When Thomas Jefferson was president, America was under threat.
In a war between Britain and France, both sides captured U.S. ships for “trading with the enemy.”
Those powers and Spain had competed to control land on the U.S. borders and the navigation of the Mississippi River.
A few months after Jefferson took the helm in 1801, the North African Barbary pirate state of Tripoli (now in Libya) demanded more in tribute, money that countries, including the U.S., paid to avoid having their merchant ships held hostage.
Jefferson preferred diplomacy to war but felt that Tripoli required a tough response and sent four warships, forcing Tripoli’s pasha to back down.
It was the first overseas military action by the young nation.
The peace was short-lived. Two years later, Tripoli kidnapped 300 Americans. Jefferson’s Cabinet advised him to pay the ransom because it would be cheaper than war. Instead, he sent 12 ships to bombard the city, while a force of Marines and Arabs attacked from the land side, overthrowing the pasha.
“The greatest of men are spoken of and thought about because their ideas resonate and their battles recur,” wrote Jon Meacham in “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.” “Jefferson’s most significant successors have defined him in terms of his vision of liberty and union. Reagan — himself a visionary with a pragmatic streak, a deft communicator of political ideals, a transformative leader — intuitively understood him.”
Jefferson (1743-1826) was the third of 10 children born on a plantation in Shadwell, Va.
His tutors and schoolmasters found him to be a brilliant student in everything from math and natural science to history and Greek.
At 16, he went to William & Mary College in Williamsburg. There he met law professor George Wythe, who became his mentor and introduced him to European Enlightenment writings about human rights and potential.
Graduating in 1762, Jefferson served as Wythe’s law clerk and was admitted to the bar five years later.
In 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles, bonding over a love of music. She bore six children, though only two survived to adulthood.
Jefferson also represented his county in the state House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775, the year war broke out against Britain.
In 1774, he had begun writing about the right of the American colonies to govern themselves.
His eloquence led to the assignment two years later to write the Declaration of Independence.
From 1779 to 1781, in the thick of the War of Independence, he served as Virginia’s governor.
“Surprisingly, Jefferson spent most of his early career as a loner,” James Thompson, author of “Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment,” told IBD. “He harbored opinions that separated him from the hierarchy of his state and the independence movement. He wanted a separation of church and state, and to have wealth and power disseminated widely. To avoid conflicts, he kept mostly to himself at Monticello and wrote his notable public papers with virtually no input from others, like the Wizard of Oz — out of sight, trying to pull the levers of power.”
Jefferson was also one of the few leaders to speak out against slavery, even though he had inherited slaves. He didn’t overwork them but used them as collateral for loans to keep his plantations afloat.
Seeing that the institution was evil and had to be phased out, he tried to start the debate by criticizing slavery in the first draft of the Declaration, but the passage was removed by the Continental Congress.
Jefferson tried four times to pass laws to reduce slavery, succeeding twice. As a member of the Continental Congress, he wrote the first version of the Northwest Ordinance, which in 1787 outlawed slavery in what would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Then as president in 1808, he pushed through a ban on importing new slaves.
During the Revolution, Jefferson had turned down several requests to act as an overseas diplomat in order to care for his family. But in 1784, after his wife died, he agreed to be a diplomat to France and brought along two daughters.
He became ambassador when Benjamin Franklin stepped down the next year.
Also in 1785, the four pirate states of North Africa began seizing U.S. crews. Jefferson advocated building a larger Navy to threaten the pirates, but Congress refused to fund it, authorizing tribute payoffs instead.
Only Morocco thought the amount was adequate. The Americans would remain captive for 11 years, a lesson that Jefferson would remember when he called the shots as president.
The exposure to the great minds of Europe, its power politics and the forces that kept most people in poverty had a great impact on Jefferson, who returned to America in 1789 just after the French Revolution started. “He arrived energized to wage a second American Revolution to create a well-ordered republic and make the world better,” said Thompson. “He was a systematic thinker and facilitator of ideas who gathered around him brilliant advisers and was incredibly industrious.”
Jefferson was President Washington’s secretary of state from 1790 to 1793, when America found itself in the middle of a conflict between European powers over Florida, the Oregon Territory and navigation on the Mississippi River.
America was not ready for another war, so Jefferson kept it neutral until the storm passed.
“He believed the American empire could expand and maintain its liberty … via a combination of war, migration, negotiation and purchase — all the elements of Jefferson’s statecraft,” wrote Francis Cogliano in “Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy.”
Jefferson began building the Democratic Republican Party with James Madison to advocate expanding land ownership and states’ rights against the Federalists, who favored banks and a strong central government.
After losing the 1795 presidential election to John Adams, he served as vice president but opposed the administration’s tilt to Britain during a war with France — a move that led to the loss of hundreds of American ships.
The election of 1800 came after a bitter campaign against his one-time friend Adams. Jefferson won and sounded magnanimous in his inaugural address: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. … We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
“As governor, he had achieved changes in the inheritance laws, reductions in property requirements to vote, the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, and universal public education,” said Alvin Felzenberg, author of “The Leaders We Deserved.”http://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Deserved-Few-Didnt-Presidential-ebook/dp/B003OBZOEE “He was more willing than some Founding Fathers to modify rules to facilitate political equality, believing that broad, well-informed participation was a safeguard of liberty.”
Jefferson’s greatest feat as president came in 1803, when he again exceeded his authority by agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase.
He secured navigation on the Mississippi and doubled the size of America at 4 cents an acre when the U.S. government was charging $2 to purchase its land. The territory would produce vast wealth in gold, copper, oil and cotton.
After leaving the presidency in 1809, he concentrated on agricultural improvements and mechanical innovations, then founded the University of Virginia in 1819.
Jefferson and Adams had revived their friendship in 1812, exchanging thoughts on the nation’s future.
Jefferson’s health declined in 1825, and he died the next year at age 83 on July 4, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
A few hours later, Adams died.
Jefferson’s words have inspired freedom lovers around the world and across the ages:
“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.”
For this reason alone, Time magazine ranked him among the 100 most influential people in history.