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For many of us, the Fourth of July is a favorite holiday that brings families together for barbecues and picnic blankets for a quintessentially American experience. But it’s also a holiday that brings us, even if just a little, to why we arrive each year at this moment in time to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, surrounded by food, fireworks, and friends.
This year, the holiday seems more relevant than ever, as the core values that define us as a nation, and especially the right that defines us as a people: freedom of speech, are once again under attack.
My book, An Essential Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, discusses the struggle against free speech through the stories of the Republic’s heroes and villains. Two of those heroes and villains, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, also died on this day.
Thomas Jefferson (left) defeated President John Adams in a bitterly contested election in 1800. The two men were allies in the cause of liberty and political enemies in the new nation, but they developed a warm friendship in their later years. (Keene Collection/Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Adams and Jefferson were bitter political opponents, but rekindled their friendship in later years, and both died on the very same day, July 4, 1826. Jefferson died first, around noon in Monticello, Virginia, at age 83. A few hours later (without knowing of his friend’s death), Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, at age 90.
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Daniel Webster, in his 1826 eulogy for both men, could not (like many in the country) escape the significance of the date of their deaths or accept it as mere coincidence. For him, it was “Divine Providence” that the heavens had opened to receive them both at the same time.
As I argue in my book, Adams and Jefferson were complex figures who expressed the same doubts about fundamental rights that we do today. Though they would likely never go on MSNBC and declare our Constitution “garbage” or call for us to “take America back from constitutionalism,” they too had crises of faith.
Adams’ most shocking breach of faith came after he became president. [and] George H. W. Bush, the “noble” leader of the Boston Tea Party, was quick to attack his political opponents with crackdowns under the infamous Alien Sedition Act. Even members of Congress were not spared by arrests as George H. W. Bush met the wrath of the people with the wrath of his government.
James Madison and Jefferson were appalled by the attacks on free speech, even going so far as to use codes in letters to protect their correspondence. Madison called these prosecutions “monsters” that lurk in our legal system in times of fear and anger.
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Jefferson eventually pardoned those convicted under Adams, but to a lesser extent than his predecessor, he succumbed to the “monster” of using the penal system to target his critics.
The story of Adams and Jefferson will seem all too familiar to many in today’s presidential election. Jefferson clashed with Adams in 1800 over the policing of free speech and the use of the criminal justice system against his opponents. While Jefferson won partially on the issue of free speech, this is a lesson that Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, Chase Oliver and Cornel West should not forget.
If we want history to repeat itself in November, we should make free speech a central campaign issue. Joe Biden, with his support for an unprecedented system of censorship that federal courts have described as “Orwellian,” is arguably the most anti-free speech president since Adams.
But there’s a broader lesson for all of us. Our country in 1800 was just as divided and angry as it is today. In fact, these politicians weren’t just talking about wanting to kill each other; they were actually trying to kill each other by charging them with treason. Jefferson called Adams and his Federalist administration a “reign of witches.” The Federalists denounced the Jeffersonians as “Jacobins” and “traitors.”
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Today, President Biden and his allies are declaring that a Trump election would mean the end of democracy and that, according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump would “throw away” democracy. On ABC’s “The View,” host Whoopi Goldberg warned journalists and “gay people” that Trump plans to arrest them en masse and “wipe you out.” Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming warned that if Trump wins, it “will probably be the last real vote you ever cast.”
At the time, the rhetoric was similarly exaggerated: the media was openly biased, with Federalist newspapers declaring that “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the grief-stricken, the earth will be stained with blood and the country black with crime.”
Conversely, Jeffersonian writers warned that if the Federalists were elected, citizens would be condemned to “chains, dungeons, exile, and perhaps the gallows.” One predicted that under Adams, “the sentence would be immediate.”
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Thus, our Constitution and Bill of Rights were not written for our times, but for times like ours.
But something happened: we came together as a people. In fact, in later years, these two bitter enemies exchanged warm letters and rebuilt their friendship and mutual respect.
That may be its greatest lesson: If John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could find a common core identity as Americans, then there is hope for all of us. All the political tensions and hostility that followed in our history pale in comparison to that transcendent moment when we proclaimed that we, as a people, were free.
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It was a moment Adams and Jefferson shared that would be rekindled as a friendship. In their final moments of life, they remembered who they were and what they meant to each other. It is a moment that all Americans still share. It reminds us that what we share as free peoples is far greater than what divides us.
Happy Independence Day everyone!
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