Every autumn I become nostalgic. Each year when whirring insect voices sing their chorus, when cool nights signal October’s approach, something tells me that it is time to prepare for settling in, time to find old roots, to reaffirm ties with those who have gone before. And I long to return to Quincy. 

Every season means something special. But autumn always stirs in me the memory of the Adams family mansion—affectionately called the Old House—at Quincy, Massachusetts. My attachment to the Old House began over a decade ago, in late fall of 1965, when my husband and I went to Quincy so that I could absorb “atmosphere” in preparation for writing a biography of John Adams. 

All of Quincy belongs to the Adamses—the birthplaces of John and John Quincy; the tombs of John and Abigail and John Quincy and Louisa Catherine; Quincy Bay where the family fished and boated—but in particular the beautiful eighteenth-century gambrel-roofed house which John Adams called “Peacefield” or “Stonyfield” and which later family members called simply the “Old House.” Adams bought the house before he returned home from Europe for the last time. He and Abigail had decided that their modest little saltbox inherited from his father no longer suited their improved circumstances, that a returning ambassador and his family deserved a grander house. 

Yet when they did return to Quincy, the new house, to their dismay, was much smaller than they had remembered it. Abigail soon put carpenters to work to build an east wing—a gracious parlor on the first floor to house her French furniture and, on the second story above it, a large study. John Quincy and Charles Francis changed it still further, building a separate stone library on the west side of the house to accommodate the papers and books of his father and grandfather. The fourth generation improved the plumbing and kitchen. The last member of the family to live in the house, Brooks Adams, died in 1927, whereupon the house became a national historic site. 

It is a lovely house, a charming house, a living house. Every other restored house I have ever seen (with the possible exception of Monticello) pales by comparison. Most other houses exhibit furniture of the period, books and ornaments such as the owner would have had. Not the Old House. Here is a tea table of Abigail’s, there a knife box of Louisa Catherine’s, here a desk of John’s, on the desk a book inscribed from John Adams to his grandson. John’s favorite wing chair still reposes in the study. John Quincy’s trees still thrive, Wilhelmina S. Harris, who was Brooks Adams’ secretary, still is superintendent of the Old House and resides only a few doors away. 

The farm is gone, of course. Only a few acres surrounding the house remain to serve as buffer against the bustling town of Quincy that engulfs the little estate. But on that golden autumn day when I first saw the house, I was enraptured. The painted gray clapboards gleamed gently in the sunlight; summer’s vines still tumbled over the trellis fronting the porch. 

I had to go back, and every fall my obliging husband took me back. But after four years the book was published, and so we did not return. Every fall, however, I thought of Quincy. Then came the Bicentennial, an opportunity to take our eight-year-old son on a gala trip into history. This time we returned to Quincy in late March. I was not disappointed. Though it was not yet spring and the day was cold, the sun bounced from the old glass of the windows; crocuses peeped up behind the house. 

I wondered whether I would still find the interior of the house so appealing. I did. The house still exuded its intimacy, its feeling of being gracious but scaled down in the kind of New England warmth that somehow has never been equalled for me in the old houses of Virginia. Moreover, this time I could show our son the delights of the house—the settee where, for example, a gnarled, wasted but still intellectually vigorous John Adams sat at ninety to have Gilbert Stuart paint his portrait; the walking stick in the hall upon which he rested his hand in the Stuart painting; the fine secretary desk that he had brought from Holland; the japanned highboy in the upstairs hall; the closets where he stored his books. 

As we wandered through the light-filled, airy rooms, I thought how much this latest trip meant after an interval of some eight years. In the intervening years I had left John Adams for a time, had gone on to other projects and then had returned to the Adams family—this time in the person of Henry, the teacher, historian, novelist, author of a nine-volume history of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison; a biography of Albert Gallatin; two novels, Democracy and Esther; and the classic, The Education of Henry Adams. 

Henry Adams had fascinated me. I had even considered writing a book about him. The march from John to John Quincy to Charles Francis to the fourth generation, that is, John Quincy II, Charles Francis II, Henry and Brooks encompassed some of the most intriguing themes I had ever studied. Consequently, when I returned to the Old House for this visit, I came with a wider frame of reference than simply John Adams himself. I could see in the house now not only John but his descendants. 

