Sublime

His opponents often labelled him a “freethinker,” or an outright atheist; milder observers came closer to the mark, pegging him as a deist who largely thought of God as a noninterventionist. But Jefferson did not openly claim the deist label. “I am a Christian,” he insisted in a letter to the educator and politician Benjamin Rush, “in the only sens

Jefferson admittedly gets more scrutiny than some of his peers, like Madison and Washington, when it comes to matters of race and status. This is largely because it is well established that he held his children born to Sally Hemings, his slave who was thirty years his junior, as slaves as well. (And yet there are people who still want to argue that

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t against expansion any more than George Washington was. It’s just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled process.

Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase.

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.