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U.S. Presidents & Presidency: Jefferson

A topic guide covering the Presidents of the United States. This is an ongoing project. As such, additional individuals will be added over time.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson served as the third president of the United States between 1801 - 1809. Additionally he served as vice president under John Adams and as secretary of state under George Washington. Noted as one of the nation's founding fathers, Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

Despite signing the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, he owned enslaved individuals. "Despite working tirelessly to establish a new nation founded upon principles of freedom and egalitarianism, Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people during his lifetime, the most of any U.S. president" (White House History).

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826. 

 

Resources

Reference, Archives, & Primary Sources

 

In which John Green teaches you about founding father and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is a somewhat controversial figure in American history, largely because he, like pretty much all humans, was a big bundle of contradictions. Jefferson was a slave-owner who couldn't decide if he liked slavery. He advocated for small government, but expanded federal power more than either of his presidential predecessor. He also idealized the independent farmer and demonized manufacturing, but put policies in place that would expand industrial production in the US. Controversy may ensue as we try to deviate a bit from the standard hagiography/slander story that usually told about old TJ. John explores Jefferson's election, his policies, and some of the new nation's (literally and figuratively) formative events that took place during Jefferson's presidency. In addition to all this, Napoleon drops in to sell Louisiana, John Marshall sets the course of the Supreme Court, and John Adams gets called a tiny tyrant.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Ox6vGteek

Ken Burns: Thomas Jefferson

Ken Burns: Thomas Jefferson - Part 1' is part of a series of films from PBS. Thomas Jefferson is a two-part portrait of one of the most fascinating and complicated figures ever to walk across America's public stage - our enigmatic and brilliant third president. Thomas Jefferson embodies within his own life the most profound contradictions of American history: as the author of our most sacred document, the Declaration of Independence, he gave voice to our fervent desire for freedom, but he also owned more than 150 human beings and never saw fit to free them. Jefferson also made himself into a true renaissance man - a scholar, a philosopher, a diplomat, an aesthete, and an architect. As a young man, he was transformed by the fire of the Enlightenment into America's most articulate voice for human liberty. Torn between his desire for a serene family life at Monticello and his passion for politics, Jefferson endured ceaseless, heartrending personal loss. As President, he helped create the first American political party, and with the Louisiana Purchase, more than doubled the size of the new nation. Jefferson's last years were spent founding the University of Virginia and reestablishing his friendship, after decades of estrangement, from his onetime rival John Adams. His influence on and vision for our country reverberates to this day.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson- The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

The little-known story of Thomas Jefferson's battle to defend America against Islamic pirates. Kilmeade and Yeager recount the dramatic events building up to this forgotten war against the Tripoli pirates and the heroics that led to its resolution. They tell the story of a 25 year-old sailor named Stephen Decatur who sailed into the enemy harbour, his boat disguised as a Maltese merchant ship, and William Eaton who led Marines on a 500 mile trek across the desert to surprise the port of Derna. New York Times bestselling authors make history come alive.

Jefferson's Demons

"I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended." -- Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals during which he was full of "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead. Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapses were to recur during anxious periods in his life, often accompanied by violent headaches. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran illuminates an optimistic man's darker side -- Jefferson as we have rarely seen him before. The worst of these moments came after his wife died in 1782. But two years later, after being dispatched to Europe, Jefferson recovered nerve and spirit in the salons of Paris, where he fell in love with a beautiful young artist, Maria Cosway. When their affair ended, Jefferson's health again broke down. He set out for the palms and temples of southern Europe, and though he did not know where the therapeutic journey would take him or where it would end, his encounter with the old civilizations of the Mediterranean was transformative. The Greeks and Romans taught him that a man could make productive use of his demons. Jefferson's immersion in the mystic truths of the Old World gave him insights into mysteries of life and art that Enlightenment philosophy had failed to supply. Beran skillfully shows how Jefferson drew on the esoteric lore he encountered to transform anxiety into action. On his return to America, Jefferson entered the most productive period of his life: He created a new political party, was elected president, and doubled the size of the country. His private labors were no less momentous...among them, the artistry of Monticello and the University of Virginia. Jefferson's Demons is an elegantly composed account of the strangeness and originality of one Founder's genius. Michael Knox Beran uncovers the maps Jefferson used to find his way out of dejection and to forge a new democratic culture for America. Here is a Jefferson who, with all his failings, remains one of his country's greatest teachers and prophets.

Jefferson's America

Jefferson's America sheds new light on one of the key aspects of Jefferson's presidency. Almost everyone who has taken a U.S. history course is familiar with Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and the travels of Lewis and Clark, but that's not where this formative episode in American history begins or ends. In fact, Jefferson sent four other expeditions West--Zebulon Pike was dispatched on two missions- first, to the headwaters of the Mississippi, and second, toward what is now Colorado. William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter explored northern Louisiana and Arkansas. Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman (with military officer Richard Sparks) followed the Red River of North Texas and Oklahoma. The stakes for American expansion were enormously high--at a time when Britain, France, and Spain were also all vying for control of the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River, the geopolitics of discovery were paramount. Jefferson, a true student of the Enlightenment, sought out men of science to undertake these urgent missions into the frontier. But they weren't always well-matched--with each other, or even with the task of exploring itself. Tensions between Dunbar and Hunter in particular threatened to undermine Jefferson's progress, leaving the United States in danger of losing its foothold in the West. Jefferson's America will rediscover the robust and often harrowing action from those seminal expeditions and use them as a means of understanding the Jeffersonian era and the president's vision for a continental America.

The Hemingses of Monticello

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth. So begins this epic work--named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times--Annette Gordon-Reed's "riveting history" of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family's extraordinary engagement with one of history's most important figures. Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings--the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony--but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson's estate. We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson's daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson's slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826. As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America's story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

Those Who Labor for My Happiness

Our perception of life at Monticello has changed dramatically over the past quarter century. The image of an estate presided over by a benevolent Thomas Jefferson has given way to a more complex view of Monticello as a working plantation, the success of which was made possible by the work of slaves. At the center of this transition has been the work of Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, recognized as the leading interpreter of Jefferson's life as a planter and master and of the lives of his slaves and their descendants. This volume represents the first attempt to pull together Stanton's most important writings on slavery at Monticello and beyond. Stanton's pioneering work deepened our understanding of Jefferson without demonizing him. But perhaps even more important is the light her writings have shed on the lives of the slaves at Monticello. Her detailed reconstruction for modern readers of slaves' lives vividly reveals their active roles in the creation of Monticello and a dynamic community previously unimagined. The essays collected here address a rich variety of topics, from family histories (including the Hemingses) to the temporary slave community at Jefferson's White House to stories of former slaves' lives after Monticello. Each piece is characterized by Stanton's deep knowledge of her subject and by her determination to do justice to both Jefferson and his slaves. Published in association with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Thomas Jefferson

The author of the Declaration of Independence, a strong voice for the defense of liberty, and the architect behind the largest territorial expansion in United States history, this episode examines Thomas Jefferson's rightful place on Mount Rushmore.

Source: Kanopy

Thomas Jefferson: A View from the Mountain

A story that tears at the heart of America, this critically acclaimed documentary from the director of Bonhoeffer explores Thomas Jefferson and his personal and public dilemma about race and slavery. For centuries people have asked how it was possible that the man who wrote the creed for America, declaring that "all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," could also live his life as a slaveholder.

Source: Kanopy