On Revolution

Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 at his family’s plantation in the Virginia Colony. A brilliant student, he studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, enrolling in 1761 at age 16 and graduating two years later. Well-read in a wide range of subjects, including classics, history, religion, science, and agriculture, Jefferson became a lawyer and represented his county as a delegate to the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769 until 1775. Although himself an enslaver, he advocated reforms for enslavement and represented several enslaved persons seeking freedom, arguing that all people were endowed with a natural right to liberty. He was deeply influenced by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other liberal Enlightenment philosophers.

Jefferson was one of the youngest delegates to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he was appointed to the Committee of Five charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote most of the Declaration himself in just over two weeks, inspired by Enlightenment notions of natural rights and the sanctity of the individual. In 1776, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he helped write a constitution and drafted over a hundred bills promoting republican government and abolishing feudal practices. He served as Virginia’s governor in 1779 and 1780 and as a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation after the Revolutionary War’s end in 1783. He was sent to Paris as a diplomat in 1784 and stayed for five years, developing a close friendship with the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. In 1789, he allowed Lafayette to use his house for revolutionary meetings and assisted him in drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Returning to America that year, he was appointed by President George Washington as the nation’s first secretary of state. Together with James Madison, Jefferson founded the Republican Party to advocate for state’s rights and local control, as opposed to the strong central government promoted by the Federalists Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Jefferson narrowly lost to Adams in the presidential election of 1796 and was thereby elected vice president, before defeating Adams in 1800 to become America’s third president; he served two terms. Jefferson remained influential in his post-presidency and in 1819 founded the University of Virginia. In declining health, he died in 1826.

John Adams was born on his family’s farm in Massachusetts in 1735 and entered Harvard College in 1751 at age 16, where he studied classical philosophers in the original Greek and Latin. Adams became a lawyer and rose to prominence leading opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765, on the grounds of taxation without representation. In 1770, he agreed to defend British soldiers charged with killing civilians in the “Boston Massacre,” arguing that everyone has a right to counsel and a fair trial. Adams was a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, where he advocated for the separation of powers and a bicameral legislature. He befriended Thomas Jefferson at the Second Continental Congress and persuaded the Committee of Five, of which he was also a member, to let Jefferson write the Declaration.

Adams served as a diplomat in France and Holland from 1777 through 1780, and as ambassador to Great Britain from 1785 to 1788. Elected the nation’s first vice president in 1789, he sided with the Federalists but feuded with fellow-Federalist Alexander Hamilton. Unlike Jefferson, he denounced the French revolutionaries as tyrannical and barbarous. After Jefferson’s election in 1800, the two did not speak to each other until reconciling twelve years later, at which point they began a regular correspondence that continued until their deaths, both in 1826.