Henry Adams and the Southern Question

Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures

by Michael O'Brien

“Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.” This judgment, rendered in The Education of Henry Adams, may be the most quoted of Adams’s writings on the South. However, it is far from the only one of his beliefs that helped to shape a national outlook on the region from the late antebellum period to the present.Thinking about the South, says Michael O’Brien, was “part of being an Adams.” In this book O’Brien shows how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O’Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history. He begins with the young Henry Adams, who served as his father’s secretary in the House of Representatives during the secession crises of 1860-1861 and in the American embassy in London during and after the Civil War, until 1868.

O’Brien then covers a number of topics relevant to Adams’s outlook on the South, including his residency in that deceptively “southern” city, Washington, D.C.; his journalism on the Reconstruction-era South; his biographical or historical works on the Virginians John Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; and his two novels, especially Democracy. Finally, O’Brien ponders the vein of southern self-criticism--exemplified by Wilbur J. Cash’s Mind of the South--that embraces the notorious slur so often quoted from The Education of Henry Adams.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Various authors, various genres (not disambiguated)

Reviews

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful books on Henry Adams I've ever come across. Michael O'Brien is a Southern historian and his brief, graceful account of Adams' involvement with the South, with slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and real-life black people, seems to reflect a lifetime's reflection on these matters, and more: how living in Washington, so much a Southern city, seemed to affect Adams; his Southern relatives (on his mother's side), his Harvard College roommates, one of whom, "Rooney" Lee, Robert E.'s son, was a kind of Steerforth for him, and one of the figures who influenced Adams' construct of the South as the 'feminine' side of the American soul. I got a better sense of Charles Francis Adams in a few pages here than I ever had before, and an appreciation of how Adams acquired the intuition into the characters of Jefferson and Madison that allowed him to write one of the greatest books ever, the History of the US during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.
Also his unique and eccentric plan for Reconstruction, based exactly on the Roman method of colonization during the Republic....
It is also written with great feeling, grace and quiet humor. I am glad that I have a library copy of this book - if I owned it I would just keep rereading it at the expense of less pleasant tasks.

[Tim Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is good and important. I don't like commenting on work-related books here.