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

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

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.