Yesterday I covered how the 4th of July is simply a clerical error. But please don’t blame me when you’re suddenly awoken this August 2nd by unexpected fireworks.

Having already dealt with the wild celebration that was the 150th anniversary, today I found a different, equally odd bit of history. The headline I found?

I had no idea.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson first met at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775. Adams was a brash, irascible lawyer from Massachusetts who knew exactly how obnoxious he could be — he once told Jefferson directly: "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise." Jefferson was a Virginia planter and Renaissance man, quieter, more erudite, better with a pen. Together with Benjamin Franklin, the much older and most distinguished man in the room, they formed a small committee to draft the declaration that would either change the world or get them all hanged.

Jefferson wrote it. Adams argued for it on the floor of Congress. The resolution passed on July 2nd. The document went to print on the 4th. Fifty years later, almost to the hour, both of them would be dead.

Their friendship didn't survive their politics, at least not for a long time. Adams became the second president. Jefferson, serving as his vice president, was so alarmed by Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts — which made it a crime to speak against the government — that he anonymously drafted documents arguing states could nullify unconstitutional federal laws. Then he ran against Adams for president in 1800 and won. Adams left Washington before Jefferson's inauguration without saying goodbye. They did not speak for more than a decade.

The reconciliation came in 1812, when a mutual friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, helped broker a resumption of correspondence. What followed was one of the most remarkable exchanges in American letters — at least 380 letters over fourteen and a half years, two old men working through everything they'd agreed and disagreed on, trying to make sense of what they'd built and what it had cost. Adams wrote Jefferson in 1825: "I look back with rapture on those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers." Jefferson replied to a question about whether he'd live his life over again: "Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole."

By the summer of 1826, both men were failing. Jefferson was 83, suffering from what his doctors recorded as a constellation of ailments — swollen joints, infections, kidney damage. He had told people around him that he wanted to survive until July 4th, the jubilee. His last words are traditionally recorded as a variant of "Is it the Fourth?" He died in the early afternoon at Monticello.

Adams was 90, at his family home in Quincy, Massachusetts. On the morning of July 4th he was conscious enough to say, according to his family, "It is a great day. It is a good day." By afternoon he had drifted in and out of consciousness.

Here is where the story becomes something stranger than history usually allows. John Quincy Adams, who was president at the time and didn't reach his father's bedside until July 17th, recorded in his diary on July 21st what he had been told: "About one afternoon [1 p.m.] he said 'Thomas Jefferson survives,' but the last word was indistinctly and imperfectly uttered. He spoke no more." The one person known to have been actually present when Adams last spoke was his niece, Louisa Smith, who told the mayor's wife simply that the last words she clearly heard were the name "Thomas Jefferson."

Whether Adams said "survives" or only Jefferson's name, whether the full phrase was supplied by a eulogist or spoken clearly — historians have questioned the exact wording — one thing is not in dispute. Adams died that evening, around six o'clock. Jefferson had been dead for approximately five hours.

The Tulsa World ran this story on July 4th, 1926, the 150th anniversary, as one of the centerpieces of its holiday coverage. The headline was straightforward and the story didn't embellish — it simply laid out the facts and called it "one of the strangest coincidences in history." A 1829 biography of Jefferson, written just three years after their deaths, put it this way: "The extraordinary coincidence in the death of these great men is without a parallel in the records of history... They were great and glorious in their lives; in death they were not divided."

There's also a detail buried in several of the 1926 coverage pieces that I find quietly remarkable: James Monroe, the fifth president and another Founding Father, also died on July 4th — in 1831, five years after Adams and Jefferson. Three of the first five presidents died on the Fourth of July. Whether that's cosmic or statistical, I genuinely cannot say. But it’s remarkable either way.

The reconciliation letters are what stay with me, more than the coincidence of the deaths. By the time Adams and Jefferson were writing to each other in their final years, they had outlived almost everyone they'd known. The world they'd made was unrecognizable in some ways, exactly as they'd hoped in others. They'd spent decades on opposite sides of arguments that felt, at the time, like the arguments that would define everything. And then, late in their lives, they sat down and wrote to each other about gardens and books and grandchildren and what it meant to have lived the lives they'd lived.

Adams wrote to Jefferson once that their correspondence was "one of the most agreeable Events in my Life." Jefferson wrote back that he steered his bark "with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern."

On the same afternoon that Jefferson died at Monticello, John Adams in Quincy spoke the name of his oldest friend, his longest rival, the man he had spent forty years disagreeing with and fourteen years writing to. Whether or not he said the word "survives" — and the best evidence suggests the word may have been imperfect, or even supplied afterward — he was thinking of Jefferson at the end.

The date took care of the rest.

Happy Fourth.

– Chris

Tulsa World, July 4, 1926
The United States Gazette, July 4, 1826
The Frankfort Argus, July 26, 1826

Images:
John Adams — BEP engraved portrait, public domain
Thomas Jefferson — BEP engraved portrait, public domain
Thomas Jefferson (Rembrandt Peale, 1800) — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Jefferson (Gilbert Stuart) — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Jefferson, Library of Congress (LCCN2004669139) — public domain

Secondary sources (background/verification only):
Monticello.org — "John Adams"
Andrew Burstein, America's Jubilee (Knopf, 2001)
History News Network — "Jefferson Still Survives"
PBS NewsHour — "Fourth of July Special: Thomas Jefferson Survives"
John Quincy Adams diary, July 21, 1826 (via Massachusetts Historical Society)