JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743-1826), lawyer and senator, of the Chesapeake (q.v.), returned by that province to the Commonwealth's own Senate at intervals across four decades and remembered there chiefly as a careful draftsman rather than as a frequent speaker, a distinction his own surviving notes suggest he was content to be remembered by. His single most consequential piece of drafting was carried, not at Westminster or at Oceana, but in the Chesapeake's own provincial assembly: the Act for Religious Freedom of the Chesapeake, adopted in 1786 after a decade's intermittent debate, which went beyond the toleration the Public Profession (q.v.) had extended by slow practice since 1660 to declare, in terms the Commonwealth's own ecclesiastical writers found considerably plainer than they were accustomed to, that no man's civil standing should depend in any particular upon his religious profession or the absence of one. The Act's preamble, which Jefferson drafted himself and which the provincial assembly amended only lightly, argued the principle from the nature of belief rather than from any calculation of the peace to be gained by tolerating it, a style of argument this contributor's colleagues in ecclesiastical history regard as somewhat in advance of the Commonwealth's general practice at the date, whatever the general practice has since caught up to it.
He divided the greater part of his working life, by his own account and by the evidence of the correspondence this contributor has consulted, between the law, the Senate, and the management of his own house at Monticello, a building of his own design above the Chesapeake's own piedmont that incorporates, on the testimony of the several foreign visitors who have left descriptions of it, more architectural invention than the province's domestic building generally allows itself. His library, assembled over some five decades and eventually the largest private collection this contributor's researches have located in the Western Provinces, was purchased by the Commonwealth's own library at Westminster after a fire had destroyed a considerable part of its predecessor's holdings, and forms, to this day, a recognisable core of that institution's earlier acquisitions.
He served two further terms in the Senate in his later years, chiefly on matters of provincial land tenure and the Commonwealth's western surveys, retired finally to Monticello in his seventieth year, and died there in the summer of 1826, in his eighty-third year. He is remembered in his own province with a regard this contributor finds, on the evidence of what he actually did, entirely proportionate: a careful legislator whose one piece of drafting has outlasted a good deal of the Commonwealth's more ambitious statute-making, and a private scholar whose house and library have outlasted, so far, everything else. (E. H. V.)