Garry Wills on Henry Adams
Posted: December 20, 2025 Filed under: America, history Leave a comment
After finishing The Education of Henry Adams, I was like what do I do with this?
Here’s a brilliant guy at the end of his life talking about how he and everybody he knows is a failure and totally lost. An autobiography of a sort, except the guy never mentions his wife except when saying her tomb had become a tourist attraction? Barely mentions his children? The guy he admired the most, Clarence King, had (extratextual research reveals) a very weird and intriguing personal situation?
Garry Wills Henry Adams and the Making of America really put the whole story in context for me. Wills book is mostly a summary of Henry Adams’s six volume history of the USA in the Jefferson era. Wills says Henry Adams history is misunderstood: everyone (he particularly calls out Richard Hofstadter) only read volume one, so they didn’t get it. They assume Henry Adams is pro-John and JQ Adams, and anti-Jefferson, but he’s not. Henry Adams actually didn’t like his grandfather, who was severe and harsh with him when he was a kid. He especially didn’t like Abigail Adams, who’d been mean to his (Henry’s) beloved grandmother Louisa.
Abigail:
“I never knew a man of great talent much given to laughter.”
Booo.
But Adams never defended the Federalists. He despised Hamilton, and he told his Harvard students, “You know, gentlemen, John Adams was a demagogue” (S 1.216). His attitude toward his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was far more caustic—he called him an opportunist in politics and “demonic” in his family relations.
Did Charles Sumner have the caning coming?
But the part of Sumner’s speech that drew the most attention was his personal slur against Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler had a lisp, and Sumner mocked “the loose expectoration of his speech” in favor of slavery. This maddened a cousin of Butler, Preston Brooks, who served in the other chamber. The thirty-six-year-old Brooks waited outside the Senate to attack the forty-five-year-old Sumner.
(still, this is a bit much:)
Sumner was pinioned behind his desk. Only by wrenching the desk from the floor, to which it was firmly bolted, could the bleeding Sumner rise, and then, as he staggered about, Brooks rained more blows on him till the cane broke, after which he continued beating him with the thick end of it.
Henry Adams was one of the first American historians to really go into the archives and dig stuff up. In the Education he kinda minimizes this part of his life, but he was a really pioneering historian, processing huge volumes of material for the first time.
In the early days of America, it was the free states who were always talking about “states rights”:
Thus, in truth, states’ rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.
The historians of these days were inspired by Tacitus’s history of Germania, and interpreted this to describe a kind of proto-democracy that was very feminist:
The Teutonists honored as their founding text the only work of anthropological sociology to have survived from classical antiquity, The Germans’ Rise and Territory (c. 98 C.E.) by Senator Cornelius Tacitus, a book commonly known as the Germania. 2 Describing a people basically different from his own, Tacitus collected everything he could find out about the Germans’ religion, education, family conditions, and what influence those conditions had on political and military affairs.
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And women, though not trained to fight, accompanied their men into battle to inspire them.
Travel in the days of Jefferson:
Adams has an even harsher picture to draw, of canals not built (J 911), of steam engines of a more advanced kind being neglected (J 7-53), of roads so lacking that “between Baltimore and the new city of Washington, it [the road] meandered through forests” (J 11). In the southern states the difficulties and perils of travel were so great as to form a barrier almost insuperable. Even Virginia was no exception to this rule. At each interval of a few miles the horseman found himself stopped by a river liable to sudden freshets and rarely bridged. Jefferson, in his frequent journeys between Monticello and Washington, was happy to reach the end of the hundred miles without some vexatious delay. “Of eight rivers between here and Washington,” he wrote to his attorney general in 1801, “five have neither bridges nor boats.”
Some context for the Education:
Early in the twentieth century Adams presented his Education as a sequel to his book on medieval art, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. He was charting a decline, from medieval unity to modern multiplicity, since he had come to believe in historical entropy, the fission of things no longer able to cohere. Those who go backward to the History from the Education look for some similar decline—from an age of Federalist statesmen, say, to the courting of separate clienteles, from the Revolution’s impulse to the growth of partisan politics. In short, from Adams to Jefferson.
