Introduction
On February 21, 1848, Congressman John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts cast a final vote in the House of Representatives, where he had served since soon after his humiliating loss to Andrew Jackson in his attempt to gain a second term as President. It was a “nay” vote on a resolution thanking American officers and soldiers for their victories in the Mexican War. In the very next moment, he collapsed from a stroke on the floor of the House. For two days he lingered in the chambers of the Speaker, before dying on February 23.
For historian Douglas R. Egerton, this moment marked not only the end of John Quincy Adams’s extraordinary life, but also the beginning of the slow decline of the Adams family as a moral and political force in American history. In his book Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America, Egerton traces the story from the towering influence of Charles Francis Adams, Sr., to the more conflicted, often contradictory lives of his sons.
The Story of a Family in Transition
Charles Francis Adams, Sr., was a formidable presence: an early voice in the emerging Republican movement, a powerful Congressman during the secession crisis, and perhaps the most skilled American diplomat of the nineteenth century. Yet his children told a different story of America’s future.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., commanded an African-American cavalry regiment in the Civil War yet became a lifelong racist and promoter of the “Lost Cause” myth.
Henry Brooks Adams, brilliant and restless, captured his disillusionment with just about everything in The Education of Henry Adams.
Brooks Adams, the youngest of the sons, wrote of the inevitable decline of commercial societies.
Together, their lives suggest both the triumphs and the unraveling of an American dynasty.
About the Guest
Douglas R. Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College and the author of numerous works on American political and social history. His recent books include Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (2016) and The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2014). This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking.
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