Cary Johnson

Thomas jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, founder of the University of Virginia, past president of the American Philosophical Society and of the United States of America, died at Monti-cello on July 4,1826. For more than eighty-three years, he had lived a life of intense and varied activity. 

The American hero is strong rather than symmetrical. Abounding in exuberant and ill-controlled vitality, he lacks grace and restraint. The soil of the United States, under the benign sun of democracy, has produced an abundant crop of sturdy patriots, wild, rough, native growths, vigorous and free, not unlike the forests of the back country in grandeur and in uncouthness.