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History of the United States of America #2
Henry Adams: History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison
This monumental work, the second of two Library of America volumes, culminated Henry Adams’s lifelong fascination with the American past. Writing at the height of his powers, Adams understood the true subject as the consolidation of the American nation and character, and his treatment has never been surpassed.
Covering the eight years spanning the presidency of James Madison, this volume chronicles “Mr. Madison’s War”—the most bungled war in American history. The President and Congress delay while the United States is bullied and insulted by both England and France; then they plunge the country into the War of 1812 without providing the troops, monies, or fleets to wage it. The incompetence of the commanders leads to a series of disasters—including the burning of the White House and Capitol while Madison and his cabinet, fleeing from an invading army, watch from the nearby hills of Maryland and Virginia.
The war has its heroes, too: William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe and Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, Commodores Perry and Decatur and the officers and crew of the Constitution. As Adams tells it, though, disgrace, is averted by other means: the ineptitude of the British, the skill of the American artillerymen and privateers, and the diplomatic brilliance of Albert Gallatin and John Quincy Adams, who negotiated the peace treaty at Ghent. The history, full of reversals and paradoxes, ends with the largest irony of all: the United States, the apparent loser of the war, emerges as a great new world power destined to eclipse its European rivals.
Covering the eight years spanning the presidency of James Madison, this volume chronicles “Mr. Madison’s War”—the most bungled war in American history. The President and Congress delay while the United States is bullied and insulted by both England and France; then they plunge the country into the War of 1812 without providing the troops, monies, or fleets to wage it. The incompetence of the commanders leads to a series of disasters—including the burning of the White House and Capitol while Madison and his cabinet, fleeing from an invading army, watch from the nearby hills of Maryland and Virginia.
The war has its heroes, too: William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe and Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, Commodores Perry and Decatur and the officers and crew of the Constitution. As Adams tells it, though, disgrace, is averted by other means: the ineptitude of the British, the skill of the American artillerymen and privateers, and the diplomatic brilliance of Albert Gallatin and John Quincy Adams, who negotiated the peace treaty at Ghent. The history, full of reversals and paradoxes, ends with the largest irony of all: the United States, the apparent loser of the war, emerges as a great new world power destined to eclipse its European rivals.
1436 pages, Hardcover
First published July 4, 1986
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418 people want to read
About the author
Henry Adams
825 books134 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Noted Henry Brooks Adams wrote his nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-1891) and also The Education of Henry Adams , a famous autobiography, in 1918.
This oldest and most distinguished family in Boston produced John Adams and John Qunicy Adams, two American presidents, and thus gave Henry the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning in the worlds of both practical men and affairs as a journalist and an assistant to his father, an American diplomat in Washington and London, and of ideas as a prolific writer, as the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and as a professor of medieval, European, and American history at Harvard, Adams of the few men of his era attempted to understand art, thought and culture as one complex force field of interacting energies.
He published Mont Saint Michel and Chartres , his masterwork in this dazzling effort, in 1904. Taken together with his other books, Adams in this spiritual, monumental volume attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature to attempt to understand the place of the individual in society. They constitute one of the greatest philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.
Noted Henry Brooks Adams wrote his nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889-1891) and also The Education of Henry Adams , a famous autobiography, in 1918.
This oldest and most distinguished family in Boston produced John Adams and John Qunicy Adams, two American presidents, and thus gave Henry the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning in the worlds of both practical men and affairs as a journalist and an assistant to his father, an American diplomat in Washington and London, and of ideas as a prolific writer, as the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and as a professor of medieval, European, and American history at Harvard, Adams of the few men of his era attempted to understand art, thought and culture as one complex force field of interacting energies.
He published Mont Saint Michel and Chartres , his masterwork in this dazzling effort, in 1904. Taken together with his other books, Adams in this spiritual, monumental volume attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature to attempt to understand the place of the individual in society. They constitute one of the greatest philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.
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August 31, 2020
Although written almost 150 years ago, Henry Adams’ histories of the United States in the early 1800s still rank among the best of this period of history. His volume on the era of the Madison administration is dominated by a history of the War of 1812 and provides a lesson of why the 2nd amendment was included in the Constitution.
