By Jane Kamensky President, Monticello
Jane Kamensky explores how for all their differences, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson became figures in an important chapter in the “American story.”
When they met, in June 1775, both were already movement-famous: Adams as Novanglus, the pseudonymous author of a dozen fiery essays printed the previous winter in the Massachusetts Gazette, and Jefferson as the man behind A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a radical pamphlet published in Williamsburg the year before. The Virginian arrived in Philadelphia in a phaeton pulled by a team of four horses, accompanied by three enslaved men robed in their owner’s livery. Adams was plainer, poorer, “a Patriot most ardent and pure,” as a fellow delegate to that momentous gathering later recalled. They were diplomats of a sort, ambassadors from two radically different commonwealths, Massachusetts and Virginia, dispatched to the capitol of a third, Pennsylvania. For all their differences—they were Yankee and Cavalier, middling and well-born, rotund and statuesque, prolix and taciturn—both would soon be joined in what Jefferson, in A Summary View, had called the “American story.”
But by the time the delegates to that second Continental Congress converged in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, a new sense of solidarity had grown among them, forged over a dozen years of economic and ideological struggle, and crystalized, that momentous April, at the business end of British muskets. The shooting war began in Lexington, an easy day’s ride from Adams’s home in Braintree. In July, Congress called on Jefferson and Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson to draft the statement justifying the colonies’ entry into hostilities, a resolution that came to be called “The Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms.” Jefferson’s pen had helped the cause of Massachusetts become, at long last that summer, the common cause of all.
Adams first mentioned the young, red-headed Virginian in his journal in October 1775, when he paraphrased a description offered by a New York delegate: “Jefferson is the greatest Rubber off of Dust that he has met with.” By then, Adams and Jefferson had rubbed off some dust together, as members of a committee charged with drafting a reply to a proposal from Whitehall. Each must have revealed elements of his character to the other: Adams both the “sound head” and the “dislike of all parties” that Jefferson would name as hallmarks of his vexing friend, Jefferson the fluent, “masterly pen” and still tongue that would excite Adams’s wonder and even his envy.
Congress was awash in committees tasked with issues large and small. By the spring of 1776, after nearly a year of war, it had become increasingly clear that a group of draftsmen would need to tackle what Adams called “the great Question”: “Independency.” In April, in a letter to his wife, he divided Congress into three roughly equal parts, “staunch Americans,” “staunch Britons,” and those eely “half Way Men, Neutral Beings, … prudent Folks.” The committee assigned to plumb the Great Question would need to persuade some two-thirds of the assembly.
And Adams, for all his adamantine brilliance, was unpersuasive, even toxic. He knew he had made himself “so obnoxious for [his] early and constant Zeal in promoting” independence that he managed to alienate even those who agreed with him. Many of his fellow congressmen considered him “the Author of all the Mischief,” he noted in his diary. A draft in his hand, he knew, would generate twice the criticism and gain half the traction.
Jefferson, by contrast, knew the value of gnomic silence. “During the whole time I satt with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three Sentences together,” Adams later remembered. Jefferson’s silence, it turned out, was golden. “Eloquence in public Assemblies is not the surest road, to Fame and Preferment,” Adams wrote, note-to-self style, in his autobiography, when it was already much too late. Because Adams proved constitutionally incapable of taking his own advice, the young Jefferson, silver-penned and lead-tongued, emerged as the essential Virginian to hold the quill.
It was a job for which Adams was desperate and one that Jefferson would have done almost anything to avoid. Life at his home, Monticello, was far more congenial, and the drafting of a state constitution in Williamsburg seemed far more important. He loathed the hurly-burly of Congress. “There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions Contention may be pleasing,” he told his cousin John Randolph in August 1775. “But to me it is of all states, but one, the most horrid.” The one, presumably, was death.
And so Jefferson had spent the winter in Charlottesville, returning to Philadelphia only in mid-May 1776, as Congress entertained a resolution to create a new form of government, free of King and Parliament. “A Machine for the fabrication of Independence,” Adams called it. On May 17, he rhapsodized in a letter to Abigail, “An whole Government of our own Choice, managed by Persons whom We love, revere, and can confide in, has charms in it for which Men will fight.” “I have been so long out of the political world that I am almost a new man in it,” Jefferson wrote to a friend in Williamsburg that same day.
He would not be new in it for long.
The drafting committee met for the first time on June 11. There were five of them: Robert Livingston of New York, Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, and the aging Benjamin Franklin joined Jefferson and Adams in framing the case. Then they relegated the work of drafting – taking the substance of their deliberations “to draw them up in form, and cloath them in a proper Dress” – to Jefferson.
