Jim Rasenberger: A Perfect Coincidence — The Deaths of Adams and Jefferson
Jim Rasenberger explores the extraordinary friendship and simultaneous July 4 deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in conversation with Jonathan Horn.
Why we picked this
July 4, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of independence, and both men died within hours of each other — remains one of the most statistically improbable and symbolically loaded coincidences in American history. Rasenberger takes it seriously rather than sentimentally.
On July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died — Adams in Massachusetts, Jefferson in Virginia, within hours of each other. The two men had been friends, then bitter enemies, then correspondents in an extraordinary late-life reconciliation that produced one of the most intellectually rich exchanges in American epistolary history. Their simultaneous deaths on the republic’s golden anniversary was noticed immediately by contemporaries, who understood it as freighted with meaning.
Jim Rasenberger’s “A Perfect Coincidence” returns to that death and the friendship it closed, treating the coincidence not as folklore but as a genuine historical puzzle and as a window into what the founding generation thought it had created. The book examines both men in their final years — physically diminished, ideologically complicated, each carrying the weight of what the republic had become and what it had failed to do — and the letters they exchanged in that last decade.
Jonathan Horn, a presidential historian and former White House speechwriter, brings a practitioner’s sense of how American political memory works to the conversation. Free at Politics and Prose.