Henry Brooks Adams
When Charles Francis Adams traveled to London to serve as Abraham Lincoln’s minister to the Court of Saint James he took with him his son Henry to serve as his personal secretary. The young Henry had graduated from Harvard in 1858, after which he had taken a tour of Europe, where he attended law lectures in Berlin. His legal education complete, he returned to the United States in 1860, to find a heated presidential election and threats of secession being uttered by several of the southern states. His father won re-election to the House that fall, and asked Henry to serve in Washington as his personal secretary, a post Henry reluctantly accepted.
When Henry and his father arrived in London (decades earlier, John Quincy Adams had accompanied his father in a similar role) they were immediately busy monitoring the activities of Confederate sympathizers and spies. Henry also took on the role of being an anonymous correspondent to the New York Times, through which he urged Americans to be calm regarding Britain’s activities during the war. Henry was befriended by noted British political and business leaders, as well as introduced into British high society, and became, like his great-grandfather, somewhat of an anglophile. He remained in Great Britain until 1868.
Henry returned to the United States and residence in Washington DC determined to become a journalist and historian. Henry witnessed first-hand the corruption and backroom dealing which was prevalent in Washington during Reconstruction, and later wrote of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, “I think Lee should have been hanged…It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” Although Henry was intent on exposing the corruption in which the journalists of the day often took part he was offered the position of professor of medieval history at Harvard. He is credited with initiating seminars in the teaching of history while there.
In 1877 Henry returned to Washington and work as a journalist and historian. While living there, over the course of 1889-91 and in nine volumes he produced The History of the United States of America (1801-1817), providing a detailed analysis and history of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as the growth of the nation. Henry also wrote a highly successful and popular novel, Democracy, though it was published anonymously, and second, less successful novel under a pen name. His home on Lafayette Square became a center of the social life of the capital.
In 1907 Henry published The Education of Henry Adams, in a private edition which was made publicly available after his death in 1912. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 and was labeled the best non-fiction book of the twentieth century by Modern Library in 1998. Throughout his life Adams was touched by torments, including the suffering of others of his family through depression and alcoholism. In 1885 his wife Clover committed suicide, whether Adams’s alleged dalliances with other women was a contributing factor is debated. He never mentioned the topic in his later works.