809 he remembered being assigned to simplify and re-codify criminal law, he remarked:

Like the British reformers whose histories Jefferson studied, this reformer of Virginian law had conservative intentions, but achieved radical results which transformed many elements of his society.

For the rest of his life, Jefferson was disappointed that the Virginia legislature did not go as far as he would have liked to restore the ancient Saxon system in Virginia. In 1824 he wrote to another Saxon aficionado, Major John Cartwright, that he hoped the legislature would “adopt the subdivision of our counties into wards,” which would “answer to the hundreds of … Saxon [King] Alfred.”[5] He then listed all the elements that each ward would contain:

In Jefferson’s model Saxon society, “[e]ach ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government,” just as he believed had existed in ancient times. Jefferson concluded that the “wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well administered republic.”[6]

As Eicholz notes, Jefferson’s rejection of slavery can clearly be traced to his studies in Williamsburg, where he came to reject any legal arguments in favor of retaining persons as property. Jefferson’s interpretation of ancient Saxon laws, as he believed they existed before the corruption of Norman feudal doctrines post-1066, served as a strong motivation for his legal attacks on slavery in colonial Virginia. In addition, Jefferson’s draft for the Ordinance of 1784 demonstrates even more clearly his vision for what new, self-governing American states could be like: lands divided into the Saxon unit of “hundreds,” government established by all “free males of full age,” and no slavery.[7] Although many of his views—especially regarding slavery—were perceived as radical at the time, Jefferson perceived himself as re-instituting ancient principles, in line with natural law.

[1] It is important to note that Jefferson’s understanding of the Saxon past rested on somewhat idealized histories, or what is now referred to as the “Saxon myth.” For a detailed study of this topic, see H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).

[2] Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 113, 114.

[3] “From Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, 13 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0205.

[4] Jefferson to Skelton Jones, July 28, 1801, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0311. All errors in original.

[5] This was actually the second time Jefferson proposed dividing Virginia in the Saxon fashion; the first was in 1778, when he devised a public education system for children that began with the division of counties into “hundreds.” See Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, 147.

[6] Jefferson to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, Founders Online, National Archives,  https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4313.

[7] See III. Report of the Committee, 1 March 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-06-02-0420-0004; for “Hundreds” see “Report of a Committee to Establish a Land Office, [30 April 1784],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-07-02-0148.

 Despite the tonnage of books, essays, articles and other publications written about Thomas Jefferson—from his lifetime down to ours—there is always room for more because Jefferson himself remains an inexhaustible source for inquiries into his past as well as the American past. This set of papers teems with examples.

 Christine McDonald’s essay digs into the question of Jefferson’s personal religious beliefs and practices and calls into question the assumptions often made about Jefferson—that he was a Deist, or an atheist, hostile to religion, or without belief himself. These assumptions are either incorrect, exaggerated, taken out of context or otherwise off the mark. In other words, they are at best incomplete. McDonald examines the last days of Jefferson’s life in summer 1826 to look for a better understanding. We know that his public statements and actions made clear his unbending commitment to the separation of church and state and to the absolute importance of the individual’s freedom of conscience in personal religious matters. But what were Jefferson’s private religious beliefs? Despite the suggestiveness of the story of his final days that McDonald recounts, the answers remain inscrutable. “Jefferson’s faith was between him and his God,” she observes as she quotes Jefferson on the matter in 1813 when he wrote that his own religious beliefs were “a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved.”

 Was Jefferson surreptitiously religious himself? At the time of his death or in the last years of his life? The answers remain elusive yet tantalizing, and McDonald’s suggestive essay makes it clear that his beliefs seem to have evolved over his life and may well have been yet another area of Jefferson’s life where myth obscured reality. What might Jefferson have said to his clergyman-neighbor, Fredrick Hatch, had they talked in those last hours? McDonald provides a deep dive into the primary source record and a close reading of key works. But I’m curious to know what other scholars who have looked at Jefferson and religion (Paul Conkin, Edwin Gaustad, and others) have concluded—not about the potential conversation with Hatch but about the larger issues. And I wonder how Kate Carte’s recent book on religion and the Revolution might shed light on the broader context of religion in Jefferson’s age.

