On August 19, 1791, Benjamin Banneker wrote a lengthy letter to Thomas ... encouraged Jefferson to accept "the indispensable duty of those who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature ...

By the time Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, his country had already birthed its original sin of slavery, whose legacy ...

As for unalienable, the early drafts of the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson wrote it ... our understanding of civil rights which comes to fuller flower in the Bill of Rights, some 15 years ...

Thomas Jefferson was a contradictory character: the Virginia aristocrat known as the "man of the people"; the president who simplified the office yet never denied himself a luxury; the slave owner ...

Voltaire (1694-1778) When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of ... the Constitution was amended by adding the Bill of Rights. James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, insisted upon ...

The White House, Washington, D.C. 1804. Thomas Jefferson was frustrated. It was not the burdens of office that bothered him. It was his Bible. Jefferson was convinced that the authentic words of ...