Thomas Jefferson
Joseph J. Ellis feels that the most important aspect of Thomas Jefferson was his mind and how he could put his ideas together to form a powerful document, whether the ideas be original or not. I, on the other hand, feel that Jefferson was not as smart as everyone thinks he may have been, but he was probably still the best choice to prepare a document as powerful as the Declaration of Independence turned out to be. I agree with Joseph Ellis' ideas in his work entitled, "The Spring of '76: Texts and Contexts." Since Thomas Jefferson was a draftsman by trade, he seemed to be highly qualified for the task of drafting a declaration that would free the colonies from the King George III. The prime suspects for this task, were Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee (Ellis, 83). Having made the final decision of Jefferson was, in my opinion and everyone else's, the best choice they could have made. What I find to be humorous was that the committee selected two people, John Adams and Jefferson, to draft the constitution, yet only Jefferson ended up doing the leg work. It was as if Adams had said, "Forget this,
I don't agree with Dumas Malone in certain areas, however. Jefferson had mentioned that he didn't need to use other people's works to create the Rough Draft (Malone, 31). Yet he drew ideas from Locke and other people. Jefferson even said in his own words that he took ideas from people such as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc (Ellis, 88). Although his ideas weren't the same exact words that these gentlemen used, he still framed his works around other's ideas. My opinion is that Thomas Jefferson didn't really create any new revolutionary ideas; he merely took several older ideas and just put them all together. Once all these ideas were smashed into one big ball he would put them into easily understandable words, perhaps he thought the common people were just idiots (Malone, 35). Jefferson even mentioned it himself that he was just using some common ideas and using common sense to create his documents (Malone, 31). I find this a little ironic that he uses common sense to create his drafts and Thomas Paine's work, Common Sense, seem to be centered on the same central ideas. I have much better thi
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Approximate Word count = 751
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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