 Both Hans Eicholz and Cara Rogers Stevens probe the uber-controversial topic of Jefferson and slavery in their papers. As I read them, it seems that Eicholz surveys the conundrum of Jefferson’s moral opposition to slavery, concedes the compromises with slavery that Jefferson made, and poses an important, fundamental, and fascinating question of “why he ever held his original commitments to begin with.” Eicholz traces Jefferson’s early convictions that slavery in any circumstance was morally repugnant. But he also notes the reality of Jefferson’s accommodation on the issue, writing “Ultimately, Jefferson did not follow through with those early commitments in his own life, but he also never wavered from the conviction that enslavement in all forms was an evil.” By looking back to the pre-1780 years in search of answers, his paper helpfully suggests, we may find some clarity on Jefferson’s perspective.

In many respects, Stevens’s well-documented and vigorously-argued paper (drawn from her superb new book on the subject) picks up exactly where Eicholz leaves off. Her work offers some answers and fleshes out the potential inherent in Eicholz’s suggestion that Jefferson’s opposition to slavery was fixed early in his career and shifted only later. Stevens confirms Eicholz’s sense that looking to Jefferson’s pre-1780s life enables us to track his initial opposition to slavery, overtaken—as his career unfolded—by a necessary softening and hedging of those positions. Context is everything in discerning Jefferson’s views. Stevens asks rhetorically if Jefferson could have done more to oppose slavery. “Absolutely,” she writes. “And, if he had, we might look more favorably on him today than we do—that is, if his risk-taking did not scuttle his political career before he was able to become president.” 17th and early 18th century Virginia, she notes, “was a place extremely hostile to emancipators.”  Context again is key: “Jefferson attempted to act within the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, doing less than some others, and more than most.”

What we can never know is what might have become of Jefferson’s anti-slavery views—and more importantly, his actions—had he chosen a career path outside of politics. For example, had he chosen to become a college professor like his mentors William Short and George Wythe, or if he had chosen a career in diplomatic service or in local government and not aspired to become a national political figure, might he not have felt it necessary to soft-pedal or abandon his earlier opposition to slavery as articulated here by both Eicholz and Stevens? Might he have retained—or even extended—the anti-slavery positions he boldly took in the 1760s and 1770s? That is an unanswerable question. But it is, thanks to these papers, at least a plausible one given the ways Stevens and Eicholz document Jefferson’s writings against slavery until his pivot.

Answers may be elusive, but well-framed, contextualized questions such as those posed here in these suggestive essays by McDonald, Eicholz, and Stevens provide a portal of entry for further study.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to contribute my thoughts on Jefferson’s faith with Hans Elcholz, Cara Rogers Stevens, and Todd Estes. I have enjoyed reading your contributions and have shared what I believe to be a summary of your essays sharing my personal thoughts on all. Thank you.

Hans Elcholz tackles the ever-present question of Jefferson’s evolving thoughts on slavery, addressing the daunting question why Jefferson did not follow the path of least resistance adopting the belief, like most of his Southern contemporaries, that slavery was “a positive good.” Unquestionably, Jefferson was influenced by the time he lived and the men surrounding him, particularly while he was in Williamsburg at the dawn of revolution. John Adams defined this remarkable period in his letter to Jefferson in 1815, “What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760-1775.” Jefferson began his studies at the College of William and Mary under the tutelage of William Small in 1760. Historians often overlook these pivotal years in Jefferson’s development, and I find this the most significant part of the essay. As Elcholz details, using Jefferson’s Commonplace Book, and recent research by David Thomas Konig and Michael Zuckert that Jefferson’s perspective on property ultimately sided with Lord Raymond’s belief and had no place in the classification of a person. Revolutionary in thought was that “enslavement in all forms was an evil.” That Jefferson teetered between this conviction, and as Elcholz reminds us “went no further than he did” is a question for the ages.[1]

