RC (MHi); endorsed by TJ as received 23 July 1820 and so recorded in SJL. RC (DLC); address cover only; with PoC of TJ to Henry A. S. Dearborn, 3 Jan. 1822, on verso; addressed: “Hon. Thomas Jefferson. late president of the U. States, Monticello, Virginia.” Enclosure: Orne, An Oration, pronounced at Boston, 4th July, 1820, at the request of the republican citizens of that place: in commemoration of American Independence (Boston, 1820), which hails the founding generation for obtaining “greater political advantages, than society has ever before enjoyed” (p. 3); states that the American people are honor bound to defend the institutions passed down to them and transmit them, unimpaired and uncorrupted, to posterity; argues that political equality is best safeguarded by the spread of education and a wider distribution of wealth; insists that a free press is vitally important as a counterweight to tyranny; quotes the “divine sentiment” in TJ’s First Inaugural Address that “Error of opinion may be tolerated with safety when reason is left free to combat it” (p. 18; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, James P. McClure, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 43 vols. description ends , 33:149); criticizes Massachusetts for electing its senate on the basis of wealth rather than population and for its retention of religious tests for office; posits that all “honest men” have “a political and religious duty” to oppose the expansion of slavery (p. 20); and looks forward to a day, “not far distant, when the diffusion of knowledge, the distribution of property, and the freedom of public opinion shall overturn all hereditary power, and erect the great temple of human liberty in every country, and in every age, on the imperishable basis of political equality” (p. 23).