[[quoteright:314:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jefferson.jpg]]
->[[caption-width-right:314:''The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.''[[note]]He goes on to say, "It is its natural manure." Practical fellow...[[/note]]]]

->''"A little rebellion every now and then is a good thing."''
-->-- '''Thomas Jefferson'''

->''"[[{{Irony}} Thomas Jefferson survives.]]"''
-->--'''JohnAdams'''' last words, July 4, 1826 [[note]]Factually incorrect; Jefferson had died a few hours earlier that day. They didn't know that, however, since Adams was in Massachusetts and Jefferson in Virginia.[[/note]]

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is best known for being the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Later, he became the third President of the United States of America, serving from 1801 to 1809, and was the first President from the Democratic-Republican Party. Previously served as Secretary of State under GeorgeWashington and Vice President under JohnAdams. Along with his good friend and political ally JamesMadison, Jefferson essentially created the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party of AlexanderHamilton. Washington, who was not at all a fan of political parties, was angered and never spoke to Jefferson as a friend for the rest of his life.

Jefferson was a champion of small government and agrarianism. He did not believe that the federal government should have authority over anything unless it was specifically mentioned in the Constitution, or if they were granted to the federal government by the state governments (he didn't really seem to get that the federal government could grant itself more powers, as is written in the Constitution). Jefferson was even hesitant to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, though he (luckily) decided to do so anyway. These beliefs often put him at odds with some of the other Founding Fathers, most notably AlexanderHamilton, who envisioned America becoming an industrial power. Jefferson particularly was against the National Bank that Hamilton founded. However, in the election of 1800 (which in its inflammatory rhetoric makes modern negative campaign advertising sound polite and genteel), the two were able to put aside their differences long enough to prevent the power-hungry Aaron Burr from entering the White House. Today, Jefferson has become a celebrated figure in libertarian communities for his belief in limited government.

Jefferson was also known for designing (he was also an architect) the famous estate of Monticello, which served as his home, as well as the Virginia State Capitol. In fact, he's probably the closest the U.S. presidency has ever had to an OmnidisciplinaryScientist, having also studied mathematics, philosophy, botany, music, archaeology, and several languages (notably French, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Gaelic). He even taught himself Arabic from his own copy of the Quran. Not to mention he also founded the University of Virginia [[Website/{{Cracked}} as he couldn't find a university that could handle his terrifying intellect]], and his 6,500-odd book collection formed the seed of the current Library of Congress (after the original contents of the Library were burned in the War of 1812). To top it all off, the guy invented [[http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/macaroni#Jefferson.27s_Notes_on_Macaroni_and_the_Macaroni_Machine macaroni and cheese]], the first American ice cream recipe, and the swivel chair – quite probably the sort of chair your butt graces right now!

Jefferson also owned slaves. That's right – the very person who wrote "all men are created equal" was a slaveholder. ([[FairForItsDay Not that that stopped him from being outspoken against slavery]]... at least, [[StartOfDarkness until the Haitian Revolution and afterward.]]) However, back then it was a Necessary Evil to support the mostly-agrarian economy of the United States against the British Empire; Jefferson did not live long enough to witness the Industrial Revolution that killed slavery once and for all. It's commonly held that Jefferson produced offspring with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves (who was actually only a quarter black, and his [dead] wife's half-sister); while it has never been completely proven, most historians today agree that Jefferson did. The Monticello estate kept records of who came and went, and Jefferson was home approximately nine months before the birth of all six of her children. Additionally, DNA evidence proves that ''a'' Jefferson did so, but without genetic sampling it's impossible to tell which one. Jefferson had a lot of relatives, most of which had good relations with the family's slaves, though not necessarily in that way. The Jefferson family has since acknowledged his descendants through Hemings and has included them in its official family reunions. Like most men of his day, he thought that Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites, though he didn't believe they should be mistreated and seemed to believe that slavery would eventually die out, but that the government should wait for more widespread popular support before trying to pass any laws to that effect.

Won election over the current president and his HeterosexualLifePartner JohnAdams, resulting in a falling out between the two for years. Jefferson referred to the peaceful transition of power from Adams' Federalist Party to Jefferson's own Democratic-Republican Party, the first party shift in American history, as "the Revolution of 1800." During his presidency, the US made its ''first'' large-scale foreign interventions in the Muslim world. The Barbary Pirates of north Africa were preying on American ships (formerly protected by the Royal Navy) and Jefferson didn't want to continue paying protection money. So the ''USS Constitution'' (Old Ironsides) was sent over with seven other ships, including sister ships ''USS Constellation'' and ''USS Chesapeake'' and an early ''USS Enterprise,''and a few Marines to persuade Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis that the young nation was not one to be screwed with (which is the origin of the "Shores of Tripoli" verse in the USMC Anthem). In 1803, he bought the Louisiana Territory from NapoleonBonaparte, doubling the size of the nation, and sent Matthew Lewis and William Clark to explore the newly purchased countryside. Jefferson readily signed an act in 1807 which banned the further import of slaves into the country after 1 January 1808, and, although it did allow internal slave trade to continue, it's the first step the government took on the road to emancipation.[[note]]Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution actually forbade Congress from making such a law until 1808, as one of its many compromises to get passed.[[/note]]

