Thomas Jefferson was very much a renaissance man. He was an architect, a philosopher, an inventor, and the United States' third president. Much of what we now all over the world think of as a part of freedom and democracy comes either directly or indirectly from Jeffersonian political philosophy. Jefferson believed that large government should not interfere in its citizen's private matters. His beliefs were almost always individualistic, and he believed that an agrarian economy would best protect the people's valued freedom. In their concern for the individual and agriculture, closely related to nature, his beliefs were similar to those of the Transcendentalists.
Jefferson was also a champion of religious freedom. As a deist, one who believes in a God who created the universe and set it into motion but then left it to develop on its own, he was not in the majority religiously. Yet the religious freedom he called for extended even further, to all people, even to atheists.
Perhaps Jefferson's ethical philosophy, one of complete tolerance of one another's ideas, can best be summed up by a rather well-known quotation:
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson
Declaration
of Independence
Statute
of Religious Freedom
(both provided by Jefferson
document archives at PBS)