Few Americans know much of anything about the War of 1812. Quotes like Commodore Perry’s “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” Captain Lawrence’s dying words “Don’t give up the ship,” or Winfield Scott’s invocation of “those damned Yankees” are interesting trivia. It was the rise of the age of schooners that later gave birth to the America’s Cup. The White House burned and Andrew Jackson’s political career was born at the Battle of New Orleans.
It was also an era of American sectional division, which Adams summed up poetically: “At the beginning of the year 1814, the attitude of New England pleased no one, and perhaps annoyed most the New England people themselves, who were conscious of showing neither dignity, power, courage, nor intelligence.” But a long-forgotten legacy of the war was that it was the first of many eras in which the Constitution was tested and “violated more frequently by its friends than by its enemies.” We find ourselves in just such quandary today when it comes to the willful misinterpretations of the 2nd amendment: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of the State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Today's 2nd amendment fetishists prefer a selective reading, valuing willful fiction over actual history. If they care about the difference, they should give Adams a try. In its early history, the United States was fragile, teetering on the precipice of failure as a nation. It had a weak standing army, no navy to speak of, and mostly relied on the formation of citizen militias in the event of war against foreign nation or Native Americans. For this to work citizens had to have the right to keep weapons; the government had no stockpiles on which to rely. The 2nd amendment was also never intended to provide citizens with the means to overthrow some mythical tyrannical American government; it was designed to give citizens the tools needed that were “necessary to the security of the State.” It was designed to protect government, not undermine it.
The War of 1812 was the first—and only—time the idea of “A well-regulated Militia” was ever put to the test. And it was mostly a failure. As Adams chronicles, Americans won the war largely in spite of themselves. Thanks to some strategic victories, British support lines that were unsustainably long and skillful diplomacy by John Quincy Adams, the United States was able to prevail. But it also led to the formation of a stronger standing Army, which saw its first major action a few decades later in the Mexican War. The idea of “well-regulated Militia[s]” became obsolete, as did, with time, a rational reading and understanding of the 2nd amendment.
As I watch the perversion of the 2nd amendment used as a basis to justify daily destruction and carnage in the United States, I often think of this account of the War of 1812. Henry Adams reminds us of why history is important to contemporary life. Agendas built on historical ignorance can be deadly.
Few Americans know much of anything about the War of 1812. Quotes like Commodore Perry’s “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” Captain Lawrence’s dying words “Don’t give up the ship,” or Winfield Scott’s invocation of “those damned Yankees” are interesting trivia. It was the rise of the age of schooners that later gave birth to the America’s Cup. The White House burned and Andrew Jackson’s political career was born at the Battle of New Orleans.
It was also an era of American sectional division, which Adams summed up poetically: “At the beginning of the year 1814, the attitude of New England pleased no one, and perhaps annoyed most the New England people themselves, who were conscious of showing neither dignity, power, courage, nor intelligence.” But a long-forgotten legacy of the war was that it was the first of many eras in which the Constitution was tested and “violated more frequently by its friends than by its enemies.” We find ourselves in just such quandary today when it comes to the willful misinterpretations of the 2nd amendment: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of the State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Today's 2nd amendment fetishists prefer a selective reading, valuing willful fiction over actual history. If they care about the difference, they should give Adams a try. In its early history, the United States was fragile, teetering on the precipice of failure as a nation. It had a weak standing army, no navy to speak of, and mostly relied on the formation of citizen militias in the event of war against foreign nation or Native Americans. For this to work citizens had to have the right to keep weapons; the government had no stockpiles on which to rely. The 2nd amendment was also never intended to provide citizens with the means to overthrow some mythical tyrannical American government; it was designed to give citizens the tools needed that were “necessary to the security of the State.” It was designed to protect government, not undermine it.
