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Charles Francis Adams

Brahmin Anti-Semites Fight the Brandeis Nomination to the Supreme Court

Louis Brandeis didn’t become one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever without a dogfight. The bitter battle over the Brandeis nomination to the high court in 1916 exposed a virulent strain of anti-Semitism among Boston’s elite.

But it was really his support of ordinary people against concentrated wealth that made the fight over Louis Brandeis’ nomination the most contentious in U.S. history.

Louis Brandeis

Not until the nomination of Robert Bork 71 years later would the Senate engage in such furious debate.

Brandeis believed the law should reflect social change and the real concerns of the world. The courts didn’t exist just to defend property rights, he thought.

His adversaries fought him tooth and nail. Over four months, witnesses, pundits, reporters, opponents and supporters joined the standing-room-only crowd in the Senate chamber during the nomination fight. His opponents feared he would bring his radical new ideas to the court.

They had good reason.

The Brandeis Nomination

President Woodrow Wilson, like Louis Brandeis, distrusted corporate bigness. He was the strongest supporter of antitrust laws among the three men who ran for president in 1912—himself, Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft.

Brandeis, a prominent Boston attorney known as the “People’s Lawyer,” supported Wilson for president. Brandeis had led public fights to improve workers’ safety, curb corporate power, break up railroad monopolies and expose insurance fraud. His campaign on behalf of Wilson took some of the progressive vote from Roosevelt and helped usher Wilson into the White House.

Several years later, as Wilson looked toward reelection, he needed to shore up his progressive credentials. So when Justice Joseph Lamar died in January 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, 59, to the Supreme Court.

Brandeis in 1915.

“I am not exactly sure that I am to be congratulated,” Brandeis wrote his brother. He probably had an inkling of the swift and furious response his nomination would inspire.

Brahmins in Arms

In 1890, with a reputation as a brilliant and promising young corporate lawyer, Brandeis had accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at the summer home of Brahmin financier Henry Lee Higginson. A year later, Mrs. Higginson was the first to visit Brandeis’ wife, Alice, on her return from their honeymoon.

Henry Lee Higginson

But Higginson changed his views about Louis Brandeis after he fought J.P. Morgan’s effort to monopolize New England’s railroads. In 1916, Higginson from behind the scenes financed the battle against the Brandeis nomination to the Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal denounced Brandeis as “super-extreme” and “rabid.” The Los Angeles Times called him a “dangerous demagogue.”

Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, an open anti-Semite, circulated a petition to oppose the Brandeis nomination. Fifty-five influential people signed it with Brahmin last names like Gardner, Peabody and Adams, as in Charles Francis. Seven of the 16 presidents of the American Bar Association signed a letter that called Brandeis unfit.

Former President Taft called the Brandeis nomination “one of the deepest wounds” he had ever suffered as an American. He called Brandeis a muckraker, an emotionalist, a socialist, a hypocrite, utterly unscrupulous, a man of “infinite cunning” who had “much power for evil.”

Later, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, Taft came to like and respect Louis Brandeis.

The Fight

It took four months of charges and countercharges for Brandeis to win the nomination. He did not defend himself personally–not the custom of the time. His enemies excoriated him.

His opponents charged him with unethical behavior. One detractor accused him of breach of faith as counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission because he supported a big rate increase for the railroads. His defenders took the witness stand to say he’d done no such thing.

Another witness, Clarence Barron, called himself a farmer and testified to Brandeis’ unfitness for the high court. Barron, a journalist, had actually attacked Brandeis during his fight against Morgan’s attempted railroad takeover.

The Rev. A.A. Berle testified that Boston’s Brahmins had enjoyed such total control of Massachusetts for so long they believed anyone who disagreed with them is “ipso facto a person who is either ‘dangerous’ or lacking in ‘judicial temperament’.”

Or as Justice William O. Douglas later put it,

… the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court.

Justice Brandeis

Ironically, Brandeis did not actively practice his religion. He did not belong to a synagogue, he celebrated Christmas and he enjoyed ham.

Brandeis had graduated from Harvard with a goal of making a lot of money as a lawyer so he could devote his time and energy to progressive reforms.

He and his college friend Samuel Warren formed a law firm, now Nutter, McClellen & Fish. Warren married a wealthy anti-Semite who refused to invite Brandeis to their wedding, despite their friendship and business ties.

But Brandeis didn’t complain of anti-Semitism before, during or after his nomination battle, according to his biographer, Melvin Urofsky. He probably understood the unsettling nature of his challenge to the settled thinking of the conservative Establishment.

On June 1, 1916, his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was official. He then sat on the court for 23 years. As his opponents had feared, he changed the direction of the high court.

Impact on the Court

Brandeis interpreted the Constitution to guarantee the right to privacy, which he described as “the right to be left alone.” He created the Brandeis brief, legal arguments that depend on facts and figures from the real world, not just legal principles. Civil rights lawyers used Brandeis briefs to argue and win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school desegregation.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1925. Brandeis is on the right, bottom row.

