The Man Who Really Founded America: Thomas Jefferson | Founding Fathers EP 4

21 insights saved from this video by @history

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Martha Jefferson did not free the Hemingses, but kept the family together and assigned them domestic work instead of field labor.
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At 16, Sally Hemings refused to return to Virginia, despite freedom and family awaiting her in France.
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Sally Hemings was both Jefferson’s enslaved property and his wife’s half-sister, making her the aunt of Jefferson’s children.
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Archaeologists found Sally Hemings’s original room directly beside Jefferson’s bedroom at Monticello.
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A 1999 DNA study placed the father of Sally Hemings’s children in the Jefferson male line, strongly supporting but not proving Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.
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James Callender became a hostile Federalist writer after Jefferson failed to give him a desired job, then was found drowned in three feet of water.
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A forgotten electoral vote created a 73–73 tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, sending the election to Congress.
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After 35 tied ballots, Jefferson finally won the 1800 election on the 36th ballot, February 16, 1801.
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Jefferson’s original Declaration draft called slavery “a cruel war against human nature itself” and a violation of life and liberty.
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Sally Hemings was seven-eighths white, yet Virginia law still classified her as enslaved because her mother was enslaved.
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Gordon-Reed found Jefferson at Monticello nine months before every birth of Sally Hemings’s children.
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Alexander Hamilton preferred Jefferson to Burr because Jefferson, despite his flaws, was less dangerous and had some claim to character.
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Unlike 1796, the 1800 candidates ran on joint tickets with designated vice-presidential partners, including Jefferson’s Aaron Burr.
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Monticello’s celebrated beauty was also the architecture of a plantation built and maintained through slavery.
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After Jefferson’s death, enslaved people were sold on the block, scattering families across the American South.
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When Jefferson was fourteen, his father’s death left him enslaved people and land, both retained throughout his life.
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Before her death, Martha Jefferson secured Jefferson’s witnessed promise never to remarry and bring a stepmother over their children.
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Madison Hemings said Jefferson promised Sally Hemings extraordinary privileges and freedom for their children at 21.
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Thomas Jefferson resigned as secretary of state in 1793 after concluding his disagreements with Hamilton could not be reconciled.
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Jefferson imagined liberty moving westward from Germany through Britain to America, carried by Anglo-Saxon settlers.
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Mount Rushmore presents Jefferson as a symbol of American expansion, not merely a Declaration author or Enlightenment hero.

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