Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's minister (ambassador) to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.
During his lifetime, he was best known for The History of the United States of America 1801–1817, a nine-volume work, praised for its literary style, command of the documentary evidence, and deep (family) knowledge of the period and its major figures. His posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the best English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century.
He was born in Boston on February 16, 1838, into one of the country's most prominent families. His parents were Charles Francis Adams Sr. (1807–1886) and Abigail Brown Adams (1808–1889). Both his paternal grandfather, John Quincy Adams, and great-grandfather, John Adams, one of the most prominent among the Founding Fathers, had been U.S. Presidents. His maternal grandfather, Peter Chardon Brooks, was one of Massachusetts' most successful and wealthiest merchants. Another great-grandfather, Nathaniel Gorham, signed the Constitution.
Adams attended the Dixwell School, where he was one of the very first students. After his graduation from Harvard College in 1858, he embarked on a grand tour of Europe, during which he also attended lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin.
In his 50s, he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity as an honorary member at the 1893 Columbian Exposition by Harris J. Ryan, a judge for the exhibit on electrical engineering. Through that organization, he was a member of the Irving Literary Society.
Adams returned home from Europe in the midst of the heated presidential election of 1860. He tried his hand again at law, taking employment with Judge Horace Gray's Boston firm, but this was short-lived.
His father, Charles Francis Adams Sr., was also seeking re-election to the US House of Representatives. After his successful re-election, Charles Francis asked Henry to be his private secretary, continuing a father-son pattern set by John and John Quincy and suggesting that Charles Francis had chosen Henry as the political scion of that generation of the family. Henry shouldered the responsibility reluctantly and with much self-doubt. "[I] had little to do", he reflected later, "and knew not how to do it rightly."
During this time, Adams was the anonymous Washington correspondent for Charles Hale's Boston Daily Advertiser.
On March 19, 1861, Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Francis Adams Sr. minister to the United Kingdom. Henry accompanied his father to London as his private secretary. He also became the anonymous London correspondent for The New York Times. The two Adamses were kept very busy, monitoring Confederate diplomatic intrigues and trying to obstruct the construction of Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners by British shipyards (see Alabama Claims). Henry's writings for the Times argued that Americans should be patient with the British. While in Britain, Adams was befriended by many noted men, including Charles Lyell, Francis T. Palgrave, Richard Monckton Milnes, James Milnes Gaskell, and Charles Milnes Gaskell. He worked to introduce the young Henry James to English society, with the help of his closest and lifelong friend Charles Milnes Gaskell and his wife Lady Catherine (nee Wallop).
While in Britain, Henry read and was taken with the works of John Stuart Mill. For Adams, Mill's 1861 book Considerations on Representative Government showed the necessity of an enlightened, moral, and intelligent elite to provide leadership to a government elected by the masses and subject to demagoguery, ignorance, and corruption. Henry wrote to his brother Charles that Mill demonstrated to him that "democracy is still capable of rewarding a conscientious servant." His years in London led Adams to conclude that he could best provide that knowledgeable and conscientious leadership by working as a correspondent and journalist.
In 1868, Adams returned to the United States and settled in Washington, DC, where he began working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalism.
In 1870, Adams was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877 at 39. As an academic historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. Among his students was Henry Cabot Lodge, who worked closely with Adams as a graduate student.
Adams was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1875.
Adams's The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889–1891) is a highly detailed history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations with a focus on diplomacy. Wide praise was given for its literary merit, especially the opening five chapters of volume 1, describing the nation in 1800. These chapters have also been criticized; Noble Cunningham states flatly, "Adams misjudged the state of the nation in 1800." In striving for literary effect, Cunningham argues, Adams ignored the dynamism and sophistication of the new nation. Such arguments aside, historians have long recognized it as a major and permanent monument of American historiography. It has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Garry Wills, and "a history yet to be replaced" by C. Vann Woodward.
In the 1880s, Adams wrote two novels, starting with Democracy, which was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular in literary circles in England and Europe as well as in America. (Only after Adams's death did his publisher reveal his authorship.) Democracy exposes the corruption of political life in Washington, D.C., building on Adams' unique insider's perspective. His other novel, published under the nom de plume of Frances Snow Compton, was Esther, whose heroine was believed to be modeled after his wife.
During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Adams edited, with the assistance of his brother Charles Francis Adams, the major American intellectual-literary journal, the North American Review. During his tenure it published a number of articles exposing corrupt malpractices in finance, corporations and government, anticipating the work of the "muckrakers" by a generation. The brothers collected several of their most important essays in Chapters of Erie (1871). This experience marked the public commencement of Henry Adams' critical observation of, and radical disenchantment with, the operations and ascendancy of corporations and centralized finance in the economic, social and political life of America. Summarizing the observations of a lifetime, he wrote to his brother Brooks on September 20, 1910 (vol. 6, pp. 369–370, Letters, ed. Levenson et al.): "Our system of protection [of industry and commerce]... is fatal to our principles.... Railways, trusts, banking-system, manufactures, capital and labor, all rest on the principle of monopoly ... The suggestion that these great corporate organisms, which now perform all the vital functions of our social life, should behave themselves decently, gives away our contention that they have no right to exist. Nor am I prepared to admit that more decency can be attained through a legislature made up of similar people exercising similar illegal powers.... From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud.... The conviction of having reached this point where we have no choice but to go on in our own rot, drove me out of all share in public affairs twenty years ago.. Every one who has assumed such a share since then has only muddled and made the matter worse."