#1539 The Alcoholic Republic

An amazing moment in the history of technology, among other things.

Finally.

Anne Randolph's father, Thomas Mann Randolph. His only solution is to is to knock Bankhead on the head with a with a fire poker. You know, that's no answer to these problems, and maybe it was the only answer that that was available. But violence upon violence, you know, it's just, I know, situations of domestic violence.

I've seen them in my life and I know how horrific it was. But I think the important point is we've never done this show before. You brought a particular sensibility to it. I think you're a little impatient with Jefferson here because I think you think, well, why didn't you do something?

So I don't know what that something would have been, but yeah.

I've been wanting to do that, but, you know that, to me, to me, that's so mean. But the fact that this, this has been clearly going on and somehow escalated, and that this is the only thing we know about. Of course, maybe there were efforts that aren't written about, or this was handled privately, and so there aren't records, and so there's so much here that we can't know.

But I just find the whole thing so.

Not surprising, but nevertheless tragic.

Lafayette came in 1824, and Jefferson sold his library to Congress. And he was reading, and he would go to his other plantation at Poplar Forest and take two of his granddaughters with him. Different children at different times, and they spent three weeks or two months there and they would have these seminars. And you know, the picture you get is just so beautiful of this glorious Renaissance man in retirement, poor but still genteel, in love with his grandchildren, and so on. And then you see this story and you realize it wasn't usually like that, it was usually crazy, and you know, if it weren't for Charles Bankhead? Jefferson's son-in-law, Thomas Mann, Randolph was a handful in himself, you know? Both Randolph and Jack Epps, the two husbands of the two daughters, were congressmen at the same time while Jefferson was president.

Jefferson, of course, said, Come live with me in the White House, you know, we'll be bachelors together. And so they did. And Thomas Mann Randolph got it into his head that Jefferson preferred Jack Epps, and so he moved out into a boarding house. And Jefferson, the president of the United States, is left to write letters, almost begging Randolph to come back, you know, into the bosom of your loving family. And no, of course, I don't love your brother-in-law more than I love you, and you just realize, I guess, the universality of human pain.

Why didn't Randolph do y?

But that's not to say that it isn't extremely troubling, nevertheless.

You know, we now know that almost all cases of domestic violence are alcohol or drug related. Do we know that? Yes, that the great preponderance of violence in households comes when somebody has had something to drink or another intoxicant? It's not that that's the only story, but that's why prohibition occurred, you know, the largely women who led the prohibition movement at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century said. If you can prohibit alcohol, all these other problems will go away or greatly diminish.

And, of course, prohibition was never successful. But I mean, you doubt this, this nexus of alcohol and violence.

Give us just the shortest possible compass of your focus.

You're terrific as the host. I hope you'll agree to do a series of these in the next year. My child, thanks very much. Let's go to the show.

Good day to you young citizen. Thank you very much for meeting with me. I'm delighted to speak to you again. I'm frankly shocked I've been invited back.

Well, let me start.

I suppose I drank one or two glasses of the best wine I could afford almost every day of my adulthood. But the glasses were much smaller than yours. And I frequently watered down my wine with water. I'm not perhaps the best example of what happens in America in my time. But I can tell you that there was widespread drunkenness that people drank all day long, not just in the evenings. Ale and cider and porter and beer were universal in our time, partly because our water was not necessarily healthy, but there were just habits of hard drinking. And so, by your standards, in the 21st century, I suppose you would say we were a besotted nation. We didn't see it that way, but we were certainly imbibing statistically much more than people do in your time, and particularly people in.

And am I overemphasizing these sort of anti-drinking sects at your time?

And although the Puritans might put up a good show and might have their preachers storming and railing against alcohol and alcoholism in the church. The fact is that New Englanders were frequently just as drunk as the rest of us, perhaps more secretly at times. So, attempts to prohibit or to diminish the consumption of alcohol have never worked in human history. The only way to do it is my way, which is as a young person, to adopt a strict code. I was a stoic, I didn't want anything to be too volatile, either positively or negatively. To have an even keel, to find a golden mean, to be impervious to ecstasy on the one hand, and deep sadness or grief on the other.

And by training myself in this way, always to try to maintain an equanimity, I was able to avoid what I saw happening all around me. In my own Virginia, and I suppose in New England, because of the heavy social pressures of the Calvinist and Puritan tradition, people probably drank more slyly than they tended to do in my Virginia. I want to.

And so as someone who almost never took a third glass of wine, even amongst my closest friends, and even when the wine was exquisite. I believe that that sort of consumption of wine can hardly be compared to the heavy, heavy drinking of punch, of applejack, of whiskey, of gin and other serious alcohols. In my time, not just in Virginia and on the frontier, but all over the United States, I don't really see a contradiction here. In fact, I said in letters while I was president that we should attempt to inculcate wine drinking among the American people. I said, No nation is drunken where wine is cheap and none sober, where the duties on wine turn people instead to whiskey. Which has desolated our houses. So when I think of an agrarian nation of mild-mannered family farmers living under the sky and working with animals, feeding themselves and clothing themselves, I hearken back to the Roman poet Horace.

I see wine as an enlivener, but certainly not as an intoxicant. But what I don't hear you mention is.

Well, we all drank ale and beer and cider, they.

If you look at my Farm Book and my Garden Book, you will see statistically, that we were brewing and we were making cider and at times even mead. You know? At this time, there were no adequate water supplies in the United States, even in a great city like Philadelphia, people were getting their water from wells. There was no public safety regimen to make sure that that water was clean and healthy. It is true that by fermenting water in some way or other, you can produce a drink that will not kill you if taken in moderation.

So certainly, if you were a guest at Monticello and you wanted cider, it would be available to you. But at dinner, which was a mid to late afternoon, there might be such drinks, but more likely, you would be asked if you wanted to drink a quantity of wine.

The thing about viticulture is that it takes an enormous amount of patience and time to produce the grapes that can give us great wine. So I wound up importing my wines from France, particularly, and Italy. There was wine in North Carolina called scuppernong, it wasn't very good wine, but there were times when I was impoverished that I would drink even that. But I did not live to see a wine industry in the United States, I'm sorry to say.

And then when I came back to the U.

S. In November of 1789. I began to work directly with these negotiants, these agents in Marseille and Bordeaux, to obtain for me the wines that I wanted. But where possible, I would write directly to the owner of the vineyard with whom I had established a kind of relationship. That was the easy part. Let me quickly describe the more difficult part.

How do you exchange currencies? So I would say I would like six pipes that was a way of delivering wine, or 250 bottles of champagne or of Mont Rocher from Burgundy. And then I would have to say that I have tobacco, which is at the wharf in Richmond. It will be shipped to London. My factor, my agent in London, will then make purchases from Bordeaux or Marseille. they will be credited against my tobacco crop in London.

There were no exchange rates that were reliable, there were certainly no digital or other forms of immediate transfer of funds. And so it was a sort of a nightmare. But there were agents in London who could handle this. But it was by no means easy. And, of course, I could write saying I want 400 bottles of something. And maybe never hear back because you don't know whether the letter ever arrived.

Six weeks, two months even to get a letter across the Atlantic, often letters were opened, ships went down in the sea, ruthless postmasters at both ends would open the mail. It was not at all a simple matter. I take pride, in some sense, in having helped to create the conditions under which true wine could be shipped safely to the United States. Fascinating, Mr. Jefferson.

So.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I'm your guest host.

Did this kind of language exist? surely alcoholism existed, so how did you respond to this, or how did people in Virginia think?

I think it's fair to say that you are infinitely better at facing these sorts of examples of human sadness, human weakness and human darkness than we were. We were a frontier society, cutting down trees and opening new fields, plowing lands that had never been plowed in the history of the world before. We were making barrels, we were building.

True, I was a.

I could do carpentry work, I could plow a field, but I need hardly say that that wasn't the style of the Virginia Cavalier. We did very little physical work, we hired people or owned others that would do this sort of work for us.

But if I were going to have a cabinet made, I would often help the cabinet maker with some basic skills. Or to show how I wanted a certain turn of the wood or a certain type of varnish. But, of course, I'm not making any claims that I was a frontiersman out in wild Kentucky, you know, killing a bear or something. My point was that we did not have a sophisticated language or mental health infrastructure to talk about these things. We were probably more tolerant of drunkenness than you are in your own time. If somebody got drunk at a tavern and rode his horse back to his farm and fell off, he might damage himself, but he's not going to damage others.

