In Henry Adams and the Making of America, Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of Henry Adams as our nation’s greatest historian and his History as the “nonfiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America.” Adams drew on his own southern fixation, his extensive foreign travel, his political service in the Lincoln administration, and much more to invent the study of history as we know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from 1800 to 1816 established new standards for employing archival sources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and other techniques that have become the essence of modern history. Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail, Henry Adams and the Making of America throws brilliant light on the historian and the making of history. "With its revisionist stance, felicitous prose and compelling argument, Wills's book charts new directions." Publishers Weekly, Starred "A contemporary historian pays tribute to a previous one in this personal and rigorous analysis of the works of Henry Adams. . .A marvelous character sketch." Booklist, ALA "Garry Wills brings a lucid style, imaginative analysis and the talent for historical elucidation...I unreservedly recommend this book." --Richard Lingeman The New York Times Book Review GARRY WILLS, a distinguished historian and critic, is the author of numerous books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, Saint Augustine, and the best-selling Why I Am a Catholic. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he has won many awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is a history professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Henry Adams and the Making of America By Garry Wills Houghton Mifflin Company Copyright © 2007 Garry Wills All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618872664 1Grandmother Louisa And The South On May 20, 1796, Abigail Adams warned her son, John Quincy Adams, against marriage to Louisa Johnson, who was not from New England: "I would hope, for the love I bear my country, that the siren is at least half blood." (A 381) In 1907,Henry Adams wrote of his grandmother, Louisa Johnson Adams: "[I] inherited a quarter taint ofMaryland blood." (E 737) Adams could never escape the fact that he was a member of the Adamses. Yet that does not justify attempts to interpret his whole life as a defense of his family, his region, or his forebears' ideology. In fact, he was determined to escape all three of those things, to be what he called "less Adamsy" (L 6.401). He preferred to be considered a descendant of his Maryland grandmother, Louisa Johnson Adams. His emotional and ideological compass bore due south, from an early age and all through his professional life. Using a genealogical quirk (his grandmother's purported southernness), he sought the South both as symbol and physical location all his life. Except for his six years of teaching at Harvard, Adams preferred Louisa's Washington to Massachusetts, from which he wrote in 1869 that "nothing but sheer poverty shall ever reduce me to passing a whole season here again" (L 2.44). Most of the men he studied and admired were southerners, and especially Virginians, including his three principal heroes, Washington, Marshall, and Gallatin (the latter he treated as a Virginian, since Virginia is where Gallatin became an American citizen). The noblest character in his first novel is a Virginian, and the heroine of the tale is the widow of a Virginian. Adams's good friend at Harvard was a Virginian — in fact, the son of Robert E. Lee — and he was visiting the Lee mansion at Arlington the night Lincoln reached Washington for his inauguration. None of this can cancel the fact that Adams was affected by his own family background. But that was not a simple thing. Those people who claimed that he defended his own family are thinking primarily of the Adamses. But Adams was aware that he was mired in a pretentious muddle of families, of whom the Adamses were the last and least. He was also a Boylston, a Quincy, a Brooks. He wrote his brother Charles: "My own theory of Boylston influence is that you and I have the Boylston strain three times repeated [through their great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and mother]. John Adams had it but once. Which accounts for you and us others being three times as damned a fool as John Adams —which seems hard" (L 6.574). The Quincy line came from Abigail Adams, and she was very proud of it, unwisely putting its crest on her carriage when she went to New York as the vice president's wife. Henry said that the Quincys were the family's "most aristocratic claim."1 The Brooks connection was through Henry's own mother, and it made Henry and his siblings the first Adams generation to have inherited wealth. All four of these family lines had ramifying branches dimmed in clouds of i