Cara Rogers Stevens likewise addresses Jefferson’s evolving perspective on slavery, similarly, identifying the powerful influences of his teachers in Williamsburg, drawing attention to George Wythe. Jefferson in his opening salvo confronting the institution of slavery politically was spared “humiliation” when the bill “allowing master to manumit their slaves” failed. This point is important in the essay as it gave Jefferson the opportunity to fight another day. Here, Stevens’ work diverges from that of Elcholz examining his efforts in the courts and legislature to effect change. From 1770 when he argued that “every one comes into the world with a right to his own person” and his argument was “thrown out” of the courts, to eight years later when Virginia’s legislature did end participation in the slave trade. Unfortunately, his efforts on behalf of his country to end slavery eventually fell silent and stopped as emancipation proved vinegar in the mouths of the majority of politically powerful Virginians. Eventually, Jefferson used his most powerful tool, education, to shift strategy. This change of approach I found quite interesting but also obvious and to be expected of Jefferson. Jefferson used his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to influence the thoughts of a coming generation, and as Stevens writes it did influence future generations including the future Commanding General of the U.S. Army Winfield Scott who “developed antislavery views while reading Jefferson’s notes” while at college in Williamsburg. Putting Jefferson into context, we can see through his eyes that he could have done more but as Stevens reminds us of acted “within the boundaries acceptable at the time.”

Todd Estes brings focus on how Jefferson’s perspective on the U.S. Constitution evolved, a topic with never-ending nuances in Jefferson’s political growth and maturity. Jefferson, like John Adams, was conspicuously absent from the Constitutional Convention. Both were in Europe, Adams serving as our first ambassador to the Court of St. James in London and Jefferson as the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles in France. Receiving news of the adoption of the Constitution by Congress and having copies shared, Jefferson had the opportunity to reflect on the new “Law of the Land” from 3,705 miles away and at a time when, depending upon weather, news traveled at a snail’s pace (6-10 weeks) between the continents. While absent from the ratification debate at home, Jefferson was active in the deliberation and made me recall Adams’ reference how “it is marvellous [sic] how political Plants grow in the shade.” During the period of ratification, Jefferson orchestrated what he could; writing to his revolutionary colleagues he articulated a need for “a declaration of rights.” Jefferson’s views on the Constitution were not bound to party but certainly in the belief that he was right, “I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own” Estes reminds us. What Estes so vividly defines is Jefferson’s lifelong commitment to inalienable rights. It was not political, it was, for Jefferson, undeniable. Returning home and to new and more challenging environments, Secretary of State, Vice President, and President, Jefferson’s evolving views on the Constitution became a political vision that shaped his legacy.[2]

[1] “John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 24 August 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-08-02-0560. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 8, 1 October 1814 to 31 August 1815, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 682–684.]

[2] John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 January 1797, Massachusetts Historical Society

Some three decades ago the literary idea that a text should be read independently and apart from the thoughts and intentions of its author sparked quite a controversy among historians. History is not literature and to understand the how and the why of a particular artifact of the past requires a careful consideration of the factors of its creation and that of necessity demands attention to the motives and thoughts of authors. But to recognize this is not to deny that a text has a life of its own once it is composed and released into the world.

My interest in Thomas Jefferson has been largely the product of my interest in his ability to articulate and synthesize the ideas that gave life to the movement for American independence. In doing so, he had to rise above the immediate context of his own state, and even that of the North Atlantic or the British Empire. By focusing on the specific set of ideas by which he was able to effectuate this goal, what I called the micro details of his early studies, we can come to more fully appreciate the power of the document that is the Declaration of Independence.

Once achieved, however, we may find ourselves disappointed, even discouraged by the author’s conduct afterwards. But as historians we should not be surprised if the cares and incentives of one’s specific situation come back into play to pull the author back down from the lofty heights of the ideal. In fact, the power and importance of context is illustrated precisely in the compelling nature of the impositions of the everyday and commonplace.

