Jefferson's advocacy for individual rights, including freedom of thought, speech, and religion, helped shape the ideological foundations of the revolution and inspired the Thirteen Colonies in their fight for independence, culminating in the establishment of the United States as a free and sovereign nation.

Presidential scholars and historians have praised Jefferson's advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance, his peaceful acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France, and his leadership in supporting the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

[38] While serving in the House of Burgesses, Jefferson pursued reforms to slavery, including writing and sponsoring legislation in 1769 to strip power from the royal governor and courts, instead providing masters of slaves with the discretion to emancipate them.

[41] Jefferson's underlying intellectual argument that all people were entitled by their creator to what he labeled a "natural right" to liberty is a theme that he later prominently incorporate as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

[69] The declaration was introduced on Friday, June 28, and Congress began debate over its contents on Monday, July 1,[69] resulting in the removal of roughly a fourth of Jefferson's original draft.

[86][87] General Charles Cornwallis that spring dispatched a cavalry force led by Banastre Tarleton to capture Jefferson and members of the Assembly at Monticello, but Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia thwarted the British plan.

Jefferson included extensive data about the state's natural resources and economy and wrote at length about slavery and miscegenation; he articulated his belief that blacks and whites could not live together as free people in one society because of justified resentments of the enslaved.

[98] Biographer George Tucker considered the work "surprising in the extent of the information which a single individual had been thus far able to acquire, as to the physical features of the state";[99] Merrill D. Peterson described it as an accomplishment for which all Americans should be grateful.

[104] On May 7, 1784, Jefferson was appointed by the Congress of the Confederation[h] to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris as Minister Plenipotentiary for Negotiating Treaties of Amity and Commerce with Great Britain and other countries.

After Adams's initial peace envoys were rebuffed, Jefferson and his supporters lobbied for the release of papers related to the incident, called the XYZ Affair after the letters used to disguise the identities of the French officials involved.

[143] To rally opposition, he and James Madison anonymously wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, declaring that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it by the states.

[207] In keeping with his Enlightenment thinking, President Jefferson adopted an assimilation policy toward American Indians known as his "civilization program" which included securing peaceful U.S.–Indian treaty alliances and encouraging agriculture.

[208] Historian Bernard Sheehan argues that Jefferson believed that assimilation was best for American Indians, and next-best was removal to the west; he felt that the worst outcome of the conflict would be their attacking the whites.

Also, in 1808, Jefferson was the first president to propose a broad Federal plan to build roads and canals across several states, asking for $20 million, further alarming Randolph and believers of limited government.

In his annual message of December 1806, Jefferson denounced the "violations of human rights" attending the international slave trade, calling on the newly elected Congress to criminalize it immediately.

Burr was indicted for Hamilton's murder in New York and New Jersey, causing him to flee to Georgia, although he remained president of the Senate during Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase's impeachment trial.

[229] Jefferson attempted to preemptively influence the verdict by telling Congress that Burr's guilt was "beyond question", but the case came before his longtime political foe John Marshall, who dismissed the treason charge.

Later that year, Jefferson asked James Monroe and William Pinkney to negotiate an end to foreign interference with American merchant shipping, though relations with Britain showed no signs of improving.

The USS Revenge was dispatched to demand an explanation from the British government, and Jefferson called for a special session of Congress in October to enact an embargo or alternatively to consider war.

However, Congress had no appetite to prepare the U.S. for war; Jefferson asked for and received the Embargo Act, an alternative that allowed the U.S. more time to build up defensive works, militias, and naval forces.

[304] Jefferson continued to attend to more theoretical questions of natural philosophy and subsequently left behind a rich philosophical legacy in the form of presidential messages, letters, and public papers.

[320] Jefferson was a supporter of American expansionism, writing in 1801 that "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent.

[329] At the onset of the American Revolution, Jefferson accepted William Blackstone's argument that property ownership would sufficiently empower voters' independent judgement, but he sought to further expand suffrage by land distribution to the poor.

While Hamilton believed so, Jefferson and Madison thought a national bank would ignore the needs of individuals and farmers, and would violate the Tenth Amendment by assuming powers not granted to the federal government by the states.

[390][r] The violent attacks on white slave owners during the Haitian Revolution due to injustices under slavery supported Jefferson's fears of a race war, increasing his reservations about promoting emancipation.

He tried to achieve self-sufficiency with wheat, vegetables, flax, corn, hogs, sheep, poultry, and cattle to supply his family, slaves, and employees, but he lived perpetually beyond his means[407] and was always in debt.

[417][418] In accepting, Jefferson stated: "I feel no qualification for this distinguished post but a sincere zeal for all the objects of our institution and an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may at length reach even the extremes of society, beggars and kings.

"[416] On March 10, 1797, Thomas Jefferson gave a lecture, later published as a paper in 1799, which reported on the skeletal remains of an extinct large sloth, which he named Megalonyx, unearthed by saltpeter workers from a cave in what is now Monroe County, West Virginia.

[438] Jefferson is seen as an icon of individual liberty, democracy, and republicanism, hailed as the author of the Declaration of Independence, an architect of the American Revolution, and a renaissance man who promoted science and scholarship.

In the 1920s, Jefferson, together with George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, was chosen by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and approved by President Calvin Coolidge to be depicted in a stone national memorial at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.