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Thomas Jefferson was a Founding Father and the third president of the United States. Almost no figure better embodies the contradictions of the new United States than Thomas Jefferson: he wrote the famous Declaration of Independence, in which he declared that “all men are created equal,” and yet he was a staunch enslaver and defender of slavery. Similarly, while he was often one of the first men to compromise in any tense congressional meetings, he preferred a hands-off approach to the Revolutionary War (declining to help a struggling Lafayette provide for his troops, for example). Still, decades later—and after serving as president—Jefferson would remain close with Lafayette, a bond that was strengthened by the former’s lifelong loyalty to France.
Thomas Jefferson Quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
The Lafayette in the Somewhat United States quotes below are all either spoken by Thomas Jefferson or refer to Thomas Jefferson . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Pages 1-59
Quotes
Who knows what happened to that particular chair. It could have been burned during the British occupation of Philadelphia in the winter of 1777-78, when firewood was scarce. But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file pass the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.
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Because these words convinced Louis XVI to open his heart and, more important, his wallet to the patriots, Vergennes’s memo arguably had as much practical effect on the establishment of American independence as the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder.
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Pages 126-190
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Anyone who accepts the patriot’s premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, “This is your 4th of July, not mine.”
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Thomas Jefferson Character Timeline in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
The timeline below shows where the character Thomas Jefferson appears in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Pages 1-59
...people were nostalgic for the founders. And Lafayette was nostalgic, too: when he visited Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in Virginia, both men wept.
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...rather than Washington’s sunny chair, a more appropriate symbol for democracy might be one of Jefferson’s chairs—namely, one he crossed the room to sit in as a gesture of good will...
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...were guillotined, moderate revolutionaries like Lafayette had to flee to protect themselves. When Vowell visits Jefferson’s Monticello, she asks British historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy about why the French failed where the...
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...hoping that King George III would put an end to parliamentary taxation. In fact, Thomas Jefferson even wrote directly to the British king (what is now known as the Olive Branch...
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After the failure of the Olive Branch Petition, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, cementing the Americans’ willingness to go to war. (Interestingly, that...
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...that Vergennes’ decision to push for aid was just as important to American independence as Jefferson’s Declaration. But Vowell also calls attention to the argument made by France’s finance minister, Anne-Robert-Jacques...
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Pages 190-268
...straits. Only 5 of 500 promised recruits showed up for Steuben’s Virginia militia, and Thomas Jefferson, the state’s governor, did little to encourage his people to pitch in.
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...incredible successes” in the years since that document was signed, especially when it comes to Jefferson’s statement that “all men are created equal.”
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