This visit to the Old House brought to focus my questions about the place of the Adams family in American history. I wondered: Could the Adams men—all fiercely independent, non-partisan, duty-bound, devoted to country—be termed successful in this American democracy? Why had not they ever achieved (at least until they became the subject of a television series) the fame and recognition in keeping with their stature? Had the principles of liberty, or limited, balanced government espoused by John Adams in the eighteenth century become by the fourth generation of Adamses as hopelessly out of tune with the times as Henry Adams said they were? I believe—had to believe—that those principles were not dead, that the necessity for men to live according to those principles of freedom was just as valid in 1776, in Henry Adams’ turn of the century, or in 1976. But I had the sinking feeling, as did Henry Adams, Tocqueville, and others, that America had turned her back on those principles and, indeed, that it was perhaps in the very nature of democracy to destroy the liberty it once had revered. I had begun to wonder not what the Adamses meant to America but what America had done to the Adamses. 

I had begun to wonder not what the Adamses meant to America but what America had done to the Adamses. 

It was not a happy reflection for a bicentennial observance. Yet, as I stood in the garden of the Old House, all these questions came to me. Two weeks later we were in Washington. There was something I wanted to see, something that before I concluded my years with the Adamses I had to see and judge for myself. 

Henry Adams, as all the Adams men, had married well. His wife Marian Hooper, daughter of a well-to-do Boston physician and surgeon, had been an intellectual companion and a gracious and renowned hostess in Washington society. But “Clover,” as she was called by her family, suffered from periods of depression. After the death of her father, with whom she was very close, she committed suicide. Henry was crushed. Clover for twelve years had been everything to him. Now he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand this cruel twist of events. 

To commemorate his wife, Henry commissioned the French sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to make a bronze statue to be placed in Rock Creek Cemetery. Though it never had a name, the statue gained the popular title of “Grief.” St. Gaudens, however, considered that title inappropriate; he preferred to call his work “Peace of God.” I had seen pictures of this statue, had read Henry’s one brief reference to it in The Education. Now I had to see the real thing. 

Our cab entered Rock Creek Cemetery, wound around several tiny lanes, and stopped before a clump of high shrubbery. We could see no statue yet, but we alighted. Telling the driver to wait, we hastened down a path, turned the corner around the bushes into a small garden. There was St. Gaudens’ statue. I was taken aback. I could not justly describe it then. I cannot now. Seated in front of a great upright slab was the figure of a woman draped and veiled, her hand brought up to her chin but not really supporting it. The figure was massive, almost frightening under its shadowy veil. Yet the hand and arm bore a graceful, delicate air. The face, though strong, was distinctly feminine. It did not weep; neither did it brood. John Hay, friend of Henry Adams, said it showed “infinite wisdom; a past without beginning and a future without end; a repose, after limitless experience, a peace, to which nothing matters. . . .”¹ I could not say. 

Later, I read again the brief remarks Henry wrote about the statue. It was not a portrait statue, he said. Moreover, “the interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer. . . . Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.” Whatever the observer brought within himself when he came to view the statue, the statue itself reflected. Henry often sat and observed those who came to the statue. The layman saw nothing much; the clergyman saw atheism, despair, denial. But this was not surprising. For Henry Adams, the American mind “shunned, distrusted, disliked, the dangerous attraction of ideals, and stood alone in history for its ignorance of the past.” Because “the American layman had lost sight of ideals,” he could see nothing; because “the American priest had lost sight of faith,” he could see only denial. Both types, said Henry, truly represented America.²

And so again I was facing my dilemma. What was the future of American democracy? Could it withstand forever the assaults from within and without that had battered it continually almost since its inception? Could liberty ever rest comfortably in a democracy, or would liberty and democracy forever be opposed? What of values, standards, distinctions of goodness, intellect, or achievement? Were they doomed, as Henry Adams thought, to be sacrificed before the altar of quality? 

Could such men as the Adamses, who resisted every encroachment upon their independence, every appeal to party or faction, ever become powerful voices in a democracy? Could these aristocrats of intellect, education, and character ever become more influential than Jeremiahs preaching their message to a heedless populace? Was the Old House at Quincy a symbol of the principles the Adamses stood for, or was it just another antique house where some famous people once lived? Did the St. Gaudens statue really mean nothing or, if something, that life was not worth much? 

