The story of the friendship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, completely broken in the aftermath of of the bitter presidential election campaign of 1800, has a happy ending. Through the intervention of their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, Adams and Jefferson resumed their correspondence after a decade of silence. Over the next fourteen years (1812-1826), hundreds of letters flowed back and forth between Quincy and Monticello. In Thomas Jefferson's last letter to John Adams written on 25 March 1826, he compares their roles in the Revolution to those of the Argonauts of Greek mythology: "It was the lot of our early years to witness nothing but the dull monotony of Colonial subservicence, and of our riper ones to breast the labors and perils of working out of it."