April 13 is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), an American Founding Father, primary author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and Governor of Virginia (1779-1780) as well as the first Secretary of State (1790-1793), second Vice President (1797-1801), and third President of the United States (1801–1809). A Virginia planter and Enlightenment thinker (i.e. Humanism, Deism), he promoted democracy, agrarianism, and religious freedom, while expanding the nation through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Contradictory to modern minds, but apparently not to his, Jefferson embraced the affluent lifestyle into which he was born, owning over six hundred enslaved people, the most of any American president. While Jefferson was the proud author of the 1786 Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, he was critical of the Roman Catholic Church, and having departed this Earth six decades before the 1887 founding of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., there are nevertheless several surprising Jefferson connections to the university and its grounds.
A grassy knoll on the Catholic University campus, northwest of Mullen Library, is where one of the city’s most historic country farmhouses named ‘Sydney’ once stood. Built in 1803 on 160 acres known as Turkey Thicket by Samuel Harrison Smith (1772-1845) and his wife Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), became both a refuge and a social center from the grime, both partisan and physical, of the early capital. Smith, a prominent newspaperman in Philadelphia, came to Washington when newly elected Thomas Jefferson suggested he move to Washington to create an official record of his presidential administration. He became the semi-official reporter for Congress, producing transcripts that are the only written record of early sessions, and established The National Intelligencer, an important contemporary source, albeit partisan, of national government news. Smith later served President James Madison as Secretary of the Treasury during the War of 1812. Many notable Washingtonians are known to have visited, including Jefferson on several occasions, as well as Madison and his notable wife and First Lady, Dolly. In the late 1830s Mr. Smith sold the property and it later passed from the Middleton family to Catholic University in 1886. The Paulist Fathers, one of the first religious communities to affiliate with the new university, occupied the building, 1889-1914, as St. Thomas Hall, thereafter a dormitory, then a classroom until it was demolished in 1970.
Another Jefferson connection are valuable editions of his various writings held in the Rare Books Department of Special Collections in Mullen Library. These include A summary view of the rights of British America/Set forth in some resolutions intended for the inspection of the present delegates of the people of Virginia, now in convention. By a native, and member of the House of Burgesses (1774), written for Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress listing grievances against he Crown and Parliament; Notes on the state of Virginia: written in the year 1781, somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782, for the use of a foreigner of distinction, in answer to certain queries proposed by him respecting; (1782), privately printed in Paris responding to queries proposed by Francois Barbe-Marbois, a French diplomat serving in Philadelphia; Notes on the establishment of a money unit, and of a coinage for the United States (1785?), proposing a decimal-based currency system for the new nation; Draught of a fundamental constitution for the commonwealth of Virginia (1786?), proposing a progressive, checks on power and personal freedoms later incorporated into the U.S. Constitution; and Notes on the state of Virginia. With an appendix relative to the murder of Logan’s family (1803), which included a 1774 story about a band of white Virginians seeking revenge for an Indian attack and instead massacred an innocent Indian family. The most audacious and controversial of Jefferson’s works, was not published until long after his lifetime, being his ca. 1819 rewrite of the Bible, the so-called Jefferson Bible, to reveal Jesus in Jefferson’s view as a human philosopher freed from later accumulations of religious mythology and deification, titled The life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth, extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English/by Thomas Jefferson, With an introduction {by Cyrus Adler} (1904).
The most recent Jefferson connection is the cherry on the cake. It is an original letter signed by Jefferson addressed to Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison V, great grandfather of the later U.S. President of same name, written from Annapolis, Maryland, on December 31, 1783 at the time of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris ending the War of the American Revolution. Jefferson, representing Virginia, was a member of the Second Continental Congress, then meeting in Annapolis. The letter was purchased by Robert F. Duckworth from the Pennsylvania based Raab Collection, a former U. S. Army paratrooper and Catholic University alumnus in Politics, Class of 1965, and generously gifted to the University in 2025 with the intent to foster among political science students, and others, a deeper research understanding of Jeffersonian Democratic Republicanism. The letter has special meaning to Mr. Duckworth as it was written from the same city where he served for 26 years as Clerk of the Court. He also took classes in St. Thomas Hall.
For more information, see the ‘America at 250’ exhibit in Mullen Library, especially the Jefferson letter. For other information or to schedule a visit, contact Special Collections. Special thanks to Shane MacDonald, Sally Kendrick, and Alexis Howlett for their assistance.
