“Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here. They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.”

— Thomas Jefferson, 1797

THOMAS JEFFERSON and John Adams started out as friends. If they hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t be celebrating 228 years of independence today.

Mr. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. But it was Mr. Adams’ idea that he do so. Or at least, Adams would remember it that way. In later years, the Sage of Monticello would recall that he was the unanimous choice of the committee of five appointed to the task by Congress. But Adams would recall the Virginian offering him the honor, which he refused for a number of reasons, including the fact that “You can write ten times better than I can.”

Between them lies much of the credit for the radical move to split from the Mother Country. It was Adams who argued the cause most strenuously before the Congress, while Jefferson, who detested confrontation, sat silent. Then Jefferson, with what Adams called “his peculiar felicity of expression,” set out the arguments for the ages.

They were even alike in their lack of excitement on the day we now commemorate. For Adams, the vote for independence on July 2 “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with ... bonfires and illuminations.” Neither took note two days later, when Congress reaffirmed the vote.

“Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776,” wrote David McCullough in John Adams. “Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer.”

The friendship between the Southern aristocrat and the plainspoken Yankee would continue through the Revolutionary years, but by 1797, when Adams became our second president, they were being driven apart by the rise of a thing that both had despised and feared: partisanship.

To Jefferson, party allegiance was “the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” But he eventually accepted that he was the natural leader of the new Republican Party, and acted the part — although from behind the scenes.

Adams never lost his disdain of party. But then, no one in the young republic ever suffered more than he from that scourge.

Republican essayist James Callendar described reluctant Federalist Adams as a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite” and “one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” He was “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

It was for the likes of Mr. Callendar that the execrable Alien and Sedition Acts were propagated during Adams’ presidency.

But the Federalists were hardly kinder to Jefferson. In 1800, as Mr. McCullough describes it, the Republican candidate “was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man.... The old smear of cowardice during his time as governor of Virginia was revived.” He was accused of atheism: “In New England word went out that family Bibles would have to be hidden away for safekeeping, were he elected.” Then there were the stories about Sally Hemings.

Does this not sound familiar? Is John Kerry not the darling of the French? Is George Bush not the National Guard coward? Week before last, Al Gore accused Mr. Bush of propagating the “big flamboyant lie” about al Qaeda ties in order to take “for himself the power to make war on his whim.” The Bush campaign posted an ad that calls the Democrats the “coalition of the wild-eyed,” interspersing clips of Hitler in full rant with video snippets of Mr. Gore, Howard Dean and filmmaker Michael Moore berating the president. (The Hitler clips, incidentally, were first used on the anti-Bush Web site MoveOn.org.)

For their part, Jefferson and Adams didn’t speak for years. But in retirement, they gradually patched it up. In the course of a remarkable series of 158 letters over 14 years, they rebuilt their friendship on a foundation of their shared experience and values.

They still sparred over their differences, and ironies were much on display. Jefferson, the dreamy philosopher, lectured the hardheaded New Englander on political realities. Parties, Jefferson now believed, were inevitable. “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time,” he wrote. “And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history.” But as historian Joseph J. Ellis noted, “However anachronistic it might seem to Jefferson, he, John Adams, would go to his grave defying party politics.”

More ominously, their contrasting views of slavery and the relationship between states and the federal government foreshadowed the split of 1860.

But what they had in common united them. After complaining of “crippled wrists and fingers,” the aging Jefferson proclaimed that “while writing to you, I lose the sense of these things, in the recollection of ancient times, when youth and health made happiness out of everything.” Adams agreed. “I look back with rapture to those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers,” he wrote. “While I breathe I shall be your friend.”

The last breaths for both men came on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the event that most united them. As he lay dying, Adams expressed his vain hope that Jefferson would survive him, not knowing his friend had preceded him in death by mere hours.

If only we could enjoy today the spirit of their reconciliation, instead of descending more deeply into the madness of faction that had once torn them apart.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.