I recalled a chilling exchange in Henry Adams’s novel Democracy in which the beautiful young heroine Madeleine Lee questioned Mr. Nathan Gore of Massachusetts. “‘Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal suffrage a success?’

“Mr. Gore saw himself pinned to the wall, and he turned at bay with almost the energy of despair: 

“‘These are matters about which I rarely talk in society; they are like the doctrine of a personal God; of a future life; of revealed religion; subjects which one naturally reserves for private reflection. But since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. The only condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilisation aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral.’

“‘And supposing your experiment fails,’ said Mrs. Lee; ‘suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism.’ 

“‘I wish, Mrs. Lee, you would visit the Observatory with me some evening, and look at Sirius. Did you ever make the acquaintance of a fixed star? I believe astronomers reckon about twenty millions of them in sight, and an infinite possibility of invisible millions, each one of which is a sun, like ours, and may have satellites like our planet. Suppose you see one of these fixed stars suddenly increase in brightness, and are told that a satellite has fallen into it and is burning up, its career finished, its capacities exhausted? Curious, is it not, but what does it matter? Just as much as the burning up of a moth at your candle.’ 

“Madeleine shuddered a little, ‘I cannot get to the height of your philosophy,’ said she. ‘You are wandering among the infinites, and I am finite.’ 

“‘Not at all! But I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first to lead the column. Anyway let us not be skulkers or grumblers. There! Have I repeated my catechism correctly? You would have it! Now oblige me by forgetting it. I should lose my character at home if it got out. Good night!’”³

This speech of Nathan Gore’s had haunted me. It exemplified everything that I did not want American democracy to mean. For Mr. Gore democracy was a necessary development in the evolutionary path of history; it had to happen when it did, but neither would it likely survive. It was a mere product of historical necessity, not of men’s ideals or actions. 

Hoping all the more to find answers to my questions about the future of American democracy, I turned to the Adamses themselves. As I read and re-read parts of their lives and works, I was struck by several characteristics that marked them as Adamses. First of all they pledged themselves to pursue their duty, regardless of the outcome to themselves. Second, they were conscious of their role in history both individually and as members of a family that had always assumed positions of leadership. Third, they sought not fame so much as recognition. Fourth, they feared the effects of democracy on the nation that they had helped bring into being. It seemed to me that an examination of these characteristics would clarify what the Adamses had meant to America—or, as I feared, what America had done to the Adamses. 

In the first place, devotion to duty marked these men more strongly than any other feature. John Adams, for instance, never refused a call to service to his country even when it meant a separation of years from his family. In his old age he wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush, “My conscience was clear as a crystal glass without a scruple or a doubt. I was borne along by an irresistible sense of duty.”⁴ His son, John Quincy, was so groomed for public duty from his earliest youth that after the age of ten, when he accompanied his father to France, he scarcely had a boyhood. At a mere fourteen he knew French so well that he became private secretary to Francis Dana, new minister to Russia; only after a year and a half, at the conclusion of an overland trip in winter made alone from St. Petersburg to Finland, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Hamburg to The Hague, did he finally rejoin his father. His anxious mother back in Quincy had not heard from him for two years. Such an adolescence could not breed softness or self-indulgence. John Quincy learned to rein in his passions and his high temper behind what his son Charles Francis was to call an “iron mask.”⁵ Educated to a disregard for personal whim, he devoted himself so completely to his country that he denied himself almost any private life. As a result, his wife and sons unquestionably suffered. Indeed, old John Adams later advised his son that “children must not be wholly forgotten in the midst of public duties.”⁶

John and John Quincy and those who followed had a moral zeal that sprang from their New England Puritanism. Devotion to duty was a kind of self-abnegation, a justification, a proof to themselves that they were righteous. It was partly for this reason that the first three generations kept such extensive diaries—in writing, their thoughts and actions were laid bare, a witness to the purity of their motives, a record by which God and posterity could judge them. The Adamses prided themselves on following the independent course their consciences dictated even at the expense of their political well-being. Both John and John Quincy, in their efforts to exhibit public virtue, to prove that they were immune to attractions of power, retained and tolerated in their administrations men who were their political enemies. Complete independence of party was a key mark of their characters. Consequently, they could be statesmen but not politicians. 

Their devotion to duty, however, was in no way entirely of psychological motivation. They were inspired by a passionately deep love of country, of principle, of devotion to liberty to which personal desire must always take second place. 

John Adams, at the close of his presidency, wrote to Benjamin Rush what amounted to his credo, “I do not curse the day when I engaged in public affairs. I do not say when I became a politician, for that I never was. I cannot repent of anything I ever did conscientiously from a sense of duty. I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice, or ambition, or even the desire of fame, if any of these had been my motive, my conduct would have been very different.”⁷

In addition to having in common their finely tuned concept of duty, the Adamses were aware of themselves in history, both as individuals and as a family. From the first two Adamses the family inherited a tradition of combined meditation and action, of contemplation and service. It was an awesome heritage. To have two presidents in one family immediately imposed upon each of the Adamses a standard of achievement that from the cradle settled heavily upon them. To some, the fact of being an Adams beckoned as an incentive, but to those whose natures were unsuited to rigorous self-discipline and the conflict of public life it proved an intolerable burden. 

Charles Adams, second son of John Adams, a lovable, generous, sociable fellow, died a drunkard’s death at age thirty, leaving a wife and two small children. 

Thomas Boylston Adams, youngest son of John Adams, never managed to succeed in public life. He developed a drinking problem, becoming in later life merely a kind of caretaker for his aged father. 

George Washington Adams, oldest of John Quincy’s three sons, was romantic and gracious like his mother, Louisa Catherine. With his poetic and literary interests, he did not take to the legal career his father had laid out for him. Drink became his solace. Eventually he became involved with a young servant girl, by whom he fathered an illegitimate child. Faced with the scandal of a child and a mountain of debts, he committed suicide. 

Yet despite these tragedies, there were those in the family who could discipline themselves to put aside their own desires for the sake of duty. For those Adamses the family tradition forced extension of themselves to new heights. Charles Francis Adams was such a man.

However, as a young man he, too, had chafed under the Adams yoke. ‘‘I am growing more and more attached to the idea of private life,” he confided to his diary, “and can only lament the necessity of the name of which I am so proud.”⁸ Only when he realized that neither of his older brothers would assume the Adams obligation, that his father focused all hopes upon him, did he acquiesce in a legal and political career. He began to emulate his grandfather, John, who he thought “was the most extraordinary character who figured in the American revolution,”⁹ and his father, John Quincy, whom he described as “uncommonly eloquent after dinner today, and laid himself out more forcibly than usual. When he does so, how immeasurably he rises above all others. There is no comparison.”¹⁰ 

Nonetheless, Charles Francis, like his son Henry after him, thought himself inadequate to the challenge of the Adams standard. He felt under great pressure to prevent the family name from deteriorating. “My pride,” he said, “is such as not to allow me to think for a moment that the family name shall be set down as degenerating.”¹¹

Henry, one of the most fascinating of the Adamses, all his life felt guilty because he had not done his part to take the Adams name into the seats of political power. A brilliant historian and man of letters, he still felt that because public life had never been available to him, he had never truly accomplished anything worthwhile. His Education of Henry Adams, an elegantly styled autobiography which has become a standard in American literature, is a sort of apology for having failed to exceed what he thought were the mediocre pursuits of teaching and writing.

If the Adamses were conscious of themselves and their family as playing a part in history, then the natural outgrowth of this awareness was ambition for recognition. And the Adamses were ambitious—not for fame in the sense of being widely known, not for money or power—but rather for appreciation, for receipt of their just due. Ambition in the Adams definition meant a desire of being emulated, of being looked up to as meritorious. Moreover, ambition for recognition moved hand in hand with devotion to duty. To be recognized as having performed valuable service in behalf of one’s country would harmonize not only with the Adams name but with self-justification; it would stand as proof that duty had been performed. 

