Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has received, with great sensibility, the communication of the 11th inst. made by you, on behalf of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, upon the occasion of the decease of our late venerable associate, John Adams. The Fellows of the Academy gratefully acknowledge the humane attention of the Philosophical Society, in their expressions of sympathy with the Academy, on the removal of one, who had sustained the most honorable relations to his Country, not less as a Scholar, than as a Patriot and Statesman; and of whom the American Academy was for many years permitted to boast, as its presiding officer.—From the various testimonies of respect paid to his memory, the Fellows of the Academy derive the pleasing assurance, that his loss is felt not less abroad than at home, and from no quarter could a more valuable tribute be received to the services and character of our departed President, than from the learned and distinguished body, which you so worthily represent.

In returning you these ackowledgements of the American Academy, I have it in charge to tender to you its sincere and profound sympathy, in the emotions of astonishment and sorrow, with which the Philosophical Society must be affected, at the dispensation of Providence, by which, on the same day that removed our late venerable President, an associate of your body; the Philosophical Society was, in like afflicting manner, deprived of the illustrious Thomas Jefferson, long the President of your institution, and an associate of ours.—We regard it as not the least afflicting affecting of the coincidences, which have forever signalized in History the Day of their United departure, that it should have deprived each of these Institutions respectively of an honored member and Head. The Academy is anxious to convey to the Philosophical Society the assurance of its respect for the Memory of this distinguished ornament of his Country, their late President; and cannot but deem a it a source of consolation and just pride to the two Institutions, as to the literary public of the United States, that the illustrious men whom we deplore, and whose political services had given them successively the first place in the Civil Administration of the Country, should also have been called, by universal acknowledgement of merit, to the head of its two most ancient and respectable Academic Institutions.—