American publicist, lawyer, and politician, brother of Henry Adams; born in Boston on the 27th of May 1835, graduated at Harvard in 1856, and served on the Union side in the Civil War, receiving in 1865 the brevet of brigadier-general in the regular army. He was president of the Union Pacific railroad from 1884 to 1890, having previously become widely known as an authority on the management of railways. In 1900–1901 he was president of the American Historical Association. He died in Washington, DC, on the 20th of March 1915. Among his writings are Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (1878); Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (1892); a biography of his father, Charles Francis Adams (1900); Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers (1902); Theodore Lyman and Robert Charles Winthrop, Jr., Two Memoirs (1906); and Three Phi Beta Kappa Addresses (1907). In 1911 he published Studies Military and Diplomatic, 1775–1865, and in 1913 Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity (lectures delivered at Oxford).
In 1916 Worthington C. Ford edited Charles Francis Adams, an Autobiography, from papers deposited in 1913 with the Massachusetts Historical Society. See also the same editor’s A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865 (1920).
Another brother, Brooks Adams (1848–1927), born in Quincy, MA, on the 24th of June 1848, graduated at Harvard in 1870, and until 1881 practised law. His writings include The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1887); The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895); America’s Economic Supremacy (1900); and The New Empire (1902).
