July 4, 1826
I have a new book coming out in October. It’s called Love Goes First: Reaching Others in an Age of Anxiety and Division. The book is about how we can actually move forward and reach the people who disagree with us, even the people who hate us.
(Please pre-order! Here’s the Amazon pre-order page, though you can pre-order at any bookseller you prefer. Every single pre-order sale will help get the message of the book out, because pre-order sales tell booksellers if a book is worth pushing and investing in.)
One of the things I do in the book is include lots of examples that illustrate what it means to go first, including one about July 4, 1826. So, here on the Fourth of July, allow me to share with you a few pages from my book.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Jefferson died at Monticello, his Virginia home, at around one o’clock in the afternoon. He was eighty-three years old. That same afternoon, Adams lay on his own deathbed, surrounded by loved ones: “Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, ‘Thomas Jefferson survives.’”
Then a few hours later, at about six-twenty in the evening, John Adams died. He was ninety years old. Both men had lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and each man died believing the other still survived. The fact that they both died on the same day is amazing. The fact that they died as friends is a miracle.
Both Adams and Jefferson were relatively young men when they were tasked by the Continental Congress with the writing of the document that would enumerate the reasons the thirteen colonies were declaring their independence from King George—when the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, Adams was forty and Jefferson only thirty-three. Although their signatures on the document prove that they were united in spirit and purpose at that point in their lives, as their long and distinguished careers played out, they became bitter enemies and had no contact with each other for years. Both served as president of the United States, but in rival parties, with Jefferson succeeding Adams to the office—two of the great men of the American Revolution implacably estranged from each other.
Their mutual friend—and signer of the Declaration from Pennsylvania—Dr. Benjamin Rush was grieved at the enmity between Adams and Jefferson and tried for several years to get them to reconcile. Then, in December 1811,
just before Christmas, Adams heard again from Benjamin Rush who wished to remind him of a visit Adams had had the summer before from two young men from Virginia. They were brothers named Coles, Albemarle County neighbors of Jefferson’s, and in the course of conversation Adams had at length exclaimed, “I have always loved Jefferson and I still love him.” This had been carried back to Monticello, and was all Jefferson needed to hear. To Rush he wrote, “I only needed this knowledge to revive toward him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.” “And now, my dear friend,” declared Rush to Adams, “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”
On New Year’s Day 1812, seated at his desk in the second- floor library, Adams took up his pen to write a short letter to Jefferson. . . .
The brief letter from Adams immediately produced a response in Jefferson:
If, as stage-managed by Rush, it had been left to Adams to make the first move, Jefferson more than fulfilled his part. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he continued. “It carried me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”
In the fourteen years that followed their dramatic reconciliation, both men exchanged dozens and dozens of letters on every possible topic. Though they were both old men in those years, they recalled and relived the months and moments of that bright time in their lives, decades before, when they were part of the great events of the American Revolution. Their letters are a precious gift to posterity and part of the inheritance of all subsequent Americans.
They are also a testament to the life-changing power of forgiveness and the catalyzing potential of going first. What if, resisting Dr. Rush’s prodding, Adams had refused to send his initial letter to Jefferson? What if Jefferson, nursing decades-old grievances, had refused to reply? I find it fascinating—though not at all surprising—that these great men of American history just needed someone to go first to turn them back toward each other and move them toward reconciliation. They each wanted to be liked by the other. For Jefferson, what moved him was the repetition in his presence of a chance favorable remark Adams had uttered to someone else; for Adams, it was the knowledge that Jefferson still loved him and had said so in a letter to Rush. The whole story is beautiful—a little jewel of American history.
Happy Fourth, everyone.
Note: the block quotations above are from David McCullough’s biography of John Adams.
