The Jefferson Adams Letters

  In his letter of February 2, 1816, John Adams responds to Jefferson’s optimistic survey of moral progress since the Borgias with a sweeping indictment of deception across the centuries. Adams traces a pattern from the Renaissance popes through Luther’s incomplete Reformation to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, arguing that each generation of reformers adopted the same tools of falsehood th...

  In his letter of March 2, 1816, John Adams writes Thomas Jefferson what he calls “the most frivolous letter you ever read”—and proceeds to deliver an extraordinary philosophical broadside. Prompted by his reading of Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, Adams surveys the intellectual project of the French Enlightenment and finds it brilliant but fatally flawed. He admires the wit and learning of th...

  In this episode, we read Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Adams dated April 8, 1816, written from Monticello. Jefferson responds to Adams’s question about whether he would agree to live his life over again, answering with an emphatic “Yea” and offering a sweeping personal philosophy rooted in what he calls his sanguine temperament. Jefferson surveys his entire life—his health, his friendships,...

  In his letter of May 3, 1816, John Adams takes up Jefferson’s question about reliving life and pushes it to its limit: not just once, but forever. Adams says yes to living again—but recoils from eternity, calling human life an endless succession of soap bubbles that would terrify him almost as much as annihilation. He asks what human life amounts to and answers with one of the most celebrated pa...

In this letter of May 6, 1816, John Adams responds to Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical question about the purpose of grief. Adams argues that grief is inseparable from sensibility and serves a vital function in human life: it compels reflection, sharpens understanding, softens the heart, and drives human beings toward rational self-governance and emotional tranquility. He illustrates his case thro...

In his letter of August 1, 1816, Thomas Jefferson responds to John Adams’s recent letters on grief, the value of life, and the restoration of the Jesuits. Jefferson concedes the argument on grief, then takes up the question of whether he would live his life over again—agreeing only for the years between twenty-five and sixty, and cataloguing the diminishments of old age with unsentimental precisio...

In this letter of August 9, 1816, John Adams replies to Thomas Jefferson’s letter of August 1, addressing two subjects. First, he provides a vivid biographical sketch of Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (1752–1829), a Dutch scholar, Mennonite minister, and military commander of the Patriot movement whom Adams had known since 1780 in Leiden. Van der Kemp defended a critical Dutch fortress against Prussi...

In this letter of September 3, 1816, John Adams pivots from the philosophical question he and Jefferson have been debating — “What are the uses of grief?” — to a far more provocative one: “What have been the abuses of grief?” After briefly introducing Dr. James Freeman to Jefferson and recounting Freeman’s response to the grief question, Adams launches into a sweeping historical survey of grief ex...