Ta hundred years agoOn July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours. Today, this is usually remembered, when remembered at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were surprised that the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence – Jefferson its author, Adams its chief advocate – died on the same day, and that this day was the Fourth of July, and that this Fourth of July was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. “There is something very strange in it,” said Hezekiah Niles Niles Weekly Notebook wrote, “that we do not know how to reconcile that fact with the ordinary doctrine of chance.” A famous mathematician calculated the odds to be one in 1.2 billion.
The events of that day were so remarkable that many Americans took them as a sign of God’s approval. “A very fortunate coincidence,” Secretary of War James Barbour said, “puts a new stamp on the hope, that the success of these Nations is under the sole protection of a benevolent Providence.”
Of all the ideas that have defined America—the melting pot, the American dream, American individualism—none has been more enduring than the belief that the nation was chosen by God. Jefferson and Adams seemed to confirm this with their deaths. But in life, they disagreed on this issue: Although Jefferson came to agree with the possibility that Americans were favored by God, Adams insisted that they were not.
This year, as the country celebrates the document that Adams and Jefferson helped create, America’s privilege is still managed in the highest reaches of government. But it is the skeptical Adams, not the sunny Jefferson, whose warning and vision speak directly to the state of America in 2026.
The famous early iteration of American privilege stems from John Winthrop’s sermon to his fellow Puritans in 1630, shortly before he sailed across the Atlantic. Borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, Winthrop spoke of a “city upon a hill” that they would build when they arrived in Massachusetts. However, Winthrop made it clear that God’s election placed upon the Puritans a unique burden of justice and mercy: Failure to live up to their covenant guaranteed God’s wrath.
A few narrow escapes and unexpected victories during the Revolutionary War—the midnight retreat from Brooklyn, the Hail Mary attack on Trenton—seemed to prove divine favor for the Continental Army. When the war ended, Congress accepted “many symbolic acts of providence in favor of the American cause” by placing the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. (It remains today on the back of the $1 bill.)
In 1776, the Founders based American independence on the idea that the United States would be a new kind of nation with a new form of government, deriving its authority not from monarchy and force but from the clear laws of “Nature’s God.” There was a problem with this claim from the start: A nation that jeopardized its legitimacy to reconcile itself to Nature’s God also allowed human slavery.
Five years after writing the Declaration, Jefferson came as close as he could to admitting that slavery invoked divine vengeance. “Truly I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever,” he wrote.
Despite Jefferson’s concerns about slavery—and some unorthodox religious beliefs—he ultimately endorsed the proposition that America was the “chosen nation,” as he said in 1801 during his first inaugural address. He believed that “excessive preparation” led the nation to benevolence. Adams flatly rejected this. “We can boast that We are the chosen people,” he said he wrote. “We may even thank God that we are not like other people, but after all it would be flattering, and deception, self-deception of the Pharisee.”
This distinction helps to explain the differences between each person’s politics. Jefferson’s sincere attitude complemented his belief that the American people should be self-governing with confidence, unfettered by government. Again, Adams disagreed. The government must be strong and well structured, he insisted, with balance between the different branches to withstand the stupidity and extravagance that the Americans showed no less than anyone else. The notion that they are special would make Americans ignore the need to strengthen their government against tyranny.
A republic, in Adams’ definition, is a “Kingdom of Law, and not of men.” He preferred a strong executive, but on the condition that his authority be checked by other centers of power, namely an independent judiciary and a parliament capable of opposing a tyrannical president. He feared a power-hungry oligarchy, but he had none of Jefferson’s faith in the wisdom of the “common people.” Indeed, he saw early on how an unruly people could try to protect themselves from a self-serving elite. “Normal people keep looking for a protector,” Adams warned. “They join together by their feelings, more than their reflections, in increasing his strength, because the more he has power, and the less the gentlemen have, the safer they are.” That power, he believed, would lead to tyranny.
Eeven as Jefferson continued owning hundreds of slaves, he claimed to hope and expect that slavery would end. Instead, the institution grew, expanding into the territory Jefferson acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The question of whether the new states will be slave or free threatens to tear the nation apart. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was at best short-lived. Only a month after the law was passed, Jefferson could hear the death of the union. He called “a fire alarm at night.”
To a grieving nation, the timed deaths of Adams and Jefferson in 1826 came as a relief, a thumbs up from the hand of God. James Monroe’s death five years later—also on July 4—confirmed that.
Such miracles did not cause the next bad era—Andrew Jackson and the cotton gin had a lot to do with it—but they certainly milked it. Slave owners insisted that human slavery fulfilled God’s will. “Slavery is said to be an evil,” James Henry Hammond, representative of South Carolina, said in 1836. “On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all blessings, which kind providence has bestowed upon our glorious land.”
In the 1840s, James K. Polk turned American elections into policy. His administration fulfilled – in the words of an approving journalist – the “definite design of the Conservancy” that the country owns all the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific, leading to the massive expropriation of Native Americans.
Civil war interrupted the evil spirit of God-sanctioned conquest, but only for a short time. Freed from the original sin of slavery, America prospered and rejoiced for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Under the strict rule of President Woodrow Wilson, who maintained the hope that “we are elected, and elected openly,” the nation sought to export its values of democracy and human rights to other countries.
Over time, the selection evolved into a more secular and less meaningful, but nevertheless double-edged, version of American unity, called exceptionalism. Sometimes this was done for good, such as the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps, and sometimes for disease, as in a series of military coups designed to end godless Communism.
Although he himself was opposed to Communism, Ronald Reagan displayed a more positive version of bigotry in his last speech as president, on January 11, 1989, when he referred to the city of Winthrop on the Hill. “I’ve talked about the shining city my entire political life,” Reagan said. “In my mind it was a long, proud city built on rocks stronger than the sea, blown by the wind, blessed by God, and full of people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”
Now Donald Trump is offering a new variation on the theme, and this time, reconciliation and peace do not seem to be imminent. After a would-be assassin shot Trump in the ear in 2024, he began to tell himself that he was saved by God. Taking office in his second term, Trump immediately dismissed the sustenance-fueled idea of ”manifest destiny” as a pretext for making Canada the 51st state, among other expansion projects. He has threatened Armageddon in Iran—in the name of God—and published pictures of himself as Jesus. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for his part, invoked divine guidance to glorify the killing of Iranians, an idea so unchristian that it prompted an open rebuke from the pope.
Today, Americans will see the Trump administration covering itself with flags and adorning itself with gold. In speeches praising our nation and our leader, we will be told that we (some of us, anyway) have been chosen by God. We would do well to heed Adams’ admonition. “We are not the chosen People, that I know of,” he said he wrote in a letter in 1812. “We must and We will go in the Way of all the Earth.”
“Instead of more educated people,” Adams he warned in another letter, “I fear we Americans will soon behave like the most ignorant people under Heaven.”
This essay is adapted from Jim Rasenberger’s new book, Perfect Coincidence: The Strange Friendship and Surprising Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson..
*Sources: GraphicaArtis / Getty; Culture Club / Getty; MPI/Getty; Getty.
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