“Independence forever!”

In 1826, Americans prepared to celebrate their country’s fiftieth birthday. It was a time to reflect on the audacious gamble which had seen a group of colonists take up arms against the mightiest empire on the planet and on the results of that gamble; a nation on its way to becoming the most powerful on earth. 

Two of the architects of those events, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, remained alive. The intervening decades had cast them on opposite sides of the great political debates of the young Republic — they contested the bitter presidential elections of 1796 and 1800, Adams winning the first, Jefferson the second — but they retained a deep affection for each other. On the death of Adams’ wife, Abigail, in 1818, Jefferson wrote to him: 

I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.  

Ten days before the anniversary of the Declaration, Jefferson wrote of that increasingly distant event:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. 

Ill health forced John Adams to decline an invitation to an event commemorating the Declaration. When he was asked to propose a toast, he replied: “Independence forever!” 

Would he add anything more? 

“Not one word.” 

Both men died, hours apart, on July 4, 1826.