Hello, everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson in this week's podcast introduction to The Jefferson Hour.

Just so glad you're aboard, I hope you like this little add-on section that we include in each week's program.

I certainly do, it gives me a chance to sort of debrief myself,

and to be a little bit more informal in the way that I talk about the great man himself.

This week, it was Kevin Goodsman, The Jeffersonians.

I liked his book a lot, interesting about the way in which these three great Virginians collaborated and became essentially three, four, five, six terms.

Two for Jefferson, two for his principal protege, James Madison and two for their protege, James Monroe.

Now, Madison was a little more pragmatic and conservative than Jefferson,

and Monroe was quite a bit more left-leaning to use one of our terms than Jefferson.

And he was the true or small-ar Republican.

Madison was, in fact, suspected amongst serious Republican ideologues as being too conservative,

too much in Hamilton's camp, too likely to extend American power beyond what a small-ar Republican vision of this country would be.

And his nomination was opposed in 188 by the radical Republicans.

They would have preferred Monroe.

Jefferson, of course, is the Dalai Lama of the whole thing.

It's amazing that this radical man, and in my view, the most radical person who was ever the president of the United States with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,

this radical man, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote these really wild things about tearing up the Constitution once every 19 years,

tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of Patriots and tyrants, and these really bizarre, really potent ideas that in a sense are so antithetical to the relatively conservative way we do business in the American system, almost every public.

It's amazing that he was able not only to become president, if people had really known the full panoply of his ideas.

But he would have thought that that would have happened if people had known that he was a true unitarian and deist.

It might have hurt him more than it did, but he was steadfastly silent and protective of his religious life.

But he becomes the third president, serves two terms, would have been re-elected to a third term, in spite of all the chaos of the embargo acts and the rising tension between the United States and Britain, which would lead in Madison's term to the War of 1812.

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