As relations with the United Kingdom and France started to strain in the years before TheWarOf1812, he passed an embargo forbidding any American goods from getting exported. Needles to say, this proved to be unpopular and did more harm to the American economy than it did to their economies. Just before leaving office, though, he replaced it with the Non-Intercourse Act, which only banned trade with the United Kingdom and France. Jefferson's first vice president, Aaron Burr, shot and killed AlexanderHamilton in a duel during his time in office, resulting in Jefferson dropping him from the ticket during his reelection campaign and, eventually, to Burr being tried for treason. Jefferson oversaw the founding of West Point and the building of 200 vessels for the American Navy, though he ironically also reduced the size of the military (this backfired during TheWarOf1812 a few years after he left office). Also admitted Ohio to the Union. He ended the then-short tradition of the president delivering the State of the Union address himself, instead writing it down and sending a clerk to read it. Jefferson thought it was too much like a monarch delivering a speech to his subjects; the fact that he was a poor public speaker also helped. No president would deliver it personally until WoodrowWilson, over a century later.

Thomas Jefferson was an outspoken [[UsefulNotes/{{Deism}} deist]] who ridiculed the [[http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Wolves/thomas_jefferson.htm virgin birth]] and the concept of the [[http://www.brunswickcounty.com/Thomas_Jefferson_and_the_Doctrine_of_the_Trinity-a-1150.html Trinity]]. He regarded the base of Christianity, the belief that the son of God (who also was God) sacrificed himself to achieve salvation for humanity, as ridiculous and hoped in time that it would be seen as being legitimate on the same level as the stories of the Roman Pagan gods. However, he also believed that JesusWasWayCool and created [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible his own version]] of Literature/TheBible by taking a razor blade and cutting out mentions of the supernatural and what he thought to be other misinterpretations of Jesus' teachings. He considered himself a materialist Christian and held that all mentions of the immaterial aspects (eg. the Holy Spirit) to be in turn metaphorical or perversions by the clergy (a "masked atheism", as he put it), and believed that Jesus and all the original Church Fathers thought of God in material terms (even if this meant the Holy Spirit was, say, an invisible gaseous entity, it would still be a material being). He considered immaterialism to be a heresy.

He was also profoundly anti-clerical and thought, based mostly on his experiences in pre-revoultionary France (where he was in deep contact with emergent revolutionary forces, also largely anti-clerical to varying degrees), that priests and bishops were nearly always reactionary forces in alliance with and helping to uphold corrupt governments and despots. This was mainly directed towards the Catholic priesthood, but he was cynical towards the clergy of Protestant faiths as well. As with JohnAdams, he didn't much like Calvinism either.[[note]]He and Adams did have substantial differences on this point; Adams, although also more or less a Deist, was substantially more conventional in his Christianity and was more content to be classified as a Unitarian--technically both were Unitarians, but Adams was a lot happier with the label than Jefferson.[[/note]] He was a fierce advocate of the separation of church and state (a phrase that he penned), but in part this was to prevent the corruption of the church ''by'' the state, and he always supported a limited government.[[note]]His letter, incidentally, was addressed to a congregation of Baptists--who in those days were the fiercest advocates of the separation. My, how have things changed.[[/note]]

Speaking of the FrenchRevolution, Jefferson is also somewhat noteworthy for his support of the revolutionaries. His hatred of France's enemy, Great Britain, may have been a huge reason. Jefferson was a diplomat to France during the years just before the Revolution, and was in contact with a number of people who would later play major roles in the revolutionary years. He helped the Marquis de Lafayette (the famous French Major General who helped the Americans during the AmericanRevolution) write The Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, a document that is still part of the French government today (think of it likes France's version of our Bill of Rights). He even supported the Revolution when events started to go downhill, such as the Reign of Terror under MaximilienRobespierre.

