Thomas Jefferson

It's his birthday today, worth celebrating for many reasons. While he favored an agrarian society (where Hamilton was busy founding a national banking infrastructure), his views on liberty were absolute: liberty is a natural right, and above all else, it is right. From Christopher Hitchens's "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America"

He [Jefferson] trenchantly restated the view that the American Revolution was founded on universal principles, and was thus emphatically for [its] export. He laid renewed stress on the importance of science and innovation as the spur of the Enlightenment, and scornfully contrasted this with mere faith and credulity.

In his last letter, dated June 24, 1826, to express his regrets at not being able to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, words that are stirring still, words that need to resonate to this day:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

Conviction with purpose, that is what is lacking in contemporary politics. Egoes swaggering about, seeking career advancement and power annexation, often through race-baiting or the language of class warfare. Jefferson was a man who had a cause worth fighting for, moreso than any after him. Fight for it, he did, and we've been enjoying his success ever since. Abraham Lincoln said of him, in 1859:

All honor to Jefferson: to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

To that, Jefferson had already added, in 1791:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Happy birthday, Tom.