Lifetime Learning will host two scholars of the Revolution, Andrew O’Shaughnessy and John Ragosta, to discuss Thomas Jefferson’s and Patrick Henry’s successes and conflicts and how their relationship helped to shape the young nation.
At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were part of the young cabal of Virginia legislators who rallied support for the coming conflict; Henry, the senior of the two, was idolized by Jefferson, who rhapsodized that Henry seemed to “speak as Homer wrote.”
How times change. By the mid-1780s, Jefferson wrote to his friend and colleague James Madison, "What we have to do…is devoutly pray for his [Henry’s] death.” In the 1790s, Jefferson called Henry’s political efforts in opposition to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions “apostasy.”