Henry Adams and History: The United States and Tahiti - Ormond Seavey

Titre: Henry Adams and History: The United States and Tahiti - Ormond Seavey
extracted text: HENRY ADAMS AND HISTORY:
THE UNITED STATES AND TAHITI

Ormond Seavey, Ph.D.
Washington State University / Professor

In this essay I have to use the word history repeatedly. At times I will be employing
the term in its familiar meaning—the record of events that occurred in the past. At other
times I have to refer to a particular text, designated with the definite article as The History, by which I mean Henry Adams’s nine-volume work The History of the United States of
America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—an ungainly
title though precise. I am also aware of the compounded confusions as someone who employs the English word history in contexts where its French cognate histoire prevails.
Just as Henry Adams came to Tahiti from Washington, D.C., I too come from Washington. It is a place deeply devoted to public life, about which Adams himself held a historian’s longer view—elections, government measures, wars, diplomacy. Those of us from
Washington cannot escape the inundations of the quotidian preoccupations of those who
concern themselves above all with such matters.
Indeed, we find ourselves at present in just the situation that Adams inhabited in
the 1880s. Hard at work on his great work, The History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, he had been obliged to
accumulate and read American newspapers from the period between 1795 and 1817, complaining in his text about how nearly devoid of substance this source generally was:
“Of American newspapers there was no end; but the education supposed
to have been widely spread by eighteenth-century newspapers was hardly to be distinguished from ignorance. The student of history might search
forever those storehouses of political calumny for facts meant to instruct
the public in any useful object. A few dozen advertisements of shipping and
sales; a marine list; rarely or never a price-list, unless it were European;
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copious extracts from English newspapers, and long columns of political
disquisition—such matter filled the chief city newspapers, from which the
smaller sheets selected what their editors thought fit. Reporters and regular correspondents were unknown. Information of events other than political—the progress of the New York or Philadelphia water-works, of the Middlesex Canal, of Fitch’s or Fulton’s voyages, or even the commonest details of
a Presidential inauguration—could rarely be found in the press.” (History I:
83-84)
By the 1880s American newspapers had advanced beyond their progenitors in
substance, but as the readers of 2024 look back at the preoccupations of that period it
is readily possible to credit Henry Adams with superior insight in directing his attention
to Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, and even manic Congressman John Randolph,
rather than their counterparts in Adams’s own time—figures like Grover Cleveland, Roscoe Conkling, Benjamin Harrison, or even his former student Henry Cabot Lodge. Adams’s
own time was focusing its attention on such political issues as the coinage of silver, the
suppression of the native population in the West by cavalry units largely made up of former slaves, the dangers of alcohol, and above all other issues the size of U.S. protective
tariffs. That Adams could emerge from the din of attention to such issues with his History
shows a capacity for focus and discrimination.
The strain of years of labor on the History, together with the noise of contemporary
political wrangling, weighed down on him in 1891 so he fled to various Pacific sites and
eventually to Tahiti. I suppose that he hoped to find in the islands some degree of relief
from faction, pettiness, and trivial wrangling and experience a domain of beauty, peace,
and sunny tranquillity. But instead what he encountered in Tahiti in particular served to
echo his situation in Washington. Tahiti had not been exempt from history.
Adams’s own personal life had already collapsed in the wake of his wife’s suicide
in December 1885, so there also could not be any respite from that intractable loss. And
Adams already knew of a cautionary warning about the prospect of escaping through
travel from personal and collective history. He had read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” as the
Concord sage had depicted the folly of traveling:
“At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty,
and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the
sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the
sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” (Emerson 278)

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For Emerson the sadness had come from the death of his first wife from tuberculosis. But to account for the feeling of something deeply amiss merely by connection to
a personal grief would be reductionist. The deaths of Clover Adams or of Ellen Emerson,
sad as they were, stand also for the deep loss experienced by every sentient being, our
common perception that time and chance finally overrule our efforts to counteract them.
So despite his hopes for relief from Washington and all its associations by going
to a place of transcendent beauty and continual supply of fruits and flowers, he did not
expect to be intoxicated. In various ways Adams’s History would provide him a matrix for
his perceptions about history in Tahiti.
Obviously there are differences between a nation state constituted from half a
continent and an island society the size of Tahiti, but he had worked with the social palette of American complications long enough for complications to seem discoverable
elsewhere as well. Probably the most important common element between Tahitian history and U.S. early national history arises from Adams’s boldest and most systematic innovation.
