Saturday, July 04, 2020
Happy Independence Day
Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, also died on this day in 1826.
National Gallery of Art, accession number 1986.711)
(Washington, United States Capitol)
Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Henry L. Pierce and others (April 6, 1859):
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Statue of Thomas Jefferson (Portland, Oregon)