Louis Brandeis sat on the court for 23 years. He did not change his mind about the threat posed by corporate monopoly. In 1933, his friend and confidante Edward Keating quoted him saying,

We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

With thanks to Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky. This story updated in 2022.

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Myles Standish and the Lost Colony of Massachusetts

In March 1623, leaders of the struggling Plymouth Plantation dispatched their paid military leader Myles Standish to a coastal settlement 25 miles north. They gave him a savage mandate: return with the head of a troublesome warrior named Wituwamat.

Wituwamat was the perceived leader of a rumored multi-tribal strike against a failed English trading post and possibly Plymouth itself.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

With a handful of men and a Native ally named Hobbamock, Myles Standish ambushed Wituwamat, a powerful brave named Pecksuot and two other Natives in a locked room. He then engaged in a running battle with another group of warriors in present-day Weymouth, Mass. A few others joined them–members of the trading colony established a year earlier by London investor Thomas Weston. Weston and his Merchant Adventurer partners wanted to capitalize on the profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

A few days later, Standish proudly impaled Wituwamat’s head on the stockade at the entrance to Plymouth Plantation—a stark warning to the local Native populations.

It was an important moment in American history–although largely forgotten. The attack clearly established the primacy of the Pilgrims. Today, the event—and the actual physical reminders of it—are being examined and reinterpreted by historians, archaeologists and descendants of the original actors.

Myles Standish, Condemned

The local tribes that had quarreled with the new English settlers quickly dissipated, clearing the way for a massive Puritan migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony anchored at Boston. The Natives feared the Pilgrims’ guns, their ruthlessness, and their rumored ability to unleash a deadly plague on command. Yet the violent preemptive strike was condemned even by the Pilgrims’ own spiritual leader, John Robinson, who had remained at their safe haven in Holland.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

The necessity of the strike is still debated. America prefers to remember the banquet between the Pilgrims and the local Natives, formally proclaimed as Thanksgiving by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. There was indeed a feast, albeit a strained affair, between the Pilgrims and a group of Natives, called the Pokanoket Wampanoags, who had sought a military alliance to stave off possible annihilation by the rival Narragansett tribe.

How It All Started

The story of how tensions escalated to the murder and decapitation of Wituwamat begins with the arrival of the first Europeans in present-day Massachusetts. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown fame explored the region in 1614 with several vessels. One of his commanders, Thomas Hunt, captured several Natives to sell as slaves. That action negatively impacted English and Native relations for years to come, in Smith’s view.

One of the captured natives, a brave named Squanto, later returned. The first Europeans spread infectious diseases that obliterated some coastal populations. Disease wiped out a village called Patuxet, once Squanto’s home.

In 1615, the Natives took revenge on a wrecked French ship, killing most of the sailors and keeping a few as slaves. One of the Natives participating in the butchery was Pecksuot. He later taunted Weston colonists and Standish with his gruesome account. Later, sailors of an English ship reportedly murdered several members of the Wampanoags. They then responded by attacking a party led by an explorer and gold prospector named Thomas Dermer.

Treaty

In his best-selling book titled Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote: “When the Mayflower arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November, it was generally assumed by the Indians that the ship had been sent to avenge the attack on Dermer. In the weeks ahead, the Pilgrims did little to change that assumption.”

A Pilgrim landing party raided a buried supply of corn seed, ripped through a gravesite and fled from the beach under a hail of arrows. The scouting party, sailing up the coast, found a spot with a harbor, fresh water and a hill for a fort. They then started to build homes.

The settlement at Plymouth had inadequate provisions, and 52 of the 102 who arrived on Cape Cod died by spring. Squanto, who had learned to speak English, befriended the Pilgrims. He then helped establish a treaty with Massasoit Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoags.

But Corbitant, sachem of the Pocasset tribe of the Wampanoag, challenged Massasoit’s treaty with the Pilgrims. The treaty seemed like a straightforward military alliance. However, it actually undercut long-standing tribal legal tradition, according to Paula Peters, a present-day activist for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by Hobbamock.

The Pilgrims dispatched Myles Standish to a village called Nemasket with less than a dozen men. His mission: to kill and behead Corbitant, who escaped. Later, the Narragansetts, also unhappy with the Pilgrims, sent Plymouth Plantation a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin, a threat. Standish ordered construction of a palisade fence surrounding their homes, and beefed up other fortifications.

Unhappy Investor

Meanwhile, the Pilgrims were struggling to feed themselves, let alone return a profit to the London investment group that paid their way. The initial plan to farm communally failed completely. Only 26 acres were planted in 1621. In 1623, each family received permission to plant privately, with the amount of land determined by family size.

“The Pilgrims, in their quest to be stepping-stones for freedom, had almost everything go wrong as they attempted to plant a colony in the new world. By the time they reached the shores of New England, they were poor, had barely enough provisions for the first winter and began to die at an alarming rate,” wrote Dr. Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.

The Mayflower

The Mayflower returned to London in 1621 empty of cargo. Weston was not happy. A return ship carried this message to Plymouth Gov. William Bradford: “The life of the business depends upon the lading of this ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter (the Fortune), I promise you I will never quit the business.”

