Jefferson and the 4th of July

The Catholic Thing, 3 July 2026

The deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the 5th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence elevated the 4th of July from a secular holiday into a sacred national memorial

In the early days of July 1826, Thomas Jefferson “marshalled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July.” So writes Jon Meacham in his marvelous biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. 

Jefferson did, repeatedly asking in his final agony in the evening hours of July 3: “This is the Fourth?” He finally heard the twelve chimes of midnight on his bedroom clock; he lingered, drifting out of consciousness, but knowing it was the Fourth. He died at ten minutes before one o’clock that afternoon. 

Five hours after the third president died at Monticello, the second president, John Adams, died in Quincy, Massachusetts. His famous final words were false: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” 

Both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, two hundred years ago. (The fifth president, James Monroe, would die on the Fourth in 1831.) It’s the great anniversarial coincidence of the Founding Fathers. The reaction to the twin presidential deaths on the fiftieth anniversary of the first Fourth was that Providence was at work, not unlike how Catholics consider miracles in the causes of saints. 

John Quincy Adams, president at the time of his father’s death, styled the coincidental deaths “visible and palpable marks of Divine Favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.”

The junior President Adams issued an executive order in memory of the senior Adams and Jefferson:

A coincidence of circumstances so wonderful gives confidence to the belief that the patriotic efforts of these illustrious men were Heaven directed, and furnishes a new seal to the hope that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence.

In early August 1826, with President Adams present, Daniel Webster was more fulsome at Faneuil Hall in Boston:

Adams and Jefferson are no more. On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and re-echoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits.

Webster continued:

If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of the Divine Providence. . .[that] the heavens should open to receive them both at once. As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care?

The Declaration of Independence, signed fifty years before Adams and Jefferson died, professed a “firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence.” Now, it seemed to their contemporaries that Providence had vouchsafed a final protection, calling Jefferson and Adams home on the anniversary of their great work.

Meacham wrote that Webster “painted an indelible portrait of Jefferson’s and Adams’s ascent to the American pantheon.”

Catholics do not have a pantheon, but there are the saints. Catholic saint-making – or saint-recognizing, strictly speaking – has two broad parts. First there is the human judgment, after a painstaking examination, that the candidate lived a holy life, culminating in a declaration of “heroic virtues.” The second is the celestial confirmation, the requirement of a miracle, understood to be divine evidence, as it were, that the candidate is in heaven, interceding before God.  

The Fourth in 1826 was something like a miracle for the secular canonization of the nation. What the founding generation of Americans knew by experience – and aspiration – had apparently been confirmed by Providence. They knew the heroic virtue of the young republic; now a divine benediction had been granted.

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