With Good Reason

Thomas Jefferson said Patrick Henry “got the ball of revolution rolling.” Historian John Ragosta says Henry was five times elected governor of colonial Virginia, but it was his ability to electrify an audience that made him the idol of the common people. Plus: Before Patrick Henry died, he credited a Presbyterian minister named Samuel Davies with “teaching me what an orator should be.” Kelley Libby finds the story of Davies at a “ghost church” on a stretch of rural road. Also: Two hundred years ago this week the British burned Washington in the War of 1812. The man in the White House was our nation’s fourth president, James Madison. Andrew Burstein says Madison was an intensely political man, but he wasn’t slippery—you knew where you stood with him. Later in the show: More than 30 people spent three years immersed in transcribing and digitizing thousands of letters written by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Abigail Adams, and James Madison. Many of them said they experienced a sense of lo