1776 All-Stars: Why Thomas Jefferson Is the Most Fascinating Founder

This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason’s favorite American Founders. Read more here.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1819. This accords well with the Cato Institute’s definition of libertarianism: “the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.”

Immediately following his definition of rightful liberty, Jefferson properly cautioned, “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

Nearly half a century earlier, as a 27-year-old lawyer in 1770, Jefferson sought freedom for Samuel Howell, who was being held in indentured servitude because his grandmother was white and his grandfather was black. In his legal brief, Jefferson declared, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” Jefferson was asserting the libertarian moral claim that every individual has full self-ownership. Alas, he lost the case.

Six years later, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously wrote, “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.” Historian Walter Isaacson calls that phrase “the greatest sentence ever written.” And the claim that sentence made has reverberated across the world for the last two and a half centuries.

Despite declaring that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson benefited from the labor of more than 600 enslaved people at Monticello and other properties over the course of his lifetime. Jefferson was conscious of this hypocrisy. In his first draft of the Declaration, he indicted King George III for having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” Jefferson further accused the king of “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” Jefferson later explained that this passage “was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.”

In his 1783 draft of a new constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that the new General Assembly not have the power “to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st. day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.” Jefferson recognized the evil of slavery but could not politically bring about its end or bring himself to give it up.

Jefferson was a fierce supporter of the liberty of conscience. “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god,” he observed in 1782. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” While Rhode Island was the only colony without an established state church, the 1786 adoption of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom made Virginia the first state to end the use of taxes to support state-sanctioned churches.

Jefferson was ambassador to France as the new Constitution was being hammered out in 1787. But in his correspondence with chief writer James Madison, Jefferson decried the “omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land & not by the law of Nations.” Persuaded, Madison drafted a Bill of Rights that largely incorporated Jefferson’s concerns; it was ratified as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy with respect to slavery is a blot on his legacy. But he still deserves our praise for expressing the principles and framing the institutions that enabled the eventual extension of civil and political rights to all American men and women. On the anniversary of Jefferson’s Declaration, it is up to us to sustain and extend that document’s ideals.

1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason‘s favorite American Founders: