Diary of Charles Francis Adams: Volume 1

Third and last of the Adams dynasty of statesmen, Charles Francis Adams followed in his grandfathers and fathers footsteps by keeping a diary from youth to old age. With only a few gaps in the earliest years, Charles Francis Adamss diary extends from 1820 to 1880, furnishing a massively detailed and intensely personal record of the writers life as an undergraduate at Harvard, manager of the Adams familys business affairs, historian and biographer, Free Soil political leader and Republican Congressman, United States minister in London during the Civil War, arbitrator of the Alabama claims at the Geneva Tribunal, and father of a whole constellation of gifted sons. The Diary of Charles Francis Adams is the second to appear in the Diaries Series of the Belknap Press edition of the Adams Papers. Unlike John Adamss Diary and Autobiography and John Quincy Adamss Diary, that of Charles Francis Adams has never before been even selectively published. This is partly because the protracted efforts of the family to prepare a satisfactory edition after the writers death finally broke down under the sheer bulk of the material. The present volume reveals Charles Francis Adams as a sensitive and self-critical young man during his college years, in the social whirl of Washington while his father was Secretary of State and President, during his training as a lawyer in Daniel Websters Boston law office, and throughout his prolonged courtship of Abigail B. Brooks, a New England heiress. A central theme of these volumes is the struggle which raged within young Adamss mind and heart between the warm, poetic heritage of his Southern-born mother and the cold, political, New England legacy of his Adams forebears.