So there was no drunken driving or anything of that sort, so it was a much simpler time. It was a three mile per hour world. But in direct answer to your question, of course there was addiction. I can tell you about people that I knew who were addicted, and not only to alcohol, but to opium.

And, of course, there was alcoholism, but finding the line between drunkenness and alcoholism was difficult in my time. Because, as I said, there was such widespread heavy drinking all day long. Benjamin Franklin, for example, talks about working in the printing press when he was a young man, as an apprentice. And he said that he saved money. While the other workers would have a pint for breakfast, then they would have a pint at mid-morning, and they would have one or two pints at lunch and more in the afternoon.

So they were drinking away their profits, in addition to impairing their capacity to be alert.

He was young enough to be my. I had no surviving sons. I collected proteges. I enjoyed being a mentor to young, promising men from my district of Virginia, helping them to get on with their lives, to read hard books, to pursue their professions in law or agriculture or medicine. And Mr.

Lewis was one of the most promising of these young men, so I invited him to be my private secretary. When I became the president in the spring of 1801, and he left the Ohio country to come back to take up his position, he lived in the East Room. What I noticed, I'm sorry to say, is that at my dinner parties, two or three a week and exquisite wines, he began to drink more than was probably prudent. And so I noticed this and it caused me concerns.

It would cause me concern in any promising person to watch this happen. But it caused me particular concern because of the great affection I had for him, and also because he was employed by me. For the government of the United States, for the executive branch, it seldom became an issue. Then I sent him off on his famous trip and I felt that this probably would cure this. Because you can only take so much alcohol on a transcontinental journey of that sort, alcohol weighs about eight pounds per gallon. And so I felt that the adventure itself, the thrill, the sense of wonder, the new prospects, the discoveries would be intoxicating in and of themselves.

That was kind of the spirit of the enlightenment. When he came back, he was a national hero and he was fated. There were balls and receptions and all sorts of parties up and down the trip from St. Louis to Virginia and to Washington, D..C. And then I noticed that he was returning to that habit of drinking rather too much.

And it worried me because I had appointed him to be the first governor of Louisiana territory. It worried me because he still had his three-volume book to write, and it worried me because I saw a really extraordinary young man struggling. Here's the point, I think that you wish me to examine. There was no treatment for this.

There was no intervention. I might have said once or twice, you know, perhaps enough wine for tonight, Mr. Lewis, but I would have had to be exquisitely careful in blight. What he drank on his own, of course, I can't know, but certainly he had access to alcohol far beyond my famous White House dinner parties. And so when this happens, and this happened to me more than once in my life, you watch with concern, then deeper concern, and eventually stress.

And you feel impotent and not knowing how you can possibly help. You can't say there's a treatment program in Philadelphia, you can't say there are meetings that you can go to with other people who have a problem. That it was something that we tolerated and it was something that I watched. But there's only so much you can do by example, and there's only so much you can do by gentle admonition. And so I watched this young man damage himself and his prospects by this.

Let me say with Per Lewis, I think a part that will really interest you is that this was connected to some mental health issues. His family on both sides had had a history of mental illness. The word we use was hypochondria, it's not the same as the way you use it in your time. An account I wrote of Mr.

Lewis after his death for the first edition of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. I said that this was family constitutional problem, and I said when he was living with me in Washington, and I'm quoting now, madam. I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course. But what I had seen in his family during his Western expedition, the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body and mind suspended those distressing affections. But after his establishment at St. Louis in sedentary occupations, that returned upon him with redoubled vigor and began seriously to alarm his friends. I had hoped that the trip might cure him, put all that behind him. But when he came back, his depressions, if anything, were more severe than they had been.

And now, of course, I could no longer monitor him because he wasn't living with me in Washington, he wasn't in Charlottesville. He was out on the howling frontier, where alcohol was even more abused, more available, more debilitating than it was in a relatively civilized place like Washington D.C.

And so they could only take so much alcohol, and when they left, they didn't really have any hope of resupply. It may interest you that they ran out, according to the Journals, on the 4th of July 1805, at the Great Falls, So they're at the Great Falls, which Mr. Louis discovered.

He said it was second only to Niagara. It's the anniversary of American independence, I hesitate to say, but of my declaration of independence. And now they're at this incredible place up in the wilds of what you call Montana. And they gave out the last of their whiskey to the men, and he said that the men got a little merry.

