The Civil War: Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr.

January 8, 1861

A few weeks after Henry Adams wrote to his brother Charles Francis Adams Jr. about the scenes playing out post-election in Washington, D.C., he wrote again—this time about the potential for warfare to soon begin.

Their father, Charles Francis Adams, had sponsored a proposal to immediately admit New Mexico as a slave state with the hope that such a proposal would drive a wedge between border states and their secessionist southern neighbors. While ultimately the House of Representatives rejected this proposal (two months later: on March 1, 1861), there was controversy surrounding Adams for seemingly abandoning the Republican Party’s principle of opposing the expansion of slavery.

Henry Adams wrote to his brother that their father had harbored a hope that the proposal would influence the border states but that he had given up that hope: “His theory is that all depends on Virginia and that Virginia is lost.” In Henry’s view, that made “war inevitable; war before the 4th of March”—Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration date.

Henry continued addressing his brother: “You and I, friend, are young enough to be sanguine where others despair. For one, I intend to remain in this city. If there is war I intend to take such part in it as is necessary or useful.” Being in Washington, he wrote that if “Virginia and Maryland secede, they will strike at this city, and we shall have to give them such an extermination that it were better we had not been borne. I do not want to fight them.”

South Carolinians, being the most ardent secessionists, were “mad, mere maniacs, and I want to lock them up till they become sane; not kill them. I want to educate, humanize and refine them, not send fire and sword among them.”

War was not inevitable, so Henry thought. “The South are too weak to sustain” a delay of a few months, but if it could go that time without further provocation, perhaps there could be peace. Regardless of timeframe, “if Virginia goes out, I do not see how [war] is to be avoided.”

Throughout it all, Henry advised his brother, do not join “with any body of men who act from mere passion and the sense of wrong . . . for they will desert you when you need their support.” Instead, he wrote, “[s]upport any honorable means of conciliation. Our position will be immensely strengthened by it. We cannot be too much in the right. It is time for us, who claim to lead this movement, to become cool and to do nothing without the fear of God before our eyes.”