Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon Wood – SIGNED

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day. And it was no ordinary day. It was the Fourth of July, 1826, exactly fifty years from the date the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, or as Daniel Webster referred to it in his eulogy of the two men, “the great day of National Jubilee.”

Jefferson and Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy’s champion, was an aristocratic southern slave owner, while Adams, the overachiever from New England’s rising middling classes was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of Government. They worked closely in the crucible of revolution. But ultimately their profound differences led to a fundamental crisis, both in their friendship and in the nation, as they became figureheads of two entirely new forces, the first American political parties.

Late in life, something remarkable happened – these two men reconciled. What started as a grudging trickle of correspondence became a great flood, and a friendship was rekindled. In their final years they were the last surviving Founding Fathers and cherished their role in helping create the young republic as it approached the half-century mark. Arguably no relationship in America’s history carries as much freight as Adams and Jefferson. Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution, tells their story in Friends Divided, a majestic dual biography of these great men, whose partnership helped birth a nation and whose subsequent falling-out did much to fix its course.