For six months now, this series has explored some of the people and ideas responsible for sustaining this American experiment for the past 250 years. All of those remarkable stories have been leading up to this weekend’s celebration of the Fourth of July.
Two documents define our understanding of this great country.
The Constitution is the rule book. It tells us how our government works.
The Declaration of Independence is something entirely different. It is the nation’s mission statement. The Declaration tells us why our government exists.
As we have seen time and time again, this latter document—just over 1,300 words written 250 years ago—has served as a touchstone for some of our nation’s most consequential leaders during some of its most perilous moments.
It is altogether fitting and proper, then, that we spend our final few paragraphs together discussing the two men most responsible for the creation of the Declaration of Independence: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s contribution to the Declaration is quite obvious—he was its principal author. Those miraculous words flowed from his pen. He is the person most often associated with the Declaration, and that credit is well deserved.
John Adams does not receive the same sort of credit, but he probably should.
As Jefferson himself later put it, “John Adams was our colossus on the floor” of Congress. During his time in the Continental Congress, Adams served on 90 different committees and chaired 25 of them.
Adams was a consistent and unapologetic voice in favor of independence—something he made unabashedly clear through his speeches on the floor of Independence Hall.
If Thomas Jefferson is the Declaration’s author, it is fair to call John Adams its chief architect.
When the Lee Resolution was proposed and its consideration temporarily postponed, it was Adams who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that when the vote finally came to the floor on July 2, Congress would not only have the votes for independence, but that no colony would vote against the measure.
What’s more, John Adams was the one who insisted that Jefferson write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
When the Committee of Five was chosen to prepare a declaration, Adams later recalled that he gave Jefferson three reasons why he should be the one to write it. First, Adams said, “You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business.”
Next, Adams recognized his own reputation among his peers in Congress: “I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular.”
Finally, Adams admitted to Jefferson that, “You can write ten times better than I can.”
An astonishing compliment coming from one of the preeminent political writers of the age.
Even though you would be hard-pressed to find two more different personalities among the members of Congress, Adams and Jefferson formed a bond that would last for years to come.
Adams was energetic, blunt, argumentative, and sometimes abrasive. Jefferson, on the other hand, was quieter, reserved, and more comfortable expressing himself through writing. Together, they formed a perfect complement.
In the 1780s, the two men found themselves together again, serving as diplomats for their new nation in Europe. They spent a significant amount of time together overseas, often traveling the continent with one another.
Because of their service in Europe, both Adams and Jefferson were absent from the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Although they were not present in Philadelphia, when it came time to put the newly created government into operation, both men were called into service in the inaugural administration—Adams as vice president and Jefferson as secretary of state.
This is where their now decade-long friendship began to crack.
Adams fell into the Federalist camp, promoting a stronger national government and closer ties to Great Britain, while Jefferson became the leader of the Democratic-Republicans, who advocated for limited federal power and expressed sympathy for the revolution underway in France.
In the election of 1796, John Adams was chosen by the people to be the second president of the United States. Jefferson was the runner-up and, under the constitutional system at the time, became Adams’s vice president.
These two men, the leaders of two emerging political parties, were now asked to govern the country together. Predictably, it ended poorly.
The following election, in 1800, Thomas Jefferson unseated John Adams. The campaign was brutally fought, with mudslinging on all sides, and it left deep scars.
After Jefferson won the presidency, Adams departed Washington before Jefferson’s inauguration, and the two men ceased communicating almost entirely.
For the next 12 years, the former friends exchanged virtually no correspondence.
In 1812, largely through the efforts of their mutual friend and fellow Founding Father Benjamin Rush, Adams sent a brief note to Jefferson. It contained no apologies and no grievances. After more than a decade of silence, Adams wrote a simple letter about ordinary things.
Jefferson responded in kind. His letter expressed his happiness at hearing from his old fellow crusader in independence:
“It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause.”
That simple exchange began to bury years of bad blood. The old friendship, the old intellectual partnership, was reborn.
What followed was one of the most remarkable correspondences in American history.
Between 1812 and 1826, the two men exchanged approximately 158 letters.
Throughout the exchange, the two old patriots reflected on their time in the Continental Congress. They looked back at what they had achieved and on how much the Declaration of Independence already meant to the world.
They even revisited the very disagreements that had torn their friendship asunder. While neither man formally apologized for what had happened, they came to better understand one another’s perspectives.
They discussed philosophy and religion, old age and mortality, their legacies, and the future of the nation they had helped bring into being.
Their final letters were exchanged in the spring of 1826. Both men recognized that their time on Earth was growing short.
On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at approximately 12:50 p.m. in his home at Monticello.
Several hours later, John Adams died at his home in Massachusetts. Having not yet received the news that Jefferson had died only hours earlier, Adams’s final words were reportedly:
“Thomas Jefferson survives.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These 35 words—and the entire Declaration of Independence—have taken on a significance that could never have been imagined by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or any of the Founding Fathers.
They have served as a beacon of liberty to the entire world.
But they have also served as a constant touchstone for the nation those men helped bring into being.
It was these words that brought John Adams and Thomas Jefferson together. Over time, politics drove them apart.
It was those same words, and the memories they shared of 1776, the pride they felt in having played a role in the nation’s creation, that brought these two titans of independence together once again.
There is something profoundly moving about these two old revolutionaries, as stubborn and proud as they were, reconciling over the Declaration.
Many have found something unmistakably providential about the author and the architect both shuffling off their mortal coil on the fiftieth anniversary of that sacred document.
This American experiment was launched 250 years ago. There is, and always will be, much work to be done to further it.
There will always be political battle lines drawn by politicians and the populace alike. But it is to those immortal words written in Philadelphia two and a half centuries ago, signed by 56 brave men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, that we must always return to if we are to bridge those divides and unite, once again, as Americans. For if those enduring truths could reunite John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, perhaps they can do the same for us.
