In 1760, Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He studied law with the state’s leading legal scholar, George Wythe (later a member of the Constitutional Convention), from 1762 to 1767, then began practicing, mostly handling cases involving land claims. In 1768, Jefferson designed and built a home of his own, which he eventually named Monticello, atop an 867-foot-high mountain near his birthplace in Shadwell. That same year, he won a seat in the Virginia legislature, then called the House of Burgesses. Jefferson’s marriage in 1772 to Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow with an impressive dowry, more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. He and Martha went on to have six children, only two of whom survived until adulthood.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Jefferson was a prominent voice in the growing opposition within Virginia to the British Parliament’s taxation policies and Britain’s general control over the American colonies. In a treatise entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America (published without his permission in 1774), Jefferson argued that America’s bonds to Britain and King George III were wholly voluntary.

In the spring of 1775, Jefferson was appointed as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A shy and soft-spoken man, he was regarded as a superior writer and was named to a five-person committee (also including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin) charged with drafting a formal statement of the reasons for the colonies’ impending break with Britain. In just a few days, Jefferson wrote the first draft of the document that would become the Declaration of Independence, listing the grievances against George III and offering this seminal statement of democratic values: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."