an extraordinary reconciliation

It is an amazing thing when enemies become dear friends.

Fresh off my reading of Ron Chernow’s wonderful Alexander Hamilton, I was hungry for more from around the same time period. And so I dove into Founding Brothers by Joseph J Ellis, Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. After an extended digression into the land of muggles, witches, & wizards, I completed Ellis’ book a couple of days ago.

For anyone who wishes to dip their foot into the post-Revolutionary War period, Ellis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning work is a fine introduction. And those well familiar with the period will surely be interested in Ellis’ comments and analysis of six distinctive pericopes from the whole volume of early American history.

Ellis’ dramatically begins the book with the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. But he ends with one of my favorite early American stories – the story of what some believe is the most extraordinary correspondence in American History.

Thomas Jefferson had been friends with John and Abigail Adams during the Revolution. John Adams, in fact, had chosen Jefferson to pen the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Adams also worked together in France for American interests during the war.

But as in the post-war period political figures began to gravitate into parties and disparate ideaologies, the two Revolutionaries found themselves on different sides. Adams was technically a Federalists (though Adams had a very strong independent streak) and Jefferson was a Republican (not to be confused with the Republican party of today).

Simultaneously, the friendship retreated into quiescence if not outright animosity.

The two leaders shared, however, a mutual friend: Benjamin Rush

After John Adams’ retirement, he and Rush began exchanging letters again and decided to share with each other some of their nightly dreams. In 1809, Rush shared this dream about his two divided friends. In the words of Ellis

Rush “dreamed that Adams had written a short letter to Jefferson, congratulating him on his recent retirement from public life. Jefferson had then responded to this magnanimous gesture with equivalent graciousness. The two great patriarchs had then engaged in a correspondence over several years in which they candidly acknowledged their mutual mistakes, shared their profound reflections on the meaning of American independence, and recovered their famous friendship. Then the philosopher-kings [in Rush's own words], ’sunk into the grave nearly at the same time, full of years and rich in the gratitude and praises of their country … and to their numerous merits and honors posterity has added that they were rival friends.’”

After three years of needling both Jefferson and Adams, Rush was successful in motivating Adams to make the first move with a brief note on the first day of 1812.

Rush’s prediction then came true.

Over the course of the next fourteen years, Adams and Jefferson began to exchange an astonishing 158 letters. Ellis notes that their letters are “generally regarded as…the most impressive correspondence between prominent statesmen in all of American history.”

Early in the exchange, Adams remarked, “You and I ought not to die before We have explained ourselves to each other” [sic]. They did this.

Rush’s dream also found its fulfillment in the nearly simultaneous death of the two great men. But what no dramatist would have dared to plot was that both men would die on no less than the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams last words are recorded to have been either “Thomas Jefferson still lives” or “Thomas Jefferson survives.” But John Adams was wrong. Jefferson had died about five and a half hours earlier on the same day – 4 July 1826.

- the graphic above is a portrait of Benjamin Rush by Charles Willson Peale from Wikipedia.