On July 4 if fireworks and flags stir feelings of love of country, it might be a good time to remember a man who loved the United States of America enough to help invent it. And he believed that those who lived in it were wise enough to keep it working.
July 4th Remembering Thomas Jefferson, author of independence
On July 4 if fireworks and flags stir feelings of love of country, it might be a good time to remember a man who loved the United States of America enough to help invent it. And he believed that those who lived in it were wise enough to keep it working.
That man was Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, a man whose vast talents have inspired the world. Born in 1743 in the area now called Virginia, Thomas Jefferson grew to manhood in a virtually unexplored continent. Like Jefferson, most of the aristocratic young men of the time came to believe that this immense land and its people must be independent. Unlike Jefferson, some were suspicious of the abilities of the so-called "people," preferring that governing be left to the educated few.
Alexander Hamilton, a great patriot father, saw the people as "a beast." John Adams argued for an aristocracy of talented men who alone might guide the nation. Jefferson disagreed. He believed men should govern themselves and that all people should benefit from free public education, free public libraries and be free of rigid royal protocol that fettered thinking.Born to some privilege, Jefferson made the most of his advantages. He was helped along in his pursuit of free thinking and freedom by the forced labor of 130 slaves, an institution that he wrote "must anger a just God." He did not waste the advantages of his birth. His marvelously creative mind explored most every aspect of human endeavor. He loved literature, architecture, geology, zoology, meterology, math, gardening, linguistics, agronomy, rhetoric.
Jefferson invented one of the first swivel chairs. He invented storm windows, filing tables, and a device with paired pens that produced an identical copy of everything he wrote, as he wrote it. He could, as one biographer noted, "calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie and artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play the violin."No wonder the nation that Jefferson helped birth is still awed by his talent and foresight.
When President John F. Kennedy hosted a dinner for Nobel laureates, he said his guests were "the most extraordinary collection of talents ... that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson who dined alone."
