Thomas Jefferson as a Political Leader

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Lily Stewart 02/21/2013 American History Dumas, Malone. Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader. Los Angles: California UP, 1963 “Thomas Jefferson as a Political Leader”, written by Dumas Malone, is a historical fiction, consisted of public lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. This book stated the message about how Jefferson assumed the seemingly incongruous role of party leader. This book contains three chapters which talks about Jefferson memorial lectures. Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia. He was a draftsman of the United States Declaration of Independence; the nation’s first secretary of the state from (1789-1794); Second Vice President from (1797-1801); and, as the Third President from (1801-1809), the statesman responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. His father had been among the earliest settlers in this wilderness country, and his position of Leadership transferred to his oldest son, along with five thousand acres of land. He became one of the best-educated Americans of his time. At the age of seventeenth he entered the college of William and Mary, where he got exciting glimpses of the “the expansion of science, and of the system of things in which we are placed.” He read widely in the law, in the sciences, and in both ancient and modern history, philosophy, and literature. Jefferson Public career began in 1769, when he served as a representative in the Virginia House of Burgess; the nation’s first elected body of Government. Jefferson rose to fame as an effective spokesman during the American Revolution, and his political thought would become the centerpiece of Liberalism, or a movement to develop freedoms, in America. Jefferson’s most important contribution to the revolutionary debate was “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” in 1774. He argued that
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