ABSTRACT
Henry Adams’s books of the fortunate years resulted from the shuttle-like movements of his thought, from present to past, from past to present. To the friends of his Washington dinner table, Adams seemed to be concerned mostly with present-day history. But in his own mind, past and present were parts of one living whole. As far back as those anxious months in London when, to distract himself from the war, Adams had hacked away at the story of Pocahontas and John Smith; he had thought curiously about the problems of history and biography. In writing the biography Adams had had large ambitions unconnected with the scholarly arrangement of verified facts. Albert Gallatin was, for Adams, the most admirable figure of the Jeffersonian period. There were other, more subtle and more personal likenesses that Henry Adams discovered between himself and the Swiss. Adams, speaking of Gallatin at nineteen, could have been writing autobiography.
