Thomas Jefferson

Principal author of the Declaration of Independence — handed the assignment by the Committee of Five because he was the strongest writer in the room, what John Adams called his "happy talent for composition." He died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, and the very same day as Adams.

Jefferson designed as much as he governed. Monticello was his home and his lifelong architectural experiment; the Rotunda at the University of Virginia was the heart of his "academical village," built around a library instead of a chapel; and the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, modeled on a Roman temple, is still a working statehouse. Home, school, and government — all his own designs.

He could not live without books, literally: after the British burned the Library of Congress in 1814, he sold his own collection of roughly 6,500 volumes to restock it — then immediately began buying again. "I cannot live without books," he wrote to Adams in 1815.

And then the contradiction I couldn't put down. Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal," yet he enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime — around 130 at a time at Monticello — and freed only about ten, every one of them a member of a single family, the Hemingses. He had a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was also the half-sister of his late wife. Historians and DNA evidence agree he fathered her children, none of whom he ever publicly acknowledged as his own. He freed two of her sons in his will and quietly let two others go; he never freed Sally herself.

What I kept turning over at Monticello: how do you write the words that build a country on human equality and own people at the same time? Were the people he enslaved simply not "people" to him? How does one man carry the public face and the private one and never let them meet? I left with far more questions than answers.

I pulled those threads apart into a longer piece — his life in four phases, a profile of Sally Hemings, and the two families' entangled trees: Learning About Thomas Jefferson.

Visited: Monticello, the UVA Rotunda, and the Virginia State Capitol — home, school, and government, all his own designs.