Charles Francis spoke as a young man of his “ambitious feelings,” his “desire of distinction and knowing so well that I am called upon particularly to act as becomes a member of a high family.”¹² He described the familial attitude toward recognition when he recorded the feelings of both himself and his father during the 1824 presidential campaign. The presidency was John Quincy’s just due. “A life,” said his son, “spent in the public service and almost exclusively devoted to it, ought to obtain so high an honour. His competitors are so much his inferiors, also, that it is mortifying to suffer a defeat. This is what my father would feel and this only. His high spirit will ill bear to see a man whom he despises governing a nation partially and feebly. But if so, it must be, I am resigned.”¹³

Though the Adamses aspired to recognition in the here and now, they concerned themselves equally with what posterity would think of them. For that reason, they took great pains to clarify the historical record, to make sure that history should judge them and their period fairly. John Adams spent much of his retirement laboring over this very task. He doubted that history would ever treat him kindly, or that the Revolutionary and early federal period would ever receive a correct accounting. Always plagued by self-doubt, he “never could bring myself seriously to consider that I was a great man or of much importance or consideration in the world”; he realized unhappily that “the few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has been passed.” Then, having said that, he characteristically chided himself, “Enough surely of egotism!”¹⁴

Yet, even though the Adamses aspired, almost agonizingly at times, to recognition, their sense of duty forbade them from seeking it by means other than independent action. Both John and John Quincy desperately wanted the presidency; but their sense of honor would not permit them either actively to seek it or to act in a consciously politically advantageous way. In other words, their search for recognition derived not from lust for power but from a desire to be judged both by contemporaries and posterity as dutiful and virtuous. 

The Adamses never received the recognition to which they aspired. There were times, of course, when their actions coincided with popular feelings; at such times they gained a certain adulation. Nonetheless, they were not politicians. Their personalities were ill-suited to pleasing crowds. What is more, their concept of democracy was generally misunderstood by the public. Though they loved their country, they expressed misgivings about the future of American democracy. In plain fact, they were not in the real sense of the word democrats at all. To be sure, they were republicans, advancing limited, constitutional government based upon fixed laws equally applied; their government was to be balanced in form so as to prevent any of the rival factions of society from encroaching upon the rights of anyone. Liberty was of primary importance to these men; widespread suffrage was not. In other words, liberty rather than equality formed the keystone of a happy and prosperous society. The one had impelled the American Revolution, the second the ill-fated French Revolution.

When John Adams expounded these views in 1776 and in the 1780s and the 1790s, he was not alone. Most of his colleagues agreed with him; they had inherited from colonial America a tradition of ardent allegiance to constitutional liberties. Consequently, the temper of the late eighteenth century weighted the scales in favor of liberty rather than equality. Each generation of Adamses beginning with John and proceeding to John Quincy to Charles Francis to Henry received its education in the tradition of classical eighteenth-century liberalism. But almost before the Revolution had drawn to a close, the democratic drive for equality in suffrage, in property, in education, in manners, in every facet of life began to overtake the fervor to preserve and protect liberty. The duty of government came to be seen by more and more people not only as protection of liberty but as fostering—even forcing—equality. As the years passed, then, the Adamses who had been so much in the mainstream of the Revolutionary and early federal concept of liberty began to find themselves increasingly out of step with popular opinion on the proper role of government. 

John Quincy was the last president who had been educated in the eighteenth-century principles of the Founding Fathers. Even then, time was short. John Quincy could not be elected to a second term. When Andrew Jackson became president, he ushered in a democratic world that was completely different from that of 1776. 

Charles Francis could not succeed in election to the presidency. And Henry could not find even a niche in public life. By the fourth generation Henry considered the family to be an anachronism. Henry did not think that even his brother Charles Francis II, historian and president of the Union Pacific Railroad, could successfully pit honor and integrity against a wheeler-dealer tycoon, Jay Gould, whom Henry saw as part of the democratic tradition. 

As strongly as ever the Adamses felt a necessity to perform their duty in the family tradition and at the same time craved recognition for their achievements. Yet, they realized that their country, in its move away from the principles of the Revolutionary period, was thwarting their efforts to provide it with leadership. Understandably, then, they suffered periods of great bitterness. 