The South vs the North at the time:
The difference had one clear cause: slavery. Traveler after traveler noted the shock of moving from an area of free farms and neat cities into fields where slovenly shacks were not tended by the owners of human property. This had struck Adams himself when he first traveled, when he was twelve, into slave territory: The railroad, about the size and character of a modern tram, rambles through unfenced fields and woods, or through village streets, among a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and Negro babies, who might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care. This was the boys impression of what slavery caused and, for him, was all it taught. (E 719)
Yet Adams admires the things that drew him toward the South—the rural simplicity, the courteous code of the owning class, the leisurely pace, the feebleness of open commercial ambition. He quotes the northern churchman William Ellery Channing on the superior manners of the South: “They love money less than we do” (92, emphasis in original).
Washington and others knew that slavery was a burden, economic as well as moral (93), and hoped vaguely that something could someday bring it to an end; but the state (and every other southern state) was quick to resent and resist any outside pressure to change the whole infrastructure of southern life. The southern leaders who ratified the Constitution, over a stout resistance, were “influenced by pure patriotism as far as any political influence could be called pure,” but the popular majority was still hostile to the Union, and certainly remained hostile to the exercise of its powers (96). It was this restive majority that Jefferson and Madison could count on in their appeal to resist the federal government in 1798, when Virginia moved further toward secession than Massachusetts would in 1804 (97-98). Washington’s massive influence was constantly needed to keep his state in line with the Union.
As president Thomas Jefferson found himself trapped in situations where he kept having to expand federal power, which was against his whole philosophy. He was trapped as his ideology confronted reality and immediate problems. He was always trying to avoid war, not because he thought we would lose, but because he thought we might win, and the federal government would expand.
Tom Wolfe would’ve done wonders on Jefferson’s shabby chic:
For them, the shabbiness demonstrated that Jefferson was, improbably, just a plain man of the people. Louisa rightly considered him an aristocrat pretending to be a democrat, noting that he presided in plain clothes over a gourmet’s meal tended by liveried servants, all to the standards, as she said, of a European court. She was wrong to think Jefferson’s attire affected. Or, better, it was not a private affectation but one of his class. He was not hiding his aristocratic style but exhibiting it. The aristocrat is often negligent of appearances, to show he is above relying on them. It is the nervous middle-class striver who is anxious about his dignity. The country gentleman, from Squire Weston to Lord Emsworth, often putters about in old clothes, proving that he has nothing to prove. The Virginia style was apparent in John Randolph, who went onto the floor of the House in muddied riding clothes, high boots on his thin stork legs.
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Even George III in England liked to call himself a farmer, as Carlos IV in Spain called himself a worker: Don Carlos was a kind of Spanish George … the gunsmiths, joiners, turners, and cabinet-makers went with him from Madrid to Aranjuez, and from Aranjuez to La Granja. Among them he was at his ease; taking off his coat and rolling his shirt-sleeves up to the shoulder, he worked at a dozen different trades within the hour, in manner and speech as simple and easy as the workmen themselves. (232) That was an aristocrat’s style, not a genuine workman’s.
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Jefferson himself had dressed like a court dandy in Europe, as we know from the first portrait of him, by Mather Brown, in which he wears a wig and frilly lace in the highest French fashion.
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No law of the United States or treaty stipulation forbade Jefferson to receive Merry in heelless slippers, or for that matter in bare feet, if he thought proper to do so. Yet Virginia gentlemen did not intentionally mortify their guests; and perhaps Madison would have done better to relieve the President of such a suspicion by notifying Merry beforehand that he would not be expected to wear full dress. In that case the British minister might have complimented Jefferson by himself appearing in slippers without heels.
Wills points out that diplomatic protocol, while it can seem silly, is really important. It’s a language to avoid conflict:
Without a symbolic language to reward favors, or to warn of possible trouble, diplomacy would fumble in the dark. The ranking of states by the degree of honor afforded their representatives is itself a continual way of feeling out the attitudes of the other country, where ambiguity can lead to dangerous misunderstandings.
James Monroe, in Europe trying to smooth things over:
Adams sees a sadly comic side to Monroe’s travail, rejected in court after court, like a silent-movie actor who opens a series of doors and gets a pie in the face every time:
When Jefferson ended up with the Louisiana Purchase he was actually trying to buy Florida (or “the Floridas” as they might’ve been called at the time). Spain, France, who was in control was shifting with the Napoleonic Wars. Adams’ book seems to call attention to the fact that history is really a lot of unintended consequences. A guy as smart as Thomas Jefferson was constantly surprised by unpredictable twists of fate.
Garry Wills is now in an assisted living facility, apparently (I wanted to send him a fan letter). I went to see if he had anything to say on Trump, and yes, he did.
Helytimes 