Wessagusset

Despite his commitment, Weston bailed on the Plymouth investment. Instead, he created another venture: a trading colony of some 60 men. No religious separatists this time. No women. And no children. Just men, albeit a rough group, who would engage in profitable beaver trade with the Massachusetts tribe.

His traders arrived at Plymouth in the fall of 1622 poorly provisioned and not prepared to establish a settlement. They left for an area on the coast that the Natives called Wessaguscus, and they called Wessagusset.

They were greeted by the local sachem Aberdikes, who welcomed the idea of trade. But the situation soon deteriorated. The alert of an emerging crisis came from a man named Phineas Pratt, a member of the Weston Colony at Wessagusset. He chronicled his story in 1664, when he petitioned the colonial government for the financial benefits accorded “First Comers.”

He was the only first-person witness to make a written record. But he was not present for the battle. That account comes from Edward Winslow of Plymouth Plantation in a detailed report to London titled Good Newes From New England. Details were also provided in accounts from Bradford (Of Plymouth Plantation) and Thomas Morton (New English Canaan). Winslow was the de facto agent with Massasoit as well as with the investors who had funded the Pilgrims trip.

Phineas Pratt’s Account

The account of Phineas Pratt went like this: When the Weston party of 60 men arrived at Wessagusset in 1622 “there was a great plague among the savages &, as themselves told us, half their people died thereof…The savages seemed to be good friends with us while they feared us, but when they saw famine prevail, they began to insult.”

Gravestone of Phineas Pratt in Charlestown, Mass.

Pecksuot sought to intimidate the newcomers with boasts of how the tribe had subdued the shipwrecked French crew. “We made them our servants. They wept much…We took away their clothes. They lived but a little while.”

Aberdikes, the local sachem, later approached the colony with several armed braves and accused one of the men of stealing corn. They retreated when they saw men armed with muskets behind a fence palisade surrounding the fort and houses.

According to legend, the Weston colonists hanged a proxy for the crime, an older man who was deathly ill.

The colonists then buttoned up the palisade and consumed what food they had left while braves watched.

‘Tomorrow I will go’

Pratt continued: “When we understood that their plot was to kill all English people in one day when the snow was gone, I would have sent a man to Plymouth, but none were willing to go. Then I said if Plymouth men know not of this treacherous plot, they & we are all dead men; therefore, if God willing, tomorrow I will go.”

Pratt made a successful escape to Plymouth, where he found preparations already under way for a military expedition to Wessagusset.

Edward Winslow

Edward Winslow had just arrived after a healing mission to Massasoit, who told of a multi-tribal plan to attack Plymouth and the Weston Colony. Spurred by the warning of Massasoit and later confirmed by Pratt, the Pilgrims sent Myles Standish to ambush the tribal leaders.

Myles Standish Battles the Natives

Standish and his men took a small vessel called a shallop and arrived at Wessagusset where the colonist ship, the Swan, lay anchored. No one was on board, and Standish fired a musket. Several men suddenly appeared.

Surprised to find Myles Standish, they said there was no imminent threat from the tribe. In fact, many of the colonists were cohabitating with them.

Standish collected colonists in a hilltop stockade and told them of his plan to lure Natives inside and then kill them. The Natives perceived the threat and only Wituwamat, Pecksuot and two other men ventured into the fort.

Myles Standish promised them a feast and invited them into a house. He then locked the door, grabbed Pecksuot’s knife and killed him. Then his other soldiers killed and decapitated Wituwamat. They hanged a third brave.

The George Soule house at Plimoth Patuxet, probably similar to the house where Myles Standish killed Wituwamat and three other Natives.

Aberdikes approached with warriors, and the conflict debouched into a running battle in the surrounding area. The Natives, outgunned, disappeared into the tall cattails of a marsh. At the end of the day, seven Natives were killed. No English died in combat.

The settlement was evacuated, with most colonists sailing the Swan to a fishing outpost in Maine. Most of the local tribes pulled up stakes and fled the area, fearing another attack.

Aftermath

Bradford lamented the lost ability to profit from further beaver fur trade— at least for a while. The events were later mythologized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1858 narrative poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Samuel Butler recalled the proxy hanging in his satirical poem titled “Hudibras” published in the mid-17th century.

The peace that prevailed in the area was short lived. Massasoit’s son Metacom planned to continue friendly relations with the English and took the name of Philip. But tensions over land use and diminished game erupted in the 1670s, leading to an armed conflict called King Philip’s War. Colonial militia overwhelmed the tribal coalition, and there was slaughter on both sides. Metacom was killed by militia in 1676.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

Today

The tribes have a modest presence in Massachusetts today. The Wampanoags, led in part by Paula Peters, made a (so far) failed bid for a federal casino license.

The Massachusetts tribe is greatly diminished, but one group still holds tribal meetings at Ponkapoag near their ancestral home in the Blue Hills area south of Boston. Many were segregated in areas such as “Indian Row” in Brockton, Mass. In the 2010 census, just 85 people identified as Ponkapoag Massachusetts.

