Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Thomas Jefferson is the only president who declined to endorse the tradition of Thanksgiving. For him, it was a question of the separation of church and state: the government should not endorse a religious exercise.

Other presidents have endorsed and or proclaimed Thanksgiving and the specific Thanksgiving Day, but Jefferson felt that to mark the day in 1801, his first year as the nation’s third president, would be supporting state-sponsored religion.

As governor of Virginia in 1779, Jefferson had declared a day of “Thanksgiving and Prayer,” but later indicated that days of thanksgiving were the responsibility of the states and not the federal government.

The principal of religious freedom — encompassing both philosophical and political poi

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