Henry Adams

Henry Adams

Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian, journalist and novelist. The son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr. and Abigail Brooks Adams, he was a member of the Adams political family.

if (window.showTocToggle)

Early life

Adams was born in Boston into one of the country's most prominent families (both his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been Presidents of the United States). After his graduation from Harvard in 1858, he embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, during which he also attended lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin.

Civil War years

Adams returned home in the midst of the heated presidential election of 1860, and which was also his father Charles Francis Adams, Sr.'s bid for reelection to the US House of Representatives.^[1] He tried his hand again at law, taking employment with Judge Horace Gray's Boston firm, but this was short-lived. With his father's victory in November, Charles Francis asked Henry to be his private secretary, a familial role between father and son going back to John and John Quincy. It was a sign that Charles Francis had chosen Henry as the political scion of the Adams family. But Henry himself shouldered the responsibility reluctantly and with much self-doubt. "[I] had little to do," he reflected later, "and knew not how to do it rightly."^[2] During this time, Henry secured outside (but anonymous) employment as the Washington Correspondent for Charles Hale's Boston Advertiser.

On March 19, 1861, Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams, Sr. United States Minister (ambassador) to the United Kingdom, and Henry Adams continued to accompany him as his private secretary. Henry again sought outlet for his literary pursuits, taking employment (again anonymously) as the London correspondent for the New York Times. The two Adamses were kept very busy, monitoring Confederate diplomatic intrigues and the construction of Confederate commerce raiders by British shipyards (see Alabama Claims). Henry's main concerns, as London correspondent, lay in attempting to persuade the American audience to maintain patience with the British. As his social life expanded in Britain, Adams befriended many noted men including Charles Lyell, Francis T. Palgrave, Richard Monckton Milnes, James Milnes Gaskell, and Charles Milnes Gaskell.

It was also in Britain that Henry read and was taken with the works of John Stuart Mill. For Adams, Mill showed (in Consideration on Representative Government) the necessity of an enlightened, moral, and intelligent elite to provide leadership to a government elected by the masses and subject to demagoguery, ignorance, and corruption. Henry wrote to his brother Charles that Mill demonstrated to him that "democracy is still capable of rewarding a conscientious servant."^[3] His years in London showed him that as a correspondant and journalist he could best provide America with that knowledgeable and conscientious leadership.

Journalist and reformer

In 1868, Henry Adams returned to the United States and settled down in Washington, D.C., where he started working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalistic pieces.

In 1870 Adams was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877 at 39. That year he returned to Washington, where he continued working as a historian. In the 1880s Adams also wrote two novels. Democracy was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular. (Only after Adams's death did his publisher reveal Adams's authorship.) His other novel, published under the nom de plume of Frances Snow Compton, was Esther (1884).

Adams was a member of an exclusive club, a group of friends called the "Five of Hearts" which consisted of Henry, his wife Clover, mountaineer Clarence King, John Hay (assistant to Lincoln and later Secretary of State), and Hay's wife Clara.

On December 6, 1885, Marian (Clover) Hooper - Adams, his wife, committed suicide. Following her death Adams took up a restless life as a globetrotter, traveling extensively, spending summers in Paris and winters in Washington, where he erected an elaborate memorial at her grave site. In 1907 he published his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, in a small private edition for selected friends. The work concerned the birth of forces Adams saw as replacing Christianity. For Adams, the Virgin Mary had shaped the old world, as the dynamo represented the new. The book has been cited recently by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute as the most important non-fiction work of the 20th century. It was only following Adams's death that it was made available to the general public, in an edition issued by the Massachusetts Historical Society. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

In 1912 Adams suffered a disabling stroke; in 1918 he died at his home in Washington.

As a historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. His magnum opus is The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889–1891). It is particularly notable for its account of the diplomatic relations of the United States during this period, and for its essential impartiality. Garry Wills's book Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005) examines Adams's History, and proclaims it a neglected masterpiece.

Adams also published Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), John Randolph (1882), and Historical Essays (1891), besides editing The Writings of Albert Gallatin (3 volumes, 1879) and, in collaboration with Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and J. L. Laughlin, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876).

Henry Adams's brothers are also notable:

• His elder brother, John Quincy Adams (1833–1894), a graduate of Harvard (1853), practiced law, and was a Democratic member for several terms of the Massachusetts general court. In 1872 he was nominated for vice-president by the Democratic faction that refused to support Horace Greeley.

• Another brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835– 1915), graduated at Harvard in 1856, and served on the Union side in the Civil War, receiving in 1865 the brevet of brigadier-general in the regular army. He was president of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1884 to 1890, having previously become widely known as an authority on the management of railways. Among his writings are Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (1878).

• Another brother, Brooks Adams (1848–1927), practiced law. His writings include The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), America's Economic Supremacy (1900), and The New Empire (1902).

See also

• Maxwell's demon

Notes

1. ^ Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), chapters 7–15, and Contosta, ch. 2.
2. ^ The Education of Henry Adams, p. 101.
3. ^ Henry Adams quoted in David R. Contosta, p. 33.

References

• Adams, Henry B. Letters. Edited by W. C. Ford. 2 vols. 1930–38
• Adams, James Truslow. Henry Adams (1933, reprint 1970)
• Adams, Marian Hooper. The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883. Edited by W. Thoron. (1936)
• Brookhiser, Richard. America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735–1918. (2002).
• Cater, H. D., ed. Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters. (1947)
• Chalfant, E. Better in Darkness. (1994)
• Contosta, David R. Henry Adams and the American Experiment. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980.

ISBN 0-316-15400-8

• Dusinberre, W. Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure. (1980)
• Samuels, E. The Young Henry Adams. (1948)
• Samuels, E. Henry Adams: The Middle Years. (1958)
• Samuels, E. Henry Adams: The Major Phase. (1964)
• Wills, Garry. Henry Adams and the Making of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.

ISBN 0-618-13430-1