#1476 Henry Laurens and the Tower of London
Listening to America
Listening to America
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
This week, a special conversation between the creator of the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson, and his daughter Catherine, home from England for the holidays. Among other things, they discuss Henry Laurens, an American Founding Father, a president of the Continental Congress and signatory to the Articles of Confederation who the British held prisoner in the Tower of London.
You can order Clay's new book at Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, or by contacting your independent bookstore. The Language of Cottonwoods is out now through Koehler Books.
Find this episode, along with recommended reading, on the blog. Support the show by joining the 1776 Club or by donating to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Inc. You can learn more about Clay's cultural tours and retreats at jeffersonhour.com/tours. Check out our new merch. You can find Clay's publications on our website, along with a list of his favorite books on Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and other topics. Thomas Jefferson is interpreted by Clay S. Jenkinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome everyone to this podcast introduction to this week's Thomas Jefferson. I was sitting across |
| 0:05.1 | for me in the new Enlightenment radio network barn on a very very cold day on the planes of Dakota is |
| 0:12.5 | none other than Catherine Missouri Walker Jenkins and my daughter. Now a doctoral student at Oxford |
| 0:19.1 | University and I asked you to come on Catherine for two reasons. First of all you're back by |
| 0:23.6 | popular demand people are missing some of your holiday snark and we're interested in Henry |
| 0:30.9 | Lawrence who was the American diplomat who was incarcerated for 15 months in the Tower of London. |
| 0:38.7 | Thanks for having me back I'm glad to be here. So how do you go about investigating this? I started |
| 0:45.5 | by looking I came across Henry Lawrence in reading a biography of Lafayette. I looked him up |
| 0:52.8 | on the internet. I read the Wikipedia article. I was astonished by some of the material in it |
| 0:58.7 | but that didn't go very far. How did you do your research? Well I was in the same boat. I knew |
| 1:03.7 | absolutely nothing about Henry Lawrence and so I started just on Google and trying to figure out |
| 1:09.8 | something about him and I admit that I have only cracked the surface here but after I found a |
| 1:14.7 | reference to Madison and Madison's skepticism about Lawrence I looked up some of Madison's |
| 1:22.8 | letters and was going through them and it's amazing dad they've they've been digitized a lot of |
| 1:28.1 | them are transcribed. If you go to the library of Congress website you can access these you can |
| 1:33.0 | search you can see what's inside and so I started looking at some of those and then became curious |
| 1:38.5 | about who else might be speaking about Henry Lawrence during this time and so I went to the papers |
| 1:44.1 | of John Adams which are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society and are really really well |
| 1:51.2 | laid out on this website you can search them you can see what's inside. You're saying that the |
| 1:55.8 | digital revolution makes a lot of things possible even when you're a long way from the tower. |
| 2:00.2 | Oh yeah but more than that just to think about being able to find these people's letters the |
| 2:05.4 | amount of extant letters from people like Madison or Adams or Jefferson or Washington. |
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