The Jefferson Adams Letters

In his August 24, 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams reflects on fame, history, and human folly. He notes public curiosity about their renewed friendship, calling it an “oddity” admired by both political parties. Turning to Europe, Adams ponders Napoleon’s downfall, comparing him to history’s failed conquerors, and predicts envy and ridicule for Wellington despite his triumph. He condemns monarchs imposing rulers upon nations, reaffirming that liberty depends on consent. Adams defines the true American Revolution as a revolution “in the minds of the people,” a transformation of thought rather than war—his enduring testament to democratic enlightenment.

In his November 13, 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams delivers a fierce meditation on tyranny, history, and vindication. He declares that despotism—whether by one, few, or many—is always “equally arbitrary, cruel, and bloody.” Adams laments how power corrupts memory, destroying records to reshape truth. Though he praises the eighteenth century for advancing knowledge and virtue, he fears the nineteenth will extinguish its light as reactionary forces rise in Europe. Responding to criticism of his 1790 warning about the French Revolution, Adams defends his foresight, claiming time has proven his “sure words of prophecy” tragically accurate.

In 1815, Jefferson and Adams exchanged six letters addressing peace, historical memory, and intellectual life. Jefferson celebrated war's end while analyzing Napoleon's paradoxical role in reshaping Europe. Adams grappled with preserving Revolutionary history, lamenting that crucial debates were lost forever. Both reflected on education's complexity, with Adams linking reform to centuries of religious violence. Adams articulated his famous definition of revolution as intellectual transformation rather than military conflict. Their correspondence attracted public fascination as an "oddity"—proof that former rivals could maintain genuine friendship. Jefferson's declaration "I cannot live without books" captured their shared bibliomania. These letters revealed aging statesmen engaged with contemporary politics while wrestling with how posterity would remember their revolutionary generation's true character and achievements.

In his letter of January 11, 1816, Thomas Jefferson reflects on the moral collapse of European powers during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. He argues that the great nations of Europe—France and England especially—once maintained a certain respect for honor and integrity in their foreign policy, but abandoned these restraints and adopted the principle that "power was right." Jefferson cites the partitions of Poland, the conspiracy of monarchs against popular government, and decades of war that cost eight to ten million lives as evidence of this moral catastrophe. Yet he closes on a note of cautious hope, seeing the spread of representative government as a force that may eventually discipline monarchs and restore a durable European peace based on the territorial settlement of 1789.

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 they set out to destroy. He calls for a return to the ethical principles of Jesus—not as theology, but as the only morality that breaks the cycle of self-serving power. The letter stands as one of Adams’s most penetrating meditations on the relationship between truth, power, and the limits of human reason. 

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 the philosophes—Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Rousseau, Grimm, and others—but concludes that their core philosophy was “Atheism; pure unadulterated Atheism.” Their doctrine reduced everything to matter and necessity, leaving no room for spirit, liberty, or conscience. Adams satirizes their concept of Fate as a being who must possess all the attributes of God while refusing the name, and asks why anyone would “abhor the Word God, and fall in Love with the Word Fate.” He closes by reaching back to the pre-Socratic cosmology of Timaeus and Ocellus—in which a good God struggles against resistant matter—and confesses that he once ridiculed this theology but may now admire it. The letter also introduces the question of whether one would choose to live one’s life over again, a thread that will run through the correspondence for months. 

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, his losses—and concludes that the world is framed on a principle of benevolence, with more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. He delivers one of his most famous lines: “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” The letter also contains Jefferson’s provocative materialist theology, his comments on Bonaparte’s character, his praise of Grimm’s literary correspondence, and a darkly comic anecdote about choosing one’s manner of death. It is among the most personally revealing letters in the entire Jefferson-Adams correspondence. 

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 passages in the correspondence, cataloguing life as vapor, fog, blossom, bubble, and a tale told by an idiot. He then tests the great Enlightenment skeptics by how they faced death, finds them wanting, and declares that hope for a future state is the only thing that makes this life endurable. The letter is at once playful, melancholy, and profound—a man of eighty staring into the abyss and choosing, with full awareness of the odds, to hope. 

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 through vivid examples — a merchant ruined by shipwreck, lovers separated by sudden death — and draws on Stoic philosophy to frame grief as the mechanism by which passion is disciplined into wisdom. The letter also contains an extended recommendation of Grimm’s literary correspondence, including an anecdote about Frederick the Great, and closes with a pointed warning about the restoration of the Jesuit order, whose influence in America Adams views with deep suspicion even as he acknowledges that religious liberty must protect them.

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 precision. He insists that life, on balance, favors pleasure over pain, yet declares himself fully prepared for death at seventy-three. He dismisses the Jesuits’ restoration as a retreat from Enlightenment progress and closes with a sweeping vision of America as a hemispheric bulwark against ignorance and barbarism, ending with one of his most celebrated lines: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”