Tensions between the tribal groups continue to this day. Ren Green, one of the sachems, or leaders, of the Ponkapoag Massachusetts, confronted Paula Peters of the Wampanoags in a standing room only meeting at the Weymouth Public Library in 2017. There, Peters claimed the Wampanoags’ territory had included the Blue Hills area of Boston. Green called it an attempt to claim the Boston area site for a casino. Peters called it a misunderstanding.

Today, on some days, you can talk to an historical actor portraying Phineas Pratt at Plimoth Patuxet, the name of the well-done tourist site recreating the Plymouth Colony and a nearby Wampanoag site.

Wigwam and Wampanoag guide at Plimoth Patuxet

The Reincarnation of Phineas Pratt

On a sunny spring day, I found a youthful Pratt working a field at the bottom of a hill. He was surprised and excited that someone wanted to speak with him. He was particularly surprised that I lived in Wessagusset, which is still dealing with its odd place in history.

Yes, he told me, he had arrived at Plymouth from Wessagusset. Yes, Standish had spiked Wituwamat’s head and stank in the sun. And yes, he had escaped the troubles and alerted the colonists.

The Plymouth settlement is commemorated at Plymouth Patuxet and at historical sites in the town of Plymouth. A recent high-tech archaeological dig by faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus identified the site of a palisade wall near the fort that protected the settlement.

Finding the Lost Weston Colony

The Weston Colony site is another matter. It had rapidly disintegrated after Myles Standish and his soldiers departed on their shallop. Per local tradition in the mid-19th century, the site was located near a freshwater creek feeding into a cove on what today is called the Fore River.

John Winthrop commissioned this map showing three structures near Hunt’s Hill with the word “Wessaguscus.” Henry F. Waters “discovered” the map in the British Museum and sent photos to the Boston Public Library.

In 1884, a map created in 1633 or 1634 by Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony came to light in the British Museum. It showed three structures next to a cove where the Fore River opens to a large bay today called Hingham Bay.

Historian Charles Francis Adams did a deep dive into the subject in the 1880s. He armed himself with the Winthrop map, a few descriptions of the topography in the Phineas Pratt account and a dollop of common sense.

Hunt’s Hill

Adams figured the Weston fort was best located on a hill that offered views of the bay and the mouth of the river. It also needed a freshwater source. There was a hill on a hook of land jutting into a cove next to the houses on the Winthrop map. And there was a spring and a swamp nearby that could have been the one mentioned by Pratt.

Adams was convinced this site, called Hunt’s Hill, was the location of the Weston Colony. His logic remains to this day the generally accepted wisdom.

The most widely accepted location for the Weston Colony: a hilly peninsula that extended into a cove near the mouth of the Fore River. The hill was removed in the 1890s for fill used to create the South Boston Marine Terminal. A private dock is on the site today. This photo was taken from King’s Cove Park, adjacent to the controversial Weymouth compressor station.

But Wait…

In the early 1890s, a salvage company needed fill for a large marine park under construction in South Boston. The hill on the cove was for sale. Adams strenuously objected, but the hill was sold with no effort at archaeological excavation.

Today a group called the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project is having second thoughts about the Hunt’s Hill site. Its director, an archaeologist named Craig Chartier, says the Winthrop map could have identified buildings put up after the Weston Colony was abandoned. He identifies four other sites in the immediate area that are possibilities. One is particularly interesting. Two sets of bodies were dug up in graves either in or adjacent to that site. It meets the key criteria: hilltop, ocean frontage, freshwater access and a nearby swamp, as described by Phineas Pratt.

A Weymouth historian named G. Stinson Lord reported in a commemorative book in 1972 on the discovery of seven bodies at one gravesite and two decapitated bodies in another.

Stories That Need To Be Told or Retold

Today, there is a strong feeling that the stories of Native Americans in the area need to be better represented. For example, the living history exhibit at Plymouth dropped the word “Plantation” in 2020 and replaced it with the word “Patuxet.” And it made plans to improve the adjacent Wampanoag site.

The Massachusetts state seal depicts the arm of Myles Standish brandishing a saber above the head of a Native American standing at peace. Courtesy Doug Smock.

The Massachusetts state seal incorporates an image of Myles Standish’s arm brandishing a sword. It hovers above a Native American with arrows pointed downward. In January an appointed commission set about developing a new state seal. In 1999, Weymouth Town Meeting voted to purchase a tract of land in Wessagusset for conservation and historical purposes. A memorial garden built with private funds raised by local resident Jodi Purdy, a descendent of Myles Standish, commemorates Massachusetts Natives killed or displaced by the colonists.

Descendants of John Saunders, the second governor of the Weston Colony, then installed another memorial.

Descendants of John Saunders, second governor of the Weston Colony, received permission from the Weymouth Historical Commission to place a commemorative marker in Wessagusset Park in 2004.

Peace, Finally?

I started an effort two years ago to place a town historical marker at the park. The town approved the proposal, but then shelved it due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Weymouth Town Meeting approved purchase of Wessagusset land in 1999 to create a park that would recognize the nearby site of the Weston Colony. Myles Standish descendent Jodi Purdy led efforts to buy the land and build a memorial garden in hopes the Weston colonists and Massachusetts tribe “have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

One of the Native American memorials in the park reads: “On Oct. 21, 2001, these puddingstone memorials were dedicated as symbols of hope that the souls of the first inhabitants of Wessagusset, the Massachusett Indians, and the first settlers of Weymouth, the Weston colonists, have reconciled their differences and found peace.”

