4 July

Two American founding fathers die on the 50th anniversary of the United States they did so much to establish

1826 It is one of the most remarkable coincidences in history, surpassing Shakespeare’s birth and death on St George’s day (see 23 April). John Adams, the Massachusetts lawyer, and Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia planter – respectively the second and third American presidents – died within hours of each other, nearly 500 miles apart, on the country’s national day. They had worked together for American independence from Great Britain, Adams arguing strenuously for the measure, Jefferson writing its Declaration.

They didn’t always get on, representing as they did the two opposing parties, the Federalists (urban and mercantilist) and the Democratic Republicans (rural and agrarian) – not to mention such diverse strands of the continent’s cultural geography. When the Federalist Adams narrowly lost to Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800, he refused to attend the latter’s inauguration.

But in due course they were reconciled, and when both men were well into retirement, they began to correspond. ‘You and I differ;’ Jefferson wrote to Adams in October 1813, ‘but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason.’ What followed was a series of 158 letters in which they discussed everything from politics and diplomacy at home and abroad, via the question of ‘natural’ versus man-made aristocracy, to religion and philosophy – many of their arguments referenced in classical authors, from whose Greek and Latin they could freely translate.

Ezra Pound thought the Jefferson–Adams letters a ‘shrine and monument to American culture’ – not so much a monument, he added, as ‘a still workable dynamo’. They wrote well. Their ‘sanity and civilisation … stems from the Encyclopaedists. You find in their letters a varied culture, and an omnivorous … Curiosity.’ They belong in the American literary curriculum (Pound argued), which was presently ‘restricted to mostly second-rate fiction’.1

1 Ezra Pound, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’, in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, London: Faber & Faber, 1973, pp. 117–28, 124, 117.