Charles Francis Adams Jr.
Charles F. Adams was born in Boston in 1835, the great grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy. In the style of the already prominent political family, Charles was educated in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1856. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Charles joined the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry in Boston, accepting a commission as a First Lieutenant, the first member of the Adams line to enter into military service (though patriarch John Adams had briefly armed himself with a musket to help defend the ship in which he traveled to France during the Revolution). The following year he was promoted to Captain.
The regiment saw action during the 1862 Maryland Campaign following Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North. Charles fought at the Battle of South Mountain and the ensuing Battle of Antietam, which remains the bloodiest single day of combat in American history. In 1863 the regiment again saw action during the Gettysburg campaign, and the company which was under Charles’s command was engaged in the Battle of Aldie. At that battle, which was part of the screening actions by the Confederate cavalry as Lee’s army advanced northward through Virginia, the 1st Massachusetts was virtually destroyed as a combat regiment, losing 198 of the 294 men deployed.
In 1864 Adams was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, a unit of colored troops led by white officers. In the spring of 1865 Charles was promoted to full colonel and command of the regiment, which he led for the rest of the war, entering Richmond in 1865 after Lee abandoned his works there and retreated to Appomattox Court House. Charles resigned his commission and returned to Boston in the summer of 1865. He was promoted to an honorary position of Brigadier General of United States Volunteers in 1866 as reward for what President Andrew Johnson called “distinguished gallantry and efficiency.”
In Boston Charles was appointed to the Massachusetts Railroad Commission. This was the start of a career in the railroad industry which boomed in the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Charles created regulations which protected the railroads and their investors, helping them to increase their size and profits, often to the detriment of their customers. In 1884 the US government, wary of the graft and profiteering of the Union Pacific Railroad, engineered a deal by which the railroad was compelled to install Charles as its president. Charles encountered difficulties with the labor and trade unions and by 1890 he resigned.
Charles Francis Adams Jr. was a longtime advocate for education; as president of the Union Pacific he established libraries in or near company facilities and stops for the betterment of its workers and their families. He also served in the Massachusetts Parks Commission, leading to the creation of several of the parks which exist today. He published several works on railroads, including an essay which revealed how railroads manipulated the rates they charged through collusion, at the expense of the consumer. His autobiography was published in 1916, the year following his death in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was buried in Quincy.