Monday quote by Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Thomas Jefferson is best remembered as the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States. Jefferson learned the Spanish language on his transatlantic passage to France in 1784, with a copy of Don Quixote and a Spanish grammar.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, « With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish. »
Many words describe Thomas Jefferson.
Lawyer. Father. Scientist. Writer. Revolutionary. Governor. Vice-president. President. Philosopher. Architect. Slave Owner.
Over the course of his life, Thomas Jefferson took on many tasks. He was a man of his time but he also managed to stay one step ahead on many issues.
For example, he is well-remembered for drafting the Declaration of Independence (1776) but he owned over 600 enslaved people. These men, women and children were integral to the running of his farms and building and maintaining his home at Monticello (Virginia, USA).
The Declaration of Independence has been regarded as a charter of American and universal liberties. The document proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status; that those rights are inherent in each human, a gift of the creator, not a gift of government, and that government is the servant and not the master of the people.
Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world.
Abraham Lincoln made just this point when he declared:
« All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. »
In 1784, Jefferson entered public service again, in France, first as trade commissioner and then as Benjamin Franklin’s successor as U.S. minister. During this period, he avidly studied European culture, sending home to Monticello, books, seeds and plants, along with architectural drawings, artwork, furniture, scientific instruments, and information.
Freely adapted from https://www.monticello.org
(ESL learning : for educational purposes only)
Other source : https://history.state.gov
(ESL learning : for educational purposes only)
