Long Sleep

THE FORMATIVE YEARS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES DURING THE ADMINISTRATIONS OF JEFFERSON AND MADISON (1,030 pp.)--Henry Adams, condensed & edited by Herbert Agar--Houghton Mifflin ($10).

Citizens of all sorts and sizes have read The Education of Henry Adams, his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and the several collections of Adams' witty, cranky, sardonic letters (TIME, Jan. 20). But the History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison has been left almost wholly to the professionals--for the simple and ample reason that it is nine volumes long.

Pulitzer Prize Historian Herbert Agar (The People's Choice) has condensed its nine volumes into two, largely by jettisoning Adams' footnotes and masses of documentary matter. The product is still far from pint-sized: it runs to some 400,000 words, or twice the size of The Education. But at last the general reader may have in reasonably compact form what is acknowledged to be : 1) the standard text in its field, 2) one of the most brilliant of all U.S. histories.

Harvard Historian Edward Channing, for one, called it a work of "almost unrivaled historical judgment." Columbia's Allan Nevins has singled out its first six chapters, plus one chapter of Macaulay, as "the best specimens of social history in English."

Even in Editor Agar's abridged form, however, it is hardly light reading. Adams made an exhaustive study of Jefferson's two terms and the amazing Burr conspiracy, of Madison's two terms and the War of 1812, of the struggles of the young democracy against enemies at home & abroad. Started when Adams was still in his 40's--long before he became the cackling old cynic convinced that the world was going to pot--the work was his scholarly masterpiece and occupied what were probably his best years.

Adams rounded off his ninth volume in September 1888. Proud and immensely relieved, he sat down and wrote a characteristic letter to a friend: "Tomorrow my narrative will be finished. ... I can hardly believe my own ears when I say [it]. All my wicked villains will be duly rewarded ... all my models of usefulness and intelligence will be fitly punished . . . all my stupid people, including my readers, will be put to sleep for a thousand years."

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