Before the founding of the United States, the Enlightenment had remained mostly a philosophical movement. With the generation of the Founders, the philosophies joined with reality, creating the government of the United States. No person embodied the philosophies of the Enlightenment more that Thomas Jefferson, who relied on liberty and committed to the ideal of liberty and democratic influences that still resonate with Americans today. True to his Enlightenment ideals, his epitaph personifies his commitment to his ideals with the inclusion of the three achievements he wished people would remember.
The Enlightenment philosopher believed that through reason, man could build a better, more efficient society. They advocated the recognition of natural rights, or rights given to men by God, which most governments wrongly denied to their people. They assumed these rights existed because it was logical that they did. Some, Like John Locke, heavily based their philosophy on their Christian beliefs. Others, like Voltaire, avoided religion and found that men had rights because there was no logical reason to allow one person to control another.
Jefferson wrote extensively, mostly through letters to friends and official documents. The Declaration of Independence provides an example of the Enlightenment thought. It borrows from Locke and assumes that the people have a right to rebel against governments that violate people’s rights. It testifies to the belief that people have “inalienable right.”
Less famous documents also extol Enlightenment virtues. The Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was the second achievement Jefferson wanted on his tombstone. Tired of religious wars of the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment philosophers advocated toleration for all religions (except sometimes Catholicism and non-Christians). Religion should be a personal concern, and combining it with government led to tyranny and suffering as regimes forced their beliefs on others. Jefferson’s Act, which became law in 1786, made Virginia one of the first states to separate Church and state and to guarantee its people free practice of religion.
The last line on Jefferson’s tombstone declares that he founded the University of Virginia. At the time, universities all had a tie to some branch of Christianity. Jefferson envisioned a great center of learning, with no requirements for loyalty to any single religious conventions. He envisioned, and built, an institution that used the ideals of the Enlightenment, especially freedom of religion and of speech, to usher in a new style of learning. Students would study their subjects without restrictions, and for the betterment of the human condition, with a freedom that allowed them to experiment beyond the limitations of medieval thinking.
Jefferson went on to involve himself in politics, and often had to sacrifice his philosophical beliefs for the nation’s good. However, he never abandoned the core of these beliefs. Along with the other Founding Fathers, he created a belief in the Enlightenment commitment to rights and rule by the people that has become the ideal for the world, mostly because of the work he began with a simple declaration of the beliefs he obtained from the Enlightenment.