Henry Brooks Adams

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Henry Adams

Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838, Boston, Massachusetts – March 27, 1918, Washington, DC) was an American historian, occasional academic, journalist, and novelist, best known for his semi-autobiographical, The Education of Henry Adams. He was a member of the Adams political family.

1 Early life
2 Civil War years
3 Historian and intellectual
4 Brothers
5 See also
6 Notes
7 Writings by Adams
8 Published as
9 Books about Adams
10 External links

[edit] Early life

The son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr. and Abigail Brooks Adams, Henry Adams was born 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.

[edit] 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. After his successful reelection, Charles Francis asked Henry to be his private secretary, continuing a father-son pattern set by John and John Quincy, and suggesting 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 was the anonymous 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. Henry Adams accompanied him to London as his private secretary. Henry also became the anonymous London correspondent for the New York Times. The two Adamses were kept very busy, monitoring Confederate diplomatic intrigues, and trying to obstruct the construction of Confederate commerce raiders by British shipyards (see Alabama Claims). Henry's writings for the New York Times argued that Americans should be patient with the British. While in Britain, Adams befriended many noted men including Charles Lyell, Francis T. Palgrave, Richard Monckton Milnes, James Milnes Gaskell, and Charles Milnes Gaskell.

While in Britain, Henry read and was taken with the works of John Stuart Mill. For Adams, Mill's Consideration on Representative Government showed 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 led Adams to conclude that he could best provide the USA with that knowledgeable and conscientious leadership by working as a correspondant and journalist.

[edit] Historian and intellectual

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. As an academic historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. Included among his students was Henry Cabot Lodge, who worked closely with Adams as a graduate student. Adams's 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. The first six chapters of the Adams's "History" are often republished as "The United States in 1800," and constitute an early example of American cultural history.

In 1876, Adams 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), whose eponymous heroine was modeled after his wife.

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. One of Adams's frequent travel companions was the artist John La Farge, with whom he journeyed to Japan and the South Seas. A long-time, intimate correspondent of Adams's was Elizabeth Cameron, wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron.

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 1894, Adams was elected president of the American Historical Association. His address, entitled "The Tendency of History," was delivered in absentia. The essay predicted the development of a scientific approach to history, but was somewhat ambiguous as to what this achievement might mean.

In 1904 Adams privately published a copy of his "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," a pastiche of history, travel, and poetry, that celebrated the unity of medieval society, especially as represented in the great cathedrals of France. Originally meant as a diversion for his nieces and "nieces-in-wish," it was publicly released in 1913 at the request of Ralph Adams Cram, an important American architect, and published with support of the American Institute of Architects. In 1907 he published his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, in a small private edition for selected friends, which curiously omitted the years 1872-91 and his entire marriage. 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. It was only following Adams's death that The Education was made available to the general public, in an edition issued by the Massachusetts Historical Society. It ranked first on the Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books and was named the best book of the twentieth century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that promotes classical education. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

In 1912 Adams suffered a stroke, perhaps brought on by news of the sinking of the Titanic, for which he had return tickets to Europe. After the stroke, his scholarly output diminished, but he continued to travel, write letters, and host dignitaries and friends at his Washington, D.C. home. He is buried next to his wife in Rock Creek.

[edit] Brothers

His elder brother, John Quincy Adams (1833-94), a graduate of Harvard in 1853, was a lawyer. He was active in politics as a Democrat, serving several terms in the Massachusetts general court, and receiving the vice-presidential nomination in 1872 by a faction of the Democratic Party faction that refused to support Horace Greeley.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835– 1915), an 1856 graduate of Harvard, fought with the Union in the Civil War, receiving in 1865 the brevet of brigadier-general in the regular army. He became an authority on railway management as the author of Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (1878), and as president of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1884 to 1890.

Brooks Adams (1848–1927), practiced law and became an intellectual of wide interests. His books include The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), America's Economic Supremacy (1900), and The New Empire (1902).

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

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

[edit] Writings by Adams

1876 (in collaboration with Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and J. L. Laughlin). Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law.
1879. Life of Albert Gallatin .
1879 (ed.). The Writings of Albert Gallatin (3 volumes).
1882. John Randolph.
1891. Historical Essays.
1918. The Education of Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Democracy (novel), and Esther. Library of America.
1930-38. Letters. Edited by W. C. Ford. 2 vols.

[edit] Published as

Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (Ernest Samuels, ed.) (Library of America, 1983) ISBN 0-940450-12-7.

History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (Earl N. Harbert, ed.) (Library of America, 1986) Vol I (Jefferson) ISBN 0-940450-34-8. Vol II (Madison) ISBN 0-940450-35-6.

[edit] Books about Adams

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

ISBN 0-316-15400-8

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