In 1781, Thomas Jefferson, having served as governor of Virginia, declared he'd had enough of politics. And he wasn't even 40.
In the next two decades, Jefferson would take on many public roles — U.S. minister to France, the nation's first Secretary of State, vice-president under John Adams, and, of course, the third President of the United States of America — but by 1781 he'd already earned a place in the history books. A delegate to the Second Continental Congress, he was just 33 in 1776, when he drafted the remarkable Declaration of Independence. Two years before holding those truths to be self-evident, he penned A Summary View of the Rights of British America while serving in Virginia's House of Burgesses.