John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could be considered âthe odd couple of the American Revolution.â They first met as delegates to the Continental Congress in 1775; the following year, Adams would personally select Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. Profoundly different in physical appearance and demeanorâJefferson was tall, elegant and philosophical, while Adams was short, stout and prone to vivid outbursts of emotionâthe two men nevertheless became close friends.
The friendship grew stronger in the 1780s, when Adams and Jefferson served diplomatic missions to Europe. While living in England and France, both Adams and his wife, Abigail, consoled Jefferson after the loss of his wife, Martha, and grew to consider him almost a part of the family.
Things got more complicated, however, when both men returned to the United States, and the heated debate over the new nationâs government. As secretary of state in George Washingtonâs cabinet, Jefferson was driven by a fear of a powerful central authority and gravitated toward the new Republican Party. Adams, who as vice president was largely marginalized in Washingtonâs administration, favored a strong central government to ensure the new nationâs survival, and aligned himself with the Federalist Party.
Jeffersonâs enduring support for the French Revolutionâeven after the execution of King Louis XVI and the dawn of the Reign of Terrorâfurther soured his friendship with Adams. His anger over Washingtonâs policy of neutrality led Jefferson to resign from the cabinet at the end of 1793 and withdraw to Monticello, his Virginia estate. It was during this period, according to Mark Silk, that Adams took the opportunity to gossip about his former friend in letters to his sons Charles and John Quincy.
Silk, a professor of religion and director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, writes in Smithsonian about two letters written by Adams in January 1794, soon after Jeffersonâs return to Monticello. In the first, addressed to Charles, Adams wrote of Jeffersonâs supposed retirement from public life, saying that when Washington died or resigned, his former friend expected to be âinvited from his conversations with Egeria in the Grovesâ to take control of the government. In a similar reference the following day, he wrote to John Quincy of Jefferson being âsummoned from the familiar society of Egeriaâ to take the reins of power.
At the time, Silk argues, âconversationâ was a euphemism for sexual intercourse, while âfamiliarâ was a synonym for âintimate.â He believes the references to Egeria were Adamsâ sly way of referring to Sally Hemings, the slave woman whose longstanding relationship with Jefferson produced (according to DNA evidence) at least one and probably six children between 1790 and 1808. In the early mythology of early Roman history (as chronicled by Livy and Plutarch), Egeria was a divine nymph or goddess who became the lover of Numa, a man chosen by Roman senators as their king after the death of Romulus, Romeâs founder.
Numa was a widower (like Jefferson) and the more philosophical and intellectual successor to a military hero. Silk believes the classical reference, though overlooked by later historians and biographers, would have been clear at the time. A French writer had published a popular novel about Numa in 1786âa year before Hemings, a half-sister of Jeffersonâs late wife, accompanied Jeffersonâs younger daughter, Mary, to Paris, where Jefferson was serving as a minister. Adams would certainly have known about the young, attractive slave girl in Jeffersonâs household, as she and Mary stayed with the Adamses in London after their transatlantic voyage. If Silkâs theory is correct, it would suggest that the rumors of Jeffersonâs liaison with Hemings would have been circulatingâat least among the political eliteâby 1794, long before they were first reported in the press.
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