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

The author of this story, Doug Smock, is a retired newspaper reporter and magazine editor who has always loved history, particularly forgotten yet important events. His next project is “Young George Washington and the Battle of Braddock”. He is the coauthor of two business books, including “Straight to the Bottom Line”. Smock has lived in the Wessagusset neighborhood of Weymouth for the past eight years. He will present his Myles Standish story to a class at UMass Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Images: Wampanoag wigwam and guide By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002766; Edward Soule house By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002664. Phineas Pratt gravestone By Darcyjae – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74569178. Wessagusset map: Lauren Chen, reference librarian, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Images of park, Hunt’s Hill, Saunders memorial and state seal courtesy Doug Smock.

This story updated in 2023.

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Six Fun Facts About Henry Adams

Henry Adams during his lifetime was known as a snob and a grouch. He was, after all, an Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents not known for their cheery dispositions — John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Today, two things distinguish Henry Adams in the public mind, neither particularly fun.

He did a lot of this.

First, he commissioned a famous bronze sculpture known as Grief, which stands in a Washington, D.C., park. Second, he wrote an unusual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

However, there’s a bit more to the 19^th-century historian and intellectual with the famous last name.

Henry Adams

Of his birth, Henry Adams commented, “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” He was born Feb. 16, 1838, the third son of Abigail Brooks Adams and Charles Francis Adams.

Young Adams had wealth, brains, prestige, social connections and the Adams pedigree. The Adams ancestry, however, could be a burden as well as a blessing. As Adams put it, your family considered you a failure if you didn’t get elected president of the United States.

Henry Adams

Henry Adams grew up in Boston with an 18^th century mindset that caused him bewilderment as railroads, steam engines and telegraphs proliferated. “He belonged to the eighteenth century,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “and the eighteenth century upset all his plans.”

After Harvard, he amused himself in Europe for a few years, ostensibly studying law. When his father won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859, he insisted his son accompany him to Washington, D.C., as his personal secretary. There he had a front row seat to the unfolding drama of the Civil War.

President Lincoln then appointed the senior Adams as minister to England. Charles Francis successfully kept the British from siding with the Confederacy, at least openly during the Civil War.

Henry began his writing career in England. Over his lifetime, he edited the prestigious North American Review, taught at Harvard, published biographies and essays, wrote two novels and a nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administration. His autobiography, published after he died, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Modern Library called it the best English nonfiction book of the 20^th century. .

Henry Adams, Failure

Though Henry wrote about history, he didn’t shape it as an Adams should–at least he thought so.

He spent 12 years writing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Then he figured only three serious people read it.

Frontispiece to Adams’ autobiography

He called his life ‘a broken arch.’

Henry Adams suffered a stroke in 1912 shortly after the Titanic sank. He had tickets for the return voyage to Europe. For a while he could still write letters to family and friends, but finally on March 27, 1918, he died in Washington, D.C., age 80.

Here are some fun—well, maybe fun-ish — things to know about Henry Adams.

1. He Had a Little Club With Its Own Stationery and Tea Service. As an Adult.

While living in Washington, D.C., Henry Adams and his wife Marion Hooper “Clover” Adam,s formed an intense friendship with Clarence King and Clara and John Hay. King, a geologist, had brains, drive and a secret African-American wife in New York City. Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s biographer, would become secretary of state for Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt.

John Hay, by John singer Sargent

Adams met Hay in Washington in 1861, when he served as his father’s personal secretary and Hay as Lincoln’s. Adams then introduced King to the rest of the group after meeting him in 1871. They gathered frequently at the Adams’ home after they moved to Washington in 1877, and remained close for the rest of their lives. Adams was so close to Hay that they built adjoining houses near the White House, the site of the Hay-Adams Hotel. In 1881, they decided to call themselves the Five of Hearts. All were about 40, except 32-year-old Clara Hay.

Clara Stone Hay

John Hay had stationery printed with a five of hearts monogram, which the club used to write to each other. King had a tea service made with the same motif and a clock face showing 5 p.m., when Clover served tea to the group.

Clarence King

Among the five, though, they had plenty of other friends – the most famous people of their age. Their circle included Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitmen, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Henry Hobson Richardson, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, every president from Lincoln to Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie.

2. He Left His Wife Out of His Autobiography.

Clover Adams committed suicide on Dec. 6, 1885 by drinking chemicals she used to develop photographs. Henry had married her at her father’s home in Beverly Farms, Mass., on June 27, 1872. He said he was wildly in love with her.

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

In the 467-page Education of Henry Adams, he didn’t once mention Clover. He also omitted the 12-1/2 years of his marriage from the book. Her death, he wrote, “smashed the life out of him.” Before she died, he had remained fairly stationary, but afterward he traveled extensively, to Japan, Hawaii, the South Seas, Mexico, Egypt, Britain, Cuba and Europe.

He commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a bronze sculpture of a draped figure to mark her grave in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. He urged Saint-Gaudens to use Buddhist devotional art as inspiration. The statue portrayed nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

Adams Monument. Henry is buried beside Clover.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

The sculpture became a tourist attraction, and people call it “Grief.” Adams hated the name, officially known as the “Adams Memorial.”

3. He Didn’t Think Much of Harvard.

His life, he wrote, was “a search for education the schools cannot give.’

He went to Harvard, he wrote in his autobiography, because his family always had. None of them, he wrote, ‘had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it.’

He also wrote the college offered ‘chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental.’

Henry Adams upon his graduation from Harvard.

“Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously,” he wrote.

But when Adams was 32, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot invited him to teach medieval history, about which he called himself ‘utterly and grossly ignorant.’ Adams took the job, though, and for six years taught a survey course of European history from the 10^th century to the 16^th.

4. He Had an Unrequited Love Affair for 35 Years.

Henry Adams met the beautiful Elizabeth Sherman Cameron in 1881, nearly five years before Clover committed suicide. A captivating hostess who read widely, she had a miserable marriage to a wealthy alcoholic U.S. senator. “Lizzie” led Adams on for 35 years, while flirting with Russian Prince Orloff, poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney, the sculptors Saint-Gaudens and Rodin and even John Hay.

Elizabeth Cameron Sherman

Did they ever consummate the relationship, which, according to their 35-years of letters, was mostly Platonic? Only they knew for sure. However, their friendship—or whatever it was—inspired plenty of gossip in their social circles.

When Henry suffered his stroke in 1912, Lizzie insisted on taking care of him. Henry’s sister Mary said no. “I won’t have her,” she said. Mary had concerns about the ‘disagreeable scandal’ and didn’t want tongues wagging about Lizzie coming from Paris to take charge of her brother’s care.

5. He Secretly Wrote a Best Selling Novel.

In 1880, Adams published a book called Democracy: An American Novel. An immediate best-seller, it prompted speculation about who wrote it and on whom did the author base his characters.

People thought maybe Adams’ friends, John Hay and Clarence King, wrote it. Or perhaps Clover Adams did it. Not until after his death in 1918 did his publishing company reveal he had written it.

Henry Adams playing with his dog.

Democracy tells the story of a ‘rather fast New York girl’ named Madeleine Lee who goes to Washington. She establishes a salon that attracts powerful men, and two fall in love with her. Each connives to get rid of his rival while the Bulgarian minister watches their machinations.

More than a century later, a Washington Post writer in 2005 gave it a positive review. “Democracy” is a joy — a worldly, profoundly knowing (and thus profoundly disenchanted), deliciously elitist social comedy…” The reason for the review: The Washington National Opera had performed an opera based on Adams’ novel in 2005.

Adams wrote his next novel, Esther, under a pseudonym, Frances Compton Snow. it didn’t sell too well.

6. He Believed Ulysses S. Grant Ruined His Life.

He moved to Washington in 1868 after working as his father’s secretary – and as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Boston Advertiser, as well as a contributor to the North American Review.

He prepared to make his mark in Washington as a political journalist. Full of ambition and conceit, he thought, perhaps, Ulysses S. Grant might tap him as an adviser when elected president of the United States in 1868. Some of his family friends already served in high office.

It didn’t happen. Young Henry Adams failed to win the right friends and influence the right people in the capital. He rubbed some people the wrong way. Invited to a White House dinner in 1870, he gave his own performance a glowing review. “I chattered with that blandness for which I am so justly distinguished,” he wrote, “and I flatter myself it was I who showed them how they ought to behave.” Well, not really.

Grant had no use for the Adams family.

President Grant

He failed to appoint Adams’ families friends to his Cabinet and cashiered others. He told his secretary the Adamses ‘did not possess one noble trait of character.’

“My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years. I am becoming more and more isolated as far as allies go,” wrote Henry Adams.

When Grant died, Adams offered up a bitter epitaph: “He had no right to exist.”

With thanks to The Education of Henry Adams by Carl Becker in the American Historical Review, April 1919 and Henry Adams and the Age of Grant by Brooks D. Simpson in the Hayes Historical Journal 1989. There’s a recent biography of Henry Adams called “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” by David S. Brown. You can help independent bookstores and the New England Historical Society by buying it here. This story was updated in 2022.

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Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,, friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Quincy Adams’ Bad Boy Brother Charles

John Quincy Adams’ diary must have been irresistible reading for his bad boy brother Charles.

John Quincy started his diary at the age of 12 because his father insisted on it. He made his first entry on the eve of his voyage to Paris with his father and Charles, then nine.

Bad boy brother Charles and John Quincy Adams in their youth.

On Nov. 19, 1779, John Quincy wrote, “This morning at about 11 o’clock I took leave of my Mamma, my sister, and brother Tommy and went to Boston with Mr. Thaxter, in order to go on board the frigate the Sensible of 28 pounders.”

John Quincy had already accompanied his father once on a diplomatic mission to France during the American Revolution. He had been sturdier and older than Charles, described as “charming,” “sensitive” and “delicate.”