That said, the fact that Jefferson was able to compose such a document is also what makes the Declaration such a singular achievement on its own. This achievement went well beyond Jefferson’s influence in his immediate community. It led subsequent generations to call for greater and more consistent applications of the idea of freedom and equal rights. Having arrived at the conclusion early in his education that slavery was a moral wrong, Jefferson never relinquished that position, even though many others eventually would. Much of this, I would argue, was owing to Jefferson’s commitment to intellectual freedom, and is well illustrated in the other approaches taken here to study the long arc of Jefferson’s life.

Cara Rogers Stevens has set out the main issues to be addressed as they relate specifically to the slavery issue. That Jefferson’s opposition was real, has been clearly set forth, especially as that opposition pertains to his first endeavors against the institution, but even more interesting is how this issue continued to haunt his conscious thoughts right to the end of his life. It will be in the details of this narrative that Rogers will be able to find the answer to the question, “Could Jefferson have done more?”  This will be a challenging narrative to write however, because it will touch on that most controversial of issues about the role of the historian. Is it our objective to judge the past, or to understand it? Some consideration of the theory of history will be needed, it seems to me, but historians are often loath to engage in such speculation.

On the other hand, an invitation to “condemn and praise” is to open the door to moral philosophy and ethics. When is such called for? Rogers states emphatically, only after situating him in “his proper context,” and yet that will require some attention to the standard of judgement being applied. Is that standard to be of Jefferson’s time, or of ours? Of the time before, during or after the Revolution? Or something else entirely? Those are fascinating questions, but they will not be easy to answer.

On the question of Jefferson’s view on religious liberty, Christine McDonald has touched on much of the same ground, noting the powerful and early influence of Jefferson’s mentors, William Small and George Wythe. On this theme, one can see a similar commitment to conclusions early drawn, but also more consistently lived. As McDonald recounts, Jefferson was particularly keen to insist that “religious rights shall never be infringed by any act of mine.”

But of greater interest, perhaps, is the degree to which Jefferson entertained more deeply held convictions of a life to come. Here, again, there is attention to those micro-level details that reveal just how complex and interesting actual history is, and just how deeply and irreducibly complicated is every individual life.

Turning then to Jefferson’s constitutional thought, Todd Estes has illuminated Jefferson’s nuanced and changing attitude towards the handiwork of the Philadelphia Convention. Not entirely in favor of the final product, Jefferson was nevertheless adamant that he was not of the Antifederalist persuasion. That is an interesting point because some of the most articulate commenters on the issues that most concerned Jefferson were generally regarded as Antifederalists.

Jefferson was troubled by the concentrated nature of the powers of the office of the president and he was especially concerned about the omission of rotation in office. This was a particularly egregious oversight in his view that would be the harbinger of future monarchy. And he was also quite adamant about the need for a bill of rights “against every government on earth.”  More interesting still, when pressed to explain his orientation to the debates over ratification, Jefferson contended for only a few particular alterations in the original Articles—a signal feature of the Antifederalist camp.

What then did Jefferson actually count as “Antifederal?” Unpacking that term with respect to the details of Jefferson’s thinking might pose a very promising endeavor. Did he perhaps mean it literally as standing against any federal relations among the states?

And finally, Estes remarks that Jefferson seemed not to have any settled opinions with respect to the interpretation and application of the Constitution until the question of the Bank. Indeed, until that time, he seemed very willing to cut deals with that “host within himself,”[1] Alexander Hamilton, both with respect to Revolutionary debts and the location of the capital.. Here, I would suggest a somewhat different reading.

Rather than having no prior views on the application of written fundamental law, I would suggest that Jefferson entertained the standard views of common law lawyers on the strict reading of statutes and that he had been well prepared by James Madison to accept the basic argument of Publius: what was not strictly granted in the document was in fact reserved.

