ADAMS FAMILY, of Massachusetts. In the varied abilities and conspicuous public im portance of its members, this family confessedly outranks every other in the United States. It has furnished in a single line two Presidents, both of great weight and permanent import ance, and even more interesting as virile and individual characters, provoking admiration or hate, but never indifference; a statesman and a diplomat of high order; the author of one of the two first-rate historiet yet written in America, matter and style both considered; a noted financier and business magnate, and prominent author as well; another keen and vigorous writer; and an able lawyer and local politician who might have attained larger im portance but for belonging to a party in a hopeless minority in his State. The founder in America was Henry Adams, an Englishman with eight sons, who removed to Braintree, Mass., in 1636; but the fortunes of the family began when to this tough stock — in the person of John Adams, who died in 1760, a selectman of Braintree and a deacon, and a farmer almost a rich man for the times — was added the energetic, passionate Boylston blood, a strain commemorated in Boylston Street, Boston, and the town of Boylston, Mass. The son of John Adams and Susanna Boylston was President John Adams (q.v.), the real founder of the family greatness and its striking individuality. All its members since have been distinguished by the same general qualities in varying mix ture. They have mostly been vehement, proud, pugnacious and independent, with hot tempers and strong wills; but with high ideals, dramatic devotion to duty and the intense democratic sentiment so often found united with personal aristocracy of feeling. They have been men of affairs first, with large practical ability, but with a deep strain of the man of letters which in this generation has outshone the other faculties; strong-headed and hard-working students, with powerful memories and fluent gifts of expres sion. But no curio of heredity in all time is stranger than the contrast between the Presi dent father and his President son, John Quincy Adams (q.v.), when it is remembered that to the fiery, combative, bristling Adams-Boylston blood was added an equal strain from the gay, genial, affectionate Abigail Smith (see ADAMS, ABIGAIL). The son, though of deep inner affections, and even hungering for good will if it would come without his aid, was on the surface incomparably colder, harsher and thornier than his father, with all the socially repellent traits of the race and none of the softer ones. The father could never control his tongue or his temper, and not always his head; the son never lost the bridle of either, and much of his terrible power in debate came from his ability to make others lose theirs while perfectly keeping his own. The father had plenty of warm friends and allies — at the worst he worked with half a party; the son in the most superb part of his career had no friends, no allies, no party except the group of constituents who kept him in Congress. The father's self-confidence deepened in the son to a solitary and almost contemptuous gladiator ship against the entire government of the country through long years of hate and peril. The father's irritable though generous vanity changed in the son to an icy contempt or white hot scorn of nearly all about him. The father's
spasms of acrimonious judgment steadied in the son to a constant rancor always finding new objects. The country has reason to be thankful for his unamiable traits, for each one strength ened his fibre to do the work awaiting him, and only John Quincy Adams could have accom plished the work of John Quincy Adams. His son, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., had the useful and forcible qualities of both without their besetting defects. He was in youth as hotly pugnacious as his grandfather; he was always as self-centred as his father, and as willing to stand alone amid hate and incessant conflict; but he had far more self-control than the former, and far less bristling repellance and contempt of co-operation than the latter. His diplomacy was cast in a spot where he was too much °boycotted" to make the softer side of much avail; but he roused no useless and costly hatreds, and ranked the peer in effectiveness of any European diplomat. Of his three sons (see CHARLES FRANCIS, 2D; HENRY; BROOKS) it would be invidious to analyze the personal traits. The former, soldier, railroad commis sioner, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, and eminent historical scholar and publicist, has shown the family traits of courage, independ ence of thought and action, and intellectual en ergy, to the full, and is still an active public force. The historian was distinguished during his historical professorship as the most original, independent and stimulating of instructors; and his history displays not only massive research, enormous power of acquisition in the most widely separated fields, and entire freedom from beaten roads and traditional but tempered self-control, the moderation of judg ment bred by thorough knowledge and a per vasive atmosphere of gentlemanly irony. The essayist assailant of the Massachusetts °the and student of economic history to saturation, was as eager and passionate as lus great-grandfather, and in striking contrast with his brothers in literary style, but none the less a man to reckon with. The late John Quincy 2d would perhaps have filled a larger public field in a less strongly Republican community. It is not likely that this virile stock has lost its energy with the present generation.
This by no means, however, ends the con tributions of the Adams stock to our public life. The patriot, Samuel Adams, the father of American liberty, was own cousin to John Adams the President; a more dexterous and politic man, and much abler political manager, but not otherwise cast in as large mold. From different sons or grandsons of the pioneer have descended William Taylor Adams Op tic''), the well-known juvenile writer; Charles Baker Adams, the naturalist, and Edwin Adams, the actor, the grandfather of the first being the great-grandfather of the second; Herbert Bax ter Adams, the eminent American historical scholar and educator; Alvin Adams, the founder of the Adams Express Company; William Claf lin, the Massachusetts merchant and governor, whose mother was an Adams; and many other strong figures in public life. Consult Adams, A. N., (Geological History of Henry Adams, of Braintree, and His (1910).