Story of a Bad Boy

The second diplomatic mission starting in 1779 turned out a disaster for young Charles. The Sensible headed into a gale and then sprung a leak. The captain enlisted passengers, including John Quincy, to take turns pumping the ice water out of the ship. The Sensible limped into El Ferrol, the first friendly port it could find, on the northwestern tip of Spain. The Adamses then traveled 1,000 miles overland in a journey John Adams called the worst experience of his life. After a brief time in Paris, they went on to the Netherlands, where John Adams negotiated a loan from the Dutch to the continental American government.

John Adams upon completion of the Treaty of Paris. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

John Quincy and Charles enrolled in a Latin school in Amsterdam where the tutors beat them regularly. Their father found out and sent them in December 1780 to another school, the prestigious Leiden University. John Quincy, though, left for St. Petersburg in July as secretary to Francis Dana. The boys’ father realized Charles was terribly homesick and sent him back to Massachusetts.

Charles left London with a chaperone in August of 1781, but his ship didn’t get far. Needing repairs, it went into drydock in Spain. The Adams family didn’t know what happened to him and thought he’d been lost at sea. He arrived home five months later, but by some accounts he had returned a lost boy.

Little survives of the notoriously voluminous Adams’ family papers when it comes to Charles’ disappearance in Spain. Or much else about Charles.

John Quincy kept up his diary for a few months after he embarked on the Sensible, but stopped writing during and after Charles’ departure.

A Sad End

Five years later, in July 1786, Charles had finished his first year at Harvard. He had already started getting into trouble at Harvard, drinking heavily and disturbing the peace.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy had just been admitted as a junior to ‘the Seat of the Muses,’ as his father called his alma mater. He had started keeping his diary again, and on July 27, 1786, he wrote about something else his bad boy brother had done.

“I perceive Charles has been guilty of a trick which I thought he would despise; that of prying into, and meddling with things which are nothing to him: and ungenerously looking into Papers, (which he knew I wished to keep private,) because I could not keep them under lock and key. If he looks here, he will feel how contemptible a spy is to himself, and to others.”

Charles did graduate from Harvard, and his parents sent him to New York to study law. He lived with Baron von Steuben, believed to be gay, and found him fascinating. Eventually he married, but he had extramarital affairs and failed at the law. Some historians believe Charles was gay as well.

His father later disowned him as a “a mere rake, buck, blood and beast.” Charles died at 30 of cirrhosis of the liver while living in poverty apart from his wife and two daughters.

John Quincy had another bad boy brother: Thomas. The baby of the family, Thomas ended up living with his parents, along with his wife and seven children. He couldn’t support himself or his family, and he vanished for days on drinking binges. He died at 59.

Like Father, Like Son

John Adams famously wrote to his eldest son that he’d only have himself to blame if he didn’t rise to president of the United States. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” he wrote. “And if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”

Some speculate that John Adams’ two youngest sons failed under the pressure of his demands.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams also demanded a great deal of his sons. And like his father, he would have one son who would make him proud and two who would disappoint him.

George Washington Adams

George Washington died at 28, a dissolute drunk who fathered an illegitimate child and may have committed suicide. John lived until 31, but led no happier or soberer a life than his older brother. Only the youngest, Charles Francis Adams, would win acclaim as a diplomat and historian.

John Adams II

This story last updated in 2022.

With thanks to J.L. Bell and his Boston 1775 blog and Steven Lee Carson, Adams Family (History Net).

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The USS Kearsarge Launched at Portsmouth to Slay the Alabama

In 1862, the Confederate Naval vessel CSS Alabama was the scourge of the seas. Just over a year into the Civil War the Confederacy had bought the ship in England. And the Union Navy had dispatched its own warship, the USS Kearsarge, to stop it.

Built in secrecy to avoid falling afoul of the British government’s official stance of neutrality, the Alabama was launched without cannon. Because the British couldn’t sell her as an armed vessel, the Confederacy to arm her. As soon as the ship entered international waters, the Confederate Navy outfitted her with eight cannon. Then it set her loose on a mission to capture as many merchant ships headed for America’s northern states as possible.

The Alabama may have exceeded the Confederates’ wildest expectations. Under the command of Capt. Raphael Semmes, she burned 65 ships, though never harmed their crew or passengers.

Under both power and sail, the ship could make 13 knots. Its captain and crew quickly made their impact on the war. Within a month of her commissioning, Alabama was cruising the shipping lanes east of the Azores, capturing and burning every American merchant vessel she encountered. Commissioned in July of 1862, she had destroyed 21 ships before the end of the year.

The Union Navy had taken notice of the Alabama. She had easily sunk a Union sidewheeler the USS Hatteras in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Battle of Kearsarge vs. Alabama by Edouard Manet, Philadelphia Museum of Art

The USS Kearsarge Receives her Orders

The Navy had constructed the USS Kearsarge at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in 1861 and sent her to sea in search of Confederate raiders.

