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Jefferson may be personally responsible for Illinois and Indiana becoming free soil states through his working friendship with James Lemen.
==Confederation Congress==
In 1783 Jefferson returned to Congress, became its leader, and launched another intensive legislative effort. His major achievement was conceptualizing a solution for territorial government in the land north of the Ohio River. Virginia ceded its land claims to the national government, Jefferson proposed a checkerboard system of land surveys, which avoided the terrible confusion that caused endless lawsuits over land ownership south of the river. One section in every sixteen was set aside to support public schools. Statehood was promised once a territory reached a certain population. Jefferson would not allow slavery in the territories. Many of Jefferson's ideas were passed into law after he left Congress, notably in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the [[The Northwest Ordinance ]] of 1787.<ref>Peterson, ''Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation'' (1975) pp 274-85</ref>
Jefferson's report on coinage established the decimal dollar as the unit of money, though he failed then and later to secure a system of uniform weights and measures based on decimal notation.
<blockquote>The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to his dying day. In the Memoir of His Life, written at the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they must hear and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=A3hRAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA50 An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request, on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1837]</ref></blockquote>
Indeed, Jefferson as a legislator always stood against the institutions of slavery and the slave trade. Even behind the scenes when people weren't looking, Jefferson sabotaged the future for slave holders. After the passage of [[The Northwest Ordinance]] Jefferson worked with and bankrolled the efforts of a close friend, [[James Lemen]], who went to the area and was involved with making sure that Indiana and Illinois became "free soil" states.<ref>[https://www.jstor.org/stable/40193650 "A Mighty Contest'': The Jefferson-Lemen Compact Reevaluated ]</ref>
Helo and Onuf (2003) have explored the logic of Jefferson's philosophical position against slavery in light of his ownership of slaves and his belief that the wholesale and immediate emancipation of slaves would threaten the new Republic. Heavily influenced by the writings of political philosophers [[Charles de Montesquieu]], Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, and especially Lord Kames, Jefferson grounded his position regarding slavery on the Kamesian principle that man was capable of moral development and, consequently, moral codes varied among different nations and progressed (or retrograded) over time in each nation. Kames posited that moral progress in a society, however, required a government. These concepts and others helped Jefferson shape his arguments in the Declaration of Independence, as rationale for the American Revolution. Moreover, they were the basis for his belief that slaves should be freed only when they could be assured of having their own government and a means, thereby, of self-determination as well as practical and moral education. Jefferson was convinced that emancipation on a large scale, before Virginia slaveholders and American society as a whole advanced morally, would precipitate racial violence and put the American experiment at risk.<ref>Ari Helo and Peter Onuf, "Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery." ''William and Mary Quarterly'' 2003 60(3): 583-614. Issn: 0043-5597 Fulltext: [[History Cooperative]]</ref>
