As the country's 250th anniversary approaches, historians agree that Thomas Jefferson's life and work resonate unlike any other founder's. According to Jon Meacham, the National Constitution Center's Semiquincentennial Scholar and a prize-winning presidential historian who wrote an entire biography of Jefferson, Jefferson embodied "the very best and the very worst" of the United States. America's founding is rooted in Jefferson's most profound contradiction: the man who proclaimed that "all men are created equal" while remaining a slaveholder to the end of his life. Jefferson advanced and explored both sides of many issues that have defined the country's path, including agrarian self-sufficiency and worldly innovation, pluralism and separatism, and limited government and dreams of an "empire of liberty."
Andrew Burstein, a professor of history at Louisiana State University, describes Jefferson as "no more malleable figure in early America." Historian Peter S. Onuf notes that there have been times in American history when just about everyone would have considered themselves "Jeffersonian," yet even at those moments, Jefferson remained a controversial figure. His legacy is debated even at institutions that owe their existence to him. The University of Virginia, the college he founded and regarded as a signature achievement, features a memorial to thousands of enslaved people who lived and worked there. At Monticello, his mountaintop estate outside Charlottesville, a banner near the entrance displays the Declaration with the caption "After all, our guy wrote it," yet reminders of slavery are pervasive throughout the grounds.