Henry Adams and the Southern Question (review)

Michael O'Brien has long sought to demonstrate the antebellum South's intellectual vitality. O'Brien must not only contend with historians who think slavery derailed Southern thought. Henry Adams lastingly branded the South as anti-intellectual with his quip that "strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament." This quote inspires Henry Adams and the Southern Question, for the "Southern Question" does not refer to what Adams's contemporaries would have thought, Reconstruction and issues of race. O'Brien sets out to provide "a sustained analysis [of ] the relevance of Southern culture to an understanding of Adams" (xiii).

O'Brien begins during the secession winter of 1860–61, when Adams was "vitriolic about Southerners" and "the idea of the Slave Power lay at the root of this fierce hostility" (7). His father's and grandfather's struggles against the Slave Power shaped the young Adams's animosity. O'Brien perceptively argues that Adams "wanted to achieve a sort of purified version of the antebellum republic, which he thought had been at its best before it was corrupted by Jacksonian spoils, the Slave Power, and the unconstitutional misdistribution of political power occasioned by the war and its aftermath" (16). Providing greater context for Adams's attitudes, O'Brien astutely notes that while the name Adams normally conjures thoughts of New England, there was a strong matriarchal connection to the South. Much of the first chapter establishes the cultural identity of Louisa Adams, Henry's grandmother, who was from a Maryland family and, according to O'Brien, helped to center the Adams clan in the southern city of Washington, D.C.

Perhaps because of his grandmother's influence, Adams lived the majority of his life in Washington. Adams became friends with Southerners and O'Brien suggests that he "began to see Southerners as real people, with histories and problems, not just as demonic abstractions of the Slave Power." This was "the social equivalent of the intellectual process that Adams was undergoing in these years," as he began writing histories of the early republic (72). Unlike his brother Charles, who wrote history from a New England perspective, Henry Adams's experience in the South made him a nationalist. In the 1880s he obscured the Slave Power to use Southerners like John Randolph in building a national story of democratic decentralization.

Like most scholars, O'Brien finds his wife's suicide in 1885 profoundly changed Adams, for "when Adams ceased to believe in such metahistorical patterns, when he came to think that the world made little or no sense, the status of the South in his imagination was to mutate" (113). Adams saw the South as "a counterpoint to the social damage of pell-mell American industrialization, with which Adams was growing disenchanted," though O'Brien stretches by repeatedly hypothesizing that Adams was a postmodernist (124, 141–44). O'Brien is on firmer ground arguing that Adams, no longer interested in details as long as the "ensemble is in scale," twisted the perception of the South in The Education of Henry Adams "to show how the truth of the twelfth century had ceased to be enactable as truths by the end of the nineteenth century" (130–31). The book's last few pages relate how twentieth-century Southern intellectuals, "troubled by the direction of industrial modernity," found it "logical to turn to Adams" (146). Hence, "Southerners took Adams's slur and made it a cultural asset, though few noticed that he always meant more than a slur" (151).

Scholars interested in Southern history will be disappointed because as O'Brien states in the preface this "is, mostly, a study in New England culture, albeit a study of how New England viewed the South" (xiii). Those seeking insight on New England, though, may also be disappointed, for...