Henry Adams insists in the History that American history must be seen in close
conjunction with contemporary world history—seemingly a truism hardly worth stipulating except that his predecessors and most of his successors in the writing of American history overlook it. Thus for example the Louisiana Purchase had to be related first
to domestic relationships in the royal Spanish household and ultimately to the Haitian
revolution. In the words of the History itself—striking and memorable though embedded
inside a sentence: “but the prejudice of race alone blinded the American people to the debt
owed to the desperate courage of five hundred thousand Haytian negroes who would not
be enslaved.” (History I: 316)
In other words, because Napoleon’s only use for Louisiana had been to provide food
for the re-enslaved sugar-producers, at the point when he realized that French armies
could never prevail on the island, he had no real need for the Louisiana territory and was
disposed to discard that large tract of territory on the North American mainland, getting
some modest payment in return.
Just as American history requires being seen in a world context, Adams will insist
on exploring the international contexts for Tahiti that begin in 1767. So a considerable
share of Tahiti’s consequence in the world derives from its availability to fit late Enlightenment paradigms for human life in the absence of urban life, in particular as articulated by
Rousseau and Diderot.
And the Memoirs of Arii Taimai elaborately documents the way that interlopers
to Tahiti like James Cook, an Englishman with the English impulse to locate everywhere
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someone accepted as the king, disrupted the local system of aristocratic families controlling collective life in Tahiti. So an unheralded figure who had caught Cook’s eye is able to
launch a take-over of the entire island.
There prove to be notable social similarities between Adams’s early national America and Tahiti before Western discovery. Both societies had been controlled by regionally
based aristocracies. The distinctive qualities of early American aristocracies he outlines
in the introductory chapters to the History. The Memoirs show that Tahiti had had a comparable system of aristocratic management functioning not just on that island itself but
also on the nearby islands—a system that had functioned effectively for centuries. To be
sure, the oligarchs he had noted in post-Federalist America had differed by region, with
a merchant oligarchy in New England coexisting with a planter oligarchy in Virginia and
the Southern states, while the Tahitian aristocrats had constituted an interlinked network
managed according to mutually understood codes of activity and discourse.
Adams’s early national United States had been a scene of religious conflicts, mostly among variants of American Protestantism, with particular threats to national unity
posed by the political version of Edwardsian Calvinism, which constituted the backbone of
a fading and increasingly impotent Federalism in New England. In Tahiti, as Adams would
document in the Memoirs, the Calvinist fatalism of early missionaries combined collaboration with colonialists together with collusion in the bloody suppression of a once viable
and peaceful social order.
For the historian there does exist a key difference between the situations in the
United States from 1800 and 1817 on one hand and in Tahiti between 1767 and 1815. That
difference consists especially of the evidence available for the historian. As Adams gradually assembled his depiction of American life, his materials could be found mostly on
paper—those unsatisfactory early newspapers, which might eke out dribbles of information when read systematically, and records of diplomatic interchanges, ferreted out of
European archives by a combination of family credibility, linguistic acumen, and some
amount of chutzpah. Let me repeat here a story already incorporated in my study of
Adams’s early writings (Seavey 262-264). In 1879 Henry and Clover Adams were in Seville,
Spain, at the site of the Spanish colonial archives, records of the Spanish empire going
back to the fifteenth century. He had previously been offered access to the archives, but
the offer had been withdrawn, obliging the Adamses to improvise an entry to the archive.
On a train ride the Adamses by chance encounter someone who knows the archivist himself. Clover Adams finagles their traveling companion into approaching the feeble old archivist, who consents to open the records to them the following morning, obliging her to
distract the old dude as Henry locates the evidence of a Spanish bribe to a highly placed
American. This would be the culmination of weeks of archival research in Europe.

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The task for the historian of reconstructing the past in Tahiti would be even more
complicated because so much of the most relevant evidence reposed in the elaborate memory of Arii Taimai. Access to that repository comes to us mostly through the writings of
Henry Adams. A visitor to her family, he had befriended two of her children, one of them
connected by marriage to the last titular king of Tahiti.
The voice first heard in the Memoirs is that of Arii Taimai, explaining matters of
custom and kinship in Tahiti as related to her own family to someone from the outside:
“If the Papara family and people had any name, in the European fashion, I
suppose it would be Teva, for we are a clan, and Teva is our clan name. On
the map of Tahiti the four southwest districts, from Papara to the isthmus, is
marked as Te Teva I uta, the inner Tevas […].” (Tahiti 1)
The voice is cordial and welcoming and also conscious of possible misconstructions. The shape of the island must be conveyed further along, with indications of comparable English terminology. The way that the space for human habitation is restricted
to the island’s coastline is conveyed. Then in the second paragraph appears information
that Adams himself has ascertained from his reading of voyage narratives from Wallis
in 1767 on the Dolphin and Cook in 1774 on the Endeavor, the latter ship name expressed
in its American spelling. The melding of perspectives between the inside versions of the
Tahitians together with alien versions that introduce some range of misunderstanding is
central to the achievement of the text.
