Dear, Dear John...

My posting today is taken from the last few pages of David McCullough's masterful biography of John Adams. Adams and Jefferson died the same day, July 4th 1826--the country's 50th birthday. McCullough's words speak volumes of these two men whom together were patriots, politicians, and finally friends.

Happy Fourth of July to all of you!

That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July, could not be seen as a mere coincidence: it was a "visible and palpable" manifestation of "Divine favor," wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary that night, expressing what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news was spread.

"In the weeks and months that followed, eulogies to Adams and Jefferson were delivered in all parts of the country, and largely int he spirit that their departure should not be seen as a mournful event. They had lived to see "the expanded greatness and consolidated strength of a pure republic." They had died "amid the hosannas and grateful benedictions of a numerous, happy, and joyful people," and on the nation's fiftieth birthday, which, as Daniel Webster in a speech in Boston, was "proof" from on high "that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care."

The last of the ringing eulogies to Adams and Jefferson was not delivered until October of 1826, when Attorney General William Wirt addressed Congress on Washington. Recounting Adams's career, he cited Adams's defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, his break with his old friend Jonathan Sewell, the crucial role he had played at Philadelphia in 1776 and Jefferson's line 'he moved his hearers from their seats.' Describing the friendly correspondence between the two old patriots in their last years, Wirt said that "it reads a lesson of wisdom on the bitterness of party spirit, by which the wise and the good will not fail to profit." But the accomplished orators who celebrated the two "idols of the hour" had all drawn on the historic record, or what could be gathered from secondhand accounts. They had not known Adams or Jefferson, or their "heroic times," from firsthand experience. Those who had were all but vanished.

Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

He felt he lived int he greatest of time, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices, "the most honorable" to human nature. "Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts , sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more that in any period."

His faith in god and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: "He who loves the workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him."

His confidence int eh future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever.

Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was sure. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend, Francis van der Kemp, he had written, "Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding."