Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father, principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801–1809), whose Enlightenment-shaped vision of liberty, natural rights, and republican self-governance shaped the founding ideals of the American republic. A polymath who corresponded with leading European scientists and philosophers, he founded the University of Virginia (1819) as a secular institution dedicated to intellectual freedom. The profound contradiction between his declared ideals of liberty and his ownership of enslaved people remains a central tension in his historical legacy.