Reviews in American History

Sons and daughters of high-performing parents are commonly held to impossible standards of success. Seldom, however, are they required to replicate the careers of their elders, much less sustain a surname's prestige. The odds are long that an American of any era will descend from a family preeminent for two or more generations. To be an Adams, a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, or a Bush is to bear an onerous burden: anything less than stunning achievement counts as a kind of failure. Pity the heir who must emerge from the forebears' shadows. A prominent family's fabled decline is the inevitable predicate of its rise.

The narrative of the decline of the House of Adams commences, as Douglas Egerton demonstrates in his engaging and insightful generational group portrait, with a diary notation Charles Francis Adams set down on February 24, 1848, just after learning that his father, John Quincy Adams, died the evening before: "I no longer have a Father. The glory of the family is departed and I, a solitary and unworthy scion, remain overwhelmed with a sense of my responsibilities."¹ Well might Charles Francis, forty years old with no extraordinary success to claim or brilliant prospect before him, feel the weight of the family legacy and suspect that he trod a downward path as the sole surviving male heir. To the degree that his line had dreamt of dynastic succession, glory had begun to depart with the death—by probable suicide—of his eldest brother George Washington Adams in April 1829, a month after J. Q. Adams's single quadrennial ended in electoral bitterness. It would depart even further with the death from alcoholism of John Adams II in 1834. Chastened, moreover, by the brevity of the presidential administrations of John and J. Q. Adams, who incurred humiliation as the first and second one-term White House occupants, the third-generation scion had every reason to temper his expectations. That Charles Francis defied what Egerton profiles as family dysfunction and predisposition to melancholy (what we might today call clinical depression) to become his father's successor as the Massachusetts third-district U.S. House [End Page 250] Representative, a founder and vice presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party, and U.S. Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War and its aftermath, constitutes success by all but the loftiest of family benchmarks.

It is therefore curious that Charles Francis Adams's rehabilitation should fall outside this book's official program. Opening the narrative with a profile of J. Q. Adams as a late-life champion of racial justice, Egerton's agenda is to track the third and fourth generations' descent first into disappointment and then into petty bigotry. But in its sensitive portrayal of the unlikely, overshadowed, yet quietly courageous career of Charles Francis, Heirs of an Honored Name makes its most valuable contribution to the already voluminous chronicle of this singular American family. It does so by elevating the lonely third-generation survivor to a nearly equal footing with his presidential ancestors even as it enforces a view of him as cold, introverted, and pessimistic, or in other words cast in the mold of the crippling family psychology.

Emerging as a statesman on par with his predecessors, Charles Francis, in this depiction, eludes the thesis, telegraphed in the book's subtitle, by which Egerton insistently frames the family saga. Upon the family's own measure of decline—chronic inoccupancy of the White House—Heirs of an Honored Name imposes another: that the third and particularly the fourth generation failed to acknowledge much less embrace a "modern America" in which privileged first-family Anglo-Americans steadily lose dominance among an onslaught of competing stakeholders. Egerton assesses the cumulative honorability of the House of Adams by its incapacity to preserve its conservatism without smothering the progressivism evinced by the first, second, and third generations. Achieving dishonor in...