Thomas Jefferson Born

April 13, 1743

On a frontier tobacco plantation at Shadwell, in the Virginia Piedmont, the third child of Peter Jefferson was born. He would grow up reading Greek, studying law, designing buildings, owning hundreds of slaves, inheriting a mountain, and eventually writing, at thirty-three, the sentence about truths held to be self-evident. His Monticello would become both a temple of Enlightenment reason and a working plantation sustained by bondage.