Picture a humid Philadelphia summer night in 1776. Candles flicker in a rented room on Market Street. A tall, red-haired Virginian, thirty-three years old, sits alone at a small writing desk, quill scratching across fresh parchment. Thomas Jefferson pauses, dips the pen again, and writes one of the most revolutionary sentences in human history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Outside, British warships hover in the Delaware River. Ins