'Henry Adams and the Making of America' (original) (raw)
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First Chapter
- Sept. 11, 2005
On May 20, 1796, Abigail Adams warned her son, John Quincy Adams, against marriage to Louisa Johnson, who was not from New England: "I would hope, for the love I bear my country, that the siren is at least half blood." (A 381) In 1907, Henry Adams wrote of his grandmother, Louisa Johnson Adams: "[I] inherited a quarter taint Of Maryland blood." (E 737) Adams could never escape the fact that he was a member of the Adamses. Yet that does not justify attempts to interpret his whole life as a defense of his family, his region, or his forebears' ideology. In fact, he was determined to escape all three of those things, to be what he called "less Adamsy" (L 6.401). He preferred to be considered a descendant of his Maryland grandmother, Louisa Johnson Adams. His emotional and ideological compass bore due south, from an early age and all through his professional life. Using a genealogical quirk (his grandmother's purported southernness), he sought the South both as symbol and physical location all his life. Except for his six years of teaching at Harvard, Adams preferred Louisa's Washington to Massachusetts, from which he wrote in 1869 that "nothing but sheer poverty shall ever reduce me to passing a whole season here again" (L 2.44).
Most of the men he studied and admired were southerners, and especially Virginians, including his three principal heroes, Washington, Marshall, and Gallatin (the latter he treated as a Virginian, since Virginia is where Gallatin became an American citizen). The noblest character in his first novel is a Virginian, and the heroine of the tale is the widow of a Virginian. Adams's good friend at Harvard was a Virginian - in fact, the son of Robert E. Lee - and he was visiting the Lee mansion at Arlington the night Lincoln reached Washington for his inauguration.
None of this can cancel the fact that Adams was affected by his own family background. But that was not a simple thing. Those people who claimed that he defended his own family are thinking primarily of the Adamses. But Adams was aware that he was mired in a pretentious muddle of families, of whom the Adamses were the last and least. He was also a Boylston, a Quincy, a Brooks. He wrote his brother Charles: "My own theory of Boylston influence is that you and I have the Boylston strain three times repeated [through their great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and mother]. John Adams had it but once. Which accounts for you and us others being three times as damned a fool as John Adams -which seems hard" (L 6.574).
The Quincy line came from Abigail Adams, and she was very proud of it, unwisely putting its crest on her carriage when she went to New York as the vice president's wife. Henry said that the Quincys were the family's "most aristocratic claim." The Brooks connection was through Henry's own mother, and it made Henry and his siblings the first Adams generation to have inherited wealth. All four of these family lines had ramifying branches dimmed in clouds of in-laws, making Henry live in a forest of cousinhoods. He found this a stifling environment, and came to admire most the one member of his family who had not a drop of Adams, or Boylston, or Quincy, or Brooks blood in her, his grandmother. He exaggerated his blood tie with her, saying it was a "quarter taint" (actually it was an eighth). She had been mistreated by the family, yet she had survived. He meant to do the same. She had been an intruder into the family fold, but she opened a gate through which he could slip free -toward the South.
"The President"
Adams knew his grandmother's husband, John Quincy Adams, during the first ten years of his own life. (His great-grandfather, John Adams, had died twelve years before he was born.) John Quincy stood for the family heritage when Henry was a boy - he was always called "the President" at his Quincy home, where Henry's family spent its summers. The most vivid picture in the first chapter of the Education tells how Henry's mother (not otherwise mentioned in the book) could not make her son go to school in the summer, and the president came down from his study to march the boy "near a mile" to school (E 732). Some have taken from this episode an impression that Henry had great respect or affection for the president; but in fact he considered the man incapable of affection, selfish, and cruel. There is no clear evidence when this feeling began; but it was clearly there by his late twenties, when he planned to publish his grandmother's papers.
Later, at the time when he was writing the Education, Henry successfully warned his younger brother Brooks not to publish an admiring life he had written of their grandfather. In over eighty pages of scorching commentary on Brooks's manuscript, he said things like this (referring to John Quincy's time as Boylston Lecturer on Rhetoric at Harvard):
There is more, much more, of this vituperation. Adams cannot even give J. Q. much credit for his great stand against slavery during his final years in the House of Representatives (which include the ten years when his own life overlapped that of his grandfather):
These white-hot comments are worth quoting in extenso, since they are not in print anywhere else, nor included in the 608 microfilm reels of the Adams Papers:
What can explain such ferocity? The elements for an explanation are in that last sentence, in the earlier references to J. Q.'s stay in Russia, and in the mention of his wife's awareness that he had no "feeling [of] his duty to others." Henry was drawing these judgments from Louisa's papers.
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