Henry Adams

Henry Adams 1838-1918, American writer and historian, b. Boston; son of Charles Francis Adams (1807-86). He was secretary (1861-68) to his father, then U.S. minister to Great Britain. Upon his return to the United States, having already abandoned the law and seeing no opportunity in the traditional Adams vocation of politics, he briefly pursued journalism. He reluctantly accepted (1870) an offer to teach medieval history at Harvard, but nonetheless stayed on seven years and also edited (1870-76) the North American Review.

In 1877 Adams moved to Washington, D.C., his home thereafter. He wrote a good biography of Albert Gallatin (1879), a less satisfactory one of John Randolph (1882), and two novels (the first anonymously and the second under a pseudonym)— Democracy (1880), a cutting satire on politics, and Esther (1884). His exhaustive study of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, History of the United States of America (9 vol., 1889-91; reprinted in a number of editions), is one of the major achievements of American historical writing. Famous for its style, it is deficient, perhaps, in understanding the basic economic forces at work, but the first six chapters constitute one of the best social surveys of any period in U.S. history.

Never of a sanguine temperament, Adams became even more pessimistic after the suicide (1885) of his adored wife. He abandoned American history and began a series of restless journeys, physical and mental, in an effort to achieve a basic philosophy of history. Drawing upon the physical sciences for guidance and influenced by his brother, Brooks Adams , he found a satisfactory unifying principle in force, or energy. He selected for intensive treatment two periods: 1050-1250, presented in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed 1904, pub. 1913), and his own era, presented in The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed 1906, pub. 1918). The first is a brilliant idealization of the Middle Ages, specifically of the 13th-century unity brought about by the force of the Virgin, which was dominant then. The second was classified by his publishers as an autobiography, although it was written in the third person and was unrevealing about much of his life. It is, however, a tour de force, and describes his unsuccessful efforts to achieve intellectual peace in an age when the force of the dynamo was dominant. These two books, containing some of the most beautiful English ever written, rather than his monumental History, won Adams his lasting place as a major American writer.

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919), edited by Brooks Adams and prefaced with a memoir by Henry Adams, contains three brilliant essays on his philosophy of history— "The Tendency of History," "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (pub. separately in 1910), and "The Rule of Phase Applied to History." Friendships, especially those with John Hay and Clarence King, played a large part in Adams's life, and his personal letters reveal a warmer man than one might suspect.

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by W. C. Ford, 2 vol., 1930-38); J. T. Adams, Henry Adams (1933, repr. 1970); W. Thoron, ed., The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865-1883 (1936); H. D. Cater, ed., Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (1947); E. Samuels, The Young Henry Adams (1948), Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1958), and Henry Adams: The Major Phase (1964); W. Dusinberre, Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure (1980); E. Chalfant, Better in Darkness (1994); R. Brookhiser, America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (2002); G. Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005).

Adams, Henry (1838–1918), historian, social critic, man of letters.Born in Boston, the son of Charles Francis Adams, a U.S. congressman and diplomat, and Abigail Brooks Adams, he was also the great‐grandson and grandson of two Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Henry grew up in Boston, summering at the Adams homestead in nearby Quincy. Following graduation from Harvard College in 1858 he embarked on an extensive European tour, returning to the United States late in 1860. When President Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams the U.S. minister to Great Britain in 1861, Henry accompanied his father to London where he served as private secretary.

Adams wrote his first serious articles on history and politics while in Great Britain during the Civil War. Upon his return to the United States in 1868 he set himself up as a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., writing blistering attacks on postwar political corruption. Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871), written with his brother Charles Francis Adams Jr., deals with fraud and bribery in the railroad industry. In 1870 he accepted an offer to teach history at Harvard and concurrently to edit the prestigious North American Review. While teaching, editing, and writing more articles on current American politics, Adams also worked on his Life of Albert Gallatin (1879). He married Marian “Clover” Hooper in 1872.

Adams resigned his teaching position in 1877 and returned to Washington, D.C. Soon thereafter he commenced his nine‐volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891), as he and his wife presided over a celebrated salon from their home on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Here they entertained a select group of friends including the statesman John Hay, the geologist Clarence King, and the artist John LaFarge. His anonymous novel Democracy (1880) summed up his disgust with Gilded Age Washington politics. Marian Adams's suicide in 1885 deepened Adam's already pessimistic and negative outlook on many aspects of modern life.

