Thomas Jefferson and John Adams celebrate their last Fourth of July.
The last letter we have in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting is an RSVP, dated June 24, 1826. It is a response to an invitation from the mayor of Washington, D.C., to attend a celebration of the 50th anniversary of American Independence. Jefferson was too ill to attend. In fact he would die, as if American destiny had decreed it, on the day for which the celebration was scheduled: July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress.
In his letter, sent from Monticello, Jefferson reflected on the meaning of the Declaration, whose language he had famously crafted. He showed that his revolutionary spirit had not dimmed.
He called the Declaration “an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world”:
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Jefferson had intended to write a memorable letter, and he succeeded. It was widely reprinted just days after he sent it and continues to be read in American classrooms two centuries later.
As one of the surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence and a former president, John Adams received the same invitation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence. Like Jefferson, Adams declined for reasons of ill health. Then, also like Jefferson, in an amazing coincidence of destiny, Adams too died on the day the celebration was to take place, July 4, 1826.
Adams’s son, the sitting president John Quincy Adams, wrote in his diary what many others were thinking and saying: that this was a manifestation of “Divine favor.” Daniel Webster, who was invited to deliver a eulogy in Boston’s Faneuil Hall the following month, called the passing of Jefferson and Adams on that day a “dispensation of the Divine Providence.” “ADAMS and JEFFERSON are no more,” he intoned, but “Their work doth not perish with them.” “No age will come,” said Webster, “in which the American Revolution will appear less than it is, one of the greatest events in human history.”
In John Quincy Adams’s and Daniel Webster’s eyes, the highest attainment of all future American generations would be to understand and live up to the greatness of the Revolution. The essence of that greatness was not the heroic deeds, of which there were many, in the war for independence. It was the Idea of Independence itself, the idea of political freedom that inspired the heroes of the Revolution and all their heroic deeds. The soul of this idea was expressed by Jefferson in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” All that is distinctively American has arisen from this idea.
In Quincy, Massachusetts, on Friday, June 30, 1826, the dying John Adams received some visitors. The young reverend George Whitney and representatives of Quincy’s July 4th celebration committee had come to ask the great statesman for a toast to be presented on the Fourth of July as coming from him. Adams said, “I will give you, ‘Independence Forever!’” They asked if he would like to add anything. Adams said, “not a word.”
Happy Fourth.
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