Good Day citizens and welcome to what would Jefferson do, our weekly opportunity to discuss

current American events with President Thomas Jefferson who is seated across for me.

Now, good day to you, Mr. President.

Good day to you, Citizen.

Mr. Jefferson, we're looking at another anniversary of the 4th of July,

and I was thinking about you authoring the document and wondering if you looked to historical

precedence to write this document.

Yes, to a certain degree, the history of Britain is the history of recovery of British

rights from the Norman conquest in the 11th century.

I was always trying to hearken back to Anglo-Saxon rights

that were first developed in Northern Europe and transplanted to Britain.

And then once these proto-Democratic norms

had been established in England,

unfortunately the British were overwhelmed

by the Norman French in 1066 in William the Conqueror and the subsequent

history of England was the slow and agonizing recovery of those more ancient Saxon rights. So such documents as the Magna Carta and the British

Bill of Rights that came in 1688 at the end of the long ordeal with the Stewart family.

Those were not precisely templates for what I was doing in the Declaration of Independence,

but they mattered because in each of them, the people who believed

in liberty articulated what they thought they could achieve against the monarchy of Britain or against the church or against the parliament.

So in some regards I was looking at these previous British documents and working from them as a base but going

I think much farther than the British had ever gone before.

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