Voices keep shifting back and forth between Adams and Arii Taimai in the text, but
at one point explicitly in his own voice Adams links the methodological situations of this
text to those of the History. The story mentions the Maraes, monuments or burial places
located in various parts of the island.
“Thanks to the Maraes, the social rank of chiefs in the South Seas was so well
known or so easily learned that few serious mistakes could be possible. On
this foundation genealogy grew into a science, and was the only science in
the islands which could fairly claim rank with the intellectual work of Europe and Asia. Genealogy swallowed up history and made law a field of its
own. Chiefs might wander off to far distant islands and be lost for generations, but if their descendant came back, and if he could prove his right to
the seat in a family Marae, he was admitted to all the privileges and property
which belonged to him by inheritance.” (Tahiti 11)
Also to be noted in this passage is the connection between history and law, a
connection which had launched Henry Adams’s earliest serious engagement with the
past. In Tahiti what might seem to have counted as legal questions about possession or
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pre-eminence are resolved by genealogical evidence. Hence, even a remote and long absent descendant from an aristocratic Tahitian house could expect his title to be honored if
matters of lineage could be established.
Back in the 1870s as an assistant professor of History at Harvard, Henry Adams
had begun the earliest U.S. graduate program in History, mobilizing a small cadre of recent graduates in the study of Anglo-Saxon law. At that early point he himself composed
a review essay about Anglo-Saxon law as the introduction to the publication of his students’ dissertations. Hence his claim that in Tahiti genealogy had grown into a science,
subsuming jurisprudence and equivalent to the intellectual work of Europe and Asia. In
other words, the ample supplies of genealogical lore in the memory of Arii Taimai count
as equivalent to the written evidence of political maneuvering to be discovered in the national archives of Spain, France, or Great Britain.
Adams had insisted in the History on connecting the story of the Jefferson and
Madison administrations to the complications of the Napoleonic Wars, so that Napoleon
himself, depicted as an avatar of Milton’s Satan, proves to be a more consequential adversary to the Jeffersonians than the largely ineffectual, regionally limited, and divided forces
of the Federalist party. In turn Adams will engage in a related paradigm in relation to Tahiti. While he begins with Arii Taimai’s account of genealogical reconstruction of the island’s
history, he must also incorporate the major misperceptions of European sea captains like
Bougainville and Cook, soon compounded by the self-serving local observations of English missionaries. So these European intruders impose their own version of the island’s
polity. Tahiti becomes a scene where competing colonial powers collide.
The crucial feature of Adams’s History is his systematic location of American history in an international context. So as Thomas Jefferson is inaugurated as President in
Chapter VII of the first volume, he is linked not to his predecessor, the absent John Adams, but to two other absent figures—“[t]he man who mounted the steps of the Capitol, March 4, 1801, to claim the place of an equal between Pitt and Bonaparte” (History I:
126). Moreover Henry Adams has already made it clear by this chapter that the newly
elected leader of the presumptuous little American republic was not really comparable
in international consequence to either William Pitt the younger, then the British prime
minister, or Napoleon Bonaparte, at that point the first consul of France.
The first six chapters of the History in their meticulous enumeration of the provincial vulnerabilities of the disunited United States have already located the still new nation
as prey to internal fragmentation. Young readers of that collection of chapters, sometimes
packaged together under the title The United States in 1800, tend to overlook the way that
unsparing depiction reveals not the promise of the nation so much as its peril. But Adams’s
story in the ensuing nine volumes of text is one of emergence from provincial limitation.
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Just as the context for United States history between 1800 and 1817 is the interaction with potent European imperial powers, Henry Adams insists in the Memoirs that the
recollections of Arii Taimai must be considered in their relation to the incursions of British and French sea captains and missionaries.
As with his History, Adams displays a highly acidic view of the British in the Memoirs, in passages more distinctly reflecting his own perceptions than those of his Tahitian counterparts. When the History announces the arrival of Spencer Perceval as
leader of the ministry coming into power in 1807, it describes that coalition as representing “everything in English society that was most impervious to reason” (History I:
966). Adams’s language does violate later historians’ conventions for the avoidance of
unequivocal pronouncements. Although historians of the present are not so likely to rally
in defense of Perceval, they would frame their treatments of him in more muted terms.
