Henry Adams
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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.
Born in
Boston into one of the country's most prominent families (both his
great-grandfather and his
grandfather had been
Presidents of the United States), Adams, after his graduation from
Harvard in
1858, embarked on a
Grand Tour of
Europe, during which he also attended lectures in
civil law at the
University of Berlin.
Adams returned home in 1860 during both the heated presidential election and his father
Charles Francis Adams, Sr.'s bid for reelection to the US House of Representatives. 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."
[Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 101.] During this time, Henry secured outside (but anonymous) employment as the Washington Correspondent for
Charles Hale's Boston
Advertiser.
On March 19, 1861, Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams, Sr.
United States Minister 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
J. S. 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."
[Henry Adams quoted in David R. Contosta, p. 33.] His years in London showed him that as a correspondant and journalist he could best provide America with that knowledgeable and conscientious leadership.
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, Clarence King (explorer),
John Hay (assistant to A. Lincoln, later Secretary of State), and his wife Clara.
On December 6th
1885 Marian Adams (
Clover), his wife, committed
suicide. Upon her death Adams took up a restless life as a globetrotter, traveling extensively and, for years, spending summers in
Paris and winters in Washington, where he erected an
elaborate memorial at her grave site. In
1907 he published in a small private edition for selected friends an
autobiography,
The Education of Henry Adams. 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 is agreed by many to be 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).
*
Maxwell's demon*Adams, Henry B.
Letters. Edited by W. C. Ford. 2 vols. 1930â€"38
*
Adams, James Truslow.
Henry Adams (1933, repr. 1970)
*Adams, Marian Hooper.
The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865â€"1883. Edited by W. Thoron. (1936)
*Brookhiser, Richard.
America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735â€"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 0-316-154008
*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 0618134301
*
Henry Adams, Globe Trotter in Space and Time*
Free ebook of Henry Adams at
Project Gutenberg:
Democracy, an American novel:
The Education of Henry Adams:
Esther:
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres*
The Education of Henry Adams at the University of Virginia American Studies Hypertext project.
*
Adams's Education is Advanced by President Grant Young Henry Adams, already an eye-witness to the Italian struggle for independence and Secretary to the United States' Ambassador to Britain (his father), votes for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election and looks on with interest to see how matters will unfold.