Yes, Jefferson did insist that a bill of rights was necessary, but that in no way subtracted from the essential nature of the instrument being proposed. It was rather a reinforcement of the idea of enumeration, of reserved and delegated powers. This is how I would read Jefferson’s letter to Madison of November 18, 1788, in which he credited his friend with being the primary writer of the Federalist Papers. And on the point of enumeration, Madison had remained very adamant both during the period of the Articles and that of the Constitution.

But all of these comments are only by way of suggestions for continuing the avenues of research that each has put forward. It was an ideal of Enlightenment science, both natural and social, that conclusions would merge when studying a common empirical base. I think it is a promising sign that our approaches appear to align so well.

[1] Jefferson to Madison, September 21 1795, see https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-28-02-0375

Hans Eicholz, Christine McDonald, and Todd Estes have each written about fascinating issues dealing with various aspects of Thomas Jefferson’s thought. In reading the work of McDonald and Estes, I have gained new insight into Jefferson’s perspective on the Constitution and into his religious views during his final days. In my own contributions to this conversation, I have chosen to focus on the topic of Jefferson and slavery—partly because that is my own chosen area of research, and partly because in any discussion of Jefferson (and most other American Founders) I have ever had, the twin concerns of slavery and hypocrisy inevitably emerge. It seems impossible, in other words, to evaluate any aspect of Jefferson’s life and work without also addressing, in some manner, these most troubling and complex of issues.

In his analysis of my first essay, Eicholz posed a great question for historians to consider: “Is it our objective to judge the past, or to understand it?” For scholars and American citizens alike, when looking at documents such as the Declaration of Independence, merely understanding the past is not sufficient. The words live; they are not relegated to the lives of generations long gone, but rather to the memories, identities, laws, and future hopes of current generations. And because Jefferson wrote those words, and so many other important foundational American documents (e.g. the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom), he invites criticism and debate beyond the level of most other historical subjects.

As Eicholz rightly observes, modern historians understand themselves as obligated to certain standards of objectivity. For the historian to presume to have moral judgements regarding the beliefs or actions of historical subjects is indeed risky, not least because of the potential subsequent loss of credibility. Moreover, to ask whether Thomas Jefferson could, or should, have done “more” to end the institution of slavery is to enter not only the nebulous world of counter-factuals, but also to ask readers to speculate regarding what that “more” could look like. Would “more” mean living up to some standard of the Revolutionary Age? Of the early 1800s? Of today? Why should the historian raise such a question, anyway?

Jefferson did not train as an historian, but he may have had an opinion on this very topic. While completing his college readings on enslaving prisoners of war—specifically, in Henry Home, Lord Kames’s 1751 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion—Jefferson made a marginal notation regarding what he perceived to be “a remarkeable [sic] instance of improvement in the moral sense.” Among the ancient “savage” nations, Jefferson noted, POWs were routinely executed. Later, nations such as the Greeks had developed their moral principles such that POWs were enslaved, rather than killed. Jefferson observed that during his own time, “it is perceived we have no right to take the life of an enemy unless where our own preservation renders it necessary”—and yet, after a battle was over, victors still demanded a ransom before freeing POWs. Just “one advance further” in moral standards would, Jefferson predicted, result in ending ransoms altogether. For Jefferson, morality was inevitably tied to rights; the right of an individual to his life and labor was inherent and did not disappear merely because of a lost battle. What did change, over time, was a society’s ability to perceive and value those inherent human rights.[1]

Americans today do not all share the same moral or ethical standards; they do not even agree on the existence of natural rights. But—largely because of figures like Jefferson—what does remain within the bulk of American society is a firm insistence regarding the right of an individual to his or her freedom. When any person’s right to freedom is revoked, a lengthy legal process takes place first, and the court’s decision is subject to debate and appeal. Many of us could not, perhaps, articulate why such processes are necessary, or why our modern society has such visceral reactions to perceived unjust incarcerations. Our prejudice in favor of freedom goes unexamined; our rights are seldom questioned; this is just the way things should be. We are living in the future society that Jefferson imagined, and most of us don’t even realize it.

