Adams, Henry, 1838-1918; Historians -- United States -- Biography
PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston,
about two million dollars, to his seven surviving children: four
sons--Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three
daughters--Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to
Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown,
born April 25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis
Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in
1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson
grandmother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given to
his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite brother just
lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had nothing to do with
the arduous process of educating.
The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but the
family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and almost
wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have sought long in
much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law more
distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally long for seven
brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all bore more or less the
stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of
difference amounted to contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly
more than Mr. Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had
broken bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a
seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's
administration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the
marriage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many promising
careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but he had risen with
the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister to England, and had
returned to America with the halo of a European reputation, and
undisputed rank second only to Daniel Webster as the orator and
representative figure of Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr.
Frothingham, belonged to the same clerical school, though in manner
rather the less clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common
with Mr. Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father,
and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal
relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and
slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking to ask what
the sermons were supposed to mean for them. For two hundred years the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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