Henry Adams & the Southern Question: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, cartea 47

Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two. This judgment, rendered in "The Education of Henry Adams," may be the most quoted of Adams s writings on the South. However, it is far from the only one of his beliefs that helped to shape a national outlook on the region from the late antebellum period to the present.

Thinking about the South, says Michael O Brien, was part of being an Adams. In this book O Brien shows how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history. He begins with the young Henry Adams, who served as his father s secretary in the House of Representatives during the secession crises of 1860-1861 and in the American embassy in London during and after the Civil War, until 1868.

O Brien then covers a number of topics relevant to Adams s outlook on the South, including his residency in that deceptively southern city, Washington, D.C.; his journalism on the Reconstruction-era South; his biographical or historical works on the Virginians John Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; and his two novels, especially "Democracy." Finally, O Brien ponders the vein of southern self-criticism--exemplified by Wilbur J. Cash s "Mind of the South"--that embraces the notorious slur so often quoted from "The Education of Henry Adams.""