Thomas Jefferson Jefferson and Adams die hours apart, July 4, 1826

On this day in 1826, which marked the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died within hours of each other. Adams was 90; Jefferson was 83.

Both while they worked together to forge the successful American Revolution and, subsequently, as political rivals, they had helped shape the nation’s early years. Adams went on to serve a term as the second U.S. president; Jefferson followed him into the Executive Mansion with two terms.


Adams was a New England Federalist who believed in a strong central government. Jefferson was an agrarian Virginia aristocrat. Adams was a political animal to the core. Jefferson remained uncomfortable in the new capital along the Potomac; he would much rather spend his days at Monticello, the classically proportioned mansion that he had designed. And yet, as historian Joseph Ellis has observed, they each in their way “came to embody the American dialogue.”

Abagail Adams, who had died in 1818, had intervened to break their estrangement. Now, well into their retirement years, they resumed writing to each other. “You and I ought not to die,” Adams wrote Jefferson, “before we have explained ourselves to each other.”

Adams, the more loquacious statesmen of the two, did more explaining, writing two letters to every one of Jefferson’s. Both of them worried about the country’s future, noting the growing divide between the slave-owning South and the commerce-minded North.

“I look back with rapture on those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers,” Adams had written Jefferson in 1825.

Jefferson had been asked to prepare a speech for July 4, 1826, but ill health prevented him from delivering in person what became his valedictory. In the draft, he would observe: “May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it to be, 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.”

Adams, too, was asked to help celebrate the occasion in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. Likewise, illness prevented him from traveling. He died at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon on the Fourth. His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was mistaken by about five hours.

SOURCE: WWW.PBS.ORG