Thomas Jefferson: First Inaugural Address

Thomas Jefferson was born on Shadwell, the family plantation, in Goochland (later Albemarle) County, Virginia, on April 13, 1743, the eldest of seven children. His father, Peter, a self-made planter and surveyor, had married well into the prominent Randolph family. Peter Jefferson, who raised his family in the tradition of the Enlightenment, died when Thomas was only fourteen. Jefferson studied at local schools until his father's death, when he studied for two years under James Maury, the local Anglican minister. At the age of seventeen, Jefferson left Shadwell and studied at the College of William and Mary under the tutelage of Dr. William Small and George Wythe. When Small returned to Scotland in 1762, Jefferson returned to Shadwell, where he continued his own studies, assisted in the law long-distance by Wythe.

In 1767, Jefferson was admitted to the bar, at which time he decided to build his own house—Monticello (“little mountain”), near Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1770 Shadwell burned, and he moved into a one-room brick cottage at Monticello. In the summer of 1771, while trying cases near Williamsburg, Jefferson met Martha Wayles Skelton, a twenty-three-year-old widow who lived on her father's plantation. The couple was married on January 1, 1772, and moved to Monticello. In May 1773 Martha's father died, bringing Jefferson 5,000 acres of land, fifty slaves, and debts that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Jefferson was active in the Revolutionary movement in Virginia. While serving in the House of Burgesses he wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), which gave him prominence in the Patriot cause and established his reputation as a great writer. When serving in the Second Continental Congress, he was appointed to a five-man committee to draft a declaration of independence. The committee selected him to draft the document.

Jefferson left Congress and served for two years in the Virginia House of Delegates, where he chaired a committee to recodify the state laws. Only a few of these revisions were actually adopted while Jefferson served in the legislature. Elected as the governor of Virginia in 1779, he served two one-year terms. He was charged with cowardice and dereliction of duty when the British raided Williamsburg and Charlottesville, where the Patriot government had fled. Although the House of Delegates exonerated him, a disconcerted Jefferson retired from public service. His wife died shortly after childbirth in 1782, and a seriously depressed (almost suicidal) Jefferson was encouraged by friends to return to government service.

Upon his return, Jefferson was appointed to the peace commission in Paris, but before he left for Europe word arrived that the preliminary treaty had been signed. Jefferson then became a very active delegate in Congress. Among his many committee assignments, he wrote the Ordinance of 1784, which provided for the territorial government of the land north and west of the Ohio River. In 1784 Jefferson was appointed as one of three commissioners (with Adams and Benjamin Franklin) authorized to negotiate commercial treaties with European and North African countries. When Franklin returned to America in 1785, Congress appointed Jefferson to be his successor as the minister plenipotentiary to France. While serving in France, Jefferson's draft Bill for Religious Freedom was shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in January 1786.

When Jefferson temporarily returned to Virginia in late 1789, he discovered that he had been appointed as the secretary of state. Jefferson reluctantly accepted the position. After serving in President Washington's cabinet for four years, where he regularly opposed the policies of Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, Jefferson retired again from public service.

Jefferson and Madison spearheaded the movement to create the Democratic-Republican Party, which opposed Hamilton's economic policies and the adoption of the Jay Treaty. When, in 1796, Washington announced his retirement, Jefferson challenged Vice President Adams for the presidency. Adams won a narrow victory, and Jefferson became the vice president.

Democratic-Republican opposition to the Adams administration heightened when the United States and France became involved in the Quasi-War of 1798 to 1800. Jefferson and Burr defeated Adams and Pinckney in the presidential election of 1800. With Jefferson and Burr tied with seventy-three electoral votes, it took thirty-six ballots for the lame-duck, Federalist-dominated House of Representatives to elect Jefferson on February 17, 1801.

Jefferson's first administration was one of the best of any president's; his second was disastrous, leaving a divided country foundering toward war with Great Britain. Early in his second term, Jefferson decided to retire even though he would have been overwhelmingly reelected to a third term. He lived the remaining seventeen years of his life at Monticello, where he took the lead in founding the University of Virginia. He died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.