Four months after Tilden’s narrow defeat, in the late winter of 1877, Henry approached Harvard president Charles W. Eliot with an unusual proposal. He suggested that Lodge, his newly plumed Ph.D., be hired “to establish a rival course to my own in United States History.” For those who may lament the lack of ideological diversity in the twenty-first-century academy, Adams’s reason for soliciting the additional section will strike a resonant chord. Lodge’s “views being federalist and conservative,” he explained to Eliot, “have as good a right to expression in the college as mine which tend to democracy and radicalism. The clash of opinions can hardly fail to stimulate inquiry among the students.” Adams presumably measured his “radicalism” by the degree of political and intellectual independence he could claim as a member of a venerable but no longer electable dynastic family. Freedom, in this slender sense, could be equated with irrelevance. He scored Lodge as conservative, by contrast, because the younger man gave already the appearance of coveting a political career—to Henry’s thinking an utterly conventional decision that now, given the rising robber-baronocracy, lacked even its old honor.1
The entreaty to President Eliot (not taken up, as things turned out) anticipated a broader struggle between Adams and Lodge to set straight both family and national history. Their differences had to do with the controversial Hartford Convention of 1814, at which some two dozen New England Federalists condemned the unpopular War of 1812 for decimating their shipping economy, leaving their coastlines unprotected, and bolstering, in a burst of nationalism, the political fortunes of the pro-war Jeffersonians. Considering that the group met in secret while the war still raged, more than a few critics called their actions treasonous. And here, on the question of New England Federalism’s loyalty and legacy, the two Henrys found themselves congenially but firmly at odds.
Lodge got the ball rolling in the summer of 1877, putting together a collection of his great-grandfather Cabot’s correspondence with accompanying annotation. The finished product, Life and Letters of George Cabot, hued closely to the New England tradition of kin veneration, with Lodge quite clearly setting out to honor his ancestor—a U.S. senator, a devotee of the banker-and-businessman Federalism refined by Alexander Hamilton, and the presiding officer at the Hartford Convention.
This last item proved problematic. The motives and outcomes of the conventioneers remained in the 1870s a matter of opinion and perception. Friendly interpretations stressed their efforts—encapsulated in a released meeting report—to limit the ruling southern plantocracy’s power by calling for an end to the Three-Fifths Compromise. Approached from this angle, Cabot might be said, in light of the Civil War (and Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which explicitly repealed the Compromise), to have served on the “right” side of history. If, however, as detractors would have it, he chaired a nascent secessionist movement in Hartford while the United States, its capital recently burned, battled Great Britain in “a second war for independence,” then history was right to forget him. Lodge predictably sided with family and, by extension, those high Federalists whose views he happened to share.
Colloquially, Cabot and his allies—including former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, one-time congressman Fisher Ames, and the distinguished jurist Theophilus Parsons—were known as the Essex Junto, named after the Massachusetts county in which several of them resided. The moniker quickly hardened into an insult. It evoked a number of unfavorable impressions: peculiar, ill tempered, arrogant, and (later) secessionist. It signified further a patriotism perverted by insularity and eager, during the years of Virginia’s political ascendancy, to abandon nationalism for a strictly northeastern conception of nationhood. Their New England critics included John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and thus Lodge inevitably reduced the reputations of these men in the Life and Letters. The senior Adams proved to be an ineffectual leader, he argued, hardly in Hamilton’s class, while his son made rash and unproven accusations regarding the Essex Junto’s alleged efforts to create a separate northern league. Actually, Lodge countered, Cabot had quashed any would-be revolutionaries at Hartford and thus performed a great national service. Recognizing the transparent partisanship of his venture, he acknowledged in Life and Letters the personal nature of the project: “I have not sought in treating New England Federalism to write a judicial and impartial history of the country. My object was to present one side, and that the Federalist, in the strongest and clearest light.”2
Such an admission could only have raised a red flag for Adams, whose sharply negative appraisal of Life and Letters appeared that summer in the Nation. Shortly before its publication he had assured Lodge, with perhaps less than perfect candor, that he wished to stir up controversy only in order to prod sales. “[The review] is ingeniously calculated to make everyone, yourself included, furious with indignation,” he wanly explained. “But I think it will excite interest in the book and sell the edition.” Henry, so recently supportive of Lodge’s contribution to Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, now attacked his protégé’s effort to rehabilitate the Essex Junto. Cabot, he argued in the review, “was Federalist to the core,” and he refused to allow Lodge to wriggle his ancestor off the Hartford hook. The conventioneers were secessionists in waiting, he insisted, their shameful plans coming to naught largely because British and American envoys, then meeting in the Belgian city of Ghent, concluded a peace treaty that ended the War of 1812. As every Nation reader knew, John Quincy Adams served as chief negotiator for the American Commission.3
Not satisfied with a public critique of Lodge’s Life and Letters, Henry spent the second half of 1877 editing a competing book of documents meant to vindicate John Quincy Adams’s dim view of the Junto. Working quickly, he completed the study in December. The result, Documents relating to New England Federalism, 1800–1815, includes letters also appearing in Lodge’s volume, though they read altogether differently with the addition of a long and spirited defense by John Quincy, “Reply to the Appeal of the Massachusetts Federalists,” that consumes more than half of the book. Paired with the “Reply,” which took the Junto deadly seriously as a secessionist force, the letters between Pickering, Cabot, and company assume a distinctly menacing tone. Packed in the book’s appendix, they bear evidence of an unmistakable eagerness to create a new northern nation: “The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy,—a separation”; “Without a separation, can those States ever rid themselves of negro [Virginia] Presidents and negro Congresses, and regain their just weight in the political balance?”; “I have no hesitation myself in saying, that there can be no safety to the Northern States without a separation from the confederacy.”4
John Quincy drafted the “Reply” in the last weeks of 1828. Earlier in the year he had made certain provocative comments, published in the (Washington) National Intelligencer, regarding the Essex Junto and its disciples. He stated in part that the “object” of the ultras “was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union, and the establishment of a separate confederation.” In response to this damning charge old Federalists and the sons of old Federalists demanded that the president prove his accusations. Declaring himself unwilling to engage in an “inquisition,” in which their “avowed object [was] controversy,” a defensive Adams, then in the midst of a tumultuous (and unsuccessful) presidential campaign against Andrew Jackson, gave no satisfaction.5 Following the election, however, he penned the acidic “Reply.” Perhaps thinking of the damage it might do him in conservative Massachusetts, he promptly buried the brief in his files, where it remained unpublished for nearly a half-century.
Eager to see it now exhumed, Henry believed the “Reply” a complete vindication of his grandfather. It included a letter from former New Hampshire senator William Plummer attesting that during Jefferson’s presidency “several of the Federalists, Senators and Representatives, from the New England States, informed me that they thought it necessary to establish a separate government in New England.” Playing the innocent—and perhaps as a private joke—Henry announced that students of history had Lodge, of all people, to thank for the resurrection of John Quincy’s bracing “vindication.” “The appearance of [Life and Letters], marking as it does the moment when party-spirit begins to yield to the broader spirit of impartial investigation,” he puckishly wrote, “has removed the last objection to publishing the paper entitled ‘Reply.’ ”6
Lodge did not go down quietly. In his own Nation review, he snidely praised Documents as a “dramatic” collection, thus hinting at what he regarded as the theatrical—though in no sense secessionary—nature of New England Federalism’s rhetorical attack on Jeffersonianism. And in doing so he called into question the judgment of John Quincy, implying that, in his dry literal-mindedness, the author of the “Reply” inflated the anxious if impotent writings of the Essex men into a full-blown conspiracy. Lodge further drew attention to Henry’s tendency to embellish, kick, and bite to make a point more pungent. He, in other words, trafficked in drama as well: “When [Adams] launches out into invective the wealth of his vocabulary, the vigor of his sarcasm, the savage ferocity of his direct assaults, combine to make this paper an almost unequaled piece of political controversial writing, worthy to rank with the best efforts in this branch of literature.”7
Perhaps in these words of polite dismissal Lodge recognized the difficulties he faced taking Adams on. And to be sure, in the battle of the books, in the contest pitting competing reviews, Henry came out ahead. His clipped opinion of the Hartford Convention, published a few years later in his magisterial history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, long held the historiographical high ground:
The delegates numbered only twenty-three persons, mostly cautious and elderly men, who detested democracy.… Possibly much was said which verged on treasonable conspiracy.… If any leading Federalist disapproved the convention’s report, he left no record of the disapproval. In such a case, at such a moment, silence was acquiescence. As far as could be inferred from any speeches made or letters written at the time, the Federalist party was unanimous in acquiescing in the recommendations of the Hartford Convention.8
But was Henry’s interpretation the right interpretation? Were New Englanders really on the edge of secession? More than a few Hartford delegates had major financial, shipping, and mercantile interests with the several states of the Union, while the region’s vast classes of pensioners and investors were reliant on government securities. It was by no means certain, moreover, that the people of the Northeast would sustain a separation movement carried out in their name. Against such a stacked deck, secession seems a long shot.
Some years ago, in the 1960s, the scholar James M. Banner Jr. revisited the history of the Hartford Convention and what he called “a decorous but always sharp historiographical war” between Adams and Lodge. The latter, he wrote, attempted
to distinguish Cabot from the radical and less gracious likes of Timothy Pickering, whose life and letters had been published five years earlier in a manner which inaccurately played down Pickering’s secessionist schemes. Lodge tried both to exculpate Cabot and more fully to implicate Pickering. But the straightforward Lodge—himself a sort of later-day embodiment of Federalism: bluff, exclusivist, nativist, prejudiced, and all—was no match for Henry Adams, the master of the ironic style.9
Banner, I think, has identified an important temperamental difference between the two men that, beyond historiographical sword-crossing, goes some way in explaining their divergent occupational paths—Lodge into politics and Adams into a historical-literary career animated by a chilly, double-edged detachment.
Though “no match” for Henry as a scholar, Lodge knew his mentor well, respected his capacity for crafting an argument, and marveled at the older man’s ability to make, as he put it, a compelling “drama” of the past. There would be more drama to come. For in addressing the Federalist feud, Adams put the intricacies of Anglo-Saxon law behind him and commenced a long engagement with the early American nation. His colorful portrayals in the History of interparty struggles among Republican chieftains Jefferson, Vice President Aaron Burr, and Virginia statesman John Randolph seem in retrospect a natural extension of the earlier project. As a précis on the young country’s struggles with schisms, only the party labels had changed.
It seems fitting that Henry took up the Documents study in 1877, his last year teaching at Harvard and living in New England. The work thus serves as a eulogy of sorts, an effort to set the historical record straight while simultaneously honoring family. Bowing before both training and tradition, he left behind an immaculate offering, a mixed memorial to a city, a region, and a way of life long since gone.