Thomas Jefferson entered the world at his family's tobacco plantation in Shadwell, Virginia, the third of ten children. He would go on to draft the Declaration of Independence, found the University of Virginia, and serve as the nation's third president, leaving a legacy as complicated as it is consequential—an apostle of liberty who owned hundreds of enslaved people.
Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 (April 2 under the Old Style calendar then in use), at Shadwell, his family's estate in the Virginia Piedmont. His father Peter Jefferson was a surveyor and planter; his mother Jane Randolph came from one of Virginia's most prominent families. Young Thomas grew up amid tobacco fields worked by enslaved laborers, an institution he would spend his life both benefiting from and, in his writings, condemning in the abstract.
Jefferson's genius was restless and wide-ranging: he was an architect, inventor, violinist, book collector, and amateur scientist, as well as a statesman. At 33 he wrote the Declaration of Independence in a rented room in Philadelphia, producing the line 'all men are created equal' while enslaving over 600 people over his lifetime, freeing only a handful. He designed Monticello, his mountaintop home, obsessively renovating it for decades.
The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1943, was deliberately unveiled on the 200th anniversary of his birth—a symbol of American ideals that has itself become a site of ongoing debate about how to remember a man who embodied the nation's founding contradictions.