It affected them because they had been without it for some time. And then they danced until there was a thunderstorm, and the thunderstorm in the evening put an end to that. And one of the men made some beer out on the West Coast, but it wasn't, apparently, of much taste or value. It wasn't until they were on the return journey in August and September of 1806, when they were on the Lower Missouri, coming down towards St.

Louis that they met some traders.

But since they could only carry a limited amount. As to discovery, my friend, he was, we think, the first white person ever to encounter the Great Falls, Mr. Jefferson.

Is it possible he had his own supply? Unclear. So, certainly, the two captains and by.

It's possible, and I can't answer this with any certainty at all. It's possible that the two captains had a private supply that they kept back, partly for medicinal purposes, for genuine medicinal purposes. And we just don't know, there's no adequate way to know, so I can say this. I've read the journals, of course, and I've read the Biddle Edition, which came out in 1814. There is never, by any of the writers of the expedition, the slightest hint that either of the captains was ever impaired.

The captains themselves said that the men were occasionally impaired, if you want to use that term. That they got drunk more easily because of the exertions that they were engaged in and the dehydration of the journey. But there's never a sense that alcohol was a problem. After they left Camp Wood in the first winter, when they were staging everything, the men were able to get supplies of alcohol from local stills, and they were frequently drunk. And there were courts martialed about this. But once they got underway without the hope of resupply, things settled down pretty quickly, I'm told.

I'm thinking, of course, of Robert Burton's 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy. What is the distinction here? and how important is the concept of melancholy in?

He set out to write a massive treatise, in a sense to fight off his own fits of melancholia. So melancholy is a medical term that goes all the way back to the ancient world. It means black bile. Essentially, there was a humorous theory of medicine that said there were four elements. And if they got out of balance, then that's what made you choleric, or made you sanguine, or made you melancholy. So it was a medical term, but it also was, how should I say this? In the enlightenment? It was a little fashionable.

There was a kind of a melancholy chic, really, yes, so people would affect melancholia, a light form of it. And this was regarded as a sign of great intelligence or artistic capacity. I don't think Mr.

Lewis was that I use the term hypochondria, which really then did mean mental illness, mental depression. And unfortunately, we didn't have a very wide terminology for this. I should say before we go on, that. Dr. Benjamin Rush up in Philadelphia, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Good friend of mine, the man who helped to bring about the reconciliation between John Adams and me in 1812. He was a pioneer in mental health. He had a son who was mentally ill.

He began to think hard about this in Philadelphia, wrote some important treatises on this. And he deserves to be called the father of American psychiatry, a term that did not exist, of course, because of this pioneering work. And what's even more interesting is that he worked with dreams. He felt that dreams are meaningful often, and that we can understand more about the human predicament by looking at someone's dreams. In fact, he said, it was a dream that he had, that Adams and I reconciled. That led him to try to get us to write to each other in 1812..

He wrote to me on the first day of January 1812.

He didn't mention the dreams at that point, and I replied, And you know what happened after that? But I don't want you to belittle Dr. Rush. He is a pioneer in mental health and he had a deep sympathy.

In my time, we had no way of handling mental health issues. We had insane asylums, and there was one in Williamsburg, and these insane asylums were unspeakable. People lived in their own excrement, they were chained off into the wall or the floor, they slept on straw. And then society, ladies and gentlemen would come, would stroll through these asylums and gawk at these poor.

Yes, they would gawk. People were displayed in all of this suffering, and so this was not going to help anybody ever. Of course, this was just a way of putting people in an asylum and locking them away with a key. So Dr. Rush, with his deep humanity, was really the pioneer for this, for America, and I have the deepest respect for him on that account.

We'll.

Be right back, Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. You're listening to your weekly conversation with Thomas Jefferson. I'm your guest host Katherine Jenkinson, Mr.

Jefferson Before the break. We were talking about Benjamin Rush and his pioneering work in mental health treatment. What sort of treatment options became available, or what did Rush think might help treat?

In our time, Dr. Rush believed that you shouldn't lock people away, you should keep them in comfortable circumstances. You should talk with them in a very gentle and positive way.

You should make sure they get plenty of sleep and exercise. This is the only answer to this in my time, there was no other answer to this. There's no therapy to be had, there's no pharmaceutical response.

