‘Heirs of an Honored Name’ Review: The Adams Family in Decline

With two forebears in the White House, later generations felt doomed to failure—at least by comparison—and harsh self-judgment.

Charles Francis Adams Sr. and his wife, Abigail Brooks. Photograph by their daughter-in-law Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams. Photo: Massachusetts Historical Society

In 1848, Charles Francis Adams learned that his father, 80-year-old Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams, had suffered a stroke at his desk inside the Capitol Building. The younger Adams hastened to Washington, D.C., but arrived too late; “Old Man Eloquent” had already died, and Charles could do little more than make plans to transport the remains home to Massachusetts. “The glory of the family is departed,” Charles wrote, public expectations now weighing heavily on his shoulders. “The heir of an honored name,” he fretted about himself, “. . . has a trying position. . . . Every act of his is contrasted, not with those of common men, but with those of persons whom all have united to produce very extraordinary specimens of the race.”

For the Adams family, those “specimens” included uncommon women. Four years after his father’s demise, word reached Charles that his indomitable mother, Louisa—the only First Lady born outside the United States (until Melania Trump )—had taken ill. The dutiful son again made his way to the capital, but upon reaching the family home found a black ribbon hanging on the front door. Once more he had failed to reach the scene in time.

Achingly slow rail and sea networks were the real culprits in these frustrating episodes. But in his elegant, sweeping “Heirs of an Honored Name,” Douglas Egerton, a Le Moyne College professor and author of eight earlier books, artfully deploys the bracketed tales as a metaphor for the lost opportunities and fading fortunes of America’s first political dynasty. Charles’s father and grandfather had both occupied the White House; anything less marked the third Adams as a failure, at least by comparison—and harsh self-judgment.

The book covers, in the words of its subtitle, “the decline of the Adams family” down to a John Adams namesake who lived until 1964—but focuses principally on Charles Francis and his sons: Henry, a second John Quincy Adams and another Charles Francis. They were historians, wits, lawyers and businesspeople who, as the generations pass, seemed to prefer clinging to aristocratic pretenses to engaging in the kind of political melees that made the original John Adams shine. Mr. Egerton does a remarkable job keeping all the similarly named Adamses distinct and distinctive, animating each personality with gripping anecdotes and pithy quotes.

Photo: WSJ

Heirs of an Honored Name

By Douglas R. Egerton
Basic, 460 pages, $35

True to the tradition of family matriarch Abigail Adams, Mr. Egerton remembers the ladies. There is Charles’s daughter Louisa Adams Kuhn, so intelligent yet so frustrated by her limited educational opportunities that physicians attributed her unhappiness to neurasthenia—a sexist diagnosis often given to ambitious, unfulfilled women; and tragic daughter-in-law “Clover” (Mrs. Henry) Adams, who committed suicide at 42 and also was the inspiration for Henry James’s Daisy Miller.

Henry Adams himself, the historian son of Charles Francis, shines on these pages. He’s as blunt and dubious about the family as were his forebears. He openly laments that his father was “so complete, as far as he went, that I shall never understand why he went no farther.” Henry would also write, “since the Civil War, I think we have produced not one figure that will be remembered [in] a life-time.” Perhaps so, but while Mr. Egerton buys into the Adams family’s own self-flagellation, I am not so sure he will convince readers accustomed to more entitlement and less humor from so-called American dynasties.

Consider his portrait of Charles Francis Adams. Like his father, Charles was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives. But when, in 1852, he allowed his name to be floated for U.S. Senate—a post then chosen by state legislatures—he lost to family friend Charles Sumner in a half-hearted and ill-advised competition. Later, after Sumner was brutally caned on the Senate floor and took several journeys to Europe to regain his health, Charles did little to discourage a movement to urge Sumner’s retirement so Adams could take the seat. This gambit underestimated Sumner’s status as an antislavery hero. Even Charles’s own son took note of “Sumner’s larger and more imposing presence.”

Like many Brahmins (Sumner included), Charles initially underestimated Abraham Lincoln, too, especially after Lincoln failed to recognize and properly greet him at his 1861 inaugural ball (“Were it anybody but a Western man I should have construed it as an intentional slight,” Adams wrote).Optimistically, Adams’s allies proposed him as New England’s choice for a cabinet seat. Lincoln instead named Gideon Welles of Connecticut, but offered Adams a consolation prize: the job of U.S. Minister to the court of St. James’s, which both his grandfather and father had filled admirably. Meeting Lincoln to accept the offer turned out to be another embarrassing fiasco, when the distracted president offered no policy instructions and bluntly told Adams he chose him “mainly” because Secretary of State William H. Seward had pressed him to do so. Once in London, however, Adams shone as brightly as had his ancestors. As Mr. Egerton notes, “his cold, controlled nature; his private and bookish personality; and his determination to uphold the family’s name and memory—rendered him a nearly perfect diplomat.”

For all his personal doubts and political clumsiness—in part the result of a style more attuned to the political culture of the previous century, when his family first rose to prominence—Charles did indeed play a significant albeit supporting role in history. His career, as Mr. Egerton suggests, may have marked the beginning of the family’s descent; but an equally valid interpretation could leave observers marveling that three successive generations of Adamses managed, despite their querulousness, to be so productive and influential.

Charles never followed the previous Adamses to the White House, but how likely—or healthy to the democracy—would perpetual dynastic succession really be (and how well did such expectations serve Jeb Bush in 2016)? Charles and his offspring may have been right in judging their achievements less memorable than those of their forebears, yet Douglas Egerton has done such a fine job in bringing these perennially dour but extraordinarily gifted people back to life that he ends up contradicting his own subtitle—for which readers should be grateful.

Mr. Holzer, director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House, is the author, most recently, of “Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French.”
