A political philosopher and natural scientist, Jefferson imagined an ever-expanding agricultural republic—a nation of innovation and experimentation, populated by yeoman farmers. He once reflected that “[n]ature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.” Science and politics were not so mutually exclusive, however. Jefferson became a leading member of the American Philosophical Society, calling his election as its president “the most flattering incident of my life” up to that point. He believed the future of the nation rested on continuous advancements in knowledge of the natural environment.
Jefferson’s wager on the future contained a rather glaring loophole. It enabled him to entrust his day’s thorniest challenge—emancipation—to subsequent generations. He considered the American Revolution to be his generation’s lasting contribution, leaving abolition to those who would follow. In Jefferson’s reckoning, the United States was not prepared for the end of slavery. Limited by self-interest, financial pressures, and the law, Jefferson could not—as Washington did—free the human beings he enslaved en masse. Of the more than 600 people he held in bondage during his lifetime, he freed only ten or so, including his four surviving children with his enslaved chambermaid, Sally Hemings. Still, Jefferson’s aspirational words in the Declaration of Independence inspired countless African Americans and their allies to realize the multiracial republic Jefferson and so many of his peers could not envision.
Jefferson’s republican principles rested on a foundation of faith in his fellow citizens. Rather than merely trust others to carry forward his vision, in retirement Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to help instill those republican values in the youth of his young nation. “I am closing the last scenes of life by fashioning and fostering an establishment for the instruction of those who are to come after us,” he wrote. “I hope its influence on their virtue, freedom, fame, and happiness, will be salutary and permanent.”
Jefferson gave much to the United States: the ideals of self-government, freedom of conscience, and freedom of mind—not to mention his personal library, whose volumes helped reconstitute the Library of Congress after the British put it to the torch during the War of 1812. In the mass of Jefferson’s contradictions, his faith in the future is his most enduring characteristic—a deliberately and carefully cultivated outlook on life that undergirds the American experiment that Jefferson wrote into being.