Thomas jefferson biography sparknotes
Thomas Jefferson (SparkNotes Biography Guide).
Read a comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson's life, including major events, key people and terms, and important achievements.!
Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world.
Abraham Lincoln made just this point when he declared:
All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.7
After Jefferson left Congress in 1776, he returned to Virginia and served in the legislature.
In late 1776, as a member of the new House of Delegates of Virginia, he worked closely with James Madison. Their first collaboration, to end the religious establishment in Virginia, became a