By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Nearing the end of another divisive election season, I’m thinking about a wonderful moment of American unity from 200 hundred years ago. I call it the Bicentennial of Partisan Reconciliation.
It involves John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, devoted friends who became bitter enemies and then close friends again. They built a nation together and then rebuilt the friendship they’d lost in the process.
Adams was born in 1735 in Massachusetts and Jefferson in 1743 in Virginia. They each distinguished themselves in their home states.
Adams was a lawyer and political activist. Jefferson was a lawyer, plantation owner, and architect. Both married remarkable women.
Abigail Adams, a founding mother in her own right, saved the family farm and the family while Adams was off being a founding father.
Martha Jefferson, from a leading colonial family, died in 1782 soon after giving birth to their fifth child. During the Revolutionary War, she and her children moved frequently to avoid the British Army.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were very different people with one important thing in common. They were Americans.
Adams was obnoxious, suspicious by nature, and unpopular. His colleagues saw him as opinionated and vain but admired his integrity and intellect.
Jefferson was well-mannered and dignified, and well-liked, but also eccentric and reserved. He was not the best public speaker.
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 George 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 their personal war started.
Adams served as Washington’s vice president and Jefferson as Secretary of State. Adams supported Washington and federalist policies favoring a strong national government.
Jefferson did not. He 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 became vice president. It was an unhappy pairing during the four years that followed.
Imagine Joe Biden as president with Donald Trump as VP. Or a similar pairing between Trump and Kamala Harris.
The 1800 election was bitter too 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 while Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr tied for first. With Hamilton’s help, the House of Representatives elected Jefferson after multiple ballots to resolve the disputed election.
Adams left the White House in the predawn hours on Jefferson’s inauguration day. He 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.
Abigail and mutual friends, however, encouraged 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 called it “one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.”
Both men died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after they ratified the Declaration of Independence and 200 years ago this year. Adams was 90 and Jefferson was 83.
Adams’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.”
Jesus might call it loving your neighbor as yourself.
It is a remarkable story. Two great Americans who were best friends and then bitter enemies, but who managed to reconcile and find common ground again before they died on the great day of freedom we all enjoy thanks to them.
Even two hundred years later, Adams and Jefferson have much to teach us bitter and partisan Americans today.
Neither man helped draft the United States Constitution—Adams was the ambassador in Great Britain and Jefferson in France. But their example is embedded in the great charter.
The Constitution and the country exist for “We the People.” That means all of us, despite the inherent and inevitable differences that exist among that “We.”
And the Constitution reminds us there is so much more for Americans to do than just be partisans.
Adams and Jefferson would want us to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
That’s what they did. Despite their differences.
*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 a future fun Christmas read.
