Over a fifteen-month period beginning in October 1889 Henry’s nine-volume History, some dozen years in the making, rolled off the presses. Mere length only hints at its singular achievement assaying the early American republic. A half-century after its appearance Columbia University’s Henry Steele Commager called the project “the finest piece of historical writing, in our literature,” and still another half-century later the noted Jefferson specialist Noble Cunningham Jr. agreed that it deserved “a high place among the great writings in American history.” More recently Garry Wills wrote an entire book, Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), revisiting the History’s origins, reviewing its contents, and arguing for its unbroken relevance. “It is,” Wills insists, “the non-fiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America.” Thinking even that encomium insufficient, Yale scholar Edmund S. Morgan raised the stakes still higher: “Are the Histories the nonfiction masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America? Probably. Are they the masterpiece of historical writing in America in any century? Certainly.”1
At its most basic level, the History tells the story of America’s growth and development between 1800 and 1817, a period encompassing the presidential administrations of Jefferson and Madison, the War of 1812, and the rise of a new post-Appalachian West. Many of the details concerning this long drama Adams discovered in European archives. Extended stays in London, Paris, and Madrid yielded huge caches of hitherto inaccessible primary sources closed to less connected scholars. Though Henry himself labored in these repositories, notably identifying important materials and working in newspapers, the task might have proven impossible if not for the small teams of copyists he employed to transcribe documents. He further enlisted both friends and officials in America and Europe to aid in the search for sources. On some occasions, so Clover liked to jest, she, “being a woman,… could make requests for permissions which Henry was… too shy to make.”2
In one signal case Adams successfully solicited Henry Vignaud, secretary of the American legation in Paris, for access to the French archives. “If your diplomacy… can succeed so far as to persuade the ‘Sous-directeur’ to let his copyist go to work, at my expense, at once,” he wrote Vignaud in early 1880, “it may save me much delay at a later time.” The secretary’s tact did, in fact, prevail and Henry happily returned the favor with a gift that, in a sense, only an Adams could supply—printed editions of his ancestors’ works and memoirs: “I have sent you through the State Department sets of the John Adams (10 vols.) and J. Q. Adams (12 vols.) so that you have now a tolerably fair beginning of the vast wilderness of Adams literature.” Henry later hinted at his desire to do Vignaud a still more substantial service by extending his tenure in the American legation. The recent election had made James Garfield president and a chance existed that Vignaud, now working in James Blaine’s State Department, might lose his post and Henry his important contact. Adams half-apologized for the unseemly scramble for offices about to transpire: “Garfield and Blaine are what are called popular men, that is to say, have hordes of needy politicians to feed.” And he confessed the limits of his own personal influence: “[I] doubt whether any interference of mine would, in the long run, do you good.” Still, as if asserting a kind of baronial privilege, or perhaps just offering a knowledgeable guess regarding Washington’s prevailing political winds, he assured Vignaud, “It is not supposed that you will be disturbed.”3
Other research courtesies were extended to Henry that emphasize the aristocratic nature of nineteenth-century historical writing. The National Archive at Madrid was opened for his use on a Sunday; copy-ists under his direction on two continents enjoyed unprecedented access to government documents; and Adams successfully prevailed upon Harvard librarian Justin Winsor to send to Beverly Farms various books and newspapers. These included The Richmond Recorder (1802), Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama (1859), the New York Commercial Advertiser (1801), William Henry Foote’s studies of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia, and Benjamin Rush’s unpublished autobiography. The last George Bancroft had tried unsuccessfully to consult in both 1849 and 1867. The security and preservation of the old materials need not be a concern, Adams assured Winsor, and he drew up a plan for packaging the precious items: “If the college carpenter will, under your orders, construct for me a strong box, with stout hinges, iron handles, and a double lock, into which the volumes may be put, I think there will be very little danger of loss or injury.”4
This research paid off handsomely, and the treasures that Adams unearthed from the European archives in particular dramatically recast the project. At one time he anticipated needing no more than three volumes to tell the story of Jeffersonian America, but the richness of source materials and the lengthening shadows they shed across the Atlantic World forced Henry to reconsider the study’s scope. Impatient with a mere national history, he drew, rather, a nuanced portrait of British diplomacy, documented the collapse of Spanish power in the New World, and traced Napoleon’s policies in Europe and its colonies. By putting the names of two Virginia presidents in the prosaic titles—History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison—Henry gave the appearance of a strictly American topic, and yet its transnational reach argued otherwise.
