Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America

Generations -- The assemblyman -- The free soiler -- The congressman -- The minister -- The officer -- The combatants -- The colonel -- The independents -- A singular, unsolved family;"John and Abigail Adams sired the first dynasty to shape American politics, but they would not witness their family's calamitous fall from grace. When President John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow death of the family's political legacy -- a decline that mirrored the fall of the Republican Party. The Adamses would abandon their forefather's enlightened republicanism, yielding to the temptation of oligarchy and personal spoils. In Heirs of an Honored Name, award-winning historian Douglas Egerton depicts a family grown famous, wealthy -- and aimless. After the Civil War, the country's future was up for grabs. Republicans disillusioned with President Ulysses S. Grant's governance looked to the Adams family to steer their party back to its 1840s roots. Instead, family patriarch Charles Francis Sr. refused to fight for the nomination in 1872 and 1876, and the family eventually quit the political arena altogether for the luxuries of Gilded Age America. Heirs of an Honored Name tells the enthralling, troubling story of the nation's first family and the end of an older, aristocratic America amid the upheavals of the Gilded Age"--