The Adams Family

By Steven Lee Carson | American History  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

In working to settle his older brother’s sordid personal affairs, Charles Francis found a letter from George to be opened in the event of his death. In it George asked Charles Francis to look after Eliza Dolph, the mother of his child. Charles Francis paid all her medical bills, and hoped she and the child would disappear from the Adams’ story.

George, however, had engaged some associates to help Eliza, and they tried to blackmail the Adams family. Matters escalated, and there was a public lawsuit. Dour, mortified Charles Francis complained to his unsympathetic mother, Louisa Catherine, who had chided him for being cold to the memory of her favorite son, that “no member of the family has been like me dragged into court” and forced to listen to stories he was “unable to defend….I have been the only sufferer of late.” He suggested that George’s past be buried with him and consigned many of his brother’s papers to the flames. Nevertheless, on a dark, rainy day, John Quincy and Charles Francis stood alone with a pastor as George’s coffin was placed in the family crypt.

Before George’s death, Charles Francis’ second older brother, John II, was already an alcoholic with an ungovernable temper; he had been expelled from Harvard for leading large, disruptive campus demonstrations. John Quincy’s disciplinary actions, or the fear of them, were such that John Adams advised his son to treat his errant namesake and grandson “tenderly and forgive him kindly.” The advice was ignored. John II was summoned to the White House to work for his father, and it was there that he met and eventually married George’s fiancée. (Historians have described Mary Hellen as a “vixen” who captivated all three of John Quincy’s sons. Her aunt Louisa Adams later told her bluntly, “You are in the habit of behaving shamefully.”)

John II was also just plain unlucky. While engaged in official duties, an opponent of his father’s physically assaulted him. Most catastrophic of all, his father put him in charge of a large personal investment that historians say would have taken a financial genius to manage. With continuous financial losses and alcoholism came utter exhaustion, mysterious physical ailments and deepening depression. His father’s ever-closer scrutiny and lack of sympathy — “Your complaints are distressing to me because they mark an impatience under adversity” — further irritated the situation. But in time even John Quincy could see things were getting bad for his son, who refused to leave his home and wandered around inside half-dressed and disheveled. He suggested a rest, and Louisa sent cheering notes, but brother Charles Francis bluntly accused John of mismanagement.

Finally, worn out in body, mind and spirit, John II died in 1834, five years after his brother George. He was 31 years old. Curiously, the doctors could not find an explanation for John’s death. Charles Francis concluded that his brother had simply determined to die rather than face “moral ruin,” leading one to the conclusion that the willful act was another form of suicide.

In time Charles Francis learned from all that he had witnessed and endured. As ambassador to England, he found success without being resident in the White House. And Charles Francis was more attentive to his children, who apparently thrived: Charles Francis Adams Jr. became an industrialist and railroad magnate; John Quincy Adams II, a gentleman farmer and Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate; and Brooks Adams, a noted essayist. Another son, Arthur, died at age 5.

The ambassador’s most prominent son, however, was the historian and writer Henry Adams, who won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. His multivolume History of the United States, chronicling the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, is still considered a paragon of historical writing. Tragically, Henry’s wife, Marian Hooper Adams, committed suicide shortly after her father’s death in 1885. Henry commissioned one of America’s greatest sculptors, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to design a memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Cemetery. Erected in 1891, the memorial has become world famous, and it is said that Mark Twain gave it the one-word title by which it is commonly known — the one word that could capture the trials of the entire Adams family — “Grief.”

This article was written by Steven Lee Carson and originally published in the February 2007 issue of American History Magazine.For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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Tags: American History, Historical Figures, People

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