In the spring of 1881 John Torrey Morse, editor of Houghton Mifflin’s prestigious American Statesmen Series, invited Henry to draft another political biography. Having read the Gallatin with pleasure, he now asked its author to take on the famously mercurial Virginia planter and congressman John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833). Eccentric, politically marginalized, and occasionally accused of being as mad as a March hare, Randolph proved too intriguing for Henry to pass up. From his Cumberland County plantation, “Bizarre,” Randolph embraced an uncompromising states’ rights philosophy that led to his break with fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison. Reflecting on the conjoined questions of slavery and civil war, Adams saw Randolph as a precursor to the secession-minded “Fire-Eaters” of 1860, who cut the union in two. Thus, in approaching Randolph, he more generally sought to assay the “errant” South and somewhat reductively used his subject’s flamboyant outbursts in Congress as a metaphor to explore what he took to be the plantocracy’s unbalanced psychology.
Following a playful “Well!—I’ll think about it,” Henry accepted Morse’s invitation and then completed the book in a remarkable three-months sprint. Well versed in American history, he returned to a wealth of materials carefully mined over the years in preparation for his large study of the early republic. He described the Randolph manuscript to Sir Robert Cunliffe as “a small volume which is really, like my life of Gallatin, only a preliminary essay,” while reporting to Lodge that it constituted “but a feeler for my history.” Confident in his grasp of the Jeffersonian era and eager to begin seeding the larger enterprise, Henry adopted the project with enthusiasm.1 His participation requires little explanation, though perhaps Morse’s invitation does.
Looking at the author roster of the American Statesmen Series, one notes a number of prominent figures—including Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Schurz, and Henry Cabot Lodge—remembered more for their political careers than for their literary talents. In securing Adams for the Randolph biography, however, Morse seized a real prize, bagging a rising scholar with a distinguished name. Even so, his decision to have Henry deliver the Randolph memoir might be sensibly questioned. The Virginian had opposed Adams’s presidential ancestors (nationalists that they were), and a harsh judgment of his career by Henry might be dismissed in some quarters, particularly those south of the Mason-Dixon Line, as little more than score-settling. Presumably Morse expected a provocative, even controversial manuscript. Henry’s description of Randolph in the Gallatin as a “bully” in Congress who enjoyed giving “speeches violent beyond all precedent, outrageously and vindictively slanderous,” accurately communicates his fascinated if dim view of the man.2 That biography followed Henry’s earlier essay debunking another Virginia icon, Capt. John Smith, which first advertised its author’s proficiency in the art of South-baiting.
Playing the iconoclast, Adams upended the traditional interpretation of Randolph. Rather than dismissing him as a rare curiosity isolated from the main trends of American governance, he made him into a representative figure, illustrative of the hard-core southern states’ rights school. “Good” southerners certainly existed, Henry acknowledged, but Randolph embodied, so he contended, a “truer,” more aggressive, and more emblematic strain of the plantocracy. This problematic line led, he had little doubt, straight to Fort Sumter. If Randolph idled, as Adams wrote in the biography, on “perverse,” it was a perversion that he shared with his people.3
This is a particularly revealing opinion considering that both author and subject, though products of different generations and geographies, came from a common “aristocratic” lineage impossible for either to elude. And thus while the Randolph obviously anticipates certain events and narratives embellished in the History, it more suggestively stands as a harbinger of the Education. The latter tells the story of a man overtaken by the speed, flux, and versatility of the modern world. As Randolph struggles to reconcile the Age of Enlightenment with a spreading cotton empire, Adams reflects on the decline of the old Massachusetts elite in a rising urban-ethnic nation. As Randolph is made to approximate the more provincial side of the squirearchy, Adams renders himself a child of rustic Quincy, ever in tension with metropolitan Boston. At root, both men are figures of a fading past. Henry observes of Randolph’s “literary diet,” a curriculum heavy on Shakespeare and Fielding, Burke and Gibbon, that it amounts to a splendid eighteenth-century initiation, hardly fitting for the coming day of frontier democracy. Adams similarly disparaged his own schooling in the Education as “colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian.”4
Still other links between Henry and Randolph include their mutual rejection of America’s two-party system (both forged third factions), ineffectual efforts at reform politics (neither Randolph’s Old Republicans nor Henry’s independents enjoyed much influence), and sense of being “insiders” now relegated to the “outside.” Adams’s claim that in defeat Randolph adopted the persona of “a faultfinder, a common scold,” might as easily be said of himself. And certainly over the years many did.5
It would be too much to say, however, that Henry sought an association with Randolph, whose theatrical temperament (he sometimes attended Congress accompanied by a slave valet and hunting dogs) and sectarian defense of planter power repelled him. And yet there is an underlying tone in the biography, beneath the sneers and jeers, that the loss of localism in America constitutes an unmistakable tragedy. Perhaps it is enough to note that in recording the collapse of Randolph’s prewar southern aristocracy, Henry simultaneously wrote of the coming political and economic forces that later reduced the influence of the postwar Brahmins.
