Heirs of an Honored Name

John and Abigail Adams sired the first dynasty to shape American politics but they would not witness their family's calamitous fall from grace. When President John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow death of the family's political legacy - a decline that mirrored the fall of the Republican Party. The Adamses would abandon their forefather's enlightened republicanism, yielding to the temptation of oligarchy and personal spoils.

In Heirs of an Honored Name, award-winning historian Douglas Egerton depicts a family grown famous, wealthy - and aimless. After the Civil War, the country's future was up for grabs. Republicans disillusioned with President Ulysses S. Grant's governance looked to the Adams family to steer their party back to its 1840s roots. Instead, family patriarch Charles Francis Sr. refused to fight for the nomination in 1872 and 1876 and the family eventually quit the political arena altogether for the luxuries of Gilded Age America.

With the party of Lincoln transformed into a lobby for robber barons and imperialists, the younger Adamses - Charles Francis Jr., Henry and Clover Adams and Louisa Catherine - found refuge alongside many upper-class New Englanders in an imagined medieval past of aristocratic preeminence. They were born elitists, each as highly educated and ambitious as they were uniformly disagreeable and overly competitive. Egerton mines their extensive personal writing and correspondence to offer an absorbing tale of aristocratic infighting and familial strain, showing how every Adams lived in the shadow of his or her name, expecting great things of themselves and their progeny. Yet they rarely lived up to those expectations and blamed others for their supposed misfortune.

Heirs of an Honored Name tells the enthralling, troubling story of the nation's first family and the end of an older, aristocratic America amid the upheavals of the Gilded Age.

“"This is a story of declension: the inter-generational devolution of a great American family line. In vivid and graceful prose, Douglas Egerton recounts the political and moral decay of the Adamses. In his time, John Quincy Adams became a leading, even heroic figure in the fight against slavery, a fight that eventually achieved victory through civil war. But in later years, his descendants turned their back on the principles that animated that struggle. In doing so, they paralleled and illuminated the retreat of the northern business and political elite as a whole from the goals of the nation's second democratic revolution."-- Bruce Levine, authorof The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolutionthat Transformed the South”

"Deeply researched and brimming with anecdotes, from this narrative emerges not only the decline and fall of the Adams family but also the political scene of the nineteenth century, the rise of modern America, and the unavoidable parallels with our own time as a nation that finds itself increasingly divided."--Booklist
"Douglas Egerton has emerged as one of our nation's leading historians... Egerton is to be praised for his in-depth coverage of not only the sons of Charles Francis Adams, but also the women who married into the family. Egerton uses the lives of Adams family members as a window into the Civil War era."--Erik Chaput, Providence Journal
"Douglas Egerton is one of the most versatile and accomplished historians of our time. Here he writes the saga of America's most extraordinary multi-generational political family. With lyrical and critical prose, Egerton chronicles the Adamses' rise and fall-the latter generations never making lives or imaginations that could match the impossible models of the founders. This is a must read for its family drama, its deep research, its richly American texture, and its cautionary tale for modern strivers."--David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
"Douglas Egerton's eloquent group biography of the descendants of Abigail and John Quincy Adams is a nineteenth-century secular version of Puritan declension. Following Charles Francis Adams's exemplary diplomatic service in Britain during the Civil War, the next generation, including his sons Charles and Henry, drifted into racism, anti-Semitism, and narcissistic self-pity-an inglorious sequel to three generations of America's most prominent founding family-chronicled by Egerton with sensitivity and nuance."--James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom
"Egerton brings to life the third and fourth generations of America's first political dynasty. Readers interested in 19th-century culture or the dynamics of American political families will find food for thought here."--Publishers Weekly
"If good biography tells us what we need to know about its subjects and the society they inhabit, then in this splendid life story of the Adams family, Douglas Egerton takes us on a troubling journey through the many ways this patrician family, and the country, abandoned their lofty principles and commitment to equality for a crass denial of rights."--Richard Blackett, author of The Captive's Quest for Freedom and Making Freedom
"In this riveting saga of the personal tribulations of America's first family's later generations, Douglas Egerton beautifully charts the declension of the American Republic from its revolutionary and antislavery ideals. He adeptly mirrors the betrayal of emancipation and hopes for an interracial democracy after the Civil War in the Adams family's retreat from the duties of patriotism to narrow elitism. This is a collective historical biography of a superior order."
--Manisha Sinha, authorof The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition
"In Douglas R. Egerton's brilliant telling, the story of this singular American dynasty becomes both accessible and captivating. The struggles of Charles Francis Adams and his sons to live up to the legacy of their illustrious forbears reveal a family at odds with itself: the Adamses' noble impulses of public service and sacrifice did battle with their corrosive competitiveness and patrician sense of entitlement. Their battle mirrors America's battle, in the turbulent nineteenth century and beyond, to reconcile the imperatives and reform and tradition."--Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War
"The Adams family contributed a stunning procession of presidents, diplomats, historians, and intellectuals who played crucial roles in the birth and maturation of the republic and its salvation during the Civil War. In this wonderfully engaging book, one of the most eminent historians of this period tells a compelling story of how this seemingly indispensable family became superfluous to the nation it had so dutifully served."
--Don H. Doyle, authorof The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American CivilWar
"This is a story of declension: the inter-generational devolution of a great American family line. In vivid and graceful prose, Douglas Egerton recounts the political and moral decay of the Adamses. In his time, John Quincy Adams became a leading, even heroic figure in the fight against slavery, a fight that eventually achieved victory through civil war. But in later years, his descendants turned their back on the principles that animated that struggle. In doing so, they paralleled and illuminated the retreat of the northern business and political elite as a whole from the goals of the nation's second democratic revolution."--Bruce Levine, authorof The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolutionthat Transformed the South

Douglas R. Egerton is a professor of history at Le Moyne College. The award-winning author of eight previous books, including Thunder at the Gates and The Wars of Reconstruction, he lives in Fayetteville, New York.

John and Abigail Adams sired the first dynasty to shape American politics but they would not witness their family's calamitous fall from grace. When President John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow death of the family's political legacy - a decline that mirrored the fall of the Republican Party. The Adamses would abandon their forefather's enlightened republicanism, yielding to the temptation of oligarchy and personal spoils.In Heirs of an Honored Name , award-winning historian Douglas Egerton depicts a family grown famous, wealthy - and aimless. After the Civil War, the country's future was up for grabs. Republicans disillusioned with President Ulysses S. Grant's governance looked to the Adams family to steer their party back to its 1840s roots. Instead, family patriarch Charles Francis Sr. refused to fight for the nomination in 1872 and 1876 and the family eventually quit the political arena altogether for the luxuries of Gilded Age America.With the party of Lincoln transformed into a lobby for robber barons and imperialists, the younger Adamses - Charles Francis Jr., Henry and Clover Adams and Louisa Catherine - found refuge alongside many upper-class New Englanders in an imagined medieval past of aristocratic preeminence. They were born elitists, each as highly educated and ambitious as they were uniformly disagreeable and overly competitive. Egerton mines their extensive personal writing and correspondence to offer an absorbing tale of aristocratic infighting and familial strain, showing how every Adams lived in the shadow of his or her name, expecting great things of themselves and their progeny. Yet they rarely lived up to those expectations and blamed others for their supposed misfortune. Heirs of an Honored Name tells the enthralling, troubling story of the nation's first family and the end of an older, aristocratic America amid the upheavals of the Gilded Age.

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