Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a statue of Thomas Jefferson depicting him drafting the Declaration of Independence at a ceremony on Wednesday as part of the state’s celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States.
The statue is located outside the Jefferson County Courthouse in Monticello, Florida. The county was named for the founding father, and Monticello is the name of his estate in Virginia.
????BREAKING: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has just revealed a new Thomas Jefferson statue in honor of America’s 250th anniversary.
pic.twitter.com/W3Utl8Usfc— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 2, 2025
“We know that when we celebrate the 250th next July that we will be reflecting a lot on the Declaration of Independence, not only what is written there, but what those words mean,” DeSantis said.
Jefferson, at 33, was the primary author of the Declaration, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who also served on the drafting committee, providing edits, according to the National Archives.
DeSantis, who was a JAG lawyer in the Navy, noted that the central premise of the Declaration turned on its head the notion prevalent in some parts of the world at the time that citizens’ rights come from government.
“Our rights, as people, come directly from what Jefferson said, the Creator, which is God. And so God-given rights are there,” the governor said. “The role of government is not to give you rights, but to protect the rights that you already possess naturally.”
DeSantis quoted from the core of the Declaration, which says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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.”
“The Declaration of Independence really was the clarion call for the Revolution, and it underlied everything they did when they got to Philadelphia a decade later and hashed out the Constitution at the federal convention in 1787,” he said. “Those words have really reverberated throughout history.”
The governor acknowledged that neither Jefferson nor the country at the founding lived up to all the ideals contained in the Declaration.
“He has been criticized for having written the Declaration of Independence, saying that all men are created equal, and yet continued all the way until the end to own a lot of slaves,” DeSantis said.
According to Monticello’s website, Jefferson freed two slaves during his lifetime and five through his will. After his death, his executors sold Monticello, as well as the estate’s remaining 130 slaves, to help pay off the former president’s debts.
“I think it’s fair to criticize any of the founders for the decisions and actions they made, but I do think it’s wrong to demonize them and act like somehow 250 years later, ‘Oh, you did this.’ So take them for all of the pluses and minuses,” DeSantis said.
The founding generation did deliver the first blows against slavery, which was a common practice and legal throughout the world at the time, including in the British Empire. The institution had existed for millennia.
However, starting during the American Revolution, northern states began abolishing slavery. By 1804, all of those states had passed legislation ending it. This was well before Great Britain, which did not abolish slavery in its empire until 1834.
Jefferson sought to place slavery on the path to extinction in Virginia through legislation introduced in 1779 that banned the further importation of slaves and created an orderly process for slaveholders to free those being held in bondage. The bill did not pass.
Jefferson, however, did not give up his efforts, supporting legislation in 1784 at the federal level prohibiting slavery in all the territorial lands west of the original 13 states.
He lamented in a letter to a friend a few years later that the effort narrowly failed, writing, “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, & heaven was silent in that awful moment! but it is to be hoped it will not always be silent & that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.”
In 1787, while the Constitutional Convention was taking place nearby, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which established the laws governing the territorial land encompassing future states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The ordinance outlawed the introduction of slavery in the territory.
The Constitution allowed the federal government to ban the importation of slaves starting no earlier than 1808, approximately 20 years from the date the document was ratified. That had been a compromise made at the Constitutional Convention between the northern and southern states.
Congress passed the legislation ending the slave trade in March 1807, and then-President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill into law, which became effective on Jan. 1, 1808.
Jefferson would write about the evils of slavery in his only full-length published work, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in 1781.
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” he wrote. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
He predicted an armed conflict in the nation’s future if “total emancipation” by the slaveholders did not eventually occur, which happened in the 1860s with the Civil War.
DeSantis noted that in addition to the statue of Jefferson, Florida plans to place others of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin in their namesake Florida counties.
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