Jefferson changed the trajectory of history
by Paul C. Harris · The Washington TimesOPINION:
This July 4, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 years old. It is a moment for quiet reflection, loud celebration and pursuing, with everything we have, all that is promised in it.
For me, it is also a moment to contemplate its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, a figure I have repeatedly been told I should abhor but one I instead venerate — not as a saint, but for his extraordinary contributions to the cause of human liberty.
Last month, at Jefferson’s University of Virginia — at the 2026 commencement ceremony — a senior university administrator told thousands of graduates that Jefferson “did not envision you as a probability.” In the next breath, he negated his one mention of Jefferson’s genius: “For all his brilliance, his unfounded and ethically corrosive claims about human capacity reflected his ignorance and his hubris.”
This administrator is hardly alone. Whether it be historians or award-winning journalists, the modern impulse is to reduce Jefferson to a catalog of imperfections, as if tallying his failures is itself a form of progress.
This habit of sitting in moral judgment over our forebears can be deeply pretentious and intellectually shallow.
By all measures, I am one of the people Jefferson allegedly failed to envision. I was born in 1964 to an unwed teenage mother. My first home, like my mother’s before me, was located only a mile and a half from Monticello.
My family’s roots on that mountain run deep. I was profoundly honored to be recognized in an exhibit at Monticello as a descendant of enslaved families who once lived and labored there.
My great-great-grandmother Eliza Coleman served for decades as a gatekeeper at Monticello, a position of responsibility passed down through generations of my family. Long before tourists climbed the mountain to reflect on Jefferson’s legacy, members of my family helped care for it.
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In 1997, when I was 33 — the same age Jefferson was when he drafted the Declaration — I was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, to Jefferson’s seat in the legislature he helped shape.
I was the first Black Republican elected to the Virginia General Assembly in more than a century.
It is from that vantage point that I see the impulse to reduce Jefferson to his failures — however well-intentioned that reduction may be — as a disservice not to Jefferson but to the people his words ultimately liberated.
Whatever his flaws — and they were real — the words he penned in July 1776 altered the trajectory of human history. As America approaches its 250th birthday, we must celebrate that truth with confidence, gratitude and humility rather than pharisaical criticism.
In the summer of 1776, Jefferson drafted a sentence so radical that it shook the foundations of monarchy and inherited power throughout the world. It continues to reverberate across centuries:
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The words were revolutionary not merely because they challenged King George III but also because they asserted something far more profound: that human rights do not come from the government. They come from the Creator, the ultimate architect of nature and natural laws.
Governments may recognize, protect or even violate rights, but they do not grant them. Jefferson rejected the ancient notion that kings, rulers or states are the source of human dignity. Instead, he understood and articulated that human equality is anchored in divine creation.
That idea changed the world. It inspired abolitionists who fought slavery, suffragists who fought for women’s rights, dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and freedom movements on every continent.
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No American captured Jefferson’s enduring significance more powerfully than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, King called the Declaration of Independence a “promissory note” to which every American was heir.
King did not reject Jefferson or his words because America had failed to live up to them. He appealed to Jefferson precisely because the words were true. The civil rights movement succeeded not by repudiating the Declaration but by insisting that America honor it.
Jefferson was flawed; of course, he was. So are we all. If perfection becomes the standard for historical significance, then no nation, leader or human being will survive scrutiny. What matters is whether Jefferson advanced humanity toward greater liberty, greater human dignity and greater opportunity. Unequivocally, he did.
My own life is evidence of the power of the American experiment Jefferson helped launch. Some might view that as a contradiction. I view it as part of the great and unfinished American story — one not of perfection but of progress. The same nation that once tolerated slavery also produced the principles that ultimately destroyed it.
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The same founding ideals that were once denied to many became the moral foundation upon which later generations expanded freedom.
I have had opportunities beyond anything my young mother could have imagined in 1964. I served as an officer in the U.S. Army. I practiced law. I served in state government and later in the Department of Justice. I have held leadership positions in corporate America.
Today, I am an executive serving the national defense, and — in an extraordinary full-circle moment — I serve on the UVA Board of Visitors.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunities this country has afforded me and the millions of others who come from humble beginnings. America is not great because it is flawless. It is great because it is founded on transcendent ideals that continually call us to become better.
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That is what the 250th anniversary asks us to remember. Not that Jefferson was perfect, but that what he wrote was true. That the words outlasted his contradictions. That they became the vocabulary of abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights leaders. That they belong — fully and without apology — to every American, including the descendants of those Jefferson failed to see clearly. They belong to humanity itself.
They belong to me.
• Paul C. Harris is a member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors and represented Thomas Jefferson’s former district in the Virginia House of Delegates.