American Minute for April 13th:
He drafted the Declaration of Independence and was Governor of Virginia. As the 3rd U.S. President, he approved the Louisiana Purchase and had Lewis and Clark explore it. He sent the Marines to stop the Muslim Barbary Pirates of Tripoli. His name was Thomas Jefferson, born APRIL 13, 1743. Inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC are his words: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever." In his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, January 16, 1786, Jefferson wrote: "Almighty God hath created the mind free...All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments...tend only to begat habits of hypocrisy...and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in His Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone." In his 2nd Inaugural, Jefferson wrote: "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old."
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