This page of biographical information discusses Thomas Jefferson's climb up the political ladder. It starts off at his beginnings as a writer of the Declaration of Independence during the Revolutionary Era to his job as Vice President of the country.
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| From the beginning of the struggle with the mother country, Jefferson stood with the more advanced Patriots, grounding his position on a wide knowledge of English history and political philosophy. His most notable early contribution to the cause of the Patriots was his powerful pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America (made in 1774), originally written for presentation to the Virginia convention of that year. In this he emphasized natural rights, including that of emigration, and denied parliamentary authority over the colonies, recognizing no tie with the mother country except the king.
As a member of the Continental Congress (1775-1776), Jefferson was chosen in 1776 to draft the Declaration of Independence. He summarized current revolutionary philosophy in a brief paragraph that has been regarded ever since as a charter of American and universal liberties. He presented to the world the case of the Patriots in a series of burning charges against the king. In the light of modern scholarship some of the charges require modification. But there is a timeless quality in the philosophical section of the Declaration, which proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status, and that government is the servant, not the master, of human beings. The Declaration alone would entitle Jefferson to enduring fame. Desiring to be closer to his family and also hoping to translate his philosophy of human rights into legal institutions in his own state, Jefferson left Congress in the autumn of 1776 and served in the Virginia legislature until his election as governor in 1779. This was the most creative period of his revolutionary statesmanship. His earlier proposals for broadening the electorate and making the system of representation more equitable had failed, and the times permitted no action against slavery except that of shutting off the foreign slave trade. But he succeeded in ridding the land system of feudal vestiges, such as entail and primogeniture, and he was the moving spirit in the disestablishment of the church. In 1779, with George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton, he drew a highly significant report on the revising of the laws. His most famous single bill is the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (adopted in 1786). His fundamental purposes were to destroy artificial privilege of every sort, to promote social mobility, and to make way for the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue, which should provide leadership for a free society. As governor from 1779 to 1781, Jefferson had little power, and he suffered inevitable discredit when the British invaders overran Virginia. An inquiry into his conduct during his last year in office was voted by the legislature after his retirement in June 1781. He was fully vindicated by the next legislature, but these charges were afterward exaggerated by political enemies, and he was hounded by them to some extent throughout his national career. The most important immediate effect of his troubles was to create in his own mind a distaste for public life that persisted in acute form until the death of his wife on Sept. 6, 1782, which reconciled him to a return to office. He also acquired an aversion to controversy and censure from which he never wholly recovered. During this brief private interval (1781-1783) he began to compile his Notes on the State of Virginia, which was first published when he was in France (1785). This work was described at the time by competent authority as "a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America." Undertaken in response to a series of queries by the secretary of the French legation, it was ostensibly an account of the resources, productions, government, and society of a single state. But it spanned a continent and contained reflections on religion, slavery, and the Indians. It afterward appeared in many editions and was the literary foundation of his deserved reputation as a scientist. In the Continental Congress (1783-1784), Jefferson's most notable services were connected with the adoption of the decimal system of coinage, which later as secretary of state he tried vainly to extend to weights and measures, and with the Ordinance of 1784. Though not adopted, the latter foreshadowed many features of the famous Ordinance of 1787, which established the Northwest Territory. Jefferson went so far as to advocate the prohibition of slavery in all the territories.
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| Jefferson's stay in France (1784-1789), where he was first a commissioner to negotiate commercial treaties and then Benjamin Franklin's successor as minister, was in many ways the richest period of his life. He gained genuine commercial concessions from the French, negotiated an important consular convention in 1788, and served the interests of his own weak government with diligence and skill. He was confirmed in his opinion that France was a natural friend of the United States, and Britain at this stage a natural rival, and thus his foreign policy assumed the orientation it was to maintain until the eve of the Louisiana Purchase. The publication of his book on Virginia symbolized his unofficial service of information to the French. His services to his own countrymen were exemplified by the books, the seeds and plants, the statues and architectural models, and the scientific information that he sent home. His stay in Europe contributed greatly to that universality of spirit and diversity of achievement in which he was equaled by no other American statesman, except possibly Franklin.
Toward the end of his mission he reported with scrupulous care the unfolding revolution in France. His personal part in it was slight, and such advice as he gave was moderate. Doubting the readiness of the people for self-government of the American type, he now favored a limited monarchy for France, and he cautioned his liberal friends not to risk the loss of their gains by going too fast. Though always aware of the importance of French developments in the worldwide struggle for greater freedom and happiness, he tended to stress this more after he returned home and perceived the dangers of political reaction in his own country. Eventually he was repelled by the excesses of the French Revolution, and he thoroughly disapproved of it when it passed into an openly imperialistic phase under Napoleon. But insofar as it represented a revolt against despotism, he continued to believe that its spirit could never die. Because of his absence in Europe, Jefferson had no direct part in the framing or ratification of the Constitution Of The United States, and at first the document aroused his fears. His chief objections were that it did not expressly safeguard the rights of individuals, and that the unlimited eligibility of the president for reelection would make it possible for him to become a king. He became sufficiently satisfied after he learned that a bill of rights would be provided and after he reflected that there would be no danger of monarchy under George Washington.