During his vice presidency, a time of frustration and trial for him, John Adams lamented the “deplorable condition” of the country, “which seems to be under such a fatality that the people can agree upon nothing.”¹⁵ Charles Francis during the 1824 presidential campaign of his father, wrote, “This country though the purest under the sun is going to ruin. I am in perfect despair for republics . . .’’¹⁶ 

In their old age, however, both John and John Quincy forgot the bitterness engendered by the presidencies, bandaged old wounds, and, with typical resilience, went on to new thoughts. John spent his retirement writing letters and philosophizing. John Quincy never retired at all but began a new career more successful than the first—as representative to Congress, a post which he held until at age eighty he collapsed on the floor of the House and died a few hours later. 

It is surely a function of age to put aside old griefs and grievances, to get on with the high business of stripping life to its truths. Since age does not have to concern itself with the inconsequential, it ought to rise to new understanding of life. Religion, for that reason, ought to achieve a peak of maturity. 

It was in depth of religious faith that Henry seemed to part company with prior Adamses. All before him had relied, even more so in old age, upon faith. John Adams, for all his attention to eighteenth-century reason, inherited from Puritanism an active, living faith. John Quincy, if possible, felt an even stronger presence of God in his life. But Henry, though he was a son of the eighteenth century, of the Founding Fathers, of Quincy and the Boston State House, as he said, was likewise a son of the nineteenth century, of science, of Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin. If as an old man he had attained a degree of faith, his Education does not reveal it. His Education imparts a futility, a sadness that what former generations possessed he could not grasp. In his eyes not only the principles of his fathers and the society they had helped to create but even their religion had, by his generation, dried up. He himself puzzled over the demise of faith in himself and his brothers and sisters. His own father Charles Francis had been a religious man. But between the third and fourth generations there evidently had been no transmission. 

Said Henry, about himself, “Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it.”¹⁷

Sadly enough, Henry knew what he was missing. Of all periods in history he most admired the thirteenth century, the age when he thought society through the unifying force of religion was most cohesive, with all elements most in tune. Henry would have loved nothing better than to have recovered medieval unity, to have found the one truth among a multiplicity of conflicting facts. But he could not make a leap of faith. He hoped merely that could he return to earth after death he might “find a world that sensitive and timid creatures could regard without a shudder.”¹⁸

What Henry apparently did not realize is that he was trying to do the impossible. Achieving faith through the study of history is a fruitless pursuit. Although the effects of faith can be seen in history, God’s hand in time appears only to the eyes of a believer. In other words, the student is an outsider looking at faith in history. Though he may study faith, though he may see how powerfully faith has worked in history, if he does not believe, he remains an outsider. One studies theology; one lives faith. Thus Henry Adams followed a thankless course. Despite his brilliant career, his magnificent, beautifully written historical works, he failed to make the leap of faith, to take the risk of believing that marks the heroic man and that marked his predecessors. He remained for me a sad character, a figure from a Henry James novel. And so, captivating though I found him, I never could write about him. 

I now had looked back over the Adams men. I had surveyed their sense of duty, their commitment to the Adams tradition, their ambition for recognition, their thoughts on democracy. I had seen that though they had had strong doubts about the future course of democracy, though they had seen America move away from rather than toward their principles, all but the last of them, in spite of periods of disillusionment, had retained a vital religious faith. How were they able to remain faithful? I began to see that I could answer my own question. The Old House in Quincy, the St. Gaudens statue—I could see now that they did have meaning. But my question, what had America done to the Adamses, became meaningless. For what did it matter? What did it matter that America had never appreciated the Adamses? What did it matter that they had not been politicians? What did it matter to the fact of their greatness that America had rejected their principles, that America for the most part had preferred equality and uniformity? It mattered for America, of course; it still made the future of America tragically uncertain; but it did not diminish the Adamses. 

What mattered were their ideas. They themselves were dead and buried; the intricacies of their diplomatic labors, their presidencies were long forgotten within the pages of a history text. But their ideas, contrary to what Henry thought, were not anachronisms. Accepted or not, their ideas on freedom were harmonious with human nature. Consequently, their ideas carried a ring of truth. 

“The fundamental article of my political creed,” wrote John Adams, “is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.”¹⁹ 

I could now answer my question of how, despite what could be viewed as abandonment by their country of their most cherished ideals, in other words, of them, the Adamses could keep their faith. Men, the Adamses knew, are strange beings. They are earthbound; they have sins and imperfections that will forever cause them to abuse their freedom, to relinquish what they hold dear, to search for the easy life, to be lured by the siren song of a multitude of earthbound things. Yet they are more. The whole man does not live only here; a part of him extends into infinity. And that part that lives in the other sphere is able to gain at least some understanding of the eternal. 

The whole man does not live only here; a part of him extends into infinity. And that part that lives in the other sphere is able to gain at least some understanding of the eternal. 

When the last trump sounds, a man departs from earth. No one may remember him; no one may remember what he looked like or what he did. But that man will have thought something; he will have had an idea. Thus, even in earthly life he will have projected himself into the spiritual. For a brief moment he will have transcended his boundaries to catch a glimpse of the infinite. Moreover, his idea is the one real link he has with both his ancestors and posterity. Deeds once done are irrecoverable; but posterity may one day rethink a man’s idea and, in doing so, actually possess it. Hence, ideas not only link man to God but they link man to man and generation to generation. I think the Adamses believed that. I think that for that reason they did not despair that their ideas would die with them. No matter how shabbily America treated them, no matter how far America departed from their ideas or what would be the future course of America, they knew that nothing could destroy their ideas. 

They knew that their idea of liberty was a great one—great because it coincided with the part of man that is of the spiritual—his freedom. They knew, too, that earthbound man is always changing, always becoming, as the philosophers say. On earth, then, he will never realize fully the spiritual; he will never become completely free. Yet knowing that he does have a bond with the eternal vision of liberty moves him to strive toward realization of his ideal. One of Henry Adams’ contemporaries, Robert Browning, put it this way: 

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?

I understood now that hereafter the Old House would embody for me the striving of the Adamses to translate their ideas into the realm of the ideal. Simply because man does in a small way share God’s vision of the ideal, the Adamses were bound to strive for perfection. They did not succeed wholly; no one ever does. But heroes strive; commonplace men accept their bounds. And from time to time the hero receives his reward: he sees with uncommon vision. If a man is a seer, as the Adamses were, he may be able to share his vision with others. The Adamses did share their vision of the ideal. They gave voice to a vision so powerful that no matter what the world did to them, their vision remained for posterity. The Old House represented to me all their striving to save that vision for those to come. 

On the other hand, the St. Gaudens statue meant to me something further. John Quincy, it is said, in the moments before he died, uttered, “This is the end of earth.” There was a silence. Then he said, “I am content.” The statue was like that. It was the end of striving, the end of earth. St. Gaudens’ own title, the “Peace of God,” served well. For in the serene face was contemplation of a vision already realized.

Anne Husted Burleigh is the author of Journey up the River: A Midwesterner’s Spiritual Pilgrimage.

1. Elizabeth Stevenson, Henry Adams, a Biography
   (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 223. ↩︎ ↩︎
2. The Education of Henry Adams, introd. James Truslow Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 328-329. ↩︎ ↩︎
3. Democracy, an American Novel, introd. Van Wyck Brooks (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1961), pp. 49-50. ↩︎ ↩︎
4. The Spur of Fame, Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813, ed. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1966), p. 191.  ↩︎
5. Diary of Charles Francis Adams, 6 vols. Vols. I-II, ed. Aida DiPace Donald and David Donald (New York: Atheneum, 1967), I, p. 315. ↩︎
6. Diary of Charles Francis Adams, I, xxv. ↩︎
7. Spur of Fame, p. 83. ↩︎
8. Diary of Charles Francis Adams, I, p. 330.  ↩︎
9. Ibid., II, p. 118. ↩︎
10. Ibid., II, p. 116. ↩︎
11. Ibid., I. xxx. ↩︎
12. Ibid., I, p. 184.  ↩︎
13. Ibid., I, p. 281. ↩︎
14. Spur of Fame, p. 61.  ↩︎
15. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1850-1856), IX, p. 567.  ↩︎
16. Diary of Charles Francis Adams, I, p. 330. ↩︎
17. Education, p. 34. ↩︎
18. Ibid., p. 505.  ↩︎
19. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959), II, p. 456.  ↩︎