By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were devoted friends who became bitter enemies and then close friends again before they died two hundred years ago on the same day—July 4, 1826.
These two remarkable Americans built a nation together and then rebuilt the friendship they’d lost in the process. This year, in their honor, I plan to celebrate the Bicentennial of Partisan Reconciliation.
Adams was born in 1735 in Massachusetts. Jefferson was born in 1743 in Virginia.
They each distinguished themselves in their home states. Adams was a lawyer and political activist and Jefferson was a lawyer, plantation owner, and architect.
They were very different people.
By his own admission, Adams was obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. His colleagues saw him as opinionated and vain but admired his integrity and intellect. Jefferson was well-mannered and dignified, but also eccentric and reserved, and not the best of public speakers.
The cause of American freedom brought them together.
They met in 1775 at the Second Continental Congress and became friends. Adams was the driving force behind the Declaration of Independence and convinced Jefferson to draft it.
They each then served their country during the American Revolutionary War.
Adams was a leader in Congress, helped fund Washington’s troops, and then negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the war in 1783. Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, rewrote Virginia’s laws, and helped with military logistics.
After the peace was won, however, their personal war started.
Adams served as George Washington’s vice president and Jefferson was his Secretary of State. Adams supported Washington and his federalist policies favoring a strong national government.
Jefferson did not. He also ran against Adams in the election of 1796 when Washington retired after two terms.
Adams won, but Jefferson got the second highest number of electoral votes and so he became Adams’s vice president. It was an unhappy pairing during the four years that followed.
The 1800 election was bitter and marked by malicious insults from both sides. Although ostensibly in the same party as Adams, Alexander Hamilton attempted to sabotage his own president’s reelection.
Adams finished third in electoral votes. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr tied for first.
The House of Representatives then elected Jefferson. Soon after, Adams departed the White House in the predawn hours on Jefferson’s inauguration day and went back home to Massachusetts without attending the event.
Adams felt betrayed by Jefferson’s many partisan attacks. Among other things, Jefferson was angry about Adams’ appointment of “midnight judges” as he left office.
The two former friends did not speak again for some 12 years. Adams’s wife Abigail and mutual friends encouraged a reconciliation. On New Year’s Day 1812, Adams sent a friendly note to Jefferson along with a book by his son, John Quincy Adams.
Jefferson replied cordially and the two revived their friendship and then sustained it by mail. This lasted fourteen years and produced 158 letters, 109 from Adams and 49 from Jefferson.
Historian David McCullough has called it “one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.”
Amazingly, both men died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after they ratified the Declaration of Independence. Adams was 90 and Jefferson was 83.
Adam’s last words acknowledged his rival and friend: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” In fact, Jefferson had died several hours before.
Jefferson’s last words recalled their most remarkable achievement together. In the moments prior to his death, Jefferson stirred and said, “This is the Fourth.”
At the time, the sitting president was Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams. He called the coincidence of their deaths on the nation’s great anniversary “visible marks of Divine favor.”
It is a remarkable story—two great Americans who were best friends and then bitter enemies, but who managed to reconcile and find friendship again before they died on the great day of freedom we all enjoy thanks to them.
Even two hundred years after took their final breaths, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson have much to say to the bitter and partisan Americans in the United States today.
(Photos of portraits from Wikimedia Commons: John Adams by Gilbert Stuart and Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
