The Political Education of Henry Adams (review)

172civil war history transferred further east, where they participated in the siege and capture of Mobile, Alabama. After the cessation of hostiUties, the 29th Iowa spent the summer of 1 865 in southern Texas near the mouth of the Rio Grande River before mustering out of service at the end ofAugust. Popchock lets Musser speak for himself, interjecting only with informative passages that summarize forthcoming letters and provide necessary context. He has left Musser's rough prose, uneven spelling, and haphazard capitalization and punctuation largely intact. Although distracting at times, this editorial choice preserves the flavor of a young, twenty-year-old Iowa farm boy off to war. Readers might take issue with Popchock's explanatory notes and bibliography . Where written, his notes provide the necessary detail, but there are references in the text that pass without any supplemental clarification. Popchock also relied on a somewhat limited bibUography in drawing up his notes, which prevented him from taking full advantage of more recent scholarship. Despite these relatively minor quibbles, Charles Musser's letters home offer valuable insight into the lives of ordinary soldiers in the Trans-Mississippi theater and are weU worth reading for those interested in this aspect ofthe Civil War. Kurt Hackemer University of South Dakota The Political Education ofHenry Adams. By Brooks D. Simpson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xvi, 154. $24.95.) Few writers have done more to define a historical period than Henry Adams. His acidic descriptions of the Grant era have shaped how the Gilded Age has been depicted as a time ofcorruption and mediocrity in countless textbooks and monographs. Generations of scholars have assessed Adams's career until it appears that he stood at the center of intellectual and political events of his day. Edward Chalfant's recent biography even describes Adams as the most important political operator in the nation during Grant's presidency and beyond. Anyone who looks closely at the actual workings of GildedAge politics soon finds that HenryAdams played at best a peripheral role in how the major parties worked or the United States was governed. In his brief and incisive treatment of Adams as a publicist and reformer, Brooks D. Simpson probes beneath the facade of Adams's posturing to reveal just how inconsequential his subject really was in the political arena. EUtist, ineffective, and something of a racist, Adams alienated the political leaders whose policy he sought to influence. His fabled insights were whimsical and misguided judgments about the events of his time. Obsessed with the failings of Ulysses S. Grant, Adams let his hatred of the president color his feelings about how public life operated. Simpson's book is well researched and written with his impressive command of the issues and personalities of Grant's career. The treatment of Adams's BOOK REVIEWS173 insensitivity toward the plight ofblacks in the South is especially telling for its demonstration of the narrow limits of his definition of reform. What emerges with the greatest clarity in Simpson's lucid pages is that Henry Adams never enjoyed significant poUtical influence at any time. Moreover, serious politicians knew that he was a marginal gadfly. Even Adams's voluminous contemporary writings turn out to have been little regarded. At most, in Simpson's words, he was "a minor political celebrity," the Gilded Age equivalent of a substitute panelist on the "Capital Gang." SinceAdams had only a subsidiary role in the political life ofthe GildedAge, a small book is appropriate to coverhis erratic involvements. There are times in the narrative when it seems that Simpson is stretching to make Adams and his inept machinations reach book-length status. Yet, given the cottage industry that has made Henry Adams one of the most documented individuals in the period, it is good that Simpson's sprightly book is available as welcome counterbalance to the historical idolizing of Henry Adams. Perhaps in the next century, historians of the Gilded Age will put aside their fascination with Adams, who was articulate but unimportant, and provide the political biographies of Grant, Samuel J. Tilden, John Sherman, and other major figures that are so much needed. If Brooks Simpson's book diminishes the incessant scholarly cud...