The Friendship - Adams and Jefferson

Ellis returns to Adams and Jefferson for his last essay in Founding Brothers. He focuses on their reconciliation and the exchange of letters which continued for 14 years until their deaths within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826.

The contortions involved in their reconciliation, although not as valuable historically as the letters themselves, interests me because of the light it sheds on the personalities -- Adams as the grumpy old man of American politics and Jefferson as the "republican" aristocrat and master of denial. If Adams had a tendency to lacerate himself, Jefferson was equally inclined to believe that nothing was ever his fault.

Reconciling two such stubborn and different men required an intermediary and that was role taken by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  As they exchanged letters, Rush proposed to Adams  "that they dispense with the usual topics and report to each other on their respective dreams."  In 1809, Rush reported "his most amazing dream yet":

 . . . that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to his magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence over several years in they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes, shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and recovered their famous friendship.

That fact that this "dream" was to become a reality did not keep Adams from mocking the possibility.  Yet he admitted the bonds of his friendship with Jefferson and noted, "If I should receive a letter from him, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it."

Rush had also been writing to Jefferson and suggesting "that Adams had indicated he was now eager for a reconciliation and virtually on his deathbed."  But Jefferson would not take the bait, "convinced as he was after his earlier exchange with Abigail that he had already made a heroic effort that had been summarily rejected."

The "reconciliation" came closer in 1811 when Edward Coles, "a Jefferson protege" visited Adams who "let it be known that his political disagreements with Jefferson had never killed his affection for the man."  Yet Jefferson still refused to write.  On Christmas Day of 1811, Adams confronted Rush:

"I perceive plainly, Rush, that you have been teasing Jefferson to write me, as you did me to write him." Adams also knew full well that Rush was sending edited versions of his letters to Jefferson, removing the potentially offensive passages.

In the end, Ellis notes, "it was Adams who made the decisive move."  Why?  As Ellis points out, "the friendship and the mutual trust on which it had rested had, in fact, not been recovered by 1812."  Ellis comes up with two reasons.

[First,] The resumption of his correspondence with Jefferson afforded Adams the opportunity to challenge the Jeffersonian version [of history] and to do so in the form of a written record virtually certain to become a major historical document of its own."  

Second, the reconciliation and ensuing correspondence permitted Adams to join Jefferson as the costar of an artfully arranged final act in the revolutionary drama. Adams had spent most of his retirement years denouncing such contrivances as gross distortions of history. But he had also spent those same years marveling at the benefits that accrued to anyone willing to pose for posterity in the mythical mode. If he could only control himself, if he could only speak the lines that history wanted to hear, if he could yet fit himself into the heroic mold like a kind of living statue, he might yet win his ticket to immortality.

So Adams saw the correspondence with Jefferson as a way to write his own version of history -- and have history pay attention.