Drafter of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. president
A founding father of the United States, the principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president. He distilled Locke’s natural rights and Montesquieu’s separation of powers into that world-spanning line of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." He championed liberty, limited power, and democracy all his life — yet held slaves all his life too; this deep contradiction makes him a key figure for understanding the fissure between America’s founding ideals and its reality.
In 1776, the thirty-three-year-old Jefferson took up the pen for the Declaration of Independence, writing the abstract doctrine of the Enlightenment thinkers into a line everyone could understand and remember: "all men are created equal." The power of this line far outran the age that bore it — the abolition, women’s, and civil-rights movements thereafter all turned back to invoke it, forcing this nation to make good on the promise it made at its founding.
Jefferson championed liberty and equality all his life yet held slaves all his life; this deep contradiction, key to the fissure between America’s founding ideals and its reality, is long debated, and this site states the fact and the dispute.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.