But Adams's histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations remain unread. Or misread -- as cynical commentaries on democracy or fusillades in a family feud with the man from Monticello. Wills is convinced that the histories are ''non-fiction prose masterpiece[s]" written not ''with bitterness but with brio," by a pioneer in the use of archival sources.
Unlike the world-weary old Adams of ''The Education," Wills claims, Henry the historian was an optimist and a nationalist who brilliantly analyzed the paradoxical legacy of the Second American Revolution. Entering office in 1801 with an ideological commitment to ''starving government back into its proper insignificance," the Jeffersonian Republicans soon asked for a standing army, a central bank, a federal bureaucracy, and a more expansive interpretation of the US Constitution. Well ahead of his time in jettisoning ''the great man theory of history," Adams showed that social forces, domestic and international, ''insensibly but irresistibly" bore the Jeffersonians along, though they deserved credit for refusing to resist them. As he savored the irony, Wills concludes, Adams embraced a progressive rather than a cyclical view of history: ''The outcome of his narrative was a very happy one" because the United States was better equipped, ideologically and institutionally, to fulfill its destiny.
''Henry Adams and the Making of America" is, in essence, an annotated summary of the histories, volume by volume. It can be slow going. But Wills demonstrates that these works are innovative and important. Adams was particularly adept, he notes, in setting a national tale in an international context. He was the first historian to assert that by tying down French forces in St. Domingue, Toussaint L'Ouverture's slave revolt made the Louisiana Purchase possible. And he understood that Jefferson and Napoleon were the contending giants on the world stage.