Understanding Thomas Jefferson—within the context of his own times—is a necessary precursor to understanding our own times. One step further is the process of attempting to understand the consequences of what Jefferson did, and did not, do when it came to his own moral values—moral values that remain relevant to American culture. This attempt to understand—to judge—does inevitably involve ethical and philosophical questions, but because so much of the world we now live in is built upon the words and deeds of men like Jefferson, those questions must be asked. Perhaps these questions are not within the purview of the historian’s craft, but they will always be within the purview of human beings and citizens. If historians want to engage with a wide audience, keeping the study of history relevant, they must at least pose the questions, inviting speculation—while keeping the context of history at the center of debate.

[1] E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols., 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 2:11–12.

I am grateful to my colleagues on this project for the thoughtful, supportive, and helpful comments on my initial essay. Christine McDonald rightly emphasizes—and does so with specific details of the distance between Paris and the United States and the time it took for news to travel—the sheer impact of Thomas Jefferson’s far removal across the Atlantic and how that vast distance made Jefferson’s absence from the ratification debate near total. As she underscores, the fact that Jefferson was so far away and the time lag between when news left one shore and reached the other made it unavoidable that Jefferson would be well behind the curve of what was transpiring in the ratification debate in the United States. Therefore, it is not the least surprising that Jefferson found it hard to keep up with events on the ground in the fast-moving ratification contest from his post in Paris, and that those events and his reactions to them existed in a time warp. Her emphasis on distance in space and time adds valuable context to Jefferson’s halting, fragmented initial comments on the Constitution and suggests logical reasons for his frustration and subsequent disengagement.

 McDonald’s point about his absence and physical distance in the ratification debate also speaks to a point raised by Hans Eicholz in his keen and probing question asking “What then did Jefferson actually count as ‘Antifederal?’” The question is complex in part because of the role of distance in explaining Jefferson’s absence from the ratification debate. Not only did it mean, as McDonald notes, that he was late in getting and processing information, it also kept Jefferson from being intimately connected to the rhythms and patterns of the ratification debate. This meant that the issues, terms, and definitions unfolding in the debate over the Constitution were not ones that Jefferson could be familiar with, certainly not in real time. Thus, Jefferson’s frame of reference was not the same as the participants who engaged in the newspaper contest and in the state ratifying conventions. The intricacies—and the occasional shifts—of what constituted Federalist and Anti-Federalist positions and arguments understandably escaped his grasp. So, what others might term the “Anti-Federal” mindset or position was not necessarily the same as what Jefferson understood it to be. It would be somewhat akin to reading from an out-of-date textbook: the terms might be familiar but the meanings and significance had changed.

 I take Eicholz’s clarification about how Jefferson did not lack prior views on applying fundamental law, but rather shared the same perspective others trained in the law might have held as a foundational tenet prior to the Constitution, which had shaken up the board quite a bit. And as both of my interlocutors noted, Jefferson’s constitutionalism did become a crucial part of his political vision. But we might say that his vision was shaped more by the events of 1798 than by those of 1788. Or, more broadly, by the events of the 1790s than by those of the 1780s. While Jefferson was far removed from the ratification contest, he was as deeply involved as anyone in the fierce partisan political contests of the 1790s in which everything seemed to be open to contestation—including, perhaps even especially—the meaning and mode of interpreting the Constitution. Jefferson’s constitutionalism emerged and became a crucial part of his vision and his legacy. But it happened gradually, and for him the ratification contest seems to have been far less significant and foundational than it was for some others.

Thank you all for your work and insight.  Reading your comments I agree with Hans Eicholz that examining Thomas Jefferson can be difficult as it quintessentially brings forth the controversial nature of a historian: “Is it our objective to judge the past, or to understand it?”  When Cara Rogers Stevens asks, “Could Jefferson have done more?”  there is judgement, but also understanding. What he did was remarkable “within the boundaries acceptable at the time.”  Ultimately, Jefferson left these issues incomplete and for future generations to inherit.