I find it refreshing to see Adams’s disposition to display without equivocation his own
encyclopedic awareness of the vicissitudes of British government leadership over some
centuries of history and his refusal to equivocate.
In the Memoirs as the story of Purea is being followed, the narrative engages in a
moment of anthropological observation, as the observers are being themselves observed:
“The English never took an idea by halves. Having made a queen of Purea in 1768, they
were determined to regard her as a beggar in 1773” (Tahiti 62). Having committed himself
again to a level of description beyond the schematic, the situation of this Tahitian aristocrat requires a much more ramified context than the alternatives of queen and beggar.
In the course of his history of early Tahiti, the narrative at one point offers what we
might rightly see as a provocative observation about developments: “[B]ut as I come to the
dark ages of our history, between 1800 and 1815, I find a want of records and traditions that
shows how narrowly our family must have escaped the fate of almost every other chiefly
race” (Tahiti 97).
The interval of time (1800-1815) which the history of Tahiti sees as the island’s dark
ages is precisely the interval of time which Adams had already exalted in the History of
the United States of America as the source of American national unity—a contention by no
means accepted by previous American historians. As for the adequacy of records and traditions in the U.S. period, Adams’s deployment of the records at his disposal would supply
thousands of pages.
Central to the connection Adams makes between Tahiti and Europe is the way
that the encounter with Tahiti connected to ideas Adams associates with Rousseau and
Diderot. The connection proves to be complicated by the ways that Tahiti is fitted to a
pre-existing paradigm particularly articulated by Rousseau. The Tahiti that the adherents
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of Rousseau perceive bears only slight resemblance to the complex and ramified social
arrangements existing over centuries and recalled for Adams’s benefit by Arii Taimai. A
handful of signifiers combine to constitute the Rousseau paradigm, including in particular Diderot’s contribution specifically designated for Tahiti. Diderot’s own access to Tahiti
derives from his connection to the Encyclopédie, as its principal editor. So that work affords its creator with cosmic connections to all things.
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville published his own account of his voyage, to which
Diderot adds his fanciful Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. From the Supplément one
would discover that love reigns in Tahiti and requires no constraints imposed by marriage
practices. The connections to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes will be obvious to all. But Rousseau’s potent assault on civilization
first appeared in 1755, years before European navigators reached Tahiti. Adams’s glances
at Rousseau and Diderot in the Memoirs indicate both his awareness of the paradigm they
advanced and his own distance from that paradigm.
At the opening of Chapter 14 he observes, “Meanwhile Europe had totally lost its
first keen interest in Tahiti. Like an old fashion, the South Seas fell into the hands of unfashionable people such as missionaries and whaling-captains; the glamour vanished,
and the worn-out excitement faded away” (Tahiti 88). In other words, the historical moment had become what Henry Adams himself had already found to be most congenial.
At the point where he himself had turned to the Jefferson administration as his own
field of focus, that territory had seemed to American historians as lacking consequence.
Jefferson and Madison had seemed to be superseded in consequence by the advent of the
abolitionist movement, the early years of William Lloyd Garrison and the sturdy Congressional resistance to slavery led by John Quincy Adams. Yet regardless of Henry’s persisting allegiance to his grandfather, he insisted on reviving the Virginia presidents. Correspondingly, the way that European attention to Tahiti descended to unfashionable people
like missionaries and whaling-captains signaled that Tahiti’s consequence would require
what Clifford Geertz would describe as thick description. Just the ways that Tahiti and the
Rousseau paradigm had been snuffed out by the French Revolution reveal how merely
superficial and suggestive its engagement with Tahiti had been.
Here is Adams’s language describing the shift of European attention away from Tahiti, as he notes the arrival in Tahiti of the Duff, with its cargo of missionaries reaching the
island in March 1797:
“Thirty years had elapsed between the coming of Captain Wallis in the Dolphin and the coming of the missionaries in the Duff. Little was left of all that
had charmed the discoverers. In these thirty years Europe had also passed
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through the experience of centuries; the dreams of Rousseau and the ideals
of nature were already as far away as the kingdom of heaven. In 1797 the philosophers were dead; the guillotine had disposed of the innate virtues of the
human heart; and war had swept away most of the landmarks of old Europe,
with much of its old population; but the wreck of society that had occurred
in Europe was not to be compared with the wreck of our world in the South
Seas.” (Tahiti 89)
Neatly embedded in the report about the arrival of missionaries are two linked histories, one of European cultural history and the other of Tahitian social history. Neither
historical record is adequately represented in these summary treatments. Adams knows
what an adequate rendition would require. The depredations to Tahiti appear as adjunct
to the devastation to free thought caused by the Jacobins of the French Revolution. And
the missionaries appear in Tahiti not as emissaries of freely chosen spiritual choices but
as components to factions which will impose a social system alien to the Tahitian indigenous pattern whose elements Adams’s text has elaborately detailed. So the freight of
cultural disaster ensconced in the syntax of Adams’s language melds European and Tahitian contexts.
