Thomas Jefferson entered the political arena during the beginning of the American Revolution. Serving as a representative from Virginia to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson is remembered as the most influential American philosopher of the founding fathers. His Declaration of Independence was the embodiment of American political thought at that time. But the seeds to his political philosophy were sown earlier in Thomas Jefferson's life when he studied the philosophies of the enlightenment era philosophers, especially those of his heroes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.

Thomas Jefferson was Aristotelian in political thought. He believed the philosophy of natural law, which held that the citizenry could govern themselves through reason and that the natural laws were an expression of God's Will. One of the main tenants of the Natural Law theory is that any law that violated a natural law was invalid and was the basis for civil disobedience. John Locke believed that the natural laws give rise to natural rights like those so eloquently written into the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.

https://www.academia.edu/6604473/Thomas_Jefferson_The_Soul_of_America