You certainly don't want someone going to an asylum unless they're in the very last stages of mental illness. We didn't have an infrastructure or institutions to handle this, we had to handle it on a family basis. Of course, in the Christian world, pastors often were able to play a role, in the Catholic world there was even exorcism.

Exorcism was a real thing. I'm aware that within your own family.

The first of the 12 children born in 1791 was Anne Anne Carey Randolph. My daughter Martha had married Thomas Mann Randolph. Anne was a lovely young woman, my first grandchild. Of course, I had a special regard for her.

She was talented, she was beautiful, she was a great conversationalist, she had a great sense of humor. In 1808, she let a man named Charles Bankhead talk her into marriage.

He came from a relatively distinguished family, we didn't know nearly enough about him. It turns out he was a brute. Who beat her domestic violence within the walls of Monticello, sometimes in front of others, once in front of her mother, Martha. Imagine this.

He also was a drunk, a terrible drunk. He spent a lot of time at taverns down in Charlottesville. Instead of running his plantation or minding the work of his life or studying for the law, he was a frequenter of taverns. A letter by an old friend of mine, Elizabeth House Trist, talks about this.

She said I heard with great concern that Bankhead has turned out a great sod, always frolicking, carousing at taverns. Poor Anne, I feel for her. She had to put up not only with a severe alcoholic, a drunk, a besotted brute, but a man who beat her, too. I knew this was going on in my own house. I'm a harmony obsessive.

I can't even imagine I would never strike anyone in the whole course of my life, and certainly never a woman under any circumstances. And this was going on, to use an inapt metaphor. You're just trying to keep the lid on this just to survive this. To hope that it will go away, to hope that he will improve. You step into the extent that you can. Now, her father was in a better position to do this. Thomas Mann Randolph, and he did.

I'll come to that in a minute, but I'm sorry to say. He had mental health issues, too severe ones, and he also drank heavily at periods of his life. So my daughter Martha wouldn't even live with him for periods. She would live in Monticello and he would only come for dinner, and maybe not for that because he was having his own mental breakdown. Charles Bankhead hit Anne in Monticello in front of her mother and Martha, my daughter. A very, very resourceful person, called out for an overseer to come in and to intervene, and instead of an overseer. In walks her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph. And he was by now so enraged by what was happening to his daughter that he picked up a poker and hit Bankhead as hard as he could on the head with it, and it actually stripped the skin off of Bankhead's face. People who witnessed this said that if he had hit him more squarely, it would have killed him. That was the level of rage that Thomas Mann Randolph felt as a loving father to this poor child. But they never were able to separate, and she died just a few months before. I did, in 1826. And when this happened, I went in my first grandchild, this young, beautiful woman. I went in where she was laid out and I just wept.

You understand, I know you're a little impatient with this story because you think, why didn't somebody stop this? But I can promise you, in my time and in yours, it is very difficult to know what to do in a situation like this. And you hope against hope, against hope, that it will go away or ameliorate, and it doesn't always. You don't want to interfere or intrude on other people's private lives, but at some point you can't not. And so we all believe that this hastened her death. She was born in 1791, dead by 1826. She was a very young woman. And, of course, Bankhead never paid.

I can tell one more quick story about it that my grandson, the second of Martha's children, named Thomas Jefferson Randolph. We called him Jeff. He was so upset by what was happening to his sister that he actually confronted Bankhead, who was down drinking heavily in Charlottesville. He confronted him with a horse whip just out of rage. And then Bankhead pulled out a knife and stabbed Jeff twice deeply, and Jeff nearly died. And all this occurred late in the afternoon I found out about it. I'm ancient by now, this is 1819..

I got on a horse, rode down to five miles from the mountain, down to the courthouse and the store where he had been placed on his back, bleeding and suffering. And I knelt down there and wept, too, and he later wrote. Jeff later wrote that he held up pretty well until he saw his grandfather weeping at his side and then he just broke down. I mean, almost nobody who's listening knows the story. Do they that I had this alcoholic brute of an in-law and that my own beloved grandson, Jeff, was nearly killed by this brute? I can promise you this. This is not by any means an unusual story in my time, and I'm guessing that it's not particularly an unusual story in your time either. No, and of.

You're at Oxford, I'm in North Dakota, so just quickly tell us what you're doing.

I'd be out there, you know, seven hours or six hours different time zone. Punching 10 pieces into the phone and then it's like talking to Mars. There were all these echoes and delays. And now you and I talk a few times a week, at least by Zoom technology, and it's as if you're in the room. I mean, you could be upstairs at this moment in my house, or I could be across town at Oxford.

