Henry’s July refusal to Eliot constituted his second Cambridge-related rebuff in three months. Earlier that spring Ephraim Whitney Gurney, Harvard professor of ancient history and editor of the North American Review, received a new appointment as the College’s first dean of the faculty. As a consequence, he offered Henry, without success, editorship of the magazine. Having published several of his articles and reviews, Gurney obviously thought highly of his talents, though more personal considerations may have been at play. Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 1868, Gurney had married Ellen Hooper, connected advantageously on both sides of her family to banking and seafaring fortunes. The nuptials, which lifted the then thirty-nine-year-old Gurney’s profile considerably in Cambridge, owed something to an unlikely matchmaker: Charles Francis. While visiting London in 1866 the Bostonian Dr. Robert Hooper, Ellen’s father, had asked the Governor for the name of a scholar to tutor his daughter in Greek. Pleased with Gurney’s efforts instructing his youngest child, Brooks, the Governor passed on the professor’s name.1 Possibly in reaching out to Henry, Gurney hoped to return the favor. If so, he soon learned, like Eliot, that honoring an Adams required patience, humility, and a bit of luck.
In August, about a month after Louisa’s death, Gurney opened negotiations with E. L. Godkin, then editing the Nation, to take over the North American Review. Despite the promise of a considerably higher salary than that offered to Adams in the spring, Godkin turned him down. At this point, both Gurney and Eliot, perhaps allied, renewed their respective interest in Henry and appear to have successfully made their plans known to a higher power. Adams’s earlier refusals to edit and to teach were launched safely from a distant Europe, but now back in America he felt the gentle if persistent pull of family pressure. He must have wondered with some embarrassment if Eliot’s offer in any way constituted a quid pro quo. The Governor, as everyone knew, counted at Harvard; he occupied a seat on the College’s Board of Overseers, which had proffered him the school’s presidency shortly after he returned from London. His decision to decline the post opened the door for Eliot, who remained in the office until 1909, a remarkable forty-year tenure that remains the longest in the University’s history. Whether or not Eliot felt an obligation to Charles Francis, he again offered Henry a professorship—and this time the Governor weighed in. Reasoning that Harvard occupied “now the field of widest influence in America,” and thus presented its more gifted instructors with every opportunity to make “the greatest mark” in scholarship, Charles Francis encouraged Henry to reconsider. The head of the family having spoken, others—brothers—piled on. Petitioned on all sides, a laconic Henry wrote to Gaskell in late September of his inevitable capitulation: “On my return home I found the question of the professorship sprung upon me again in a very troublesome way. Not only the President of the College and the Dean, made a very strong personal appeal to me, but my brothers were earnest about it and my father leaned the same way. I hesitated a week, and then I yielded. Now I am, I believe assistant professor of history at Harvard College.”2
In truth, he yielded twice. Exposed to Dean Gurney’s “very strong personal appeal,” he agreed not merely to instruct students but to take over the editorial duties of the North American Review. That last task made sense. He had written for the Review, as well as several other magazines, and could thus claim some journalistic expertise. But the idea of lecturing on ninth-century witch cults before an audience of nineteen-year-olds seemed absurd—until it happened. Assigned to teach medieval history, a doubtful Henry observed to Gaskell, “I gave the college fair warning of my ignorance, and the answer was that I knew just as much as anyone else in America knew on the subject, and I could teach better than anyone that could be had.” This dry report captures Adams’s appreciation of historical training’s low status in America. The professionalization of history had yet to occur, so the past still remained in the hands of patrician scholars. Indeed, more than a decade after Henry’s appointment, Ephraim Emerton, an Adams student who later returned to Harvard to teach German history and language, condemned the still common assumption that “any ‘cultivated gentleman’ could teach European history.”3
If Henry sported with the offer (he later swore that “Harvard… made him Professor against his will”), it nevertheless arrived in an appealing fashion. Throughout his life Adams took great pleasure in being courted, even if he sometimes found the prizes unpalatable, as he seemed to in this case. Returning to Washington in late September to “break up” his lodgings before heading north, he described himself to Gaskell as “very hot, very lonely, and very hard run.” So many of his political friends had deserted the “corrupt” capital, and only this, so he insisted, “reconcile[d him] to going away.” But the note betrays the inference of exile, and his explicit coda—“I hate Boston and am very fond of Washington”—seems closer to the mark. Adams probably knew, as he reluctantly packed for Cambridge, that his long-term future lay elsewhere. “My engagement is for five years,” he wrote, sounding like a prisoner, “but I don’t expect to remain so long.” For now, he had decided to bide his time and appease his family; the prodigal son would make his mother happy—which is precisely what transpired. Having learned of Henry’s plans, Abigail wrote with a mixture of gratitude and relief in her diary, “Very glad, we shall not only have him with us… but I think his life will be more useful and settled.”4
It is difficult to say which of Henry’s positions promised more prestige. As a Harvard professor he taught at America’s best college, and as the editor of the North American Review he ran one of its most important literary magazines. To be sure, the combined outlay of effort and hours proved considerable. The editorial post alone must have seemed to Henry a full-time office. Published quarterly, the Review appeared each January, April, July, and October; anxious to fill a raft of empty pages, he called upon Adamses young and old to contribute. Along with Charles, Brooks, and the Governor, he wrote dozens of unsigned essays and reviews, sketches and notices. In all, Henry edited over one hundred articles during his six-year tenure (1870–76), the ever-present load lightened somewhat by the assistance of his doctoral student Henry Cabot Lodge.
At Harvard, Henry joined a small cohort of historians. Dean Gurney and Henry Warren Torrey, the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, were his colleagues. With a bemused attitude, he recalled his impossible pedagogical obligation to the sons of the College: “Between Gurney’s classical courses and Torrey’s modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill.” Given free rein to teach what he pleased within the period 800–1649, he began to work up lecture material and discovered an unexpected interest in medieval building and design that deepened over the years. His classic studies Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the Education juxtapose the moral imagination of medievalism with the rush and anomie of modernity. Henry may have come to this signal cultural comparison without the spur of performing in a Harvard lecture hall, though this initial immersion in Gothic forms proved memorable, what he called at the time “a new interest in architecture.”5
Adams’s students are adamant that he rejected a classroom of “facts” for one of critical engagement. Lindsay Swift, later to serve as editor of library publications at the Boston Public Library, remembered Henry characteristically pacing in front of his young scholars, hands in pockets, and carrying on as though he were in conversation. He seemed genuinely concerned with his students’ welfare and almost certainly identified with the pressures that many of them faced as the sons and grandsons of “great” men. Just a dozen years earlier he had been of their number, and now he again lived in their midst. For two years Henry resided “on-campus,” occupying two ground-floor rooms in the gambrel-roofed Wadsworth House, which had previously sheltered nine Harvard presidents, briefly served as Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, and once lent Andrew Jackson its parlor to receive students. One of Harvard’s more iconic buildings and an excellent example of early Georgian architecture in America, its five-bay façade sits conspicuously on Massachusetts Avenue and looks, in all its circa 1720s splendor, suitably sage-like.6
A reflective instructor, Henry embedded his personal educational philosophy in a long essay on Cambridge and its college in the January 1872 North American Review. One passage in particular, though relating to the late eighteenth century, made a more general observation on the importance of respecting, engaging, and listening to students:
The College records… tell a somewhat stiff and often ludicrously formal tale of boys’ experiences and petty discipline, without in the least entering into boys’ feeling. For after all it is primarily with students that education deals, and the opinion of students is therefore an essential part of all successful education. One wishes to know what the student, at any given time, thought of himself, of his studies and his instructors; what his studies and his habits were; how much he knew and how thoroughly; with what spirit he met his work, and with what amount of active aid and sympathy his instructors met him in dealing with his work or his amusements.
Clearly Henry’s sympathies ran to the “boys,” and he seemed eager to know their occasional nonsense as a way of fostering trust and keeping clear the lines of learning. Professors, he poked, were dry reeds without the provocation of their students. “A skilful instructor ought,” he suggested, “to derive as many ideas from the absurdities or extravagances of the scholars who are in his charge, as he does from their better qualities.”7
Adams’s openness and intellectual charisma in the classroom became the stuff of Harvard Yard lore, and over the years a number of alumni wrote of his impactful manner. Lodge observed that Adams “had the power not only of exciting interest, but he awakened opposition to his own views, and that is one of the great secrets of success in teaching”; Stewart Mitchell maintained that “he was a new type of man”; and Edward Channing, himself a distinguished Harvard historian, remembered Adams as simply “the greatest teacher that I ever encountered.” As one might guess of such a protean thinker, Henry continued to inspire young scholars long after retiring from the classroom. In 1884 Johns Hopkins instructor John Franklin Jameson, a critical force behind the professionalization of history in the United States as the longtime managing editor of the American Historical Review, wrote appreciatively of Adams to one correspondent: “His abilities impress me greatly; I would give a great deal to be under him, as some of those Harvard fellows were.”8
One of those fellows, J. Laurence Laughlin, later an economist at the University of Chicago, remembered Adams as unmistakably aristocratic, a dapper man indelibly marked by descent:
At the time when I was a Harvard undergraduate, examinations were held in Lower Massachusetts Hall, then hung with the college portraits. In the intervals of writing, when I looked up, I was struck by the likeness of Henry Adams to the full-length portrait of John Quincy Adams on the eastern wall. Henry was small, short, bald, with a pointed clipped beard, a striking brow, but he was not as stout as his grandfather. There was in both the same air of self-contained strength.… His manner was animated and brusque, but kindly. Although short in stature and unconventional in manner, he never lacked dignity.9
Laurence described Adams’s teaching as “original, unexpected, and even explosive,” the raw qualities of an iconoclast intent on being something more than merely “faculty.” Delighting in resistance, “he was satirical, heterodox, and sweeping in his comments… chiefly from a sense of humor, a desire to shake up established commonplace, to start others to think.”10
Brought in to teach the “gap of a thousand years” between the ancient world and modern Europe, Henry soon moved his courses beyond the Frankish Middle Ages. In 1874 he offered a section on “colonial history of America to 1789” and initiated that same year a seminar on Anglo-Saxon law for doctoral candidates—the first history seminar at Harvard. Two years later he pioneered the course History of the United States from 1789 to 1840, shorthanded in the College’s catalog as “History 6.” Facing his students the first day of class, he acknowledged that some of them descended from the public men they were about to study. As one undergraduate remembered, Adams delicately allowed “it was probable that some toes would be trodden on uncomfortably.”11 Of course Henry, with all the prerogatives, controversies, and dead weight of an ancient family name, had no need to remind his audience that his own toes were likely to be trampled on, too. Swift, a student in the section, recalled Adams as a fraternal, available presence rather than a distant man speaking down to ignorant boys:
Mr. Adams… was wholly unacademic; no formality, no rigidity, no professorial pose.… We faced a friendly-disposed gentleman some twenty years older than ourselves, whose every feature, every line of his body, his clothes, his bearing, his speech were well bred to a degree.… In our course, he would select various topics, incidental to the periods covered, and assign one side to one student and the opposing to another. Thus we had under discussion all the important phases of American history for about fifty years—the formation of the Constitution, Jay’s Treaty, Genet’s Mission, the Alien and Sedition Laws, the trial of Aaron Burr, the Hartford Convention, etc., etc., down through the Administration of Van Buren.… The point of it all was that we moved in a perfectly free intellectual atmosphere; no constraint, no didacticism, and really no partisanship.12
Adams’s views on the success of History 6 were more qualified. He offered in the Education an affectionate regard for his students, describing them as “excellent company,” even as he insisted that only one in ten demonstrated an original intelligence. More typically he listed Harvard’s shortcomings—the packed lecture halls, the pressure to make history fit into neat patterns, the gentlemen’s agreement among the professors to avoid intellectual disagreement—and a little unfairly claimed that his Cambridge days amounted to a handful of lost years.13 This pregnant period fills only a few pages of the Education in a chapter casually called “Failure.”
In truth, Henry’s Harvard turn contributed greatly to his growth as a historian. Though he unapologetically neglected to build the College into a center of medieval studies, other and more personal accomplishments were attained. Working in the classroom forced him to consolidate and arrange material for a lay audience; turning students loose on competing historical debates brought to his own writing an enlarged and questioning perspective; and identifying as a Harvard scholar helped him to make the transition from serious magazine work on the North American Review to longer and more specialized studies of the past. In terms of prompting Henry to reflect and develop a historical methodology, these were vitally important years. They gave him the apparatus of “scientific” learning without encumbering his developing manner of clear and occasionally elegiac expression. “Learn to appreciate and to use the German historical method,” he once wrote Lodge, “and your style can be elaborated at leisure.”14