The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography

552 Pages·1999·1.98 MB·English

by  Henry Adams

oxford world’s classics
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Henry Adams, essayist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer,
was born in Boston in 1838,a great-grandson ofthe second president
ofthe United States,John Adams,and grandson ofthe sixth,John
Quincy Adams.He graduated from Harvard in 1858and later studied
in Europe,where he also worked as private secretary to his father,then
minister to England.He was professor of history at Harvard from
1870to1877and editor of the North American Review.He moved
permanently to Washington in 1877to begin work on a biography of
Albert Gallatin,an American statesman,and what would become a
nine-volume History ofthe United Statesunder the administrations of
Jefferson and Madison,published between 1885and1891.He also
published two novels:Democracy(1880) and Esther(1884).Following
the death ofhis wife in 1885,he began to make annual trips to Europe,
especially France,until the beginning ofthe First World War;he also
travelled widely in the Far East and Caribbean.In 1904his narrative
ofmedieval churches and culture,Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,
appeared to great acclaim;in 1907The Education ofHenry Adamswas
privately printed and circulated among friends including Henry
James and President Theodore Roosevelt. In September 1918, six
months after Adams’s death,the Educationappeared in a trade edi-
tion;it was widely reviewed,became a bestseller,and received the
Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
Ira B. Nadel is the author of Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form
(1984), Joyce and the Jews (1989), and Various Positions: A Life of
Leonard Cohen(1996).He has also edited The Dead Secretby Wilkie
Collins for Oxford World’s Classics (1997) and The Cambridge
Companion to Ezra Pound(1998).He is professor of English at the
University ofBritish Columbia.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of
Henry Adams
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
IRA B. NADEL
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations vi
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxix
Select Bibliography xxxii
A Chronology ofHenry Adams xxxv
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS 1
Explanatory Notes 421
Index 493
ABBREVIATIONS
BD Chalfant,Edward,Better in Darkness,A Biography ofHenry
Adams,His Second Life,1862‒1891(Hamden,Conn.:Archon
Books,1994).
HA Samuels,Ernest,The Young Adams(Cambridge,Mass.:
Harvard Univ.Press,1948),HAI;Henry Adams:The Middle
Years(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard Univ.Press,1958),HAII;
Henry Adams:The Major Phase(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard
Univ.Press,1964),HAIII.
LA Adams,Henry,Novels,Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,The
Education ofHenry Adams,Poems(New York:Library of
America,1984).Introduction and notes by Ernest and Jayne
Samuels.
Lett. The Letters ofHenry Adams,ed.J.C.Levenson,Ernest
Samuels,Charles Vandersee,and Viola Hopkins Winner,
6vols.(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard Univ.Press,1982‒8).
INTRODUCTION
‘I must know whether America is right or wrong.’...
‘I grant it is an experiment,but it is the only direction society can take that
is worth its taking;the only conception ofits duty large enough to satisfy its
instincts....Every other possible step is backward,and I do not care to re-
peat the past.’(LA 39–40)
The voice is not Henry Adams’s but the explanation is. The vexed
question about America is put by Madeleine Lee, the heroine of
Adams’s popular novel of 1880, Democracy; the reply is by John
Carrington,a fictitious Washington observer ofthe political scene.But
it could just as easily be Adams in the Educationor in his History ofthe
United States During the Administrations ofJefferson and Madison.As a
journalist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer, Adams was con-
stantly focused on the American experiment, testing a statement
offered by another figure in Democracy:‘You Americans believe your-
selves to be excepted from the operation ofgeneral laws.You care not
for experience’(LA 37–8).The Education of Henry Adams,privately
printed in 1907,is a response to this claim,exploring the potential of
laws and theories and experience to guide America through a turbulent
present based on Adams’s atlas ofthe past.The author,who embodies
the ambivalency ofthe country’s direction,searches for a narrative as
well as a theory to explain his life and that ofthe nation.
The fact that Adams was born into a family which helped to shape
the values and principles ofthe country—his great-grandfather was
the second president ofthe United States,his grandfather the sixth—
lends irony to his journey. Adams was duty bound to attend to the
growth,reform,and renewal ofthe country,a task he undertook with
confused dedication. A critic of political life, he none the less lived
mostly within the shadow ofthe White House;refusing to run for any
elected office, he none the less hoped for various political appoint-
ments;a constant student ofAmerican history,yet he formed his ideas
about the past and the future in Europe. A closed and private indi-
