“Hereafter there will be no intimacy”: Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, and the Emerging Divisions within the Republican Party

THE Adams family knew how to hold a grudge. Over the decades, they feuded with their political enemies, their personal rivals, and quite often one another. On occasion, these quarrels were personal, on others, ideological, and sometimes both. But because of their enormous political clout, when America's first dynasty took on not merely their political opponents but their former allies, these disagreements assumed national significance. That was certainly true of the long relationship between Charles Francis Adams Sr. and Charles Sumner—a downward spiral from warm friendship and political alliance to bitter enmity—which mirrored the crippling post-1865 division between Republican moderates and progressives. In examining the damage that was done to Reconstruction-era reforms as the dominant Republican Party began to fracture over questions of how far the federal government should go in defending the rights of the freedmen, historians sensibly look to the decades after Appomattox. But as the Adams and...