The War of 1812 was the first—and only—time the idea of “A well-regulated Militia” was ever put to the test. And it was mostly a failure. As Adams chronicles, Americans won the war largely in spite of themselves. Thanks to some strategic victories, British support lines that were unsustainably long and skillful diplomacy by John Quincy Adams, the United States was able to prevail. But it also led to the formation of a stronger standing Army, which saw its first major action a few decades later in the Mexican War. The idea of “well-regulated Militia[s]” became obsolete, as did, with time, a rational reading and understanding of the 2nd amendment.
As I watch the perversion of the 2nd amendment used as a basis to justify daily destruction and carnage in the United States, I often think of this account of the War of 1812. Henry Adams reminds us of why history is important to contemporary life. Agendas built on historical ignorance can be deadly.
April 29, 2015
Bear in mind that the current writer has never spent a significant period of time with Emerson, but after completing Adams’s History, it is hard not to believe that Adams is the greatest liberal intellect America has ever produced. His insight into affairs political, military, religious, and cultural are deep and broad; his storytelling is first-rate, and his prose is as sterling and readable as anyone in English. Adams is masterful in explicating the complex ideas driving the different parties and people throughout, but is just as adept at describing particular scenes of courtroom intrigue and bloody battle with a novelist’s intensity. The combined effect is a work which is both deeply intellectually compelling and compulsively readable. I don’t think I’ve ever read a work of nonfiction which combines these traits so well.
Adams, above all, was a man who strove for consistency of ideals. His other masterworks, Mont St. Michel and The Education are both about Adams’s quest for intellectual consistency. In the former work, Adams looks back to the century 1150-1250, when the intellect of man was most at home in existence, and best equipped with the intellectual tools to know his place in the universe. The apotheosis is the perennial philosophy of Aquinas, who built the intellectual edifice of Catholicism, and of all Western philosophers got closest to knowing the mind of God. In The Education, the struggle for intellectual consistency is made a vanity in a world dominated by Darwinism and the dynamo, foisting the demands of “progress” on man faster than his intellect can endure.
The History of the United States is never so explicitly philosophical, but Adams’s preoccupation with intellectual consistency provides the underlying structure of the work, and one which makes the two volumes compelling beyond their descriptions of historical events. Above all, History of the U.S. is a battle of ideas, between the Jacobins and the Burkeans, the Federalists and the Republicans, and (most tellingly) between the Republican ideals of 1798 and the Republicanism of 1817 born of the disastrous administrations of Jefferson and Madison. How could the two authors of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798 later endorse the unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase, a strong standing naval, and an openly imperialistic war with a major European power? Though Adams is not necessarily supportive of the “old Republican” ideals of 1798 (disparaging of his great-grandfather as they were), he respects them, and treats them seriously. Were the old Republican ideals ever really suitable to lead a great nation? Probably not. But Adams recognizes that ideals, no matter how unfeasible in reality, are beautiful in their own right; they deserve both criticism for their lack of realism, and eulogy in a world which will not allow them to exist.
The best representation of this is seen in the Louisiana Purchase. The exchange itself was based on duplicity, with Napoleon taking advantage of the weak Spanish crown and alienating a territory which was not in his legal authority to alienate—but as Adams piquantly puts it, the force of law is impotent without the force of armies to back it up. The Purchase was also, under old Republican philosophy, unconstitutional. Jefferson himself clearly believed he lacked the authority to add to the nation a territory which would make mere paper of the original compact between the states, and that at the very least he would need a constitutional amendment to properly carry out the exchange. But Congress and eventually Jefferson ignored these scruples, and in effect traded Louisiana for the old Constitution. Not only was the American map distorted, but America was now the dictatorial protector of tens of thousands of Louisianans who in no way displayed any consent to be governed. So was America now a republican compact between the states, as conceived by the Virginia republicans, or was it a pseudo-dictatorship akin to those of Europe? This unresolved question reared its head in the Dred Scott decision, wherein Justice Taney gave the reasonable opinion that, no, the United States were not a dictatorship, and the government of the territory must be determined by the consent of the governed. And with this decision were planted 650,000 corpses. What better illustration exists of the Straussian point that ideas have consequences?
In a sense, the entire work can be considered a kind of vindication of the John Adams administration; driven out of office in infamy in 1800, John Adams’s version of Federalism was largely adopted by Jefferson’s party by 1817. Henry Adams is ironic of this shift, but never condescending. This is unsurprising. The greatest of H. Adams’s assets is his ironical sympathy with diverse ideologies and characters. He writes of the New England and Southern temperaments with equal respect and scrutiny. He gives his ideological opponents the benefit of the doubt (giving the incompetent Jefferson and Madison their due credit) and is unaffraid to condemn his New England Federalists, who openly committed treason long before the shots rang out at Fort Sumpter. Though the book often acts as a condemnation of the Republican party, there is enough grist to assure the reader that he is not being served tendentious swill in the guise of history; Adams certainly gives his own perspective on affairs, but the perspective is such a broad one that no openminded reader can complain of myopia.
Astounding is the breadth and depth of Adams’s knowledge. As a law student, one of my favorite section concerned the impeachments of Pickering and Chase; Adams is clearly aware of the legal consequences and principles behind impeachment, and lays them out as well as any legal scholar could hope. Briefly, if Pickering was insane and incompetent, how could he he possess the requisite mens rea to commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary to impeach him? How could a legal rule be shaped to impeach the noxious Chase while also keeping the door open for impeaching other Federalist judges? Adams handles these questions with clear understanding and clear prose. Raoul Berger, the legal scholar who can accurately be said to have written the book on impeachment (appropriately titled Impeachment) refers to Adams’s description of the Pickering and Chase impeachments with approval. And though Berger’s description of events is more thorough and complex, referring back to English history and impeachment proceedings, his description of events are never so clear and understandable as the account presented by Adams. A great teacher has both great understanding of his material, and is superior at expressing this understanding; Adams is about as great a teacher as any student could hope for.
In general, Adam’s history of Jefferson is more consumed with ideas, while the War of 1812 allows him to play the role of military historian in describing the course of battles. This is no great disadvantage to the second volume. Adams’s accounts of the battles of Tippecanoe, Detroit, Plattburg, Washington, and New Orleans are as exciting and thorough as to be able to thrill any fan of military history. Adams displays especially great excitement when writing about the naval battles of the war. Blue-blood and intellectual that he is, Adams is unafraid to use words like “heroism” and “courage” in a way that would make modern ivory tower-dwellers blush; his descriptions are manly without being vulgar, and patriotic without losing perspective. Adams is liberal in the best sense of the word in that he makes an attempt to understand differing perspectives and attitudes, and shine light on them with both insight, scrutiny, and due respect. If only the contemporary mob of intelligentsia could show such freedom of thought.
Read these books. They are two of the finest pieces of work ever created by and American. Taken together the History is esoteric and approachable, intellectual yet exciting. Adams is also capable of placing American character and innovation in the context of world history.
“For the first time in history, great bodies of men turned away from their old religion, giving no better reason than that it required them to believe in a cruel Deity, and rejected necessary conclusions of theology because they were inconsistent with human self-esteem” (Madison, 1344).
Could any better description of American consumerism be written? (to say nothing of the Mormon church?)
No library should be without a copy, and no American should go without reading.
Adams, above all, was a man who strove for consistency of ideals. His other masterworks, Mont St. Michel and The Education are both about Adams’s quest for intellectual consistency. In the former work, Adams looks back to the century 1150-1250, when the intellect of man was most at home in existence, and best equipped with the intellectual tools to know his place in the universe. The apotheosis is the perennial philosophy of Aquinas, who built the intellectual edifice of Catholicism, and of all Western philosophers got closest to knowing the mind of God. In The Education, the struggle for intellectual consistency is made a vanity in a world dominated by Darwinism and the dynamo, foisting the demands of “progress” on man faster than his intellect can endure.
