In the early days of July 1826, Thomas Jefferson “marshalled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July.” So writes Jon Meacham in his marvelous biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.
Jefferson did, repeatedly asking in his final agony in the evening hours of July 3: “This is the Fourth?” He finally heard the twelve chimes of midnight on his bedroom clock; he lingered, drifting out of consciousness, but knowing it was the Fourth. He died at ten minutes before one o’clock that afternoon.
Five hours after the third president died at Monticello, the second president, John Adams, died in Quincy, Massachusetts. His famous final words were false: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
Both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, two hundred years ago. (The fifth president, James Monroe, would die on the Fourth in 1831.) It’s the great anniversarial coincidence of the Founding Fathers. The reaction to the twin presidential deaths on the fiftieth anniversary of the first Fourth was that Providence was at work, not unlike how Catholics consider miracles in the causes of saints.
John Quincy Adams, president at the time of his father’s
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