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• Born: 16 February 1838
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: 27 March 1918
• Best Known As: American historian and presidential descendant

Henry Brooks Adams was the great-grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the son of Charles Francis Adams, the Minister to England during the Civil War. Henry Adams worked as a personal secretary to his father, then as a Harvard history professor, but is most widely known for his nine volume history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, and for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. The latter was named by The Modern Library as the best non-fiction book of the 20th century.

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The American historian and author Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) lived in an era of remarkable change and recorded the implications of the period with great perception. He is best known for "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres" and "The Education of Henry Adams."

Henry Adams was born in Boston on Feb. 16, 1838, the fourth of seven children of Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Henry's mother was the daughter of one of Boston's wealthiest men; his father was the son of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, and the grandson of John Adams, second president. The boy grew up in a household which contained Boston's largest private library and in which politics and history were perpetually present.

Entering Harvard in 1854, Adams proved himself an able student, but the proffered reward of high class standing did not tempt him to become a conformist even in this period of rigid college regulations. He wrote for the Harvard Magazine, acted for the Hasty Pudding Club, and at his graduation in 1858 was chosen Class Day Orator. Although he had learned far more than a reader of his autobiography might imagine, he graduated without academic distinction. In the autumn he traveled to Germany, intending to study law at the University of Berlin. When he discovered that his German was inadequate for university study, he entered a gymnasium (secondary school) for one semester. He toured Europe for 2 years, sending reports to a Boston newspaper.

Private Secretary

When Adams returned to America in 1860, he became private secretary to his father, newly elected to Congress, and again arranged to act as correspondent for a newspaper in his native city. The plans of father and son were abruptly altered in March 1861, when President Lincoln appointed the elder Adams minister to Great Britain. By the time the new minister and his private secretary sailed, Southern forces had fired on Fort Sumter and the Civil War had begun. Henry thought of seeking a commission, but his elder brother Charles, himself in the army, urged him to remain in England and advance the Union cause as a writer. Whether or not the reports Henry published in the New York Times and elsewhere contributed to the war effort is an open question, but the 7 years he spent with his father in England unquestionably contributed greatly to his education. He met Sir Charles Lyell and John Stuart Mill and at their urging read the works of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer; in the course of time these influences would reorient his thinking on politics, economics, and science. During this period Henry Adams published three long and promising articles in the influential North American Review.

The Educator

Adams returned to the United States in 1868 and settled in Washington, where he reported on the political scene for the Nation and for some newspapers. The Adams family was accustomed to wielding power, and he doubtless dreamed from time to time of holding high office, but the political realities of Washington in the "gilded age" seem to have brought him quickly to the conviction that his role would be that of critic and commentator rather than political leader. His brilliant, acerbic articles were soon making him famous and men in and near the White House infamous. In the autumn of 1870 he reluctantly quit Washington for Boston to become editor of the North American Review and assistant professor of history at Harvard.

At Harvard, Adams's teaching assignments were concentrated in the medieval period, but his methods were modern and innovative, emphasizing student participation rather than lectures, and critical understanding rather than the memorization of names and dates. In 1872 Adams married the wealthy and intelligent Marian Hooper and took her to Europe for a year-long wedding trip. This was the beginning of the happiest and most productive period of his life - a period which, ironically enough, he omits entirely from his autobiography. By 1876 he was ready to offer his Harvard students a course on the history of the United States from 1789 to 1840. From that course he developed materials for the books upon which his reputation as a historian rests: Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800-1815 (1877); The Writing and The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), a classic political portrait; John Randolph (1882); and the monumental History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols., 1889-1891).

Observer and Critic of Society

Adams resigned as editor of the North American Review in 1876 in an election-year dispute with the loyal Republican publishers. The following year he left Harvard and settled with his wife in Washington, where he could more easily pursue his historical research. In 1879 they returned to Europe, spending much of the winter in London, often in the company of their close friend Henry James. Before their return to America in the fall of 1880, an anonymous novel treating the political and social life of Washington appeared under the title Democracy; Adams's authorship of this sprightly piece was to remain a well-kept secret until 1909.

Living in Washington again, the Adamses established their own little court - a splendid circle of sentimental cynics which included John Hay and his wife, the brilliant geologist and writer Clarence King, and the aging senator Don Cameron and his wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, always a favorite of Adams, served as the model for Catherine in his second novel, the pseudonymous Esther (1884). The title character was based on Adams's wife, and it is a tender and touching portrait. In 1885 Marian Adams's father died; she sank rapidly into a manic-depressive condition and on December 7 committed suicide. "For twelve years I had everything I most wanted on earth," Henry Adams wrote to a friend; suddenly he seemed to have nothing.

Six months after his wife's death, Adams and the artist John La Farge set out for Japan. Adams returned in time to stand by his father's deathbed in November 1886. He went to Washington next and completed the History. More travels followed, notably a trip to Polynesia, again with La Farge, in 1890. One of the native women Adams admired provided materials for Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti (1893). From the South Seas the writer-traveler journeyed to France.