The History of the United States is never so explicitly philosophical, but Adams’s preoccupation with intellectual consistency provides the underlying structure of the work, and one which makes the two volumes compelling beyond their descriptions of historical events. Above all, History of the U.S. is a battle of ideas, between the Jacobins and the Burkeans, the Federalists and the Republicans, and (most tellingly) between the Republican ideals of 1798 and the Republicanism of 1817 born of the disastrous administrations of Jefferson and Madison. How could the two authors of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798 later endorse the unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase, a strong standing naval, and an openly imperialistic war with a major European power? Though Adams is not necessarily supportive of the “old Republican” ideals of 1798 (disparaging of his great-grandfather as they were), he respects them, and treats them seriously. Were the old Republican ideals ever really suitable to lead a great nation? Probably not. But Adams recognizes that ideals, no matter how unfeasible in reality, are beautiful in their own right; they deserve both criticism for their lack of realism, and eulogy in a world which will not allow them to exist.
The best representation of this is seen in the Louisiana Purchase. The exchange itself was based on duplicity, with Napoleon taking advantage of the weak Spanish crown and alienating a territory which was not in his legal authority to alienate—but as Adams piquantly puts it, the force of law is impotent without the force of armies to back it up. The Purchase was also, under old Republican philosophy, unconstitutional. Jefferson himself clearly believed he lacked the authority to add to the nation a territory which would make mere paper of the original compact between the states, and that at the very least he would need a constitutional amendment to properly carry out the exchange. But Congress and eventually Jefferson ignored these scruples, and in effect traded Louisiana for the old Constitution. Not only was the American map distorted, but America was now the dictatorial protector of tens of thousands of Louisianans who in no way displayed any consent to be governed. So was America now a republican compact between the states, as conceived by the Virginia republicans, or was it a pseudo-dictatorship akin to those of Europe? This unresolved question reared its head in the Dred Scott decision, wherein Justice Taney gave the reasonable opinion that, no, the United States were not a dictatorship, and the government of the territory must be determined by the consent of the governed. And with this decision were planted 650,000 corpses. What better illustration exists of the Straussian point that ideas have consequences?
In a sense, the entire work can be considered a kind of vindication of the John Adams administration; driven out of office in infamy in 1800, John Adams’s version of Federalism was largely adopted by Jefferson’s party by 1817. Henry Adams is ironic of this shift, but never condescending. This is unsurprising. The greatest of H. Adams’s assets is his ironical sympathy with diverse ideologies and characters. He writes of the New England and Southern temperaments with equal respect and scrutiny. He gives his ideological opponents the benefit of the doubt (giving the incompetent Jefferson and Madison their due credit) and is unaffraid to condemn his New England Federalists, who openly committed treason long before the shots rang out at Fort Sumpter. Though the book often acts as a condemnation of the Republican party, there is enough grist to assure the reader that he is not being served tendentious swill in the guise of history; Adams certainly gives his own perspective on affairs, but the perspective is such a broad one that no openminded reader can complain of myopia.
Astounding is the breadth and depth of Adams’s knowledge. As a law student, one of my favorite section concerned the impeachments of Pickering and Chase; Adams is clearly aware of the legal consequences and principles behind impeachment, and lays them out as well as any legal scholar could hope. Briefly, if Pickering was insane and incompetent, how could he he possess the requisite mens rea to commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary to impeach him? How could a legal rule be shaped to impeach the noxious Chase while also keeping the door open for impeaching other Federalist judges? Adams handles these questions with clear understanding and clear prose. Raoul Berger, the legal scholar who can accurately be said to have written the book on impeachment (appropriately titled Impeachment) refers to Adams’s description of the Pickering and Chase impeachments with approval. And though Berger’s description of events is more thorough and complex, referring back to English history and impeachment proceedings, his description of events are never so clear and understandable as the account presented by Adams. A great teacher has both great understanding of his material, and is superior at expressing this understanding; Adams is about as great a teacher as any student could hope for.
In general, Adam’s history of Jefferson is more consumed with ideas, while the War of 1812 allows him to play the role of military historian in describing the course of battles. This is no great disadvantage to the second volume. Adams’s accounts of the battles of Tippecanoe, Detroit, Plattburg, Washington, and New Orleans are as exciting and thorough as to be able to thrill any fan of military history. Adams displays especially great excitement when writing about the naval battles of the war. Blue-blood and intellectual that he is, Adams is unafraid to use words like “heroism” and “courage” in a way that would make modern ivory tower-dwellers blush; his descriptions are manly without being vulgar, and patriotic without losing perspective. Adams is liberal in the best sense of the word in that he makes an attempt to understand differing perspectives and attitudes, and shine light on them with both insight, scrutiny, and due respect. If only the contemporary mob of intelligentsia could show such freedom of thought.
