From The President

A new beginning

Dear Friends,

By 1826, the quinquagenary anniversary of these United States, Thomas Jefferson was one of three surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, "An instrument, pregnant with our own, and fate of the world," he wrote in a letter late that June. He, John Adams, and Charles Carroll of Maryland comprised what Jefferson called "the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us, on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make, for our country, between submission, or the sword." The youthful vigor of that moment in the sweltering summer of 1776 lay far in the past. The Declaration's principal author was eighty-three years old. He was arthritic, exhausted, and deeply in debt — a debt that would sunder the enslaved families of Monticello and put the house itself on the auction block. Asked to grace the celebrations planned for July Fourth in Washington, D.C., he declined, pleading "the sufferings of sickness." He would hang on till the Fourth by sheer force of will, breathing his last, hours before Adams, on the date of the country's jubilee.

Though he was sorry to miss the fiftieth anniversary celebrations, Jefferson had never thought that the country's fate and future lay with its framers. Throughout his long life, he swatted away anything that smacked of idolatry toward the founders and their all-too-human efforts to forge one people from many. "Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, & deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," he wrote in 1816, responding to an effort to revise the Commonwealth's founding charter. People who would freeze the past in amber, Jefferson continued, "ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment." He thought otherwise, precisely because he "knew that age well." The past, he reflected, "was very like the present, but without the experience of the present." He committed himself to the now and, even more so, to the future. In other words, to we the people: the educated, curious, and reasonable citizens charged with carrying on the world's oldest continuing experiment with self-government.

As you'll read in this issue, the Declaration itself was the work of less than three weeks. But its transmission and ongoing adoption has been the work of centuries. "The ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe," Jefferson wrote in 1795. "It is our glory that we first put it into motion," he continued. Perpetual motion. But the ball did not belong to the United States alone, nor did it roll by itself. The arc of liberty required the ongoing investment of multitudes of men and women every bit as extraordinary, and as ordinary, as Jefferson and his fellow founders had been in 1776.

That work, our great work together, is still unfolding. Through this anniversary year, Monticello's staff is working with guests, supporters, and partners around the United States and the world to share the Declaration's living legacy. Our past, present, and future as one people, created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness is the subject of special tours, programs, exhibitions, and publications, including Declaration Book Club, produced with More Perfect, and Declare: A Civic Gospel, created in partnership with San Francisco's Arion Press.

The Declaration was and remains a powerful tool in the ongoing work of forging the nation. Wielding that tool had been the labor of generations of Americans, including the enslaved men and women who built Monticello and made it run. They, too, were founders. We, too, are founders. A great national anniversary is upon us. What will you do to help steer the ball of liberty through its next and needed lap around the world?

Monticello Magazine, Spring/Summer 2026