In 1890–1892, Adams took a round‐the‐world voyage with LaFarge. Breaking his trip in Paris, he began a custom of spending part of each year in the French capital. While in France Adams became fascinated with the Middle Ages and wrote his Mont‐Saint‐Michel and Chartres (1905, 1913). Contrasting the unity of medieval culture with the seeming multiplicity of the early twentieth century, he proposed to use his own life story to portray what he liked to call the acceleration of history and the breakdown of philosophical and moral certainty. The result was his Education of Henry Adams (1904, 1918), a brilliant but often distorted autobiography written in the third person.

Adams's eloquent and often biting criticisms of American life have made him one of the nation's most important observers. He was also a pathbreaker in historical scholarship, offering the country's first graduate seminar in history while teaching at Harvard. His own historical writings were exhaustively researched. After more than a century, they remain of value, though later historians found him somewhat biased against Thomas Jefferson and the whole Jeffersonian program.
See also Historiography, American.

Bibliography

David R. Contosta , Henry Adams and the American Experiment, 1980.
Ernest Samuels , Henry Adams, 1989.

David R. Contosta

Adams, Henry [Brooks] (1838–1918), grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams, claims in his autobiography that his conventional education was defective, despite the best Boston and Quincy background, Harvard, German postgraduate training, and his position as secretary during his father's ministry to England at the time of the Civil War. His first writing, an article on Captain John Smith published in 1867, was followed by other contributions to periodicals, including a review of Lyell's Principles of Geology (1868), clearly showing his belief in the importance of the evolutionary theory in human history and Adams's own divorce from the absolute standards of his ancestors. Returning from England to Washington, D.C. (1868), he continued to write carefully considered articles, and, completely out of sympathy with Reconstruction politics, abandoned former ideas of a political career to teach history at Harvard (1870–77), for most of this period also editing The North American Review. He next went to Washington to write history and to seek the companionship of such men as Secretary of State Evarts, John Hay, and Clarence King, for he said ironically, “So far as [I] had a function in life, it was as stable‐companion to statesmen.” There he wrote Democracy (1880), an anonymous novel on Washington politics, and Esther (1884), a pseudonymous novel of New York society. In 1872 he married Marian Hooper, whose suicide in 1885 tragically affected his life. Although he never mentions her in his writings, she probably served as a model for the heroine in Esther. Adams commissioned his friend Saint‐Gaudens to design for her grave in Washington a symbolic statue, which he called “The Peace of God.” When he could no longer endure life at Washington, he made a long trip through the Orient, from which he returned to complete his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vols., 1889–91), portraying politics and diplomacy in the early republic. He traveled widely during the following years, and among the literary results was the Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti (1893, revised 1901). He “drifted back to Washington with a new sense of history” after a summer in Normandy (1895) and a visit to the Paris Exposition (1900), where he saw the huge dynamo that in his autobiography he was to take as a symbol of mechanistic power and energy in the multiplicity of the 20th century as contrasted to the force of the Virgin, “the ideal of human perfection,” representing the unity of the 13th century, which he treated in Mont‐Saint‐Michel and Chartres (1904). This scholarly descriptive work, interpretively studying a unified world, was Adams's first attempt to measure the life and thought of an era in terms of Force. In 1910 he published A Letter to American Teachers of History, reprinted in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) by his brother Brooks Adams. This work sets forth Henry Adams's dynamic theory of history. The second law of thermodynamics supposes a universal tendency to dissipate mechanical energy and thus vitiates the idea of human history as evolving toward a state of perfection. On the contrary, according to Adams, human thought is a substance passing from one phase to another through critical points determined by attraction, acceleration, and volume (equivalent to pressure, temperature, and volume in mechanical physics), and he points out that history must be studied in the light of these principles. The complementary work to Mont‐Saint‐Michel is a study of 20th‐century multiplicity, The Education of Henry Adams (1907). The skepticism and cynicism in the account of his self‐termed failures pass beyond autobiography to a study of the garment of education draped on the “manikin” Henry Adams, a figure used to measure motion, proportion, and human conditions. In later chapters the use of his dynamic theory of history is made explicit. Other books include Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871), written with his brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr.; The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879); John Randolph (1882); and The Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911). His letters have been printed in various collections, and those of his wife were published in 1936.