Thomas Jefferson sold 6,500 books to rebuild the burned Library of Congress
After British troops set fire to the Library of Congress in 1814, Thomas Jefferson sold the government his own library of nearly 6,500 volumes for $23,950. He used part of the money to pay down heavy debts, then immediately began collecting a third library, telling John Adams he could not live without books.
Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell Plantation in colonial Virginia, third of ten children of the planter and surveyor Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph. His self-taught father, regretting his own lack of schooling, enrolled him in an English school at five. Later a Presbyterian minister and then the Reverend James Maury taught him Latin, Greek, French, history and science. When his father died in 1757, the 14-year-old inherited about 5,000 acres, including the hill where he began Monticello in 1772.
At the College of William and Mary from 1761 he studied under William Small, who introduced him to Locke, Bacon and Newton and to the lawyer George Wythe and Governor Francis Fauquier. After a first year of parties and overspending, he resolved to study fifteen hours a day. He then read law in Wythe's office, and Wythe was so impressed that he eventually left Jefferson his entire library. Jefferson's first collection of about 200 volumes burned with the Shadwell house in 1770.
Representing Virginia in the Second Continental Congress, he became the main author of the Declaration of Independence. He governed Virginia from 1779 to 1781, served as minister to France and then as the first secretary of state, and in 1792 organised the Democratic-Republican Party with James Madison. Finishing second to John Adams in 1796 made him vice president under the rules then in force; he beat Adams in 1800 and won reelection easily in 1804.
As president he confronted Barbary pirates, bought Louisiana from France, doubling the country's size, and backed the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His second term brought the trial of Aaron Burr and the 1807 Embargo Act. Historians rank him highly while weighing the fact that he enslaved more than 600 people over his life. He died on July 4, 1826.
Source: Thomas Jefferson
