I remember reading about the Patrick Henry/Thomas Jefferson flap over the churches, but the details have slipped my mind. Zot, I’m getting old. I was trying to tell my son about Ross Perot the other day, and I couldn’t remember the name. I kept saying, “It wasn’t Frank Perdue ... it was ... whatshisname!”
Bill looked it up on his phone, but he still didn’t recognize the name.
Jefferson and even Madison were more Jacobin that we like to remember. They thought all the horror stories about the Revolution was British propoganda. Jefferson would not believe even a friend of his who had remained in France and, I think, had married a Frenchwoman. His attitude toward France was a bit like that of the Trotskites in America with regard to the USSR. It was all Napoleon’s fault. Never mind that the lopping off of aristocratic heads was not the whole of it. Three hundred thousand are supposed to have died in the civil war in the Vendee. And that was only the biggest of the uprisings.