As Jefferson well knew, any independent country had to be an interdependent country.īy the time of Jefferson's death, 'half a century of experience and prosperity' had confirmed American independence as a political fact. Both also acknowledged that the young United States was tied to a wider world, whether as an exporter of revolutionary ideas or as an importer of luxury goods. Jefferson's last public thoughts may have treated the afterlife of the American Revolution, but his last private instructions concerned the stocking of his wine cellar. A day after sending it on June 24, 1826, he wrote two more, one to his business agent in Richmond, Virginia, the other to a merchant in Baltimore, regarding a shipment of French wine that had just arrived from Marseilles and on which duty had to be paid. He surely intended the letter to be made public, and so it soon was, in a Washington newspaper on his deathday. Yet this was not the very last of Jefferson's letters. He had written it in the tones of a prophetic utterance surveying past and future from the very brink of death. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, two weeks after sending this letter. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self government.' As he declined an invitation to attend the commemoration in Washington, D.C., of the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, Jefferson called the Declaration 'an instrument, pregnant with our own and the fate of the world.' He regretted that illness would keep him from a reunion with 'the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword.' He would have 'enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. In the last public letter he wrote before his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson offered an expansive vision of the Declaration of Independence, a document he had drafted half a century before. David Armitage's, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History examines how this innovative 18th century document became a political and philosophical model for nations and people across the globe. In the two hundred years since, over 100 other declarations-from Haiti in 1804 to Eritrea in 1993-have announced the independence of nations, regions, and peoples modeled on the ideals and language of independence, sovereignty, and human rights established by the American Declaration. Opening with, "When in the Course of human events." the Declaration of Independence boldly announced that the 13 colonies were now "Free and Independent States' not just to Great Britain, but to the world in 1776.
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