#1431 A Little Rebellion

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

We speak with President Jefferson about an armed uprising that occurred in Massachusetts in 1787 known as Shays' Rebellion. We ask Jefferson about an often quoted letter from January of that same year in which he wrote, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," and that, "It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good day, Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners. As always, thank you so much for listening. And
0:07.1	as always, thank you for the letters you send to us. The questions got some great stuff in the
0:13.6	past couple of weeks. I read every one of them. And also, thank you very much to those of you
0:20.2	who have decided to support the show financially. We so need it and we so appreciate it.
0:26.0	So you really were the provocateur here based on a letter that we received. What are you talking
0:31.6	about? You know, I've been dreading this program because from the moment that the thing happened
0:36.8	on January 6th, because of a lifetime of trying to look at the world through the lens of Thomas
0:43.4	Jefferson, I thought, oh, here we go, because Jefferson said he liked a little rebellion now then.
0:49.4	He said the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots
0:53.6	and tyrants. He said sometimes these sort of insurrectionists are misguided, but that doesn't
0:58.2	mean we should overreact. We should try to conciliate them and listen to their point of view and
1:03.2	educate them if we can. And he said that the French Revolution was a righteous thing, even if it
1:08.4	had killed everybody except one Adam and one Eve. And so I thought, oh, I'm going to be forced
1:17.3	as a Jefferson pretender and a Jefferson scholar to argue that he probably would have been
1:25.8	fairly tolerant of what happened on January 6th, although I think Jefferson is going to say,
1:35.6	is there any evidence that the election was stolen because wouldn't that be an important
1:40.0	factor here? But I knew you were going to do this, David. And you heard me during the program
1:44.9	squirming, bobbing and weaving, trying to the hesitation because I was so, first of all,
1:54.4	you got to be really careful in a situation like this. This is not about who won the Super Bowl
1:59.4	and whether the referees were fair. This is about the very fabric of our sense of order and
2:06.3	the rule of law and our republic. And yet Jefferson of all of the founding fathers, if you had
2:11.6	asked Hamilton, he would have said, hang them all. If you had asked Washington, he would have said,
	...

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