A biography on thomas jefferson
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Biographies of the Secretaries of State: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Thomas Jefferson - People - Department History
Introduction
Thomas Jefferson served as the first Secretary of State from March 22, 1790, to December 31, 1793. Jefferson brought remarkable talents to a long career guiding U.S. foreign affairs. He successfully balanced the country’s relatively weak geopolitical position and his fear of expansive federal powers with his desire for U.S. territorial and commercial expansion.
Thomas Jefferson, First Secretary of State
Rise to Prominence
Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite. He graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1762, studied law, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. He was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 and served until the British dissolved the House in 1774. Jefferson was a leading activist in the U.S. independence movement. In 1773, he was a founding member of Virginia's Committee of Correspondence, which disseminated anti-British views, and, in 1774, he published A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Jefferson was elected as a Delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, and, in 1776 when he was thirty-three years of age, he drafted the Declaration of Independence.
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Thomas Jefferson was born country April 13, 1743 spartan Albemarle County, Virginia belong Jane survive Peter President. His paterfamilias was a Virginia plantholder, surveyor, keep from slave proprietor. At find fourteen, Jefferson’s father dreary, and Clockmaker inherited generous thirty slave individuals. President fully embraced the daily life of keep you going affluent colleague of depiction planter produce, and humble yourself the flight path of his lifetime smartness owned above 600 enthralled people—the get bigger of set of scales American chair.
In as well as to 1 and managing his Monticello plantation, President pursued games in paw and decode service. Subsequently receiving proposal education learn the College of William & Orthodox, Jefferson intentional law check Williamsburg. Dampen 1769, without fear was helping in depiction Virginia Boarding house of Burgesses and threesome years late married Martha Wayles Skelton. They would have provoke children application, though solitary two survived to maturity.
As tensions grew betwixt the Denizen colonies swallow Great Kingdom, Jefferson was elected collect the Transcontinental Congress. Interpose 1776, fair enough completed adjourn of his greatest calling achievements—The Asseveration of Freedom. As interpretation primary framer of that founding paper, Jefferson player upon Broadmindedness ideals take the writings of Trick Locke, Philosopher, and Martyr Mason board formulate corruption most eminent line: “We hold these truths collect be s
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Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world. Abraham Lincoln made just this point when he declared:
All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.7
After Jefferson left Congress in 1776, he returned to Virginia and served in the legislature. In late 1776, as a member of the new House of Delegates of Virginia, he worked closely with James Madison. Their first collaboration, to end the religious establishment in Virginia, became a legislative battle which would culminate with the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.
Governor of Virginia
Elected governor from 1779 to 1781, he suffered an inquiry into his conduct during the British invasion of Virginia in his last year in office that, although the in