Good day, Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners and as always, and we really mean this.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for taking time to write the show and give us your questions for clay, for

joe Ellis, even your criticisms.

We appreciate all of that.

And we also appreciate those of you who have gone to Jefferson Hour.com and clicked on

that donate button and decided to support the show.

So this week, it's happy birthday, Thomas Jefferson.

Happy birthday, Mr. Jefferson.

You know, one of the things I really wanted to emphasize today, David, was that finding

the right way to balance our response to Jefferson is the project of our time.

So just to kind of back up from the time I first began to look at Jefferson in the 1980s

until, oh, I suppose almost the year 2000, he was riding high.

He was the founding father.

He was almost universally beloved as this creative genius, the most gifted pro-stylus

of the founding fathers, the most innovative.

But then the problem of slavery, race and slavery really began to catch up with him and

tell now the pendulum has swung.

And you hear more condemnation of Jefferson than you hear celebration and even people that

want to celebrate him feel a little anxious, a little hesitant because they know that

that lays open the possibility that they will be seen as insensitive on these great questions

of race and slavery and Sally Hemings and so on.

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