iety for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery cause. Franklin was bedridden during the final year of his life and died on April 17,1790. As one of his final public acts, he signed a petition to the U.S. Congress urging theabolition of slavery, just two months before his death at the age of 84 in 1790.Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia. His father,Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor who built a substantial estate; he died in 1757 leavingJefferson and his family a very wealthy will. His mother, the former Jane Randolph, wasa member of one of Virginia’s most wealthy and respected families. Jefferson was theoldest of two sons; he also had six sisters. In 1760, Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg,Virginia. He studied law with the state’s leading legal scholar, George Wythe from 1762to 1767. Jefferson then began practicing his law, mostly handling cases involving landclaims. He practiced until 1774 when the American Revolution closed the courts. In 1768 , he won a seat in the Virginia legislature, then called the House ofBurgesses. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Jefferson was a powerful andwell known voice in the growing opposition within Virginia to the British Parliament’staxation policies and Britain’s general control over the American colonies. In a bookentitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America (published without hispermission in 1774), Jefferson argued that America’s bonds to Britain and King GeorgeIII were voluntary and Parliament has no authority in the Colonies. "The colonies were taxed internally and externally; their essential interestssacrificed to individuals in Great Britain; their legislatures suspended; charters annulled;trials by jurors taken away; their persons subjected to transportation across the Atlantic,and to trial by foreign judicatories; their supplications for redress thought beneath answer,th...