vidual (Democracy, as well as his later novel Esther, was published
anonymously),Adams is nevertheless best known for a work that is os-
tensibly an autobiography and work ofconfession but is in fact a care-
fully constructed and artfully arranged text reflecting literary skill and
viii Introduction
historical consciousness.It is not only incomplete,with twenty crucial
years omitted,but replete with factual errors.Yet since its first appear-
ance from a trade publisher in 1918,the Educationhas become a clas-
sic,equivalent in importance to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographyor
the earlier Diary ofCotton Matherfor understanding the evolution of
the American psyche.
Legacy
The Adams family legacy ensured both an identity and a burden for
Henry Adams.He had no difficulty in escaping from obscurity;the
challenge was to find his own identity. The family was perhaps the
most distinguished in America, the source of presidents and diplo-
mats, individuals who shaped the direction of the nation. Adams
began as a minor diplomat and then became a journalist, academic,
biographer,historian,and,finally,an autobiographer.His career took
him from Quincy to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then to Berlin,
London,and Washington,with long residences in Paris and journeys
throughout Europe.Adams also travelled to the American far West,
the Caribbean (including Cuba) and the Pacific, including Tahiti,
Singapore,and Australia.
But fame and success haunted him. Adams’s family had been
defined by both and he was constantly aware of his heritage.As the
fourth-generation heir to America’s most illustrious family name,
Henry Adams possessed a system oforder he called ‘the family mind’
which sometimes challenged his need for independence.Surrounding
him were constant reminders ofwhat he inherited in terms not only of
accomplishments but of possessions and relationships: the family
home known as The Old House purchased by John Adams in 1788;the
many aunts and uncles who repeated stories ofpast successes;the his-
tories,diaries,and autobiographies written by preceding generations
of Adamses. Rigorous self-examination was a documented family
habit,as the numerous pages ofdiaries and notebooks confirm.1The
family also possessed carefully defined principles and interests which
reinforced a set of fixed concerns from one generation to the next,
unified in a statement linking politics, religion, science, and history
1 The many volumes ofthe Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society,
Boston,testify,in thousands ofpages ofletters,diaries,copybooks,essays,poems,his-
tories,novels,biographies,and autobiographies,that they were a writing family.
Introduction ix
made by John Adams (1735–1826).‘Politics’,he wrote in 1778,‘are the
divine science after all.’2Political and diplomatic service at local,na-
tional,and international levels was the path to fame.A lawyer who be-
came the second president ofthe United States,John Adams believed
in reason as the instrument to good government.But sceptical ofhuman
perfectibility,he upheld the need for checks and balances to ensure ef-
fective government,a system he enshrined in the Massachusetts con-
stitution which he helped to draft in 1780.
John Quincy Adams (1767–1849), the eldest son of John Adams,
enforced these goals through his own political actions,becoming a far-
sighted secretary ofstate (largely responsible for the Monroe Doctrine
which declared that North America would no longer be colonized by
foreign powers),the sixth president ofthe United States,and,later,a
hard-working congressman.He also developed a devotion to science
which resulted in the establishment of the Smithsonian Institute in
Washington,a monument to the vigorous pursuit ofscientific know-
ledge in the new country.Charles Francis Adams (1807–86),the third
son ofJohn Quincy and the father ofHenry,gravitated to politics,be-
coming a congressman and then American minister to England.He
also believed in the value ofthe family letters and defined his role as
archivist and editor, overseeing the publication of family papers in-
cluding his own diary. This interest in historical completeness and
sense of literary responsibility was passed on to Henry, who could
nonchalantly begin a letter in 1891with ‘a century ago,more or less,
President Washington sent my grandfather [John Quincy Adams],
before he was thirty years old,as minister to the Hague’—as ifmost
grandfathers normally did such work (Lett.iii.594).
The family heritage personalized American history for Henry
Adams and meant that every step of his own life possessed a mythic
resonance,raising echoes of his forebears.The history of the nation
and ofMassachusetts literally cast a shadow over his youth in Quincy,
Massachusetts.Born to privilege,although in the Educationhe ironic-
ally declares that he had been an average young man,Adams went like
his predecessors to Harvard and became the centre ofa coterie ofthe
ninety-strong class of 1858.He had a prodigious memory,which he
applied to the classics,and was well versed in French,which his father
had taught him, although he could also read Italian, German, and
2 John Adams in Earl N.Harbert,The Force So Much Closer Home:Henry Adams and
the Adams Family(New York:New York Univ.Press,1977),6.