The Concerns of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was only 14 when his father died, and he inherited the responsibility of the family estate.  In his youth he had studied Latin, French, and Greek, Math, and History.  He was well prepared for entering the College of William & Mary, where he studied law.  Later, he married a well to do widow, and fathered 6 children, only two of whom survived into adulthood.  His wife was frail, and soon after the death of her last child, she died.  There was help for raising his children, but only 2 of them reached adulthood.

What history knows best about Jefferson are his political roles.  He is largely credited with writing the Constitution, although John Adams played an important role in its drafting.  Nearly unknown today is that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence there was a passage blaming the slave trade on George III.  That clause was quickly                                                                                     deleted.  

In 1782 Jefferson served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Paris.  When he returned in 1789, he served as George Washington's Secretary of State, assisting with matters of foreign policy.  All of this had occurred before the serious rift between Jefferson and Adams. 

Politics were very ugly during this time.  Washington had warned against the trouble political parties could cause, and this period represented an example of just how ugly opposing parties could get.  Adams had served one term, and he planned to follow Washington's example by running for a second term.  Jefferson decided to run for the presidency, in opposition to his friend, and opposing parties became personal.  Adams was displaced, and Jefferson became President.  The false and hateful tactics during the political campaigns severed their friendship.  Jefferson served two terms as President, the Louisiana Purchase generally regarded as his greatest achievement.  

The ultimate part of his legend, however, may be the reconciliation of their friendship.  John Adams reached out first, and their back-and-forth correspondence continued for the remainder of their lives.  The letters of both men were preserved for history, a total of 158 letters between 1812 and 1826.  Their deaths could not have been written better as a Hollywood script.  The two friends died on the same day of the same year, slow correspondence of that era causing both of them to die without awareness of the death of their friend.  Even more remarkable was the fact that the day of their deaths was the 4th of July. 

The example of the political ugliness engineered by political parties between two men who had been friends is an example of what concerned President Washington.   Washington realized that political parties could do great harm if they cared more about their candidates winning than they cared about the things for which our constitution stood.  It remains a good example.      

Jefferson also had concern about threat to the system of government that our founding fathers devised, if the original purpose of the three branches ignored the original purpose.  During his two terms in office, he expressed his warning that "Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show what road it will pass to destruction..."  His fear was that the loss of the original purpose of the three branches of government was being ignored.  He warned:  "The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary.  That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and alarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the [state] governments into the jaws of that [federal government] which feeds them." 

And here we are...with similar problems existing today.