Skip to content
Read • Question • ConnectAnthony’s notes & researchReturn with a new question
Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

Thomas Jefferson

  • Notes: Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 03 Thomas Jefferson
    • Doubtful that Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemings
      • Was in old man at the time
      • Was many men in the house during that time
    • Author of the Declaration of Independence
    • Was a slave holders in Virginia
      • Most were in Virginia
      • Inherited most from Father in Law
      • In debt; couldn’t sell them off
      • Couldn’t emancipate slaves due to law
        • Wanted to put it into law; bill not enacted in Virginia
    • Religious Freedom
    • Liberal society
    • John Locke influenced
      • “Life liberty and pursuit of happiness”
    • Ownership of property — linked to pursuit of happiness
    • French example of what we can not do.
    • Influenced by French philosophers
    • Became more of a radical from his years in France
    • Revolutionary thinking about representation in government
      • Two houses—why?
        • New idea
        • He didn’t truth the people—so there was a Senate
          • should still act for the people
        • Best form of government would be natural Aristocracy
    • Resounding critique of slavery and King George in Declaration of Independence
      • In original draft
      • Went out because of the South

      He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

    • Tried to set a date to end slavery in draft of Virginia constitution
    • Invented a machine to make copies of his letters
    • Purchased the Louisiana territory, doubling the size of America
    • Wanted America to stay agrarian.
    • Wrote his own summarized Bible
    • Didn’t want big cities
    • Farmers had independence, their own boss
      • Wanted everyone to have 50 acres
      • Farmers had to know many things
    • Didn’t like the scandalized way of Parisian life