Read these books. They are two of the finest pieces of work ever created by and American. Taken together the History is esoteric and approachable, intellectual yet exciting. Adams is also capable of placing American character and innovation in the context of world history.
“For the first time in history, great bodies of men turned away from their old religion, giving no better reason than that it required them to believe in a cruel Deity, and rejected necessary conclusions of theology because they were inconsistent with human self-esteem” (Madison, 1344).
Could any better description of American consumerism be written? (to say nothing of the Mormon church?)
No library should be without a copy, and no American should go without reading.
November 1, 2016
Just as amazing and insightful as his first volume on the Jefferson administrations, Henry Adams proves that he is as good in war as he is in peace. As this history revolves around the Madison administrations and, hence, the War of 1812, it is only natural that he should spend much of the book discussing the land and sea battles of that war. But what I didn't fully expect, and what most other readers may not fully expect, is how good he is at it. I found myself cheering when our navy harrassed the all-powerful British navy with its better guns and faster ships, just as I found myself screaming at the incompetence of General Winder at Bladensburg, which would lead to the torching of Washington. And Adams's ending chapters on how far America had progressed in terms of character, intellect, and culture both leaves the reader (when contrasted with the first chapters of Adams's previous volume on the same topics) in wonder of the short period of time in which Americans adapted and hopeful about our own future. Again, the sheer length of this book (over 1300 pages) will deter the general reader, but for any and all American history buffs, this and Adams's previous volume is a must read.
April 16, 2012
Part 2 of the 2600-page history of the US during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. It may sound like a dry topic but Adams, with his keen insights and subtle wit, makes those formative years in our nation's history come alive in a way that few if any modern historians could. A genuine tour de force that I was sorry to finally have to put down.
July 6, 2020
My rating is 3.5 stars
This history is a detailed account of the people and events leading up to and including the War of 1812. The author is the great grandson of Founding Father John Adams and the book was first published over 100 years ago.
The detailed and well researched narrative is the book’s strength. But such detail is also its biggest weakness. It was interesting to have a history delve into the politics of foes (Great Britain and Napoleonic France) but unfortunately, to understand the full context of this requires an great knowledge of those countries history and political traditions.
A major takeaway for me is the eternal truth of the maxim: “weakness invites aggression “ in the affairs of nation states. The young United States of America was scorned and disrespected internationally. Madison tried a peaceful policy of ‘commercial restrictions’ (tariffs and embargoes)because there was no standing army or effective navy to militarily defend against impressments, ship seizures, and geographic excursions on the borders. Failure of this policy ultimately lead to this conflict.
Immediately following the Treaty of Ghent, Congress passed legislation establishing a larger and permanent army and an expanded navy.
...and the rest is history! (LOL)
This history is a detailed account of the people and events leading up to and including the War of 1812. The author is the great grandson of Founding Father John Adams and the book was first published over 100 years ago.
The detailed and well researched narrative is the book’s strength. But such detail is also its biggest weakness. It was interesting to have a history delve into the politics of foes (Great Britain and Napoleonic France) but unfortunately, to understand the full context of this requires an great knowledge of those countries history and political traditions.
A major takeaway for me is the eternal truth of the maxim: “weakness invites aggression “ in the affairs of nation states. The young United States of America was scorned and disrespected internationally. Madison tried a peaceful policy of ‘commercial restrictions’ (tariffs and embargoes)because there was no standing army or effective navy to militarily defend against impressments, ship seizures, and geographic excursions on the borders. Failure of this policy ultimately lead to this conflict.
Immediately following the Treaty of Ghent, Congress passed legislation establishing a larger and permanent army and an expanded navy.