A prime example is slavery.  In 1820 when Jefferson wrote to John Holms on the Missouri Question that it was a “fire bell in the night” and that he considered it a “the knell of the Union.” He recognized that his role was over.  “I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.”[2]  Jefferson died six years later.

Todd Estes asked if I had looked at other historians who have looked at Jefferson and religion.  Yes, I have. With my essay, however, I tried to draw from untraditional sources with his family’s letters of his life and what they inherited when Jefferson died, his legacy.  It is a different perspective from relying on Jefferson’s writings.   Reading the accounts of his family and friends I saw him with a new perspective, and I questioned my own interpretation of Jefferson’s faith as I sought to understand it.  For instance, I initially thought that perhaps Jefferson Randolph may have presumed he understood his grandfather’s faith, or transferred his own faith or lack thereof, upon his grandfather when he removed religious references from news releases regarding Jefferson’s death.  In short, I suspected that Jefferson Randolph was an atheist. I initially felt confident of this belief especially when I read the account of his youngest brother George’s death.

Jefferson’s youngest grandson, George Wythe Randolph was also present when his grandfather passed away in 1826.  A little more than forty years later he passed away and his niece Sarah N. Randolph, author of Domestic Life at Monticello, was present and recorded the scene. Recognizing the hour of his death was fast approaching he said that he looked with peace at the idea of being “carried to Monticello when the birds are singing and the leaves are budding out.”  His brother Jeff was there, too. To Jeff he pleaded, “Trust in Jesus, and you will die as happily as I do: See how a Christian can die could there be a happier death?” Later that evening, George stirred with anxiety regarding the previous conversation.  “I hope my dear good brother Jeff did not take amiss what I said to him this morning…. His reason must be convinced, mine had to be too.”  His faith was firm, but that of his brother was unknown and presumed absent. As he died, he said to his wife Mary, “I see Jesus.”  She asked him if he was quoting a hymn. “No” he said distinctly “It was Him Himself.”[3]

Perhaps George’s death impacted Jeff’s faith but perhaps it was always there, and, in his grandfather’s fashion, he kept his faith between him and his “Maker.”  When facing death, having been told by his son that “he must die” in 1875 after contracting gangrene, he requested that “the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper be administered to him according to the rites of the Episcopal Church” and gave “open testimony to his belief in the religion of Christ.” He reassured his family attending him, “Don’t weep for me, my hopes for the future rest on the same foundation as yours.  I do not fear to die” and passed away on October 7, 1875, at his home Edge Hill in the shadow of Monticello where he is buried.   At his funeral his former slaves requesting to pay tribute swelled up “an [sic] hundred… voices” in hymn “Am I a soldier of the cross, A follower of the Lamb?” until “the last notes died away amid the oaks of Monticello…”.[4]

Years ago, when I had the honor to meet David McCullough, I asked him why he changed the title of his book from Jefferson & Adams to John Adams.  He told me it was easier, and he felt Adams was more interesting and sympathetic.  Jefferson shared nothing whereas Adams McCullough said, “wore his heart on his sleeve.”  I agree (in part) and quite possibly that is why we continue 199 years after his death to have quite differing views as historians. As with all our essays I am left asking more questions than unearthed answers.

[1] “Inheriting Jefferson” is the title of my larger work on Jefferson and the Randolph Family of Monticello, however I thought it would work well here as a title of the summary of my thoughts.

[2] Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, 22 May 1820 see: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html

[3] See Published in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., http///tjrs.monticello.org, 2025.  Jefferson’s Family and the Civil War Family Letters, Sarah N. Randolph Last Words of Gen. G. W. R. by S. N. R. April 4, 1867.

[4] Death of Thomas J. Randolph Alexandria Gazette, November 4, 1875 (pg 2); Death of Col. Thomas J. Randolph, Alexandria Gazette October 11, 1875 (pg. 2) and Thomas Jefferson Randolph Obituary, Alexandria Gazette, October 11, 1875 (pg 3) reported by the Richmond Enquirer copy found at https://genalogyneard1.com., 2025.