Good Day Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners. And as always, thank you for

listening. We're so pleased today to bring you part three of a series of four

conversations with Professor Joseph Ellis about

the Adams Jefferson letters, the collection of letters the two gentlemen exchanged at the end of their lives when Mr Adams said we ought not

to die before we understand one another and this week we spend a lot of time talking about poor Mr Adams.

Yes, well Jefferson made the mistake in one of his letters of saying what are the uses of grief and Adams picked that up and ran with it as he was want to do.

Jefferson frequently as Joe Ellis says in this episode would almost innocently or inadvertently mention a word like terrorism or grief or abuse of power or ideology or something and then Adams would go into some sort of almost a mania in sending one, two, or five letters on that subject.

And so Adams is a self-pitying person at times in his career in a wonderful and amusing way to us.

I'm sure it didn't amuse him.

But he then wrote a long dissertation on the abuses of grief after the death of Hamilton and the death of

George Washington and the death of Julius Caesar and so on.

One of the favorite, my favorite parts of this week's episode is your reading of this letter

from October 12th 1823 that that Jefferson wrote to Adams and the people are going to hear it in the program,

but can I insert just a little bit of it right here?

Of course.

It would be strange indeed if at our years

we were to go on and age back to hunt up imaginary or forgotten facts to disturb

the repose of affection so sweetening to the evening of our lives.

Be assured, my dear sir, that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort

now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to so tears between

friends who have been such for near half a century,

beseeching you then, not to suffer your mind

...