Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a founding father of the United States. He authored the Declaration of Independence and served as the third President of the United States from 1801-1809. Following the War of Secession, Jefferson was best remembered as an anti-Federalist who attempted to prevent the formation and later to eviscerate the powers of a strong central government. His anti-Federalism provided the intellectual underpinnings for John C. Calhoun's belief in the right of the state to nullify federal law within its borders, which in turn provided the intellectual underpinnings for the Founding Fathers of the Confederate States' belief in secession. Because of this, as well as because of his Virginian roots and his ownership of slaves, he is more popular in the CS than in the US (though he would doubtless have found Jake Featherston's centralization of the former nation's federal government very problematic and would in fact probably have considered Featherston a worse tyrant than the British).

In the US, historians tend to look much more favorably on Northern Founding Fathers--such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, both of whom Jefferson considered his archrivals. Nevertheless, he joins George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt as the most memorable presidents in US history, though of the four only Roosevelt is viewed in a positive light.