New Hampshire newspaper publisher Henry McFarland claimed he had suggested naming the vessel for New Hampshire’s Mount Kearsarge to his friend, an assistant secretary of the Navy who summered in the Granite State. The assistant secretary would later say his own wife suggested the name.

USS Kearsarge

Either way, the USS Kearsage had been launched in 1862 and soon it was given a new mission: Capture or sink the Alabama. Capt. John Winslow, a Mayflower descendant, and a crew of sailors, many from New England, tackled their mission with gusto. From November 1862 to March 1863 the Kearsarge underwent some special modifications at ports in Spain.

The Kearsarge carried seven guns and under power and sail she could manage 11 knots. Though she might not seem quite a match for the Alabama, the Union Navy had taken notice of the awesome power of the Alabama. Steps were taken to strengthen Kearsarge. Along her sides, strategically placed to protect her engines, the Spanish shipyard installed three layers of chain armoring. And to disguise the battle armor, they constructed false wooden sides that sat atop the armor, painted black to match the hull.

The Kearsarge Hunts Alabama

For months, the Kearsarge scoured the Atlantic in search of the Alabama. But the elusive Alabama sailed the waters of South America and across to Africa, leaving a trail of devastation in her wake. By June of 1863, when the Alabama pulled into the French port of Cherbourg for much needed refitting, she had captured and destroyed 65 ships. She had boarded more than 450 ships and taken 2,000 prisoners over a period of 560 days.

When the officers of the Kearsarge learned the Alabama was in Cherbourg, they made their way to the port at best speed, arriving just three days after the Alabama. At the mouth of the port, the Kearsarge’s pursuit stopped abruptly. France was neutral in the war, and an attack on a ship in port would have been an unprovoked act of war.

CSS Alabama

The Kearsarge requested support from other Union naval vessels in blockading the Alabama in port. The commander of the Alabama made a snap decision. He would not be hemmed into the port while the Union Navy gathered strength. He quickly outfitted the Alabama to go to sea with the intention of engaging the Kearsarge.

Kearsarge at the Battle of Cherbourg

On June 19, the Alabama left port. The Kearsarge raced ahead of it to reach international waters to avoid a naval battle in French waters. Safely out to sea, the two vessels began to circle, each trying to gain an advantage.

From a range of 1,000 feet, the Alabama fired first. The Kearsarge waited until the ships got closer. On shore, spectators watched as the two ships fired hundreds of cannon shots at each other. The Alabama fired more than 370 shots at the Kearsarge, but the Kearsarge’s makeshift armor held. Though her hull bent under the barrage, it did not break.

The gun that sunk the Alabama

The Kearsarge fired far fewer shots, but her shots were accurate. When the smoke began to clear, the Alabama was sinking. The Kearsarge had blasted holes through the ship below the waterline, dooming the mighty Alabama.

The Alabama surrendered. Capt. Semmes dumped his sword into the ocean rather than face the indignity of surrendering it — an act considered dishonorable by some. One man was killed on the Kearsarge and two were injured. On the Confederate side, 19 men died. Some 70 men surrendered to the Kearsarge. Semmes managed to flee aboard on a passing British vessel and escape to England with about 40 of his men.

The crew of the Kearsarge were hailed as heroes back in New York. For their actions in the Battle of Cherbourg, 17 sailors received the medal of valor. The ship, meanwhile, would continue in service in various capacities up until 1894.

The Kearsarge commander, John Winslow, was promoted to commodore and then rear admiral, commanding the Pacific Squadron until his retirement in 1872. He died in Boston shortly thereafter.

Aftermath and Repercussions

The Alabama’s captain, Raphael Semmes, went on to teach Moral Philosophy at the Louisiana State Seminary, later Louisiana State University. He died in 1877 from complications of food poisoning after earing contaminated shrimp. The city of Semmes, Ala., was named after him.

Cartoon showing the US bullying Britain into paying the Alabama Claim

Britain had angered the United States by letting one of its shipyards build the Alabama. That led to a long legal challenge initially led led by American Minister Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents. Known as the Alabama Claims, the U.S. demanded payment of damages for the destruction wrought by the Alabama and several other British-built Confederate raiders. In 1872, Britain settled with a payment of $15.5 million.

In 1984, a French Navy mine hunter discovered the wreck of the Alabama off Cherbourg. The archaeological investigation recovered several cannon. In 2002, a diving expedition recovered the ship’s bell along with cannon, tableware and ornamental commodes.

In Stamford, Conn., a cannon from the USS Kearsarge stood in West Park from 1901 until 1942. It was then hauled away as scrap during World War II.

Thanks to: Kearsarge Mountain and the Corvette Named for It by Henry MacFarland.

Images: The gun that sank the Alabama By Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14576197040/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/photographichist06mill/photographichist06mill#page/n308/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43879541. Battle of Kearsarge and Alabama By Édouard Manet – 1. From en.wiki2. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1757414. Painting of Alabama By Rear Admiral J. W. Schmidt [1] – From the US Navy's Naval Historical Center. Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is (was) here;uploaded onto en.wiki 03:11, 14 November 2004 by McMullen 740×571 (59,800 bytes; Painting of CSS Alabama), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1338854,

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