It's also known today that Jefferson held a few secret talks with French consul Joseph Letombe while he was Adams' Vice President. Exactly what was said will always remain a mystery, but the consensus among historians is that he told the French to make relations as difficult as possible with the American diplomats appointed by Adams. Jefferson won the election against Adams a few years later, not-so-coincidentally. Jefferson and Madison also (secretly) wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Adams. These actions probably played a role in Adams and Jefferson having a falling-out around this time. While Madison's Virginia Resolution only criticized the two acts, Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution went further, asking that the state nullify them. Jefferson even supported secession if this wasn't done. When an elderly Washington read the resolutions, he wrote to Patrick Henry that they would "dissolve the union or produce coercion," a prediction that totally came true. These two documents would have largely negative consequences for the nation over time, leading to the the Nullification Crisis of AndrewJackson's presidency and (eventually) to [[TheAmericanCivilWar the southern states seceding]].

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 -- the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. JohnAdams, the second president and Jefferson's sometimes-rival-sometimes-HeterosexualLifePartner, died a few hours later on the same day, his last words being commonly recorded as "Jefferson lives!"

Sadly, [[OldShame he came to hate the presidency]] and [[CanonDiscontinuity he had it left off his gravestone]]. However much he disliked the presidency, history has not shared his opinion. He's generally regarded as one of the best presidents the U.S. has had and frequently tops or nears the top of historical rankings, sharing company with the likes of GeorgeWashington, AbrahamLincoln, TheodoreRoosevelt and FranklinDelanoRoosevelt. His face is one of the four atop Mount Rushmore. Jefferson's face features on the US $2 bill, which is so famously rare that a lot of people seriously believe that they're counterfeit.
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!!This President provides examples of:

* AmbiguousDisorder: One current theory is that Jefferson was somewhere on the Autism spectrum, possibly Asperger's Syndrome. Contemporary accounts of his behavior are in line with commonly-recognized symptoms of the condition: above-average intelligence, highly knowledgeable in a wide range of scientific and intellectual disciplines. Also socially awkward, by all accounts a poor public speaker, had difficulty maintaining close personal relationships. And possessed [[SacrificedBasicSkillForAwesomeTraining one glaring hole]] in his otherwise all-encompassing genius: economics. He was so bad at managing his own finances that he died ''tens of thousands'' of dollars in debt (And this is 1826 dollars we're talking about; adjusted for inflation we're talking a couple of ''million'').
* ArchEnemy: AlexanderHamilton, to the point that if the two were in agreement, it was pointless to argue against them.
** {{Irony}} abounded when Jefferson used Hamiltonian inclinations during his presidency.
** Aaron Burr joined the enemies' list when he tried usurping the ticket for President in the 1800 Election: it was the first time parties nominated separate candidates for President and Vice President... but the Electoral College wasn't yet set up to handle such a ticket split, and Jefferson and Burr ended up ''tied'' with electoral votes. Rules had the results sent to the House where Federalists were still in charge and were keen on humiliating Jefferson by voting instead for Burr, and Burr subtlety encouraged it. It took Hamilton of all people - he disliked Jefferson but ''hated'' Burr - to get his Federalist allies to vote for Jefferson. This is why Jefferson went with another Vice President for the 1804 election, and Jefferson had a huge hand setting up the treason trial against Burr years later.
*** This was also one of the reasons - the other was a scandalous insult Hamilton made against Burr - Burr challenged Hamilton to that infamous duel.
* BadassBoast: "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
* BadassBookworm: UpToEleven. His personal library formed the core of the University of Virginia's library when it was founded -- over 6000 books.
** He also donated a substantial library to Congress after the WarOf1812 when the invading British burned their original collection. That became the basis for the current Library Of Congress.
* BigFancyHouse: Monticello. For bonus RenaissanceMan points, Jefferson designed it himself, integrating many of his own ideas about great architecture. For even more points, the mansion housed many of Jefferson's household inventions.
* BunnyEarsLawyer: Had a reputation for wearing wacky, mismatched outfits. He also often received visitors while he was still in his pajamas. To be fair, he seemed to do this as a way of distracting people from his poor speaking skills.
* CommanderContrarian: As Vice-President to JohnAdams. So much so that his term highlighted a flaw in the American electoral process: that having the Vice-President be the candidate with the second-most votes in the Electoral College would likely lead to the President and the VP being from ideologically opposed parties, as the second-place candidate would almost certainly be the opposing party's presidential candidate. This flaw was quickly corrected in 1804 through the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution Twelfth Amendment]].
** He would [[IronicEcho suffer this]] with his first Vice-President Aaron Burr.
* {{UsefulNotes/Deism}}: Thomas Jefferson is to Deism what RichardDawkins or Christopher Hitchens is to atheism.
* FieryRedhead: Ever the ardent revolutionary, Jefferson was one of the most passionate of the Founding Fathers. He also was extremely excited to hear about the beginning of the French Revolution. Jefferson famously wrote that "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing" and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
* GadgeteerGenius: In addition to all his other skills, Jefferson also had several inventions, many of which he used around the house at Monticello.
* GeniusSweetTooth: Ice cream was one of the most common foods served at Monticello.
* HeterosexualLifePartners: With JohnAdams. Their friendship was interrupted for a long time when they ran against each other for the presidency in 1797 but by 1812 they had reconciled and remained good friends for the rest of their lives...which coincidentally ended on the same day.
* MagnumOpus: The Declaration of Independence.
* OmnidisciplinaryScientist
* RedHeadedHero
* RedOniBlueOni: The Red to Madison's Blue. Also, the Blue to Adams' Red.
* RenaissanceMan: Philosopher, author, lawyer, architect, musician, naturalist, botanist, inventor, engineer, statesman, diplomat, and political theorist.
* TemptingFate: "Conquering Canada shall be a mere matter of marching." 3 years of war later...
* VitriolicBestBuds: With John Adams.
* WhyDoYouKeepChangingJobs: Tied into his role as one of America's earliest examples of the RenaissanceMan.

