Greg’s Reviews > The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams > Status Update

He seemed to take a grim satisfaction in ignoring the public and thereby denying it the opportunity to ignore him.

What seems to be most conspicuously lacking from the Quincy perspective is simple compassion. To a man, the Adamses appeared curiously incapable of recognizing the humanity of the former slaves...At bottom, and for all their education, erudition, and reputation as men committed to liberty, they lacked the moral vision to grow beyond their now dated prewar principles.

He more accurately indicted Harvard for seeking to inculcate its students with the liberal protestant virtues – ‘moderation, balance, judgment, restraint’ – that mirrored the character of the Cambridge Unitarian clergy. This did nothing to prepare Henry and his peers for either the coming carnage of the Civil War or the age of industry and empire that followed.