Henry Brooks Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 16, 1838, the fourth of seven children of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks Adams. Henry’s distinguished family included a great-grandfather, John Adams (1735–1826), who was the second President of the United States, as well as a grandfather, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth President of the United States. Henry’s boyhood memories included pleasant summers spent at Quincy, the residence of his paternal grandparents located seven miles south of Boston. A nearly fatal bout of scarlet fever shortly before his fourth birthday may have accounted for Adams’s diminished physical stature (barely five feet three inches tall as an adult). A trip to Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D. C. with his father in 1850 exposed Henry to slavery and left a lasting impression; he and his family strongly opposed the institution. His formal childhood schooling was at the private Latin School of E. S. Dixwell in Boston where he was graduated in June 1854. On August 31 of that year, he began his collegiate studies at Harvard.
Henry was only an average student at Harvard but did contribute to the Harvard Magazine and was Class Orator for graduation. Throughout his life, Adams was critical of formal education; even Harvard could not escape his scorn. Following graduation in 1858, Henry sailed with several friends for the “Grand Tour” of Europe, a tradition that some of the privileged young men of the day enjoyed. Adams’s specific plan was to study civil law in Berlin. Finding his German inadequate, he enrolled in a German secondary school. He spent most of 1859–1860 seeing Europe, significantly beginning his writing career by publishing travel letters in the Boston Daily Courier. Returning home in October 1860, Henry served in Washington as private secretary to his father, a member of Congress. He was also Washington correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser during this volatile period, just before the beginning of the Civil War.
Henry continued as private secretary to his father during Charles Francis Adams’s tenure as Minister to England (1861–1868); until January 1862, he was also the secret London correspondent of the New York Times, a situation that nearly caused him and his father considerable embarrassment (see Chapter VIII of the Critical Commentaries). The American Civil War years (1861–1865) were especially intriguing because his father’s work dealt with pro-Confederacy interests and successfully tried to keep England neutral.
Returning to the States in July 1868, Henry concentrated on a career as a freelance political journalist in Washington. He published extensively in journals during this period and earned a reputation as a reformer, especially in articles dealing with American finance and the New York gold conspiracy. While vacationing in Europe in the summer of 1870, he learned that his beloved sister Louisa had been in a cab accident near her home in Italy. He rushed to her side, but she died of tetanus a few days later. Despondent, Henry briefly sought solace in a monastery in England. He received a letter from the president of Harvard offering a position as assistant professor of history and editor of the prestigious North American Review. With personal reluctance but overwhelming encouragement of family and friends, he accepted.
At Harvard, he gained a reputation as an effective, innovative teacher and an unorthodox, iconoclastic, sometimes-dictatorial editor. He was an American pioneer in the use of the seminar system, evaluations by students, and the importance of student journals. He introduced graduate studies in history at Harvard and promoted the study of American history.
On June 27, 1872, Henry married Marian “Clover” Hooper of Boston. The couple spent the next academic year on an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt. He resigned from Harvard in 1877, moving to Washington to edit the papers of Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. This precipitated a period of extensive publishing that included The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879); two novels (Democracy, published anonymously in 1880, and Esther, published under the pseudonym “Frances Snow Compton,” in 1884); a critical biography of the southern statesman John Randolph (1882); and, most important, the History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891), in nine volumes.
On December 6, 1885, Henry’s wife, Marian, committed suicide after a long period of depression, a disease that ran in her family. The event was especially traumatic for Adams and the principal reason for his leaving twenty years of his life (1872–1892) out of his most famous work, The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1907). He sometimes referred to the rest of his life as “posthumous,” but some of his best work was completed after his wife’s tragic death.
After Adams’s wife’s suicide, his friends became even more important to him. He traveled the South Seas and visited Japan with the artist John La Farge and was especially close to geologist Clarence King and statesman John Hay. Elizabeth Cameron, married to a Senator from Pennsylvania, became his emotional confidante in an apparently platonic relationship.
Henry continued his interest in politics, explored a scientific approach to history, studied medieval philosophy and architecture, and wrote extensively. The Panic of 1893 drew him into the controversy over the gold standard: The question was whether international trade and American currency should be based on gold only or on both gold and silver, which would expand the economy and cheapen the currency. Henry supported the backers of silver and feared a new ruling class of gold capitalists (whom he called gold-bugs). He also advocated independence for Cuba. Remarkable advances in science caused him to wonder if scientific method could be successfully applied to the study of history. This is considered in detail in the Education and resulted in Adams’s “Dynamic Theory of History.” An intense interest in medieval philosophy and architecture led to the writing of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, printed privately in 1904. He thought of this and the Education as companion pieces.
Henry Adams was partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1912 and spent most of his remaining years traveling, resting, receiving dignitaries, and quietly socializing at his home at 1603 H Street in Washington. He died on March 27, 1918 and was buried beside his wife at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D. C. The first trade publication of his Education came out later that year and was an immediate best-seller. In 1919, Adams was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Education of Henry Adams. In 1999, Modern Library listed the Education as the best nonfiction book, written in English, of the twentieth century.