As a work of history, the Randolph tries to say and explain too much. In declaring that Randolph “discovered and mapped out from beginning to end a chart of the whole course on which the slave power was to sail to its destruction,” Adams indulges in the temptation to reduce the past to the actions of a single individual. Randolph’s fingerprints were not on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) or the Missouri Compromise (1820), both of which enlarged slavery’s domain, and he died before the Mexican War (1846–48), the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), and the territorial crisis in “Bleeding Kansas” (1854–61), which pitted Yankee settlers against southern sodbusters, broke up the conventional Democratic-Whig concert, and ushered in a far more divisive partisan culture. In making “that lunatic monkey,” as Adams extravagantly referred to Randolph in his correspondence, the representative mind of the plantocracy he denied its calculation and foresight, its long-standing social and economic self-interest.6
Adams’s biography, published in October 1882, earned favorable reviews in both the Atlantic (“one of the most effective books in the whole range of our historical literature”) and the Nation (“an excellent piece of work”). Many southerners, however, dismissed the study’s emphasis on the Randolph–states’ rights side of Virginia, which slighted the bold nationalism embodied by Washington and the influential Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall. Henry’s cherry-picking description of Randolph offering a corrosive 1795 dinner toast, “George Washington,—may he be damned!,” seemed to some of these readers a low blow that said more about Randolph’s muddled mind than the mentality of the Old Dominion.7 Apart from such interpretive shortcomings, a more general question remains as to whether Randolph even belonged in the American Statesmen Series. Was he, in fact, an American statesman, or a statesman of Virginia? Henry’s study clearly suggested the latter, and subsequent biographers have seldom argued otherwise.
Adams knew that he had written, as he put it, “an unpleasant book” and a month after its release said as much to Morse, pinning the blame on Randolph: “The tone was really decided by the subject, and the excess of acid is his.” Morse supposed otherwise. Many years later he admitted to expecting a less piquant product from Adams. In referring to the recruitment of authors for the Series, he observed, “I think only one real blunder was made and that was in allotting Randolph to Henry Adams. I fancied that I should evoke something quite different from what I got.” In 1930 James Truslow Adams (no relation) published a study of the Adams family that included an assessment of the Randolph. He too considered the biography problematic and faulted both editor and author. He interviewed Morse and wrote that the old man “counted, as he has told me, on Henry’s sense of humor, a sense in which the Adamses have always been largely lacking; and the choice was an unfortunate one. Henry should never have been asked to write the book, and, if asked, should have declined.”8 Biography requires a certain critical empathy or understanding of a subject’s motives, but Adams stood too far outside of Randolph’s “Bizarre” world to make anything more than surface observations. The writing is crisp and felicitous, but “the excess of acid is his.”
One further episode of this period is worth relating, and that is Adams’s efforts to place two books in the American Statesmen Series. In the same letter to Morse in which he agreed to write on Randolph, Henry indicated a strong interest in producing a biography of Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s first vice president but better known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. “If I find Randolph easy,” he said, “I don’t know but what I will volunteer for Burr. Randolph is the type of a political charlatan who had something in him. Burr is the type of a political charlatan pure and simple, a very Jim Crow of melodramatic wind-bags. I have something to say of both varieties.” And wishing to say it, Henry, after completing the Randolph, moved just as quickly on the Burr biography. Houghton Mifflin, however, declined the finished manuscript on the grounds that the quick-triggered Burr was no statesman. Angered and perhaps a little embarrassed at the rebuff, Adams testily wrote to Morse that he cared nothing for Houghton Mifflin and had merely wished to do a friend a favor: “I want you to understand that my offer to write Burr was an offer to you, not to Houghton, to help you out in your editing. I should not choose Houghton for my publisher, and for many reasons prefer to publish in New York or Philadelphia. So long as it looked like going back on you, I would not back out of my offer, but I confess, if you will release me, I shall be glad of it; and you have only to tell Houghton that I have withdrawn my offer.”9
Some months later, another emissary from Houghton Mifflin approached Henry with an offer to publish the Burr biography outside of the Statesmen Series. Adams’s refusal prompted, several months after that, a similar appeal from Morse and this too was declined, though with an unmistakable finality: “I don’t propose to be dictated to by any damned publisher.”10 Accordingly, the Burr biography never saw the light of day, per se. But given the lengthy treatment that Burr receives in the History (over 150 pages in volume 3) it is a reasonable guess that Henry massaged the material into his masterwork.
These early Washington years were wonderfully productive for Adams, rich in their results, though not without attendant difficulties. As he approached his next project, a second and final novel, personal rather than political concerns were to dominate its contents.