It Is a Great Day. It Is a Good Day.

I want to imagine that it is real. That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the only two signers of the Declaration of Independence to become president…they both died on the Fourth of July 50 years after the signing. The history books tell me that it is real. Accounts from those present, preserved in a variety of different places – delivered to us by the McCulloughs, Diggins and Ferlings of the world tell is it is so.

The story goes that Adams who was in and out of consciousness since the previous day was awakened and told it was the Fourth, to which he answered: “It is a great day. It is a good day.”

His son, John Quincy (a great man and mind in his own right) reflected on his father and, to some degree his other mentor (Jefferson) dying on the same day. He said that both giants of the American Revolution dying on the same day, and that the day was THAT day was “a visible and palpable manifestation of Divine favor.”

I don’t know about any of that. I love America, but think it is at least disingenuous if not out and out dangerous to think of this place as a product of divine intervention in human history. But I can forgive John Quincy and the nation for making myths regarding the deaths of these two great men.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson represented very different visions and hopes for America. They fought the revolution and later they fought each other. The election of 1800 saw partisanship (maybe) at it’s lowest in American history (I love you KO, but you are so wrong when you say the left and the right have never been further apart). Both men, dying so close together probably left the nation feel the same way John Quincy felt…

orphaned.