The Jefferson Madison Letters

About this podcast

For fifty years, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote to each other — across an ocean, across a revolution, across the whole experiment of building a republic. Theirs was the most consequential friendship in American history, and most of it survives on paper: nearly 1,250 letters, written between 1776 and Jefferson's death in 1826. We can't read all 1,250 together. So I've chosen thirty — the ones that carry the essentials: the argument that produced the Bill of Rights, the exchange over whether the earth belongs to the living, the building of a political party, two presidencies, the Missouri crisis, and the founding of the University of Virginia. This is not a series about two men arguing. It is a series about two men building. When they disagreed — over a bill of rights, over how far one generation may bind the next — they did it as allies who trusted each other completely. And we do not look away from the contradiction at the center of it: they built a republic of liberty while living inside a republic of slavery. In each episode, host Charlie Jett reads a single letter, sets its scene, and asks what it still has to teach us. A history lesson, from the founders themselves — one letter at a time.