...and the rest is history! (LOL)
November 2, 2017
A seamless continuation of Adams' Thomas Jefferson biography, it's also one of the most detailed books on the conflicts of the War of 1812 one could hope for. Naval battle fans, in particular, will thoroughly enjoy the accounts of engagements.
Although one might wish he'd kept on with more presidential biographies, the final chapter articulates why this was a good stopping point for him. At over 1300 pages of text, this will take you a while to get through, but for serious students of history, it is well worth the time and effort.
Although one might wish he'd kept on with more presidential biographies, the final chapter articulates why this was a good stopping point for him. At over 1300 pages of text, this will take you a while to get through, but for serious students of history, it is well worth the time and effort.
August 6, 2021
Classic Adams. Acerbic takes. Very cynical and quite critical of the framers.. Sees both Federalsts and Republicans as selling out their ideology. Its a good thing that Britain's heart wasn't in this war. He has a way with words.
July 16, 2014
As a follow up to his (equally long) history of the Jefferson administration, Adams continues his story of how Jefferson's party, having achieved power in reaction to Washington and Adams efforts to strengthen the national government, over the course of sixteen years and two presidencies wound up leaving the federal government even stronger and more central to American political life than they first found it.
Adams hardly comes across as an objective observer - he makes no secret of his disrespect for a number of the figures involved here, particularly Jefferson. And, not surprisingly, anyone named Adams comes across looking awfully good. Still, his opinions usually seem sound.
He's not always the easiest writer to read, though. And contributing to that problem is his penchant for sticking with one thread of his story for months to years and then jumping back in time to bring another thread up to the same general time frame. The problem is that he doesn't always make it clear that's what he's doing, so you have to pay attention when he gives the date for a particular occurence. It just might be a couple of years before what he was discussing on the previous page.
Still, on the whole his writing is good. I particularly enjoyed his account of the War of 1812 in this volume.
Adams hardly comes across as an objective observer - he makes no secret of his disrespect for a number of the figures involved here, particularly Jefferson. And, not surprisingly, anyone named Adams comes across looking awfully good. Still, his opinions usually seem sound.
He's not always the easiest writer to read, though. And contributing to that problem is his penchant for sticking with one thread of his story for months to years and then jumping back in time to bring another thread up to the same general time frame. The problem is that he doesn't always make it clear that's what he's doing, so you have to pay attention when he gives the date for a particular occurence. It just might be a couple of years before what he was discussing on the previous page.
Still, on the whole his writing is good. I particularly enjoyed his account of the War of 1812 in this volume.
June 9, 2015
Madison's administration included the War of 1812, a comedy of errors in basis, execution, and ending, which Adams takes great delight in telling well. In all, the Americans acquitted themselves as well as might be expected for a weak, broke, pacific-minded nation.
And by the end of Madison's tenure, 1817, as Adam's recaps the state of America much like he did to start the 2,500 pages of his history, the United States are to a remarkable degree more tightly united than the fragile Union had ever been since the days of Washington.
Adams writes with the strong and vivid vocabulary of the 19th century (even as he writes at the turn of the 20th). My personal favorites are gasconading, animadverting, and imbecility, which Adams even points out as his frequent modifier used to describe actions of the House of Representatives.
Truly classic in form and execution.
And by the end of Madison's tenure, 1817, as Adam's recaps the state of America much like he did to start the 2,500 pages of his history, the United States are to a remarkable degree more tightly united than the fragile Union had ever been since the days of Washington.
Adams writes with the strong and vivid vocabulary of the 19th century (even as he writes at the turn of the 20th). My personal favorites are gasconading, animadverting, and imbecility, which Adams even points out as his frequent modifier used to describe actions of the House of Representatives.
Truly classic in form and execution.
February 17, 2014
Every bit the first-rate history as his preceding history of the Jefferson Administrations (1801-1809). Well-written, researched, a grand narrative. Left me thinking there's much to be redeemed of the Madison presidency, our last 'classical' administration as the nation began its steady incline toward regional power.
Read
September 23, 2010History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison (Library of America) by Henry Adams (1986)
June 18, 2012
Superb! One of the most engaging history tomes I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews