On this week's 1776 Club broadcast, Clay is in character at David's behest, to sing Jefferson's song of America. Today's episode is an optimistic one to combat whatever anxieties you may be feeling this election eve. It's a show — a song — meant to remind us of the boundless possibilities at the core of our republic.
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“No person can become President unless they learn to sing the song of Jefferson.”
President Thomas Jefferson, as portrayed by Clay S. Jenkinson:
We have a wide and fruitful nation with room enough for the hundredth & the thousandth generation. We're a people, huddled on the eastern seaboard; in my time, the population was about six million and 75% of those lived within 50 or 60 miles of the Atlantic shoreline. It was a nation of forests that had never been cut down. In fact, it was said in my time that a squirrel could jump from tree limb to tree limb all the way from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi River — and maybe beyond.
Thanks to George Rogers Clark & his heroic gallantry during the revolutionary war, in the settlement that came in 1783, we got everything all the way up to the Mississippi — much larger than we could have expected. Then, in 1803, I was able to double the size of our republic for three cents per acre with a single stroke of my pen, creating what I called an empire for liberty such as the world has never previously seen.
Here we were, these people with fertility: the Mississippi River valley, the most fertile river valley in the world; the Great Lakes with two-fifths of all of the fresh water on the planet Earth; the Rocky Mountains, which we had heard of and Lewis & Clark began carefully to explore. At some far distance off the horizon, here we were: this tiny population, well-educated, with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, a sense of due process — infinite opportunity — as we would slowly make our way west across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio valley, and then come up to the banks of the Mississippi and linger, and then cross the Mississippi into the Missouri country, into the Louisiana country, and then go, as Lewis & Clark did through the Bitterroots and on over, into the Oregon country.
I knew, without any question, that this was the greatest birth right that any people in the history of the world had ever received.
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More from the Thomas Jefferson Hour
The public domain image of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. comes from Wikimedia Commons. The photograph was shot by a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy.
Recorded on November 6, 2020, three days after the election, Clay Jenkinson and Joseph Ellis share their thoughts on the recent presidential election and predictions about what’s to come in the next presidency. The two scholars also offer historical context between the elections of Jefferson’s time and this election of 2020.
This week on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Jefferson speaks about his election to the Presidency and the delays in certification as the 3rd President, along with his feelings of the need to unite a divided electorate. On March 4, 1801 in his inaugural address he famously stated, "But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans. We are all federalists."
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This week on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, along with some listener questions, we present a discussion with Clay Jenkinson and Joe Ellis about the upcoming presidential election and the strong divisions in our nation between the two major political parties.