Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed. John Adams died on the same day. Ten days earlier, too sick to travel to Washington for the fiftieth anniversary celebration, Jefferson wrote a final letter that ended up serving as his last public statement to the country he had helped found.
In this clip from Part 1 of The Jenny Beth Show’s four-part Constitution training series with Tea Party Patriots Foundation, constitutional scholar Bill Norton walks Jenny Beth Martin through that final letter — and the quote Bill calls his single favorite line from any of the founders.
Jefferson wrote that the Declaration was “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.” He told the country that the safest place for power was always with the people themselves, and that the remedy for an uninformed citizenry was never to strip them of power but to “inform their discretion by education.”
And then the line Bill loves most: “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
It’s a hopeful, almost prayer-like closing from a man who had seen the worst of political division and the worst of public attacks — and who still believed the American experiment would succeed if Americans simply educated themselves.
Bill Norton has been studying the founders for more than three decades and is co-author of “Speaking the Language of Liberty.”
Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Learn more at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — Jefferson’s Final Letter
01:15 — “I Know No Safe Depository But the People”
02:30 — Education as the True Corrective
03:30 — “Enlighten the People Generally”
04:40 — The Dawn of Day
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