Good day, podcast listeners, and welcome to this week's edition of The Thomas Jefferson Hour.

What fun this week, you brought up a statement from a biography of Jefferson,

one of his political adversaries.

You immediately recognize the quote before I had said maybe six of the words.

Justice William Patterson, who was a Federalist anti-Jeferson

said you can't know him personally and still regard him as your enemy.

And I continued to try to get President Jefferson to come back to that, but he had so much

to talk about and share this week.

Mostly I wanted to get his take on how politicians

can put aside their differences and work together. You know it was really

Jefferson because they were more vicious to him than he ever was to any of them. Jefferson was one of those rare,

seemingly egoless people who could put this aside and he, I mean it's a gift as you know because it's so easy to take the bait.

He wrote a famous letter to his nephew saying if you aren't naturally good-humored and most of us aren't, then adopt what he called artificial good humor.

Oh I remember that.

And you know I have practiced that as much as possible within my own life and it always

works and I sometimes, well you, when I'm traveling and I'm

tired and I'm in an airport and people are doing crazy things or just annoying in

one way or another, I want to lash out in some way and then I think wait artificial good humor and it

always works I've learned this from Thomas Jefferson and he thought that our republic, our system of government could not

survive unless there were a high level of harmony between political adversaries that

it was essential that we get along as human beings,

as friends, as people who think well of each other, even when we disagree profoundly

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