11To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 10 December 1819 (Adams Papers)
I have to acknolege the reciept of your favor of Nov. 23. the banks, bankrupt law, manufactures, Spanish Treaty are nothing. these are occurrences which like waves in a storm will pass under the ship. but the Missouri question is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, & what more, God only knows. from the battle of Bunker’s hill to the treaty of Paris we never had so...
12To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 14 March 1820 (Adams Papers)
A continuation of poor health makes me an irregular correspondent. I am therefore your debtor for the two letters of Jan. 20. & Feb. 21. it was after you left Europe that Dugald Stuart, concerning whom you enquire, and Ld. Dare, second son of the Marquis of Lansdowne came to Paris. they brought me a letter from Ld. Wycombe whom you knew. I became immediately intimate with Stuart, calling...
13To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 15 August 1820 (Adams Papers)
I am a great defaulter, my dear Sir, in our correspondence, but prostrate health rarely permits me to write; and, when it does, matters of business imperiously press their claims. I am getting better however, slowly, swelled legs being now the only serious symptom, and these, I believe, proceed from extreme debility. I can walk but little; but I ride 6. or 8. miles a day without fatigue; &...
14To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 22 January 1821 (Adams Papers)
I was quite rejoiced, dear Sir, to see that you had health & spirits enough to take part in the late convention of your state for revising it’s constitution, and to bear your share in it’s debates and labors. the amendments of which we have as yet heard prove the advance of liberalism in the intervening period; and encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it...
15To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 12 September 1821 (Adams Papers)
I am just returned from my other home, and shall within a week go back to it for the rest of the autumn. I find here your favor of Aug. 20. and was before in arrear for that of May 19. I cannot answer, but join in, your question, of May 19. are we to surrender the pleasing hopes of seeing improvement in the moral and intellectual condition of Man? the events of Naples & Piedmont cast a gloomy...
16To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 1 June 1822 (Adams Papers)
It is very long, my dear Sir, since I have written to you. my dislocated wrist is now become so stiff that I write slowly and with pain, and therefore write as little as I can. yet it is due to mutual friendship to ask once in a while how we do? the papers tell us that Genl. Starke is off at the age of 93. Charles Thomson still lives at about the same age, chearful, slender as a grasshopper,...
17To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 27 June 1822 (Adams Papers)
Your kind letter of the 11th. has given me great satisfaction for altho’ I could not doubt but that the hand of age was pressing heavily on you, as on myself, yet we like to know the particulars and the degree of that pressure. much reflection too has been produced by your suggestion of lending my letter of the 1st. to a printer. I have generally great aversion to the insertion of my letters...
18To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 1 November 1822 (Adams Papers)
I have racked my memory, and ransacked my papers to enable myself to answer the enquiries of your favor of Oct. 15. but to little purpose. my papers furnish me nothing, my memory generalities only. I know that while I was in Europe, & anxious about the fate of our seafaring men, for some of whom, then in captivity in Algiers we were then treating, and all were in like danger, I formed...
19To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 25 February 1823 (Adams Papers)
I recieved in due time your two favors of Dec. 2. & Feb. 10. and have to acknolege for the ladies of my native state their obligations to you for the encomiums which you are so kind as to bestow on them. they certainly claim no advantages over those of their sister states, and are sensible of more favorable circumstances existing with many of them, & happily availed of, which our situation...
20From Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April 1823 (Adams Papers)
The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of “ mon Dieu ! jusque à quand”! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his god . he was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Dæmonism. if ever man worshipped a false god, he did. the being described in...