Henry Adams (1838-1918)

Source

Historian, writer

Illustrious Family. Born in Massachusetts in 1838, Henry Adams was descended from a long line of distinguished American statesmen. His great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams had both served as president of the United States, and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was a congressman and diplomat. His childhood instilled in him a belief in the virtues of public duty and political service, and as a youth he had little reason to doubt that he, too, would advance to national public office as an adult. Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1858, traveled and studied in Europe for two years, then served as his father’s private secretary, first in Washington, D.C., and then in London following Charles Francis Adams’s appointment as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

A Passion for History. In 1868 Henry Adams returned to Washington and, appalled by the corruption and incompetence of the Grant administration, wrote scathing essays in the North American Review and The Nation that condemned the crass ambitions of the new American capitalism and called for civil-service reform. These articles and other efforts to organize political reform proved ineffectual, and in 1870 Adams left Washington and accepted an instructorship at Harvard. For seven years he taught courses in medieval and American history and began the research and writing that would earn him a reputation as the foremost American historian of the nineteenth century. In 1879 he published his first major book, a biography of Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, then began working on the monumental History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which would be published in nine volumes between 1889 and 1891. A classic of American historical writing, the work was an early model of “scientific” historiography. Rather than telling an entertaining narrative, Adams elected to arrange the facts of the two administrations in sequence and to invite his readers to form their own conclusions. The objectivity of such a method was not absolute, and Adams’s history portrays Jefferson’s and Madison’s efforts as an admirable experiment in popular democracy that failed because of the incompatibility of its ideals with America’s geographic immensity and its fragmentation of culture and identity into sectionalism. The work ends with questions that Henry Adams saw his own generation struggling to answer: What path will the country take? What common ideals and culture will unite a vast society? What goals will the nation seek to attain?

Later Work. Following the suicide of his wife in 1885, Adams withdrew even further from the public sphere. His last two major works, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907), were initially privately published and not intended for a commercial audience. The first, which takes the form of a travel guidebook addressed from an uncle to his nieces, is a meditation on two wonders of medieval French architecture, the cathedral at Chartres and the monastery on the island of Mont-Saint-Michel, and the moral lessons they offer about the society that produced them. In eleventh-century Norman culture, Adams found a desirable image of unity: a society that through common passion and faith triumphed over hardship to create the enduring art of the cathedrals. Adams saw no such unity in his own time, and his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, documents his struggles to come to terms with the changing political and cultural character of mid-nineteenth-century America. He perceived a degenerative moral movement in the country from the optimistic democratic vision of Thomas Jefferson to the crassness and decadence of the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. In the process Adams found himself dispossessed of the traditional role of his statesmen forbears and alienated from a world that seemed to have lost the virtues of culture, civility, and public service. Against the Virgin Mary, an older symbol of unity and feminine wisdom, he contrasts the image of the dynamo, a masculine force of energy, power, and motion that he saw as characteristic of his own age. Adams’s works are read today primarily as reflecting the philosophical and social concerns of his generation and class at a time when American cultural and political authority was passing from the Colonial-era patricians of New England and Virginia to the capitalists and party-machine newcomers of the Gilded Age. A year after his death in 1918, Adams received the Pulitzer Prize for The Education of Henry Adams

Source

Elizabeth Stevenson, Henry Adams: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1955).