In June of 1826, the citizens of Washington, D.C. invited Thomas Jefferson to their celebration of America’s 50th Independence Day. His health failing, the Sage of Monticello sent his regrets:

I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.

Stirring words. The more so since, as every schoolboy knows (or used to know), their author would not live through the end of that Fourth. Jefferson’s death, twinned with that of John Adams just a few hours later, immediately passed into American legend. More than a striking coincidence, this was nothing less than a divine benediction on our republican experiment.

And in the decades following, something else remarkable happened—or rather, failed to happen. When other Founders shuffled off this mortal coil, their influence on public life tended to quickly recede. Many were honored, of course (deified, in the case of Washington), but behind museum glass, as relics and reminders of days gone by.

Not so Jefferson.

The body was barely cold before the wrangling began for his mantle. The Jacksonians pressed the first and most compelling case, making Jefferson’s enthusiasm for popular democracy and abhorrence for privilege central elements of their political creed. “The Jackson press constantly circulated his writings,” one historian relates, and “Democratic politicians developed the habit of answering their opponents by squirting Jefferson’s opinions into their eyes.”

But the Southern radicals who defied Jackson on the tariff question also had a claim. Was not Jefferson a lifelong opponent of centralization? And did he not himself write the celebrated Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which asserted the right of states to nullify federal law? (It is a great irony of history that the occasion at which Jackson gave his famous toast—“Our Union, it must be preserved”—and Calhoun his less famous reply—“The Union, next to our liberties most dear”—was a dinner celebrating Jefferson’s birthday.) Even some Whigs, those noted defenders of privilege, wielded Jefferson’s republicanism against the purportedly dictatorial rule of “King Andrew.”

In the lead-up to the Civil War, both fire-eaters and free soil men repaired to the standard of Jefferson. Dixie enthused over his states’ rights views, his lifelong ownership of slaves, and his endorsement of a people’s prerogative to sever its existing political bonds. In seceding from the Union, Jefferson Davis claimed, the Southern states had “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable.” Of course, the “all men are created equal” line stuck in some Southern craws, with Davis’ vice president proclaiming the Confederacy’s foundation “upon exactly the opposite idea” in his notorious Cornerstone Speech.

Among Northern Republicans, it was precisely that articulation of universal equality that resonated most powerfully. As Lincoln wrote in 1858:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

As the years wore on, our third president would remain a political touchstone accessible to most sides of most issues.

When America underwent its first spasm of overseas expansion, Jefferson was trotted out by anti-imperialists like William Jennings Bryan, who quoted his statement that “conquest is not in our principles [and] is inconsistent with our government” in a speech to the Democratic convention, and by imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt, who assured his own party’s convention that “the parallel between what Jefferson did with Louisiana and what is now being done with the Philippines is exact.”

New Dealers invoked Jefferson’s solicitude for the common man to justify their construction of a welfare state (FDR was a frequent visitor to Monticello, and took a personal interest in the creation of the Jefferson Memorial). Their Republican opponents, naturally enough, fought back with the great man’s criticisms of overweening federal power.

During the ’50s and ’60s, segregationists made what they framed as Jeffersonian arguments for racial hierarchy and “local institutions”; the civil rights movement, more powerfully, appealed to what MLK called the great “promissory note” of the Declaration.

And around the turn of the millennium, the popular image of Jefferson became that of an “American Sphinx” (to filch from Joseph Ellis), the enigmatic embodiment of all the country’s bundled hopes, disappointments, and paradoxes.

Recent years have been harder on Jefferson. His involvement with slavery was brought to the forefront in the 2010s, gradually occluding almost every other element of his legacy. He came in for cancellation during the Great Awokening—schools were renamed, statues toppled, and a damnatio memoriae pronounced.

Today’s Democratic Party seems to have utterly sundered its 200-year connection with him. Republicans, meanwhile, have more use for historical figures with fewer compunctions about the exercise of executive power (Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon are the presidents of choice).

But the high tide of woke is receding, and the right will eventually rediscover the virtues of Jeffersonian restraint. If the past is any guide, Jefferson will be back in vogue sooner or later. He is simply too compelling, too interesting, too fundamental.

Much ink has been spilled to explain this unique appeal. As his political afterlife suggests, much of it stems from the sheer range and diversity of Jefferson’s thought, together with his unparalleled eloquence and talent for expression. Contradictions that would have driven lesser minds into muddled incoherence are by his genius held in productive, fascinating tension.

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There is also the attractive richness and multifariousness of Jefferson’s character—his intense sensitivity and sentimentality, his successes in pursuits ranging from lawmaking and diplomacy to architecture and agriculture, his insatiable curiosity concerning essentially every dimension of the human experience. Here was a man who defied easy characterization; who could, as Henry Adams once observed, “be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil.”

Then we have his practical record: literally articulating our national creed; defending democracy, civil liberties, and peace against a Federalism that would have destroyed all three; doubling our national territory. Any one of these achievements would have been enough to secure everlasting fame: the three together vault him into the pantheon.

All of this has enabled Jefferson to encompass and represent as much of our national promise as it is possible for one person to embody. On our 250th anniversary, we may still say with one of his early biographers, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”