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"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Of course, that declaration would be heard the world over as thirteen small British colonies began an experiment that would change the face of the world. The words came out of a Continental Congress, more specifically a committee that included Ben Franklin and John Adams. But it is neither of those men from whose pen came the liberating words of the Declaration of Independence. That honor belonged exclusively to the young wordsmith Thomas Jefferson. He would put words to the spirit of rebellion that consumed a small corner of a great continent. He would become our third president and the first to expand the country by more than double with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Bonaparte in France. His concept of the separation of church and state would become known as Jefferson's Wall and become one of the most abused and misunderstood rights of the Constitution. He was an inventor. He was a naturalist, cataloging hundreds of new species of plants and animals. He was a meteorologist, leaving us the first accurate records of America's climate. He would die on the Fourth of July at the 50th anniversary of his famous document.