There's a reason why Thomas Jefferson's face is on a corner, why his sculpted head is on Mount Rushmore,

and why there is a magnificent memorial in his honor in Washington, DC.

As British historian Paul Johnson put it in a history of the American people,

no one did more than Jefferson to create the United States of America.

Born on April 13, 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, Jefferson early on displayed an intellectual curiosity

that would never be quince. He devired books on history, science, math, and philosophy,

while learning Latin, Greek, and French. He would eventually amass a personal library of

6,500 volumes declaring, I cannot live without books. There was virtually no subject

which he didn't find fascinating and didn't try to master. Most of the time he succeeded.

He graduated from college in just two years with a plan to practice law. At age 25,

he won a seat in Virginia's House of Burgesses, Virginia's colonial equivalent of a House of

Representatives. Entrant politics just as the American colonies were beginning to challenge

British rule. Although Jefferson was not a gifted speaker, he was a genius with words.

This gifted not going notice John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, no rhetorical slouches themselves,

asked him to write the first draft of America's Declaration of Independence.

Their confidence was richly rewarded. Jefferson's assertions that all men are created equal

and that nature's God, the creator, had granted them in ale and liberal rights, formed the cornerstones

of the American experiment. Jefferson was not yet 34. In 1790, President Washington appointed him

to be the new nation's first secretary of state, one of the two key posts in Washington's cabinet.

The other posts was Secretary of the Treasury to which Washington appointed Alexandria Hamilton.

The two became bitter rivals. Jefferson distrusted Hamilton's belief in a powerful central government.

Hamilton thought Jefferson was an impractical dreamer. Both misunderstood the other. This was

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