Laboring in a trim redbrick house on the corner of Seventh and Market Streets, attended by his enslaved valet, Robert Hemmings, who must have mixed his ink and fetched his paper, Jefferson scratched out a draft in a matter of days. By his own account, late in life, the role he played was closer to that of the scribe than to author: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, … it was intended to be an expression of the American mind,” he told Henry Lee. The document’s force, came from “harmonising sentiments of the day” – including, no doubt, the powerful expressions of liberty-loving and independence-seeking that Jefferson saw, on the daily, from Hemmings and his kin. No committeemen, they, too, were founders.
Jefferson was a large-scale slaveholder in a commonwealth where enslaved people comprised roughly half the population. Adams was a free labor man from a colony whose enslaved population hovered at the two-percent mark, and which would abolish slavery within a decade of the Declaration’s drafting. Both men loathed the institution. But in Congress, as they well knew, there was little consensus and less shared will on the subject. Back in April, a resolution on the transatlantic slave trade had been debated, mooted, and then expunged from the very journals of the deliberative body. Adams recorded the discussion angrily in his diary:
There is one Resolution I will not omit.
Resolved that no Slaves be imported into any of the thirteen Colonies.
I will not omit to remark here, the manifest Artifice, in concealing in the Journal the Motions which were made and the Names of the Members who made them.
Jefferson had raged against the slave trade in Summary View, proclaiming that “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies.” Now he poured his fury into his draft of the colonies’ Declaration, which included a lengthy broadside against the transatlantic slave trade, which he described as “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” For this, he blamed the King, a pretended Christian “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.” Current scholarship suggests that Jefferson’s indictment of the crown for frustrating legislative attempts to “restrain this execrable commerce” was substantially correct.
The committee proposed, and Congress disposed, excising the passage in its entirety, a 168-word deletion that amounted to the largest single change the delegates imposed upon the draft. Years later, Adams recalled, with some bitterness, the “severe Criticism” which resulted in “striking out several of the most oratorical paragraphs.” Jefferson is said to have silently seethed through it all.
On July 4, 1776, the revision, however eviscerated from that early draft, became the country’s originary speech act, the founding utterance of what the historian Joseph Ellis calls “the American creed.”
Adams sensed the momentousness of the moment, referring to it then and afterwards as “the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” It was, he said, a “Day of Deliverance” to be commemorated “from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Jefferson had a much more modest impression of what had been accomplished. On July 8, he sent Richard Henry Lee the version passed by Congress, and his original draft, offering simply, “You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the Critics.” Jefferson would return to Virginia the next month, “under a sacred obligation to go home” to his ailing wife. There he would take up what he saw as the central work of the American struggle: the reforming of individual states.
The years ahead would strain the civic friendship of Jefferson and Adams, present at the creation, annealed in the crucible of revolution. Allied in the cause of independence, they came to espouse divergent visions of the country they had helped to birth and would each come to lead.
Jefferson would face West, where he pictured free white small holders working former Indian lands, and slavery slowly succumbing to its own weight. A slave-holding proto-populist, he retained a fundamental trust in the (free) American people, even those yet unborn. He thought future generations ought to take the structures of state back to the studs every nineteen years or so, and begin the world anew, again.
Adams would face East, where he longed to restore England as a key commercial partner in a national economy rooted in trade. A middling monarchist, he had little faith in the common man, but could compass a more universal civic personhood, held by Black men and even, perhaps, by women.
For a time, the Declaration’s founding friends would find enough common ground to bridge their considerable gaps. “That you and I differ in our idea of the best form of government is well known to us both,” Jefferson told Adams in 1791, “but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives.” But by the end of that decade, the heat of politics would burn them both. In March 1801, when Jefferson succeeded Adams to the nation’s highest office, his one-time committee mate would not be there to witness the first peaceful transfer of power in the history of a modern republic.
The schism proved long but not permanent. After an eleven-year gap in their friendship, Adams broke the silence, and they began again to correspond regularly. In their late letters – a correspondence in which Adams predominated by a ratio of four to one – they deliberated serious points of contention while articulating a shared belief in the American project which transcended, though never erased, their different histories of the past and dissimilar visions of the future.
In the midst of yet another war with Britain for the control of North America, Adams wrote to Jefferson, plumbing the depths of the Virginian’s optimism. “Let me now ask you, very Seriously my Friend, Where are now in 1813, the Perfection and perfectability of human Nature? Where is now, the progress of the human Mind? …. When? Where? And how? is the present Chaos to be arranged into Order?”
More than two centuries later, the questions linger.
But Adams proposed an answer, too, telling his longtime friend and sometime enemy: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
Explanation had been the great work of the Declaration. It remains the great work of our constitutional democracy, even still.
Jane Kamensky the president and CEO of Monticello. She is also the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, Emerita, and the former Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
