Two hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Today, this is usually recalled, when it’s recalled at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were stunned 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 so strange in it,” Hezekiah Niles of Niles’ Weekly Register wrote, “that we hardly know how to reconcile the fact by the common doctrine of chances.” An eminent mathematician calculated the odds at one in 1.2 billion.
The events of that day were so extraordinary that many Americans took them as a sign of God’s favor. “A coincidence of circumstances so wonderful,” Secretary of War James Barbour said, “furnishes a new seal to the hope, that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence.”
Of all the ideas that have defined the United States—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 by their deaths. But in life, they disagreed on the subject: Whereas Jefferson came to embrace the possibility that Americans were indeed divinely favored, Adams insisted they were not.
This year, as the country celebrates the document that Adams and Jefferson helped create, American providentialism is still being championed in the highest reaches of government. But it is skeptical Adams, not sunny Jefferson, whose warning and vision speak most directly to America’s predicament in 2026.
The most famous early iteration of American providentialism comes from John Winthrop’s sermon to his fellow Puritans in 1630, shortly before they sailed the Atlantic. Borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, Winthrop spoke of the “city upon a hill” they would build when they arrived in Massachusetts. Winthrop made clear, however, that being chosen by God imposed a special burden on the Puritans to exercise justice and mercy: Failure to live up to their side of the bargain guaranteed God’s wrath.
A few narrow escapes and unlikely victories during the Revolutionary War—the midnight retreat from Brooklyn, the Hail Mary attack on Trenton—seemed to certify divine favor for the Continental Army. As the war concluded, Congress acknowledged “the many signal interpositions of providence in favour 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 rested America’s independence on the idea that the United States would be a new kind of nation with a new kind of government, drawing its authority not from monarchy and might but from the self-evident laws of “Nature’s God.” There was a problem with this claim from the start: A nation that staked its legitimacy on alignment with Nature’s God also permitted human bondage.
Five years after writing the Declaration, Jefferson came as close as he ever would to admitting that slavery practically begged for divine retribution. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote.
Despite Jefferson’s apprehensions about slavery—and some unorthodox religious beliefs—he eventually endorsed the proposition that America was “a chosen country,” as he said in 1801 during his first inaugural address. He believed that an “overruling providence” guided the nation with benevolence. Adams flatly rejected this. “We may boast that We are the chosen People,” he wrote. “We may even thank God that We are not like other Men. But after all it will be but flattery, and the delusion, the Self deceit of the Pharisee.”
This contrast helps explain the divergence between each man’s politics. Jefferson’s sanguine view complemented his conviction that the American people ought to boldly self-govern, unimpeded by the state. Again, Adams disagreed. The government must be strong and well structured, he insisted, carefully balanced among different branches to withstand the stupidity and avarice that Americans exhibited no less than anyone else. The assumption that they were special would make Americans oblivious to the need to fortify their government against tyranny.
A republic, by Adams’s definition, is an “Empire of Laws, and not of men.” He preferred a strong executive, but on the condition that its authority be checked by other centers of power, namely an independent judiciary and a legislature able to stand up to a rash president. He feared a power-hungry oligarchy, but he had none of Jefferson’s confidence in the wisdom of the “common people.” Indeed, he foresaw how an unbridled populace might try to defend itself from a self-serving elite. “The common people are continually looking up for a protector,” Adams warned. “They unite together by their feelings, more than their reflections, in augmenting his power, because the more power he has, and the less the gentlemen have, the safer they are.” That dynamic, he believed, would lead to despotism.
Even as Jefferson continued to own hundreds of slaves, he claimed to hope and expect that slavery would expire. Instead, the institution grew, spreading into territory that Jefferson secured in the Louisiana Purchase. The question of whether new states would be slave or free threatened to fracture the nation. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was at best a short-lived salve. Just one month after the law passed, Jefferson could hear the union’s death knell. He called it “a fire bell in the night.”
For a fretful nation, the providentially timed deaths of Adams and Jefferson in 1826 came as relief, a thumbs-up from the hand of God. The death of James Monroe exactly five years later—also on July 4—affirmed it.
Such miracles did not cause the rapacious age that followed—Andrew Jackson and the cotton gin had a lot to do with that—but they certainly juiced it. Slave owners insisted that human bondage fulfilled God’s will. “Slavery is said to be an evil,” James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina representative, said in 1836. “On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings, which a kind providence has bestowed upon our glorious region.”
In the 1840s, James K. Polk turned America’s chosenness into policy. His administration fulfilled—in the words of an approving journalist—the “manifest design of Providence” that the country take possession of all land between the Atlantic and Pacific, leading to the large-scale dispossession of Native Americans.
The Civil War interrupted the giddy spirit of divinely sanctioned conquest, but only briefly. Liberated from the original sin of slavery, America boomed and gloated through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Under the crusading administration of President Woodrow Wilson, who maintained the hope that “we are chosen, and prominently chosen,” the nation sought to export its values of democracy and human rights to other countries.
Over time, chosenness morphed into a more secular and nuanced, but nonetheless double-edged, version of American singularity, called exceptionalism. Sometimes this was committed to good, such as the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps, and sometimes to ill, as in a series of military blunders meant to quash godless Communism.
Though himself fiercely anti-Communist, Ronald Reagan voiced the most benign version of exceptionalism in his final address as president, on January 11, 1989, when he alluded to Winthrop’s city upon a hill. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan said. “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”
Now Donald Trump offers a new variation on the theme, and this time, harmony and peace don’t seem to be in the offing. After a would-be assassin struck Trump’s ear with a bullet in 2024, he began speaking of himself as saved by God. Taking office in his second term, Trump immediately dusted off the providence-fueled idea of “manifest destiny” as a pretext for making Canada the 51st state, among other expansionist ventures. He has threatened Armageddon in Iran—in the name of Allah—and posted images of himself as Jesus. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for his part, invoked divine providence to glorify the killing of Iranians, an idea so un-Christian that it prompted an apparent rebuke from the pope.
Today, Americans will see the Trump administration drape itself in flags and gild itself in gold. In speeches acclaiming our nation and our leader, we will be told that we (some of us, anyway) are divinely chosen. We’d do well to consider Adams’s admonition. “We are not a chosen People, that I know of,” he wrote in a letter in 1812. “We must and We Shall, go the Way of all the Earth.”
“Instead of the most enlightened people,” Adams warned in another letter, “I fear we Americans shall soon have the character of the silliest people under Heaven.”
This essay has been adapted from Jim Rasenberger’s new book, A Perfect Coincidence: The Extraordinary Friendship and Astonishing Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
*Sources: GraphicaArtis / Getty; Culture Club / Getty; MPI / Getty; Getty.
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