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Four years later, in a contest marked by grotesque vituperation, Jefferson beat Adams. In the first Washington-less presidential election, in 1796, Adams edged Jefferson by only three electoral votes (which, under the electoral system of the day, made Jefferson vice president). Jefferson thought the French Revolution was glorious: “Rather than it should have failed,” he wrote, “I would have seen half the earth desolated.” Adams thought it was doomed from the start: “To think of Reinstituting Republics … would be to revive Confusion and Carnage, which must again End in despotism.” America’s first two-party system - Jefferson’s Republicans versus Adams’s Federalists - coalesced in part around these opposing estimates of revolutionary France. There was also an issue that separated the two friends: the revolution in America’s sometime ally France (the Bastille fell three months after Washington’s first inauguration). But after he retired, only one man could take his place. Everyone assumed that George Washington would be president as long as he wanted the job.
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He talked politics with her and became her personal shopper, informing her that when buying figurines for her dining room he passed on one of Venus because “I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.” Although both men were abroad when the Constitution was written and ratified, each did well under the new system, Adams being elected the first vice president in 1789, and Jefferson becoming the first secretary of state the following year.īut in the 1790s their friendship buckled, and finally shattered. There Jefferson, recently widowed, befriended Adams’s formidable wife, Abigail.
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But in the 1780s the victorious new nation wanted Jefferson’s services as a diplomat too, and the patriots were reunited in Paris and London. As the Revolutionary struggle ground on, Adams was dispatched to Europe as a diplomat while Jefferson served as governor of Virginia. Jefferson, a quieter presence, was assigned to put America’s principles and grievances on paper his stylistic gifts (and some tough editing by his colleagues) made an immortal document. Adams was the workhorse of the Continental Congress, laboring on committees and making the case for independence in speeches. Politics brought them together, as radical representatives of the two most radical American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution. Adams was warm and ardent with friends, prickly and argumentative with rivals (and friends). Jefferson wrote for the ages Adams admitted, “I have never had time to make my poor productions shorter.” Jefferson was shy, gracious and smooth. As an intellectual, Jefferson was a water-strider, skimming over every subject Adams bored into history. Although both men deplored slavery, Jefferson owned slaves all his life, while Adams never owned any. Adams, the son of a farmer/shoemaker, thrust himself into the Massachusetts elite by unremitting application as a lawyer and activist. Jefferson was a Virginia aristocrat whose first election to the colonial legislature at age 26 was an easy trot to home plate from third base. There was ample potential for division in this romance. Way university professor at Brown, who has been writing history as long as Jefferson and Adams knew each other, examines their relationship in “Friends Divided.” Their friendship lasted (with interruptions) for 51 years, from their meeting in 1775 in the Continental Congress to their deaths on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him,” Adams said when he was an old man. Thomas Jefferson, describing John Adams in a letter, wrote, “He is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if you ever become acquainted with him.” The feeling was mutual. FRIENDS DIVIDED John Adams and Thomas Jefferson By Gordon S.