A further striking feature is the work’s steep discounting of “great” men. While preparing the volumes Adams wrote to the philosopher William James, “With hero worship like [the Scottish historian Thomas] Carlyle’s, I have little patience.” Process rather than personality, so he stressed, catalyzed change. The Jeffersonians had come to power in 1801, Henry observed, as a “peace party” opposed, during the long French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815), to high taxes, a large national debt, and an expanding military. But this commitment ultimately collapsed. Near constant conflict between France and Britain enflamed the Atlantic and eventually drew the United States into the War in 1812. Such is the folly of men, parties, and platforms. In a letter to Samuel Tilden, written with the volumes well under way, Henry insisted that the celebrated Virginia triumvirate of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe counted for very little in the larger scheme of things. “They appear like mere grass-hoppers, kicking and gesticulating, on the middle of the Mississippi river,” he challenged decades of Founders’ filial piety. “There is no possibility of reconciling their theories with their acts, or their extraordinary foreign policy with dignity. They were carried along on a stream which floated them after a fashion without much regard to themselves.”5
Adams’s dismissal of elite leadership had the salutary effect of commending non-elites. He lauds the doomed if resolute warriors fighting under the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh for having “compelled the [U.S.] government to pay for once something like the value of the lands it took”; he asserts that “Burr’s conspiracy” to carve out a rogue empire in the Southwest “had no deep roots in society, but was mostly confined to a circle of well-born, well-bred, and well-educated individuals”; and he further extols popular resistance to the great Bonaparte: “Napoleon’s rule in politics, and one which cost him dear, was to disregard masses and reckon only on leaders.”6 There is a strong intimation in the volumes, moreover, that while American civil and military authority had stumbled badly during the War of 1812—to wit, the burning of Washington and failure to conquer Canada—the people’s resolve to rally and survive saw the young nation through. Not that any among them, Henry tutted, made “history” happen. Looking to identify a truly momentous event in the so-called Age of Jefferson, he designated the August 1807 maiden voyage of Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat, the first vessel to use steam propulsion for transport. Paddling up the southernmost part of the Hudson River at an average speed of five miles per hour, the experimental craft traveled from New York City to Albany and back, thus demonstrating technology’s capacity to challenge nature.
Some readers have wondered over the years if the History’s downgrade of the Jeffersonians constituted a family vendetta. The evidence suggests otherwise. Yes, John Adams lost the 1800 presidential election to Jefferson, but John Quincy Adams, of whom Henry had a living memory, prospered under Virginia presidents, who secured him diplomatic posts and a cabinet seat. Rather than attack the southern plantocracy, Henry saw it as simply another ephemeral power structure invariably relegated to history’s ash heap. His own people had stumbled along the same path to obsolescence. In an 1875 review of John Gorham Palfrey’s History of New England, Adams had soberly described “the Puritan colonies… [as] an anachronism in the world. Virginia or Pennsylvania could flourish in such an atmosphere, but New England slowly perished. The descendants of Winthrop, Endicott, and Dudley found themselves in a new order of things. Their fathers’ great experiment of a religious commonwealth had broken down. The past had to be abandoned.”7
Perhaps recognizing the impossibility of attracting a significant audience for his tome, Henry presumed to be uninterested in sales, suggesting that the project constituted a gift to the nation. “If I were offering this book for sale,” he wrote his publisher, Charles Scribner, a year before the first volumes appeared, “I should, on publishers’ estimates, capitalise twelve years of unbroken labor, at (say) $5000 a year, and $20,000 in money spent in traveling, collecting materials, copying, printing, &c; in all $80,000, without charging that additional interest, insurance, or security per-centage which every business-man has to exact. This book, therefore, costs me $80,000” (about $2.2 million in current dollars). But, far from begrudging the cost, Henry, the great scoffer of Great Man History, wanted only great men to write history, and he willingly paid for the pleasure. “History has always been, for this reason, the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits,” he once observed, “because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.… I should feel sure that whenever such a rate of profit could be realised on history, history would soon become as popular a pursuit as magazine-writing, and the luxury of its social distinction would vanish.”8
Henry may have prized the aristocratic character of his craft, but it nevertheless rankled him when the History sold in small numbers. In the winter of 1892 he wrote irritably to Charles, “Literature has vanished from mankind.… My own works lurk in some dusty corner among other odd volumes.” A few years later his former student Charles Franklin Thwing suggested that Adams continue his American story beyond the Jeffersonians. “His reply,” Thwing later recalled, “was that the American people had never shown that appreciation of his history which would warrant him in further writing.” And in 1916, long after the books appeared, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison paid a social call on Adams and listened as the old man offered a last lament on the topic: “He said that the first volume of his History of the United States… sold only to the extent of about 1,500 copies; and that by the time the ninth and last volume appeared in 1891, the sale of each new volume had fallen off to less than one thousand. That seemed to him proof that the American public did not care for his contributions to their history.”9
Among associates on both sides of the Atlantic, however, the project received a more welcoming response. “You have made an invaluable contribution to American history,” Francis Parkman wrote to Adams when the first volumes began to appear, and Hay singled out books 5 and 6 for, as he put it, “tak[ing] the cake. There is a gathering strength and interest in these later volumes that is nothing short of exciting.” Several years later, shortly after Henry’s death in 1918, the British political theorist Harold Laski praised the originality of Adams’s scholarship to Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I think him on the whole the first of the Americans who wrote specifically American history. His book has the wrath and insight of a man who did not merely write from documents but had something of his own to say.” Succeeding generations seem to have agreed. In 1955 Cornell University Press published the first volume’s opening six chapters, which review the physical, intellectual, and economic conditions of the country at the moment the Jeffersonians assumed power. Titled The United States in 1800, it sold over 130,000 copies through the mid-1980s; in 2004 the University of Missouri Press put out a revised edition, and in 2007 yet another version appeared in the New York Review of Books Classics series. This latest iteration included not only the History’s first six chapters but also its four concluding chapters, “America in 1817,” under the expansive title The Jeffersonian Transformation: Passages from the “History.”10 After being out of print for decades, the full work was reissued in a two-volume set by the Library of America in 1986.
