With the publication of the third and fourth volumes of the Diary of Charles Francis Adams, the Adams editorial enterprise moves a step further toward one of its several objectives: the presentation of complete, accurate, and annotated texts of all three of the statesmen’s diaries, which comprise collectively an almost unbroken, and during long periods overlapping, record of American life as observed and experienced by Adamses over more than a century and a quarter.

Volumes 1 and 2, published in September 1964, were edited by Mrs. Aïda DiPace Donald and her husband, Professor David Donald of The Johns Hopkins University. The Donalds had been drawn to this task by a conviction that probably no hitherto unpublished diary kept by an American in the 19th century contained greater riches for the inquiring student of that period; and in carrying out their task they placed the stamp of their scholarly skill and authority not only on the volumes they edited but, in a more general way, on the edition as a whole. For this the editor in chief and all others concerned in the Adams enterprise at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard University Press are and must remain deeply grateful. But upon the appearance of the first two volumes Mr. Donald was obliged by the pressure of his other scholarly commitments to withdraw from his role as co-editor, and in view of this circumstance Mrs. Donald likewise resigned. Editorial operations on the Diary of Charles Francis Adams were thereafter resumed at the headquarters of the enterprise in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

These operations have been concentrated in the hands of Mr. Marc Friedlaender, for many years a professor of English literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, who, after five years as a publisher, joined the Adams staff at the beginning of 1965. His interest in The Adams Papers predated by a considerable time his affiliation with the enterprise, for it was he who, as an editor at Athenaeum Publishers in New York City, had provided the stimulus for a paperbound reprint edition of The Adams Papers and had the oversight of the volumes as issued by Athenaeum. It is only proper to say that he has performed the lion’s share, or more, of the editing of the two volumes of Charles Francis Adams’ Diary now published, has xxiiseen them through the press, and has written the Introduction which follows.

It is proper to say further that the Introduction deals with only a few themes in the diary record now spread before the reader, and dismisses a number of others on which it would be easy and agreeable to comment—for example the remarkably full and faithful, though dispersed, account furnished by this document of Boston’s social, economic, and cultural life in the 1830’s, and the accompanying physical growth of the city. These and other matters have been deliberately omitted in order to deal with the most basic themes running throughout this segment of Adams’ massive and intensely personal record: his continuous effort to find his true nature between those poles of passion and restraint that had always marked, and would continue in the future to mark, the Adams character; his developing sense of responsibility as a dynastic heir, which, since the diarist’s conception of it clashed—or seemed to clash—with his father’s conception, led to one of the frankest series of exchanges between a son and a father on record; and, finally, his yearning search for a vocation, which he accidentally discovered in the course of these years but did not have the satisfaction of knowing he had done before these volumes close.

If none of these questions is resolved in the text of the diary, neither is any one of them categorically answered—by anticipation of future evidence—in Mr. Friedlaender’s probing commentary. To judge by the amount of study being given to the subject in the 20th century, the problem of growing up as an Adams was one of the most unusual and difficult feats a human being could be called on to perform in the 18th or 19th century. It seems to be agreed that the difficulties were compounded as the generations of the family succeeded each other. In the present volumes is assembled a voluminous mass of new data on the most conspicuous figure in the third generation of the dynasty. That among them are many trivia and frequent longueurs, the editors must be the first to admit because they have been the first to cope with them. The volumes of C. F. Adams’ Diary so far published, and some that will follow, document a slow starter’s painfully slow start toward mastery of himself and thereby toward his important place in the political, diplomatic, and cultural history of his country and his central place in the Adams story for half a century. In the ever-enlarging view we now take of both history and psychology, no evidence in the personal record of such an evolution is wholly irrelevant to an understanding of it.

Adams himself presciently felt the force of this truth and furnished xxiiihis editors with convincing arguments for proceeding as they have. Among the many books he read during the years spanned by these volumes was Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. In his diary entry for 30 March 1831 he remarked that Boswell’s book contains “much the best Picture of [Johnson’s] mind. None has ever been so fully laid bare to the public, and none could exemplify more strongly in itself the singular medley of weaknesses and power of which the human mind generally is composed.” At that moment Adams was doubtful whether “such books are a blessing, for they tend to destroy all the Romance about perfection of character.” But when, a few years later, he began his lifelong, if often interrupted, task of editing large portions of his family papers for publication, he started with the letters of his celebrated grandparents, in order, he said repeatedly and in a variety of ways, to expose the hidden springs of action that lay behind the momentous events in which John and Abigail Adams participated. And in the preface to his last filio-editorial undertaking, the monumental Memoirs of John Quincy Adams... from 1795 to 1848, carried out at the close of his active life, Adams echoed this early commitment to recording directly the personal testimony on which our understanding of the past must ultimately rest, as distinct from and better than reconstructing the past at second-hand, from partial evidence, and according to what we wish to think those who acted and were acted upon in “history” were like.