\n2. HIS GREATEST WORK WAS A STUDY IN CONTRADICTION.<\/strong>
\nAs a member of the Second Continental Congress and the \u201cCommittee of Five\u201d (a group consisting of John Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson brought together for this purpose), Jefferson was tasked with writing the Declaration of Independence, an argument against the 13 colonies being held under British rule. While the Declaration insisted that all men are created equal and that their right to liberty is inherent at birth, Jefferson\u2019s plantation origins meant that he embraced the institution of slavery. In any given year, Jefferson supervised up to 200 slaves, with roughly half under the age of 16. He perpetuated acts of cruelty, sometimes selling slaves and having them relocated away from their families as punishment. Yet in a book titled Notes on the State of Virginia (which he began writing during his stint as governor and published in 1785), Jefferson wrote that he believed the practice was unjust and \u201ctremble[d]\u201d at the idea of God exacting vengeance on those who perpetuated it. Though Jefferson acknowledged slavery as morally repugnant\u2014and also criticized the slave trade in a passage that was cut from the Declaration of Independence “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia\u201d\u2014he offered no hesitation in benefiting personally from it, a hypocrisy that would haunt his legacy through the present day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n11. HIS WIFE HAD A CURIOUS CONNECTION TO HIS MISTRESS.<\/strong>
\nJefferson was married for just 10 years before his wife, Martha Wayles, died in 1782 at age 33 of unknown causes. Curiously, Jefferson\u2019s involvement with his slave, Sally Hemings, was part of Martha’s convoluted family tree. Martha\u2019s father, John Wayles, had an affair with Sally\u2019s mother, Elizabeth Hemings\u2014meaning most historians think Sally and Martha were half-sisters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n18. HE PROBABLY HAD A FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING.<\/strong>
\nWithout today\u2019s methods of addressing the public\u2014radio, television, and Twitter\u2014Jefferson was largely free to succumb to his reported phobia of speaking in public. While working as a lawyer, he found himself unable to deliver orated arguments as eloquently as he could write them. When he did speak, it was apparently with a meek disposition. One listener to his inaugural address in 1801 described Jefferson\u2019s speech as being in \u201cso low a tone that few heard it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jake Rossen and Mental Floss present 25 Things You Might Not Know About Thomas Jefferson.\u00a0 Here are three of my<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-trivia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21072,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21071\/revisions\/21072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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