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!!Jefferson in fiction

* Played by Ken Howard in ''[[Theatre/SeventeenSeventySix 1776]]'' and ''Independence''.
** Jefferson was also one of the several presidents Howard played in the musical flop ''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.''
* In HBO's [[Series/JohnAdams miniseries]] about JohnAdams, he's played by StephenDillane.
* In the Merchant-Ivory film ''Jefferson in Paris'', Jefferson is played by Nick Nolte with ThandieNewton as Sally Hemings.
* Briefly mentioned in the 90's ''{{Franchise/Batman}}'' storyline "Dark Knight, Dark City", where he turns out to have been a [[BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy demon-summoning cultist before becoming a politician]].
* Voiced by Creator/BenStiller(!) on the PBS show ''WesternAnimation/LibertysKids''.
* In an episode of ''Series/ThirtyRock'', Tracy Jordan discovers that he is a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Tracy then has a DreamSequence in which Jefferson is played by Alec Baldwin.
** Inspired by this, Tracy tries to self-finance a movie about Jefferson with him playing *all* the roles.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode ''Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington'', Lisa goes to the Lincoln Memorial for inspiration, but it's too crowded, so she goes to the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson takes offense:
-->'''Jefferson''': No one ever comes to see me. I don't blame them. [[SarcasmMode I never did anything important.]] Just the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the dumbwaiter... No, don't go! I'm so lonely...
* An extremely negative portrayal of Jefferson as a hypocrite who trampled on the democratic principles he advocated appears in Creator/GoreVidal's ''Burr''. Since the book is from Burr's perspective, it also provides a very different portrayal of him than most Americans are familiar with.
* Sort-of example: The Jefferson Memorial is the site of Project Purity in ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}''. [[spoiler: After activating it, the muddy, irradiated water clears to show his statue standing proudly.]]
* The film ''Almost Heroes'' is set in his administration. The protagonists meet Aaron Burr at a party.
* In the ''Series/MarriedWithChildren'' episode "Here's Looking at You, Kid", Bud is supposed to help Kelly study history; instead, he tells her that Jefferson's wife was black, he was "a real Renaissance man [...] an architect and a dry-cleaner" and he wrote "Movin' On Up" (the ThemeSong for ''TheJeffersons'').
* ''Webcomic/TheAdventuresOfDrMcNinja'' briefly depicts Jefferson as a time-traveler. [[RuleOfCool With a jetpack.]]
* Jefferson's early death in 1809 is the PointOfDivergence for the AlternateHistory ''DecadesOfDarkness''.
* In an episode of ''FamilyTies'' while working on a term paper about Thomas Jefferson, Alex falls asleep and dreams of being at the Continental Congress in 1776 where Thomas Jefferson looks like Alex' dad Steven. Alex gets a job as Jefferson's house boy and ends up helping him decide to write the Declaration of Independence.
* Jefferson appears in ''MoreInformationThanYouRequire'', where his cosmopolitan interests - specifically, his friendship with the mole-men prove instrumental in the development of American democracy. The book also features an ''extremely'' [[CuteMonsterGirl alternate universe version]] of Sally Hemings.
* A Cahill from the Janus Branch of The39Clues.
* His invention of the swivel chair gives us [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2bfYw1B_Ww one of the most priceless and hilarious scenes]] from Series 1 of ''Series/DowntonAbbey''
-->'''Lady Grantham:''' Good heavens, what am I sitting on!?
-->'''Matthew Crawley:''' Er..swivel..chair.
-->'''Lady Grantham:''' Another modern brainwave?
-->'''Matthew Crawley:''' Hardly. They were invented by Thomas Jefferson.
-->'''Lady Grantham:''' Why does every day involve a fight with an American?
** This takes place in ''1913''.
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