No “customer success” this week. It's July 4th weekend, and with the country turning 250 I've been feeling a little nostalgic — so instead, I want to tell you a story (something I researched).
In the fall of 1809, Benjamin Rush wrote a letter to John Adams describing a dream he'd had.
Rush was a signer of the Declaration and one of the few men in America still on good terms with both Adams and Thomas Jefferson — which took some doing, because Adams and Jefferson hated each other.
It hadn't always been that way. In 1776 they were partners. Jefferson drafted the Declaration; Adams was the one who put him up to it, and the one who defended it on the floor of Congress. Jefferson later said Adams fought for it "fearlessly and indefatigably" — its finest champion.
Then politics did what politics does. By 1800 they were running against each other for president in one of the nastiest campaigns in American history. Adams' side called Jefferson a godless radical. Jefferson's side called Adams a tyrant with "neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." (that one was a hired writer. Jefferson paid him.)
Jefferson won. Adams left Washington before dawn rather than attend the inauguration. For the next decade, the two men who built July 4th didn't speak.
Which brings us back to Rush's dream. In his letter, he told Adams he'd dreamed of a future history book — one describing how Adams and Jefferson reconciled, renewed their friendship through letters, and then, in Rush's words, "sunk into the grave nearly at the same time."
Adams took the hint, eventually. On January 1, 1812, he sent a short, almost shy note to Monticello. Jefferson answered within days. And then the dam broke: 158 letters over fourteen years, two old men arguing about philosophy, grief, religion, aging, and what the revolution had actually meant. Adams wrote more than twice as many as Jefferson — of course he did. "You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other," he wrote.
By the summer of 1826, both men were dying. The country was preparing its Jubilee — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. Both were invited to the celebrations in Washington. Both were too weak to travel.
Jefferson sent a letter instead, his last public words: the Declaration would be "the signal of arousing men to burst the chains" — that "all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man." Adams, asked for a toast to be read at his town's celebration, gave five syllables: "Independence Forever." Asked if he'd like to add anything, he said no.
On the night of July 3rd, Jefferson stirred from sleep at Monticello and asked, "Is it the Fourth?" Those around him assured him it soon would be. He held on until midday on July 4th, 1826 — fifty years, almost to the hour, after his document went out into the world.
Five hundred miles north in Quincy, Massachusetts, Adams was fading the same afternoon. He died just after six o'clock. His last words, as reported: "Thomas Jefferson survives."
He was wrong by about five hours. There was no way for him to know.
News moved slowly then. It took days for the country to piece together what had happened — that the two men most responsible for July 4th had both died on July 4th, on the 50th July 4th, within hours of each other. Rush's dream, nearly word for word. He didn't live to see it; he'd died in 1813, having seen only the first letters cross.
This weekend the country turns 250. There will be a lot said about what the founders built. But I keep coming back to the smaller thing those two did in their last fourteen years: they wrote their way back. Two people who disagreed about almost everything, who'd said unforgivable things through hired n mattered more than the grudge.
"You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other."
Not a bad standard. Happy 4th.
