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Property of a New York Collector
Jefferson, ThomasAutograph letter signed ("Th: Jefferson") as third President, to his son-in-law John W. Eppes, commiserating on the death of Eppes's wife (and Jefferson's daughter) and anticipating his famous reconciliation with John Adams
2 pages (252 x 182 mm) written recto and verso on a sheet of wove paper, Washington D.C., 4 June 1804; worn and repaired at folds affecting a couple of letters of text, some light staining.
"I have never withdrawn my esteem": an important and affecting letter, written by Jefferson shortly after the death of his daughter Maria, addressing his ruptured friendship with Abigail and John Adams
"I inclose you a letter I recieved lately from mrs Adams [not present]. the sentiments expressed in it are sincere. her attachment was constant. although all of them point to another object directly, yet the expressing them to me is a proof that our friendship is unbroken on her part. it has been a strong one, and has gone through trying circumstances on both sides. yet I retain it strongly both for herself and mr Adams. he & myself have gone through so many scenes together that all his qualities have been proved to me, and I know him to possess so many good ones, as that I have never withdrawn my esteem, and I am happy that this letter gives me an opportunity of expressing it to both of them. I shall do it with a frank declaration that one act of his life, & never but one, gave me personal displeasure, his midnight appointments. if respect for him will not permit me to ascribe that altogether to the influence of others, it will leave something for friendship to forgive. if Patsy [Jefferson's other daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph] is with you, communicate the letter to her, and be so good as to re-inclose it to me. "
The "midnight appointments" to which Jefferson refers, were John Adams’s appointments of several dozen judgeships in his last hours of his presidency. When Jefferson succeeded to the White House he and his secretary of state, James Madison, refused to honor these appointments, which they claimed had not been properly filed. These included William Marbury's appointment as Justice of the Peace for the District of Columbia. Marbury then sued Madison in the Supreme Court, asking that it issue a writ of mandamus to force the Jefferson administration to honor Adams's appointments. In the celebrated case that resulted, Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall also an Adams appointee and an inveterate enemy of Jefferson, invoked the doctrine of judicial review to uphold the legitimacy of Adams's commissions. Jefferson felt that Adams had spitefully named Federalists to these positions, where they could only be removed by impeachment, when he should have allowed them to remain vacant until he assumed office and could fill the openings with candidates loyal to his Democratic-Republican party.
Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, had died nineteen years before he became president. His two daughters who survived to adulthood, Maria Eppes and Martha Randolph, each married to a talented Virginia politician, shared hostess duties at the White House. Maria, however, died at twenty-five on 17 April 1804, two months after giving birth to a namesake daughter, leaving behind a grieving husband and a devastated father. In the present letter Jefferson counsels his son-in-law on the upbringing his now motherless granddaughter and her three-year-old brother, Francis, while assuring Eppes that he will remain part of the president's family. "we consented to consign little Maria to the entreaties of mrs Eppes until August when she promised to bring her back herself. … while I live both the children will be to me the dearest of all pledges; and I shall consider it as increasing our misfortune should we have the less of your society. it will in no wise change my views at Pantops, and should considerations, which ought not to be opposed by me in the actual state of things, induce you to change the purpose of your residence at Pantops, I shall still do there what I had always proposed to you; expecting it will some day become the residence of Francis." Pantops had been Jefferson’s dowry to the couple on their wedding day in 1797.
In 1787, the eight-year-old Maria made an indelible impression when she spent several weeks with the Adams family in London while travelling to Paris to join her father and older sister. Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson that she had "never felt so attached to a child in my Life on so short an acquaintance," assuring him that "the pleasure she has given me is an ample compensation for any little services I have been able to render her." John Adams for his part, confided to Jefferson, "I am extreamly sorry … that we are obliged to part with her so soon. In my Life I never saw a more charming Child."
So when Mrs. Adams learned of Maria's death, she broke an epistolary silence of almost three years to write, 20 May 1804, the letter that Jefferson included with his own letter to Eppes (and which Eppes returned to him in his 14 June response). "Had you been no other than the private inhabitant of Montecello, I should e’er this time have addrest you, with that sympathy, which a recent event has awakend in my Bosom. but reasons of various kinds withheld my pen, untill the powerfull feelings of my heart, have burst through the restraint, and called upon me to shed the tear of sorrow over the departed remains, of your beloved and deserving Daughter, an event which I most sincerely mourn. The attachment which I formed for her, when you committed her to my care; upon her arrival in a foreign Land: has remained with me to this hour. … the tender scene of her seperation from me, rose to my recollection, when she clung arround my neck and wet my Bosom with her tears—saying, 'o! now I have learnt to Love you, why will they tear me from you[.]'"
Jefferson may have taken Abigail's warm condolence as "a proof that our friendship is unbroken on her part," as he wrote to Eppes, but he should have noted that she closed her letter as one "who once took pleasure in Subscribing Herself your Friend." He answered her on 13 June, thanking her for her kind words—and her earlier kind acts—and regretting "that circumstances should have arisen which have seemed to draw a line of separation between us." But he also elaborated on his charge that her husband's "last appointments to office [were] personally unkind." 
This Mrs. Adams would not brook and she sent a withering response, 1 July, detailing her grievances against Jefferson, particularly his pardon of the pamphleteer James T. Callender, who had been prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Act by the Adams administration. She also alluded to the removal of John Quincy Adams as a bankruptcy commissioner as "personally unkind" on Jefferson's part. The correspondence continued for another four letters before being terminated by Adams in October. Their disagreements, rooted in the party factionalism of the 1790s and the election of 1800, were still irreconcilable. 
"When Jefferson retired from the presidency in 1809, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration that Adams and Jefferson worked to create, took it upon himself to renew their suspended friendship. He had no success until 1811, when one of Jefferson's neighbors [Edward Coles] visited Adams in Massachusetts. The neighbor returned to Virginia with the report that he had heard Adams say, 'I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.' In response to these words, Jefferson wrote Dr. Rush: 'this is enough for me. I only needed this knolege to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.' He asked Rush to persuade Adams to renew their correspondence. A letter from Adams was forthcoming, and they continued to write until their deaths" ("John Adams" in Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/).
In 1813, Mrs. Adams, who had closed her own correspondence with Jefferson nine years earlier, charmingly reopened it in a postscript appended to a letter from John to Jefferson of 15 July: "I have been looking for some time for a space in my good Husbands Letters to add the regards, of an old Friend, which are Still cherished and perserved through all the changes and vissitudes which have taken place since we first became acquainted, and will I trust remain as long as A Adams."
REFERENCE:The Papers of Thomas Jefferson ed. McClure, 43:534–535, 458–459 (for Abigail Adams's letter of 20 May 1804); cf. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, 1:265–282, 2:283–289
PROVENANCE:Christie's New York, 19 June 2007, lot 263 (undesignated consignor)