Growing Up Distinguished

DIARY OF CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS (Volumes I & II). 983 pages. Harvard University. $20.

The most remarkable family in American history made sure its good deeds did not go unrecorded. All the prominent Adamses of Massachusetts kept voluminous diaries in which they quarreled with their enemies, justified their own acts, occasionally fell into despair or soared into poetry. As part of its mammoth project to publish the Adams family papers, Harvard University Press has already brought out four volumes of John Adams' diaries. Now it is Charles Francis Adams' turn.

Third and youngest son of President John Quincy Adams and father of Historians Henry and Brooks, Charles Francis* was not so famous as the other Adamses; he served in Congress, ran for Vice President in 1848 on the Free Soil ticket, was Ambassador to England during the Civil War. Yet he left behind by far the longest Adams diary, to be published in 18 volumes, the first two of which are now out.

Singular Doctrines. Though he had a reputation in later life for austere reserve, these early diaries show that the young Charles Francis was sensitive, touchy, and much more frolicsome than the rest of the Adams clan. Covering his life from age twelve to 22 and dealing mostly with his Harvard years, the entries are often solemn commentary on his vast reading, but there are also vivid accounts of drinking bouts, billiard games, and pretty girls who powerfully affected him: "Women have acted upon me by a voluptuous manner, to which I am unfortunately peculiarly susceptible." In a hurry to get married, he was balked by his elders until 22.

This was a flouting, he felt, of natural law: "I believe God intended the union of the sexes as soon as they became of age to know the passion. This may be a singular doctrine and I may hereafter find it false, but I do now firmly believe." Charles Francis was always drawing a moral, even from a word-slinging match between a friend and an Irishman: "A young man is sure to disgrace himself by entering into quarrels with his inferiors, particularly when he is in the wrong."

During the years of these diaries, John Quincy was Secretary of State, later President, but his son does not have much to say about politics--though it seems he made a bet against his father's winning the 1824 election and had to pay up. Intensely proud of his lineage, a bit of a snob, he considered most politicians "hogs" or "fops," and he was,sure that politics was injurious to "the heart, the morals, the interest and the happiness of life." What he liked best about Washington was its Southern location: "The good people of the North are far too steady for my blood; I cannot help preferring the traits of the Southern character with all the faulty ones to the eternal purity of the Northern hypocrites."

Grave & Reformed. Adams' two older brothers were black sheep. John Adams II was kicked out of Harvard for joining in a riot, and the family allowed him to settle down as the manager of a flour mill in Washington. George became an alcoholic, had an illegitimate child by a servant girl, and finally committed suicide. Charles Francis, who would have preferred to be a scholar, felt obligated to carry on the family tradition of public service. He cut down on the drinking bouts, made an effort to appear "grave, sober, formal, precise and reserved," and began his new career by going to work in Daniel Webster's law office. No one has better expressed this pull of family tradition than the young--and reformed--Charles Francis: "Many men have been surprised that in a distinguished family much of the same spirit and feeling is transmitted from father to son, but nothing appears to me more natural. Everything conduces to it, the conversation perpetually going on, the views laid open before one, the love of distinction which is so easily caught, everything indeed which we can possibly imagine in the atmosphere, unite in forming it."

* His grandson, Yachtsman Charles Francis Adams, was Secretary of the Navy under President Hoover. His great-grandson, the fourth Charles Francis, 54, has been longtime boss of Raytheon (space equipment), two weeks ago was elected chairman of the board.

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