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| Although his fears of monarchical tendencies remained and colored his attitude in later partisan struggles, it was as a friend of the new government that he accepted Washington's invitation to become secretary of state.
During Jefferson's service in this post from 1790 to 1793, Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, defeated the movement for commercial discrimination against Britain, which Jefferson favored. Hamilton, also, connived with the British minister George Hammond to nullify Jefferson's efforts in 1792 to gain observance of the terms of peace from the British, and especially to dislodge them from the northwest posts. Jefferson's policy was not pro-French, but it seemed anti-British. Hamilton was distinctly pro-British, largely for financial reasons, and he became more so when general war broke out in Europe and ideology was clearly involved. In 1793, Jefferson wanted the French Revolution to succeed against its external foes, but he also recognized that the interests of his own country demanded a policy of neutrality. Such a policy was adopted, to the dissatisfaction of many strong friends of democracy in America, and was executed so fairly as to win the reluctant praise of the British. Jefferson was greatly embarrassed by the indiscretions of the fiery French minister, Edmond Charles Genet, who arrived in Washington in the spring of 1793, but he skillfully brought about Genet's recall and avoided a breach with the revolutionary government of his country. Jefferson helped Hamilton gain congressional consent to the assumption of state debts, for which the location of the federal capital on the Potomac was the political return. His growing objections to the Hamiltonian financial system were partly owing to his belief that the treasury was catering to commercial and financial groups, not agricultural, but he also believed that Hamilton was building up his own political power by creating ties of financial interest and was corrupting Congress. The issue between the two secretaries was sharply joined by 1791, when the Bank of the United States was established. They gave to the president their rival interpretations of the Constitution in this connection. The victory at the time and in the long run was with Hamilton's doctrine of liberal construction, or interpretation, of the Constitution and his assertion of broad national power. But Jefferson's general distrust of power and his reliance on basic law as a safeguard have enduring value. By late 1792 or 1793 the opponents of Hamiltonianism constituted a fairly definite national party, calling itself Republican. Jefferson's recognized leadership of this group can be more easily attributed to his official standing and his political philosophy than to his partisan activities. In the summer and autumn of 1792, by means of anonymous newspaper articles, Hamilton sought to drive Jefferson from the government. The alleged justification was the campaign being waged against Hamilton by the editor of the National Gazette, Philip Freneau. Jefferson had given Freneau minor employment as a translator for the State Department, but he claimed that he never brought influence to bear on him, and there is no evidence that he himself wrote anything for the paper. But he had told Washington precisely what he thought of his colleague's policies, and had already said that he himself wanted to get out of the government. Early in 1793 the Virginians in Congress vainly sought to drive Hamilton from office or at least to rebuke him sharply for alleged financial mismanagement. Jefferson undoubtedly sympathized with this attack and probably drafted the resolutions that were introduced by Rep. William Branch Giles (Va.) and soundly defeated. A degree of unity was forced on the president's official family by the foreign crisis of 1793, which also caused Jefferson to delay his retirement to the end of the year.
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| During a respite of three years from public duties, he began to remodel his house at Monticello and interested himself greatly in agriculture, claiming that he had wholly lost the "little spice of ambition" he had once had. He was outraged by Washington's attack on the Democratic societies, which were identified with his party, and by what he regarded as the surrender to the British in Jay's Treaty, but at this stage he was playing little part in politics. Nonetheless, he was supported by the Republicans for president in 1796, and, running second to John Adams by three Electoral Votes, he became Vice President. His Manual of Parliamentary Practice (1801) was a result of his experience as the presiding officer over the Senate. His papers on the extinct megalonyx and on the moldboard of a plow invented by him attested to his scientific interests and attainments. These papers were presented to the American Philosophical Society, of which he became president in 1797.
A private letter of his to his friend Philip Mazzei, published that year, severely criticized Federalist leaders and was interpreted as an attack on Washington. Jefferson's partisan activities increased during his vice presidency. He deplored the Federalist exploitation of a dangerous quarrel with France, although Jefferson's own sympathy with France had declined. The notorious Alien and Sedition Acts were the principal cause of Jefferson's disapproval of the Adams administration. Jefferson's grounds were both philosophical and partisan. The historic Republican protest against laws that attempted to suppress freedom of speech and destroy political opposition was made in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions (1798). Jefferson wrote the former, as James Madison did the latter. Jefferson's authorship was not known at the time. In the Kentucky Resolutions he carried his states'-rights doctrines to their most extreme point in his career. In invoking the authority of the states against laws that he regarded as unconstitutional, his resolutions were in the tradition that finally led to nullification and secession. But they were also in the best tradition of civil liberties and human rights.
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