In 1904 Adams privately printed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a classic study of the architecture, thought, and spirit of the Middle Ages (a trade edition appeared in 1913). In this book the Virgin of Chartres stands as a symbol of 13th-century unity. For his next major work he also found a dominant symbol in France: the dynamo he observed at the Paris Exposition of 1900 somehow expressed for him the "multiplicity" of the 20th century. This was the subject of the book for which he is best remembered, The Education of Henry Adams (private edition 1907; published 1918). Customarily called his autobiography, it is really the history of an era.

Adams spent his last years in Washington, surrounded by nieces and visited by a new generation of America's social and political elite. He approved of President Wilson's decision to enter World War I because he hoped it would lead the country into a permanent Atlantic alliance. Adams died quietly in his home on March 26, 1918. He was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery beside the grave of his wife with no marker save the beautiful statue he had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to execute for her.

Further Reading

Ernest Samuels's exemplary biography in three volumes is the standard authority: The Young Henry Adams (1948), Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1958), and Henry Adams: The Major Phase (1964). J. C. Levenson, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (1957), is rigorous and thorough. George Hochfield, Henry Adams: An Introduction and Interpretation (1962), is also useful.

For more information on Henry Brooks Adams, visit Britannica.com.

(1838-1918), historian and writer. As a fourth-generation member of one of America's most distinguished families, Henry Adams was born into history, which became a determining influence on his long but undramatic life. Childhood visits to grandfather John Quincy Adams in the White House and family tales of great-grandparents John and Abigail Adams first served to personalize the facts and dates he studied at school. During the Civil War, he witnessed history in the making as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, minister to the Court of St. James.

Rather than becoming a maker of history, however, Henry, a master of English prose, chose to write about it. His classic account of self, The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed, 1907; published, 1918), today remains his most popular work; yet his finely crafted letters, essays, and especially Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed, 1904; published, 1913) retain a specialized appeal, as, to a lesser degree, do his novels, Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884). Adams's reputation as a historian derives chiefly from the nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891), a pioneering study of intellectual and documentary history that focuses on the years between the presidencies of the two Adamses.

Henry Adams also introduced both the seminar method and the Germanic rigor of the Ph.D. degree to Harvard during his seven-year stint as a faculty member and editor of the prestigious North American Review. Dissatisfied with both roles, however, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he conducted research for the History. From that base, he launched one travel expedition after another during the remaining years of a highly independent life. In 1885, his domestic comfort was shattered by the suicide of his wife, Marian ("Clover") Hooper Adams, a tragedy that drove him deeper into seclusion. Notable among his few intimates were the colorful geologist Clarence King; the politically ambitious John Hay, biographer of Abraham Lincoln; and the reigning beauty Elizabeth Cameron, who was unhappily married to a much older senator and who filled an idealized role of heroine in Adams's later life.

Adams believed in the possibility of a truly "scientific" history, founded on such models as physics or mathematics. Yet his Education also declared that "Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man." In fact, his most ambitious goal as a thinker and writer was never simply prescriptive; instead, he sought to understand history in the largest possible way. Concluding his History, Adams insisted that although "the traits of American character were fixed" by 1815, any final test of the results "required another century of experience." Not surprisingly, such high ambition often led him to express pessimism and disappointment, especially in terms of personal "failure." Nevertheless, he succeeded most admirably as a writer. He used the exercise of composition to escape from excessive introspection and, even more, to instruct and provoke his readers, hoping they might reach even higher levels of intellectual performance than he had displayed.

Bibliography:

William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (1952); J. C. Levenson, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (1957); Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (1989).

Author:

Earl N. Harbert

See also History and Historians; Literature.

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).

(1838-1918)

1879	The Life of Albert Gallatin. The grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams had previously written an article on Captain John Smith (1867) and a review of Lyell's Principle of Geology (1868), as well as other political essays. His four-volume biography initiates the research that would lead to his History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vols., 1889-1891).
1880	Democracy: An American Novel. Adams's best-selling satire of Washington politics presents the nation's powerful as seen by a widow from New York who travels to the capital to learn about government and finds it corrupted. Initially published anonymously, the novel portrays many actual Washington figures such as Rutherford B. Hayes and James G. Blaine, creating a sensation among readers as to the true identity of the author and his characters.
1884	Esther. Published under the pseudonym "Francis Snow Compton," Adams's novel, about the collapse of the relationship between a woman artist and a clergyman due to the incompatibility of their religious beliefs, has been read as the author's commentary on his own marriage.
1889	History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Adams's much praised nine-volume history (completed in 1891) would be for years considered the finest description of Jefferson's presidency. Distinguished for its research in primary sources and extensive new information and details, the book has been called by modern scholar Paul Nagel "the finest historical writing ever done by an American."
1893	Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti. Based on Adams's encounter with a Tahitian woman during his tour of the South Pacific in 1890, the book chronicles Tahitian society before and after Westernization. It shows Adams's interest in women and their influence, a theme that would recur in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes.
1904	Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. In the first private printing of this classic study of medieval civilization, which would be published in 1913, Adams contrasts the unified, coherent system of beliefs and culture of the Middle Ages with the confusing modern "multiverse."
1907	The Education of Henry Adams. Adams's classic autobiography, subtitled "A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity," is privately printed, to be later published in 1917. Adams provides an analysis of the modern world through a selective account of his own development.

Quotes:

"They know enough who know how to learn."

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."

"As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore."

"The proper study of mankind is woman."

"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."

See more famous quotes by Henry Brooks Adams

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