So I'm so proud of you for all you're doing at Oxford University, and of course, there's been a lot of groundswell. Bring Catherine back as a guest host because they like to watch you mess with your innocent father. But what an interesting story and harrowing. It's quite easy to get caught up in the world that.

We have serious psychiatry, we have superb mental health institutions, and we understand these things in a way that they simply couldn't in Jefferson's time, for example. We now know there's a biochemical relationship to some of this. They, of course, had no idea how the brain worked at that time.

So, in a certain sense, we're far ahead of them. And we have no crazy, insane asylums, at least in the first world, as they had back in Jefferson's time. On the other hand, I don't speak for you. But I am the child of an alcoholic. I know what it's like to grow up in an alcoholic household, and I know that the same patterns exist. That you just hope it goes away, that you just want to contain it, that you just want to keep the lid on it.

You just want to avoid touching it off, precipitating some bout of it. And my situation was by no means a horrific one. This is very common and the way we normally cope with these things is to pray and hope they go away. Luckily, that's not the only approach to it we have in the 21st century. But I can feel as Jeff when you asked me as Jefferson to talk about this. I can feel the sense of impotence and helplessness that a parent, a friend, a lover, a husband, a wife, a child feels in the face of this.

And so we're better off in many, many respects. But people like to keep these things really private, and people often fail to get the.

He said to his daughter, who was suffering a little bit in Paris. He said Determine never to be idle. He who works constantly will never complain of a want of time. The idleness breeds ennui, and ennui allows hypochondria and so on. That the answer is to keep busy, and of course, that is an answer.

But to think that it happened at Monticello, you know, the picture Jefferson wants to create of Monticello is this Horatian farm, the agriculture, agrarian life.

Harmony, violin, concertos, French food, good wine, beautiful conversation. Of course, slavery, slavery, slavery. But that's not what was happening at all. Towards the end of his life, he was consumed with debt, his family was coming apart. You know, he was more worried, frankly, about Thomas Mann Randolph than he was about Ann, because Thomas Mann Randolph was the patriarch of his family of 11 children.

And he was losing control of his own life, and Jefferson is just kind of beside himself and helpless. But it certainly is a corrective to any notion we have of the Sage of Monticello quietly going about his idyllic life on the.

But what you say about Jefferson being more concerned about his grandson than his granddaughter? Also says so much about the patriarchal world that he lived in. The fact that this woman was literally being beaten, almost some would say to death, and that his concern is greater for his grandson.

But the point I would make is that we talk about harmony. Well, there are 200 slaves, enslaved people in and around this plantation, and it's not all harmony there. These overseers were often brutes themselves. Violence and the threat of violence were the only way to hold this institution together. There was violence, of course, used against enslaved peoples.

There was probably violence within the enslaved community, too, because of the severe pressures that this institution created and the deep frustrations. So when Jefferson, even the previous myth, take what happened to Anne Randolph out of the picture. Even without that, it would be, I think, a silly thing to talk about. An idyllic Monticello. No slave plantation was idyllic. No, of course not.

That this just was America at the time, and we have. We're much more sober today than we were then. It's pretty amazing to think that this was the case. But, you know, and when I talk about this or lecture about it, or even perform, people often say, Well, the water was no good, but that doesn't explain this.

And, in fact, one of the most interesting chapters in Rorabaugh's book, The Alcoholic Republic, is called The Pursuit of Happiness. And he argues that for many people in these frontier circumstances, being able to get drunk was a sign of their freedom. You know that they had complete freedom to behave as they wished.

So we'll see you all next week for another exciting edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

The Thomas Jefferson Hour is brought to you each week by Dakota Sky Education. The program is distributed nationally by Prairie Public. President Thomas Jefferson lived from 1743 to 1826, and this program presents his views. President Jefferson is portrayed by the award-winning humanities scholar and author Clay S.

Jenkinson. This program is also available online at jeffersonhour..com and on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to correspond with President Jefferson or submit a question for him to answer on the program, please visit the website at jeffersonhour..com. Bach Cello, Suite No. 3 in C Major by Stephen Swinford.

Thank you for listening. Please tune in again next week for another thought-provoking, historically accurate program through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson.