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This chapter examines why a commission such as the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was created to regulate the railroads by focusing on the views of railroad expert Charles Francis Adams Jr. It first considers John Reagan's opposition to bureaucracy, and especially to the idea of a regulatory commission, before turning to a discussion of liberal reformers' justifications for commissions. It argues that members of the Republican Party's liberal reform faction favored the creation of an independent commission to mitigate the more radical implications of Reagan's bill. It also explains how the institutional form introduced by Adams and other liberal reformers contributed to state formation and how the creation of the ICC inaugurated a form of state authority that was increasingly federal, regulatory, and bureaucratic.

The liberal republicans saw the Cincinnati Convention as the ultimate means to gain control of the Republican Party. However, the proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention in Cincinnati upset the original liberal republicans. The reason for the liberal republicans' pain was the unexpected nomination of Horace Greeley as the new party's presidential candidate. They tried to determine how Greeley had been nominated in place of their preferred candidates, Charles Francis Adams and Lyman Trumbull. The liberal republicans lost control of their movement at the Cincinnati Convention. Though many were experienced politicians, the liberal republicans repeatedly made political miscalculations: counting on candidates hesitant to work for the nomination, continually compromising with Greeley, and mismanaging the balloting. The discussion argues that they lost control at the convention because the liberal republicans, despite their experience, were poor politicians.

Henry Brooks Adams always knew for whom he wrote. It was not for himself, or his friends, or his family, but for the ages. His letters to his brother, Charles Adams, undulate with confused and forbidden desires. Descended from glory, Adams needed to make his own place in family history. He knew the Civil War was the defining event for his generation. Adams introduced ideas and feelings that persisted for decades. Intellectually, he searched for the equations that would unlock history and society, contemplated the nature of democratic institutions and the power of scientific laws, and flirted with mysticism. Emotionally, he alternated between hope and despair, he craved something more yet sensed he must settle for something less. The letters grab one because they are immediate and honest, unvarnished. The stories told in the correspondence differ from the stories told in the Education.

Henry Adams rarely referred to Abraham Lincoln in his public writings. He was in Rome when news reached him of the president's assassination, and his attitude was distant, hardly grief-stricken. This coldness is especially puzzling because Adams had many reasons for being attentive to Lincoln. It seems odd for Adams to have remained so aloof from Lincoln in these circumstances. However, a careful reading of his whole work, private as well as public, shows that Adams did have an initial hostility to Lincoln, one not entirely dispelled by the time of his assassination, though he gradually softened and altered his view after that. He did not mark the stages of this development, partly because he did not want to rehash his own first views, and partly because he did not want to quarrel openly with his father and brother, Charles Francis Adams Jr., who retained their animus against Lincoln.

This chapter elaborates that until now nobody has attempted to provide a systematic portrait of English seasonal rituals and pastimes in the half-century before the Reformation. The evidence of such a project is supplied chiefly by sets of accounts, left by churchwardens, urban corporations, colleges, monasteries, monarchs, and nobles, which detail the expenditure upon ceremonies, decorations, and entertainments. It was Charles Phythian-Adams who identified the existence of a ‘ritual year’ in early Tudor England. He argued that it commenced with Christmas and ended around Midsummer. For most people the first sign of the opening of the season of ceremony would have been the decoration of buildings with holly and ivy on or just before Christmas Eve. The urban churchwardens' accounts for the period virtually all show payments for these.

For part of Harvard’s graduation ceremony of 1883, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., delivered a fiery address lambasting the college for its continued insistence on ancient Greek as part of its admission examinations. This chapter analyses Adams’s speech and the spirited reactions it engendered. It probes the arguments proponents of the classical humanities made for their subject during this consequential debate over the shape and purpose of the nation’s higher education. The chapter demonstrates that skills-based arguments dominated the appeals offered by supporters of collegiate requirements in ancient Greek. Almost entirely failing to invoke the tenets of humanism, such supporters anchored their apologetics in the concept of “mental discipline.” Their opponents, sensing the weaknesses of these appeals, ably countered this defense. At a crucial point in time for the classical humanities in American higher learning, skills-based rationales proved a dismal failure.

Chapter Seven describes how the constitutional amendment’s supporters—conciliatory Republicans and antisecession Southerners—tried to make common cause. This chapter profiles seven key House members and concludes with the startling pro-Union victories in early February, when large popular majorities in Virginia and Tennessee rejected secession. But the momentary advantage enjoyed by those who were attempting to restore the Union peacefully was illusory. The Deep South continued to plunge ahead in its quest for independence. Unionists in the Upper South insisted that they could not tolerate any use of force against secessionists. And majorities of Republicans would not even accept the constitutional amendment, let alone the territorial compromise that most Southern Unionists demanded.

Chapter Six introduces Seward’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, Ohio’s Thomas Corwin, a prominent veteran who headed a special committee to address the crisis. When the Deep South reacted to Lincoln’s victory by renouncing the Union, Corwin was dismayed. The proposed centerpiece of his last-ditch effort to head off disaster was a constitutional amendment, similar to Seward’s, to bar any federal interference with slavery in the Southern states.

Chapter Ten details the improbable achievement of the conciliators during the last week of the congressional session in late February and early March 1861 as they assembled wafer-thin two-thirds margins in both the House and the Senate. Majorities of Republicans in both chambers opposed the amendment, but conciliatory leaders, aided covertly by Lincoln, supplied just enough Republican votes to enable it to squeeze through. The pattern of Republican votes had a pronounced regional skew. The amendment fared poorly in the Upper North but was salvaged by support from the Lower North.

This chapter aims to trace railroad, tourist, and Mormon interactions beneath–and influencings of–the canopy of congressional law. It explores the recasting of federal anti-Mormon policies in light of railroading concerns and how Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s preface was a profound political act. Railroad literature played a role in mediating and marketing Utah religion and amplifying the genre of prerailroad tourism and guidebooks by focusing on the Mormons. The chapter also demonstrates how even while Congress attacked and, in time, forced concessions from the LDS Church with regard to polygamy and politics, Mormon material culture and geography were concurrently identified with Mormonism by railroads and capitalists if not also by congressmen.

This chapter details the establishment of Cornell University's medical department. Within a few years of Cornell's founding in 1865, the university started offering a four-year course in natural history leading to a Bachelor of Science degree. The program was considered good preparation for students contemplating a career in medicine, but there were no large hospitals that were suitable for training medical students. In 1885, Charles Adams became Cornell's second president and attempted to expand the university by creating a medical school, although his efforts were frustrated after failing to pitch the idea to Cornell's board of trustees. Ultimately, in 1898, a proposal to create a new medical school that would maintain both high academic standards and financial stability presented itself, backed by Colonel Oliver H. Payne along with Dr. Lewis Stimson and Dr. Alfred L. Loomis.

This chapter tells the story of a visit to Nauvoo by two men from illustrious American families, Charles Francis Adams and Josiah Quincy. Adams and Quincy were touring the American West in 1844 when, in May of that year, their steamboat stopped at Nauvoo. The men spent the night in the city, and the next morning they met Joseph Smith at his home. Adams and Quincy spent the entire day together and toured the city and surrounding farms in Smith’s coach. Both men would record their impressions of Smith and Nauvoo, including Smith’s political opinions and presidential ambitions. Smith did not win over their political support, be he sustained their curiosity.

This chapter suggests that tenancy plays a major role in nineteenth-century detective fiction, an emerging genre that counted Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Warren Adams as enthusiastic early practitioners. The chapter starts by investigating the relationship between geography, class, and morality in contemporary social discourses, focusing on the ‘low’ or ‘common’ lodging house in London. Low lodging houses were widely associated with criminal behaviour, and Dickens and Collins were interested in the function they could perform in their fiction. The chapter moves on to examine the murders that take place in Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Notting Hill Mystery, and argues that rented space becomes a tool in the battle between detective and criminal. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Krook’s lodging house and rag-and-bone shop in Bleak House. Here, a mystery narrative intersects with farce and the Gothic, attesting to the porosity between aesthetic forms.

This chapter briefly considers the persistence of Anne Hutchinson as a historical figure, remembered but frequently misunderstood, across the centuries. Notes the limited sources and chronicles the changing perceptions of her that accompanied the changing viewpoints of Puritan New England. For many, the treatment of Hutchinson became a marker for society’s understanding of the character of Puritans. After changing perceptions of her as heretic and egotistical sinner, nuisance, brilliant woman oppressed and misunderstood, transformative philosopher, and advocate for women’s rights that accompanied.