One may still read with profit Adams’s long meditation on the early republic, even as scholarly revision and shifting cultural priorities have naturally altered our view of the period. Today, for example, no such “definitive” study would downplay the impact of slavery, as did Henry. He regarded chattel servitude as a feature of the South, ignoring its still firmly rooted presence in the North; as one modern critic of the History has observed, Adams had nothing to say about the twenty thousand bondspeople living in New York in 1800—the state having provided only the previous year for gradual manumission.11 Women are similarly hidden in the work. The History, though an imposing four thousand pages, contains fewer than a dozen references to women in its index. These exceptions, including Dolley Madison, a Spanish queen, and Theodosia Burr Alston (daughter of Aaron Burr), reflect the aristocratic tone of political society that interested Henry.
Adams betrays a similar chauvinism in treating states and sections. When handling the growing South, he leans too heavily on coastal Virginia; New England to him is Boston. His discussion of the expanding West, moreover, is both hurried and hypothetical. As an actual place with real cities, economies, and peoples, it receives little notice, and yet as an idea or concept of where America’s democratic energies are moving, it is somewhat abstractly regarded as the nation’s “future.” Other absences and imprecisions—the lack of attention to religion outside of New England, the defining of culture as high culture, and a tendency by Henry to read his struggles with Grantism into the patronage battles carried on among the Jeffersonians—bear evidence of the History’s various partialities and limitations. And yet taken on its own terms the work offers a compelling (if perhaps too neat) interpretation of how the United States transformed itself from a backward-looking republic into a forward-looking democracy.
Written at the tail end of Romantic historiography’s heyday, Henry’s History, though grounded in the new scientific rigor, is perhaps not quite as fashionably empirical as he presumed. For rather than drafting a narrow, footnote-heavy monograph, Adams adopted the then common practice of producing an “epic,” distinguished as much for its literary merits as its sheer size. More important, he tacitly agreed with the Romantic view that a benevolent fatalism intervened in the New World’s break from its old colonial masters. Bancroft’s insistence that “the spirit of the colonies demanded freedom from the beginning” is echoed in Henry’s claim that “every American, from Jefferson and Gallatin down to the poorest squatter, seemed to nourish an idea that he was doing what he could to overthrow the tyranny which the past had fastened on the human mind.”12 Between the two scholars we might define Adams as the more secular in that he avoided the apologias of manifest destiny and their attendant assumptions that other nations should emulate the democratic ideals of the United States. But in presuming the inevitable progress of America, Henry tells the familiar story of a rising people living in a blessed land and moving toward certain prosperity.
Edward Gibbon recounted in a memoir that directly after completing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he strolled the grounds of his garden in reflection:
It was on the day, or rather the night of the 27th of June 1787… that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summerhouse in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a… covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.… I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.13
With Gibbon’s sentimental model in mind, Henry sought a moment of equal gravitas. After composing the final lines of the History in Quincy while visiting his mother, the full import of the proj-ect, much of it researched and written with Clover’s interest and aid, finally caught up with him. “The narrative was finished last Monday,” he wrote on September 16, 1888. “In imitation of Gibbon I walked in the garden among the yellow and red autumn flowers, blazing in sunshine, and meditated. My meditations were too painful to last. The contrast between my beginning and end is something Gibbon never conceived.”14
In pursuit of yet another beginning, Henry made plans to go abroad. He may have desired a fresh setting to place Clover’s absence into perspective; he may have grown self-conscious of his undeniable attraction to Elizabeth Cameron and sought to put oceans between them; or he may have simply repeated an old family cycle of writing and traveling. Among these possibilities resides a single certainty: Henry found peace in motion. Following college, he went to Germany; after teaching the sons of Harvard he haunted Europe’s archives; and within months of Clover’s suicide he had departed for Japan. And now, still teased by the search for an elusive and loosely defined nirvana, Adams looked once more to the Pacific, eager to sample Polynesia’s “primitive” island societies.