Inside the Jefferson Memorial, “All men are created equal” is carved into marble as Jefferson’s sentence. Two years before the Declaration, however, an Italian immigrant published something

remarkably similar: “All men are by nature equally free and independent”.

Filippo Mazzei had trained as a doctor but sold wine in London. In 1773, he crossed the Atlantic hoping to grow grapes in the Virginia area. Jefferson persuaded him to settle next door, and they became friends. In 1774, Mazzei brought Jefferson an article urging resistance to British rule. Jefferson helped arrange its publication in the Virginia Gazette, provided Mazzei’s identity remained secret.

“Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government”, the article continued. In 1776, Jefferson wrote the line that entered American history. The word equality, however, carried an obvious problem in slaveholding Virginia. Mazzei opposed slavery. Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime and understood the immediate argument differently: colonists were naturally equal to people in Britain. That did not require him to free the people working on his plantations.

So, did Jefferson take it from Mazzei? We do not know. He never said that he did, and similar language was already circulating. Jefferson himself had written in 1770 that “under the law of nature, all men are born free”. George Mason used wording close to Mazzei’s in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights.

Still, Mazzei’s connection was unusually direct. He was the man next door. The two discussed politics, and Jefferson personally helped his article into print. Jefferson later said the Declaration was not intended to present an original theory. It put what he called “the American mind” into words.

The memorial makes the sentence look solitary and finished. Its history is neither. We may never know whether Mazzei gave Jefferson the line. We do know that an Italian moved to Virginia to make wine and ended up arguing revolution with Thomas Jefferson.