The Thomas Jefferson Papers - 1743 to 1827 Timeline. April 13 (April 2, Old Style).* Thomas Jefferson is born at Shadwell plantation in Goochland (later Albemarle) County, Virginia, to Peter Jefferson, a planter and surveyor, and Jane Randolph, daughter of a prominent Virginia family.
*April 2 by the Old (Julian) Calendar, April 13 by the New (Gregorian) Calendar. The New Calendar was adopted by Great Britain and its colonies in 1752. To bring the calendar in line with the solar year, it added eleven days; the new year began in January rather than March. Jefferson begins attending a local school run by a Scotsman, Reverend William Douglas. Peter Jefferson dies.
Jefferson attends the school of the Reverend James Maury in Fredericksville Parish, twelve miles from Shadwell. Jefferson attends the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Jefferson begins law studies with George Wythe, his former teacher at the College of William and Mary and now his mentor in the legal profession.
Top Spring-Summer. May. February 1. January 1. September 27. Thomas Jefferson. Virginia House of Burgesses, Representing Virginia at the Continental Congress by Ole Erekson, Engraver, c1876, Library of Congress More than a mere renaissance man, Jefferson may actually have been a new kind of man.
He was fluent in five languages and able to read two others. He wrote, over the course of his life, over sixteen thousand letters. He was acquainted with nearly every influential person in America, and a great many in Europe as well. Jefferson was born at Shadwell in Albemarle county, Virginia on April 13, 1743. In 1775 when a Virginia convention selected delegates to the Continental Congress, Jefferson was selected as an alternate. Jefferson returned to his home not long afterward. In June of 1779 he succeeded Patrick Henry as Governor of Virginia. In 1781 he retired to Monticello, the estate he inherited, to write, work on improved agriculture, and attend his wife.
In 1784 Jefferson went to France as an associate Diplomat with Franklin and Adams. Thomas Jefferson. In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
" This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello. Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause.
Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. When Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.