About this item
In this letter to French politician and author Jean Nicolas Démeunier (1751—1814), Thomas Jefferson expressed the central contradiction of the American Revolution’s claims of freedom and liberty: “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is Man!” He will risk death for his own liberty yet “inflict on his fellow man a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”