#1546 The Founders and the Cutting Room Floor

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Beau Breslin of Skidmore College returns to the Thomas Jefferson Hour to talk about important passages that were edited out of key American documents of the Founding Era, including the famous anti-slavery passage of the Declaration of Independence. How would America have been different if Jefferson’s attack on the slave trade had been included in the birth certificate of America. Clay and Beau also discuss the congratulatory letter to President-elect John Adams that Jefferson wrote but Madison persuaded him not to send. John Dickinson tried to include in the original Articles of Confederation a passage guaranteeing women religious freedom. Why was it removed?

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Thomas Jefferson is interpreted and portrayed by Clay S. Jenkinson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean, I'm on a show. It was packed, but my Pele are not. Yeah, none.
0:03.9	It tells you that Jefferson's hold on the imagination continues. It sure does.
0:08.5	I always think it's odd that Madison doesn't have anything in Washington DC to commemorate
0:14.8	his constitutional stuff. I'm glad Jefferson does, but Madison is not quite,
0:19.8	doesn't have quite the allure that Jefferson does. So why do you suppose that's true?
0:25.0	I think one of the reasons is because Madison's presidency is not so successful, right?
0:31.6	The war is not great. He's not a, you know, he doesn't have the eloquence and the presence and the
0:39.5	mystique that Jefferson has to be Jefferson in that moment because he's talking at both sides of
0:45.9	his mouth in a way that Madison didn't talk about slavery much, you know? So I think it's just
0:50.9	a complicated legacy, but I think he probably gets gets more condemnation than he deserves,
0:57.9	but he also gets more praise than he deserves. So let me stop you right there. This is the Thomas
1:04.0	Jefferson hour. I think you know, you're saying he gets more praise than he deserves. How can that
1:09.6	possibly be? I mean, I do think I do think he deserves everything he that has come to him,
1:19.0	but you know, he's not alone in some of the great advances he makes. He's not, he's not on an
1:27.4	island in terms of the writing that he does. I give some credit to the Ben Franklin's of the world
1:32.8	that helped him craft some of those things. Despite the fact that he's the greatest, as I said last
1:38.0	time I was talked to you, he's the greatest poet of the 18th century, political poet of the 18th
1:43.6	century. Jefferson is the greatest. This week on the Thomas Jefferson hour, my conversation was
1:49.6	Skidmore College History Professor Bo Breslin about the things that wound up on the cutting room
1:54.5	floor during the founding generation of American history. Why was John Dickinson's Guarantee
1:59.4	of Women's Religious Freedom removed from his draft of the Articles of Confederation? Why did
2:04.0	James Madison persuade Jefferson not to send his old friend John Adams a congratulatory letter
	...

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