The Jeffersonian Transformation

by Henry Adams, Garry Wills (Introduction)

A New York Review Books Original

The ideal introduction and companion to Adams’s "massive and magisterial" history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, presenting an indelible picture of America’s startling rise to world power.

Henry Adams’s nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison is the first great history of America as well as the first great American work of history, one that rivals Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its eloquence and sweep. But where Gibbon told of imperial collapse, Adams recorded the rise of an unprecedented new power, America, which, he shows, beat nearly inconceivable odds to expand in a mere seventeen years —1800 to 1817—from a backward provincial outpost to an imperial power. What made this transformation all the more unexpected was that it occurred under the watch of two presidents who were in principle dead set against it, but whose policies promoted it energetically. A masterpiece not only of research and analysis but of style and art, Adams’s history is a splendid coming-of-age story, with romantic and even comic overtones, recording a young nation’s amazed awakening to its own unsuspected promise.

The Jeffersonian Transformation presents a new selection from Adams’s History, the first to bring together in one volume the opening and closing sections of the work, with an introduction by the historian and political commentator Garry Wills. The two sections of Adams’s History included here present a bold picture of America before and after the Jeffersonian transformation. Together they define the scope and argument of the History as a whole, while raising still-provocative questions about the relationship between American democracy and American empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American, Politics, Essays

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2006

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garry Wills calls Henry Adams’ The History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-91) — a nine-volume beast from which Wills made this slim selection for the NYRB Classics — “the nonfiction prose masterpiece of nineteenth century America.” I’ve read not a page of Prescott or Parkman, and so must shrug “sure, whatever” to Wills’s contention; but I can say that after reading this I feel reconciled to Henry Adams. The Education annoys me because it is at once indispensable and insufferable; as an autobiography it seems to have everything going for it — a style like a bright blade, an ironically detached third-person point-of-view, a ringside seat to the midcentury upheavals — but Adams' affectation of modesty, which Lincoln Kirstein thought imparts "a wry charm" to his "artificed" writing, always kills it for me. I hate artificial modesty. Artifice goes better with arrogance. Give me Nabokov.

The first six chapters of the History, which survey “America in 1800,” make up the bulk of Wills’s selection. The United States in 1800 was a dubious experiment. Politically, its citizens had just changed course, electing Thomas Jefferson over John Adams; and Jefferson, reviled as a godless democrat by his enemies, saw his election as a return to the Spirit of '76, a repudiation of the previous decade of quasi-monarchial Federalist rule. Those citizens were also on the cusp of leveling their feudal-colonial political structure, discarding their technologically rudimentary export-based economy, loosening age-old theological strictures, disestablishing their Churches, and stretching their limbs before surreal physical and material obstacles: mountains, rangy rivers, primeval forests, spirited tribes. To conquer and settle the continent, and to supply arms, goods and unifying ideals for such conquest and settlement, the United States needed to use its people more economically, more flexibly than traditional societies did; with democracy it could mobilize the talent and the ingenuity, the inventions and the energy of more of its citizens, regardless of their prior station in the old hierarchy. This is a story I know from Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, but to hear it from Adams is to hear it fresh. (I’m even keener to hear it from Tocqueville, someday.) A moodily imaginative stylist, Adams chills you in the shades thrown over the fragile seaboard nation:

Nearly every foreign traveler who visited the United States during these early years, carried away an impression sober if not sad. A thousand miles of desolate and dreary forest, broken here and there by settlements; along the sea-coast a few flourishing towns devoted to commerce; no arts, a provincial literature, a cancerous disease of negro slavery, and differences of political theory fortified within geographical lines,—what could be hoped for such a country except to repeat the story of violence and brutality which the world already knew by heart, until repetition for thousands of years had wearied and sickened mankind? Ages must probably pass before the interior could be thoroughly settled; even Jefferson, usually a sanguine man, talked of a thousand years with acquiescence, and in his first Inaugural Address, at a time when the Mississippi River formed the Western boundary, spoke of the country as having "room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation." No prudent person dared to act on the certainty that when settled, one government could comprehend the whole; and when the day of separation should arrive, and America should have her Prussia, Austria, and Italy, as she already had her England, France, and Spain, what else could follow but a return to the old conditions of local jealousies, wars, and corruption which had made a slaughter-house of Europe?

And Adams, never more satirical than on the subject of Boston, is the writer best suited to portray the Federalist gentry and Calvinist clergy as they recede into bitter little pools and lonely literary voices:

Meanwhile even Cabot and his friends Ames and Colonel Hamilton recognized that the reform they wished could be effected only with the consent of the people; and firm in the conviction that democracy must soon produce a crisis, as in Greece and Rome, in England and France, when political power must revert to the wise and good, or to the despotism of a military chief, they waited for the catastrophe they foresaw. History and their own experience supported them. They were right, so far as human knowledge could make them so; but the old spirit of Puritan obstinacy was more evident than reason or experience in the simple-minded, overpowering conviction with which the clergy and serious citizens of Massachusetts and Connecticut, assuming that the people of America were in the same social condition as the contemporaries of Catiline and the adherents of Robespierre, sat down to bide their time until the tempest of democracy should drive the frail government so near destruction that all men with one voice should call on God and the Federalist prophets for help. The obstinacy of the race was never better shown than when, with the sunlight of the nineteenth century bursting upon them, these resolute sons of granite and ice turned their faces from the sight, and smiled in their sardonic way at the folly or wickedness of men who could pretend to believe the world improved because henceforth the ignorant and vicious were to rule the United States and govern the churches and schools of New England.

Adams almost induces a fondness for forgotten figures like the anti-Jeffersonian Fisher Ames, his political writings “saturated with the despair of the tomb to which his wasting body was condemned,” passing years “in constant dwelling upon the same theme, in accents more and more despondent, before the long-expected grave closed over him, and his warning voice ceased to echo painfully on the air.” But then again I have a soft spot for the counter-revolutionary conservative with a floridly abusive prose style. He’s the skull on the feast-table. Dr. Johnson, Joseph de Maistre, Baudelaire, and Henry’s great-grandfather John Adams remind us that among humans hierarchy is instinct, subordination imperishable, and universal suffrage no check against oligarchy. (Original Sin is a clumsy but serviceable metaphor for human irrationality and self-destructiveness.) John Adams warned his idealistic correspondent Jefferson, Democrat-Jacobin bugbear of the dying Federalists: “You may think you can eliminate it, but Aristocracy like waterfowl dives for Ages and rises again with brighter plumage.”

[Tom Wascoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

First and last books of 9 volume History of Jefferson and Madison and the transformation of the US during their presidencies. Extremely dry history. Reads like a typical history book. Some interesting conclusions but overwhelming amount of data.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Particularly interesting that a lot of his assumptions about the future course of the nation think of it as a homogeneous society.