Among the late nineteenth-century Brahmin faithful, filial piety remained the dictum of the day. One wrote of ancestors with an eye toward edification, presenting cleaned-up versions of past and parent. This tradition continued deep into the next century, as evidenced in Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s multiple memoirs (in 1913 and again in 1969) of the Boston Federalist Harrison Gray Otis, a “four generations removed” descendant, so Morison put it. In the 1913 edition he stated without apology, “Contrary to general opinion, I believe that a statesman’s biography can best be written by a descendant.”1 Not all descendants deigned to agree. Aside from editing (without commentary) John Quincy’s “Reply” in the Documents project, Henry showed little interest in publicly assaying the House of Adams. He did so only glancingly in his long study of the early republic, while the Education’s absorbing sketch of pre–Civil War Quincy is suggestive but teasingly incomplete. To a remarkable degree, his published work managed to avoid the trap of tribal worship. But in rendering Albert Gallatin, the subject of his first major study, into an ideal candidate for the independent cause of the 1870s, he stumbled into a different kind of snare.
The Geneva-born Gallatin (1761–1849) had arrived in America at the age of nineteen and within a generation, under the auspices of the Jeffersonians, became the country’s longest serving Treasury secretary. He played a critical role in shaping the Democratic-Republican Party’s agrarian political economy before discovering a second career as a diplomat, serving as U.S. minister to both France and (during John Quincy’s presidency) Great Britain. Now, decades later, Albert Rolaz Gallatin invited Henry to edit his father’s papers for publication and produce from them a definitive biography. The overture likely occurred after Rolaz read “The Legal Tender Act,” in which, as noted, Adams commended the monetary acumen of Rolaz’s brother James. Presiding over the Gallatin National Bank of New York, James had encouraged the U.S. government to finance the Civil War along the fiscally conservative lines followed by his father during the War of 1812.
Gallatin’s invitation offered Henry an appealing alternative to journalism, organized politics, and classroom teaching. For though he gladly left Boston behind, he wished to have influence and thought a scholarly vocation—what he called “the historico-literary line”—to be the most plausible path.2 Having concluded his Harvard run by offering a course on the history of the early republic from, as he had informed President Eliot, the Jeffersonian perspective, he seemed ideally positioned to write on one of Jefferson’s chief lieutenants. Certainly Rolaz Gallatin thought so, offering to pay for Henry’s research expenses and the cost of publication. Over several months Henry selected the Gallatin letters he wished to use and, now living in Washington, approached Secretary of State William Evarts, a personal friend, for certain accommodations. Evarts complied handsomely, lending Adams a third-floor office in the State Department Building and securing him access to the trove of Jefferson and Madison papers in the Department’s extensive archives. These collections Henry supplemented the following year by visiting Jefferson’s Monticello and Gallatin’s Friendship Hill homestead in southwestern Pennsylvania. The trips provided Adams with impressions of their owners’ living arrangements, architectural taste, and daily physical environment.
Upon completion the project came to four thick volumes. Two were packed with several hundred letters of correspondence (paired down from a formidable twenty thousand); a third contained Gallatin’s public writings, speeches, and documents; and the fourth comprised Henry’s biography, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879). For such an immense undertaking—docking in at 2,700 pages—it jelled rather quickly. No longer attached to Harvard, the North American Review, or the independents, Adams worked without distraction, obviously stimulated by Washington, which proved an ideal location in which to conduct research. In just eighteen months he had finished. But rather than erecting a “scientific” or academic history à la Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, he exercised the prerogatives of a gentleman scholar, relying heavily on narrative, irony, and pathos. The Life, after all, was an authorized text, bought and paid for. One scion of a distinguished clan came to the aid of another—and enlisted still other blue bloods to aid in the endeavor. Henry’s acknowledgments in the biography to Secretary Evarts and to Sarah Randolph, “representative [i.e., granddaughter] of Mr. Jefferson,” recognized the polite power of the nation’s first families to extend certain courtesies to their own.3 Who but a Brahmin, even a Brahmin in exile, could thank, as did Henry, “his friendly adviser,” George Bancroft, then the doyen of American historical letters? And who but a moneyed gentleman could devote a year and a half to such a project on such terms as Gallatin had laid out? Rolaz kept his promise, of course, and paid Adams $237 (a little over $6,000 in current dollars) for his expenses.
Considering both the swiftness with which Henry completed The Life and the edifying light it shone on its subject, it is tempting to suppose that in writing on Gallatin’s America he mused, in unspoken but evident contrast, a little invidiously on Jay Gould’s America as well. The former comes out, of course, superior in nearly every way. Its pre–Tweed Ring era policies of government, diplomacy, and economic development, if imperfect and conducted on a comparatively small scale, are cast in a sentimental manner. Due to the efforts of men like Gallatin, Henry argued, the United States “had found a solution of its most serious political problems.” No Gilded Age here. Interestingly, Adams made Gallatin’s eighteenth-century Geneva something of a separate character in the biography, part of a Swiss canton (confederation) system that practiced the “proper” balance between deference and democracy. The dollars of industrialists, the francs of financiers, in other words, were largely kept at bay. And so no Gilded Age there either. “Aristocratic as her government was,” Henry wrote, “it was still republican, and the parade of rank or wealth was not one of its chief characteristics.” In such partisan asides he presumed a golden era of Old World governance while simultaneously lamenting a lost American (or at least patrician) ideal of a nation led by the “best.”4
Henry took care in the memoir to link Gallatin with John Quincy Adams (“his old associate”), thus suggesting a shared outlook and outcome. Though they often occupied different sides of public issues, he argued, “there was nevertheless a curious parallelism in the lives and characters of the two men, which, notwithstanding every jar, compelled them to move side by side and to agree in policy and opinion even while persuading themselves that their aims and methods were radically divergent.” Notably, both men, residing above the Mason-Dixon Line, favored federal aid to internal improvements—roads, turnpikes, canals, and so on—and thus drew the suspicion of the more states’ rights–minded. In time, the rise of Jacksonianism (a.k.a. common man democracy) is said to have secured their exiles from public service when men independent of party loyalties, as Henry insisted they were, were no longer tolerated. Reaching for a tragic ending, he wrote that they lived out their final years as “the last relics of the early statesmanship of the republic.”5 Grantism, he all but added, was just around the corner.
Despite its timely appeal, The Life failed to win over reviewers put off by its intimidating size and demanding prose. The North American Review showed its former editor no favor, calling the project “too voluminous… to be attractive to the general reader,” while the New York Tribune criticized the biography for showing “no extraordinary skill or practice in the arts of literary composition.”6 In a long and cutting two-part review published anonymously in the Nation, Henry’s brother Charles attacked the tome for its lack of accessibility, going so far as to damn it for literally being too heavy:
In its superficial make-up this volume falls little short of being an outrage both on Albert Gallatin and on every one who wishes to know anything about him.… Mr. Adams… seems… to have… set to work in a spirit of defiance, and made every detail of publication as repelling to the general readers as he knew how. The book resembles in appearance a volume of a cyclopædia,—it measures ten inches by six, and weighs nearly four pounds. It is printed—narrative, extracts, and correspondence—all in one monotonous type, contrary to agreeable modern usage, and it bristles with letters in French which seem to say, as clearly as if in words, that the book is not for general readers.7
There is a good deal of truth in these remarks, and they do accurately convey Henry’s shortcomings as a first-time biographer. Letters go on for too long, Gallatin’s early life in the Pennsylvania backwoods is dispensed with superficially, and his last years receive little attention. Adams’s unwillingness, as Charles noted, to translate Gallatin’s French correspondence into English further compromised the work. The author’s classic class-bound defense for this strategy—“It is always a little impertinent to suggest that one’s readers are ignorant of French”—is pure Henry.8
So too is his insistence that Gallatin—once among the most respected and decorated statesmen of his day—was fundamentally ill-fated. No hero of Henry’s, no (Swiss) prince among republicans could possibly have made peace with the country’s erratic democracy. He saw Gallatin, rather, much as he saw himself. And when he confessed to Lodge, in reference to The Life, “The inevitable isolation and disillusionment of a really strong mind… is to me the romance and tragedy of statesmanship,” he combined a deeply held personal philosophy with an equally embraced historical outlook.9 This despairing sensibility, already evident in Henry’s best North American Review pieces, would come increasingly to inform his scholarly work and to further give both shape and spirit to his experimentation as a novelist.