ABSTRACT
In those days in Virginia, as in England, leadership was likely to come from elite of birth. Virginia government was government by gentry; Thomas Jefferson's father, Peter Jefferson, although a farmer with little education, belonged to the substantial plantation gentry, married a Randolph, became a land surveyor and land speculator, and was drawn into the circles of larger wealth and higher social standing. Thomas was born on 13 April 1743, at Shadwell in what is now Albemarle County, in the Piedmont area of Virginia. Jefferson was clearly an earnest young revolutionary, committed to a meaningful internal democracy and freedom as well as to independence from Great Britain. He continued to fight for these reforms in the Assembly, until he pushed through the statute for religious freedom, which he drafted and in which he took an inextinguishable pride, but even at his death, fifty years later, he was still critical of the state constitution.
