Thomas Jefferson: Second Inaugural Address

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, was born into one of Virginia's most prominent families on April 13, 1743. He showed his intellectual curiosity at the College of William and Mary, where he studied Greek, the classics, philosophy, and science, practiced the violin, and perfected his French. From 1767 to 1773 he practiced law, and in 1769 he was elected as a representative to the Virginia House of Burgesses. He became involved in the movement for American independence in 1774 when he wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America in opposition to Parliament's Coercive Acts, sometimes called the Intolerable Acts. He was elected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where he was assigned to a five-member committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, though Jefferson was the principal author.

In the years that followed, Jefferson served Virginia and the nation in numerous capacities. He returned to Virginia to serve in what was now called the Virginia House of Delegates. From 1779 to 1781 he was the governor of Virginia, and at one point he escaped just minutes from being captured during a British invasion of Virginia in the Revolutionary War. In 1783 he was elected to Congress. From 1785 to 1789 he served as the nation's minister to France, and he was in that post in 1786 when the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which he had drafted in 1779, was passed. From 1789 to 1793 he was President George Washington's first secretary of state. In 1796 he ran for the presidency but came in second to John Adams; under the provisions of the Constitution at that time, he became vice president as the second-place finisher in the electoral vote count. In 1800 he again ran for president; he was tied with Aaron Burr in the number of electoral votes, throwing the election to the House of Representatives, which elected Jefferson. He was sworn into office (and delivered his First Inaugural Address) in 1801. He was easily reelected in 1804, delivered his Second Inaugural Address in 1805, and served as president until 1809. His chief accomplishment after leaving office was the establishment in 1819 of the University of Virginia, the nation’s first institution of higher learning that did not have a religious component.

Jefferson often preferred intellectual pursuits over the political fray. In addition to the interests he cultivated in college, he was an ardent student of architecture, agriculture, horticulture, and the infant science of archeology. He died at his Monticello estate on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, the epitaph on his tombstone makes no reference to the presidency but rather identifies him as the “author of the Declaration of American Independence” and “of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom” and as “father of the University of Virginia.”