Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes
comment at [email protected].

For most Americans, April 13 is just another day.

The date of Thomas Jefferson’s birth passed on Monday with scant observance, aside from celebrations in his native Virginia at Monticello and Natural Bridge State Park. Yet as we celebrate our semiquincentennial — Latin for celebration of a 250th birthday — Jefferson has as good a claim as any, and better than most, for being the leading actor.

For indispensable contributions to winning the Revolution and establishing the presidency, George Washington is more universally recognized as the “father of his country.” But it is Jefferson who expressed the leading idea of America, that “All men are created equal” — what set the American Republic apart from all the major nation-states of the 18th century right down to the present.

Both Washington and Jefferson were plantation owners who enslaved hundreds — the “original sin” of the compromise between North and South devised for the 1787 Constitution that followed 1776’s Declaration of Independence. This created a legacy whose polarities of freedom and bondage have troubled our history, and have emerged in our own time as a tortured debate over what the very idea of America’s founding might mean.

In his own day, Jefferson was a figure eliciting passionate support and opposition. Visibly uncomfortable in many of his public roles, including that of president, Jefferson wanted nothing more than to retire to his beloved Monticello, where all his contradictions were in evidence. Though his presidency was probably the most consequential between those of Washington and Lincoln, Jefferson hoped to be remembered differently.

His first term had been marked by the Louisiana Purchase, a breathtaking departure from the philosophy of limited government he espoused; the second term by the Embargo Act, an unfortunate misunderstanding of the system of international trade that is even more unfortunately being repeated in 2026.

Jefferson was also effectively the founder of the Democratic Party, which unlike today’s
Republican Party has been in continuous existence from Washington’s second term, after
Jefferson resigned as the first secretary of state. It’s one of American history’s most telling ironies that today’s Democrats were first known as Republicans, in opposition to the Federalists.

Jefferson designed his own tomb and wrote his inscription, “as testimonials that I have lived.” There are three elements: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom and Father of the University of Virginia.”

All three are vital to understanding Jefferson. The “separation of church and state,” his other essential idea that along with “all are created equal” helped ensure success for the American experiment. Religious wars roiled Europe and Britain for centuries and battling between Protestant and Catholic states seemed perpetual. The solution is enshrined in the Bill of Rights’ guarantee for “free exercise of religion” paired with forbidding the “establishment of religion” by government, a tension the current Supreme Court seems to have forgotten.

Yet it is Jefferson’s belief in knowledge and information as central elements of a democratic society that most needs renewal.

As we confront a serious decline of local news throughout the land, Jefferson’s conclusion in a 1787 letter, while the Constitution was being debated, is more resonant than ever: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

That’s not what we often hear about Jefferson today, especially from the Democratic Party he founded, which shows an alarming propensity for discarding leading lights on the basis of accusation and even suspicion alone.

In 2021, amid Black Lives Matter protests, Jefferson’s 7-foot likeness was removed from the New York City Council chambers by unanimous vote, despite having presided for more than a century.

What seems to many to matter most is not Jefferson’s vision for America, but his manifest flaws. This focus permeates much contemporary historical writing. A new biography of Jefferson as a writer contains a dozen references to Sally Hemmings, the enslaved house servant with whom he is presumed to have had several children, and about whom the author repeatedly speculates — even though we know virtually nothing about their relationship.

The debate about Jefferson, raging at the time of his presidential campaigns, will last as long as there is a United States of America. We can seek a better balance in our history, however, and try to recapture what it is that made this nation unique in the first place — and as it remains.