Henry Adams scholars who come to the Memoirs from an immersion in The Education of Henry Adams would probably already expect to hear the note of despair, so vividly
sounded in that work. But the Education would not be composed until after the turn of the
century. The more appropriate context for the Memoirs is the History of the United States
of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Though my
own critical effort has aimed to distinguish the History from the bleak perceptions of the
Education and The Life of George Cabot Lodge, his latest completed books, this occasion
invites me to observe that even though the trajectory of the History is positive, its surface
is quite often dark. Henry Adams did not have the sunny Emersonian discourse as a note
he could sound personally despite his palpable affinities for Emerson.
If there is any favored protagonist in the History it would have to be Thomas Jefferson, in part by the way he pivots away from the earlier Republican revulsion against
Federalist exercises of national action—but consider the History’s early description of the
position taken by Jefferson’s party:
“Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in
his view the whole future of man. That the United States should become a
nation like France, England, or Russia, should conquer the world like Rome,
or develop a typical race like the Chinese, was no part of his scheme. He
wished to begin a new era. Hoping for a time when the world’s ruling interests should cease to be local and should become universal, when questions
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of boundary and nationality should become insignificant, when armies and
navies should be reduced to the work of police, and politics should consist
only in non-intervention—he set himself to the task of governing, with this
golden age in view. Few men have dared to legislate as though universal
peace were at hand, in a world torn by wars and convulsions and drowned in
blood; but this was what Jefferson aspired to do.” (History I: 101)
There appears to be something laughable about Jefferson’s aspirations. Had any
Federalist contemporary of Jefferson—someone like Fisher Ames or Timothy Pickering—
spelled out this Jeffersonian position in such high-flown terms, the characterization
would have been dismissed as exaggerated partisanship. Henry Adams had notoriously
little personal sympathy with the sort of unpractical idealism that he describes in Jefferson. Yet his History documents not the collapse of the Democratic Republicans into ideological futility but rather their success at consolidating the disparate and still unregenerated components into a union that would survive civil war.
So despite incorporating this damning characterization of the Jefferson position,
Adams depicts Jefferson’s actual conduct of the Presidency in quite positive ways. But irony has to disguise those affirmative elements.
It is Henry Adams’s deep attachment to irony that disguises the affirmative vectors in his perceptions. Himself the lineal descendant of Emerson even more than that
bachelor defender of chastity Henry Thoreau, Henry Adams turned to the weatherbeaten Emerson of the essay “Experience,” not just in The Education of Henry Adams but
also in his own flight from the illusory realm of contemporary politics surrounding him
in Washington. He comes upon Tahiti not to find the escape from Western social mores
but to live out Emerson’s direction in “Experience” that “[w]e must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come” (Emerson 481). The story of
Arii Taimai had had a potent element of personally effectual activity, as the chiefess had
intervened in 1846 to prevent a French assault on Tahiti, even at the cost of reinstating an
indigenous regime whose lack of legitimacy had been so much the matter of the Memoirs.
We are here in Tahiti as evidence that the strong present tense can still be set up
and that Tahiti itself has had a history and has a future. It is where Henry Adams found
himself.

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Works Cited
Adams, Henry, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Earl N. Harbert, New York, Library of America, 1986, Vol. 1.
Adams, Henry, Tahiti (Memoirs of Arii Taimai), Kissimmee, McAllister Editions, 2015.
Diderot, Denis, “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” in This is Not a Story and Other Stories, translated by P. N. Furbank, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Experience” in Essays Second Series in Essays and Poems, New
York, Library of America, 1996.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Self-Reliance” in Essays First Series in Essays and Poems, New
York, Library of America, 1996.
Seavey, Ormond, Henry Adams in Washington: Linking the Personal and Public Lives of
America’s Man of Letters, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press,
2020.

Abstract
Exhausted by the effort that went into completing The History of the United States
of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in nine volumes, Henry Adams departed Washington, D.C., on the voyage that would take him to
Tahiti. There he encountered not a refuge from history but another complex history preserved in large part in the recollections of Arii Taimai. In various ways Adams’s History
would provide him a matrix for his perceptions about history in Tahiti. Despite the apparent differences between a nation state constituted by half a continent and an island the
size of Tahiti, he would apply to his treatment of Tahiti his boldest and most systematic
innovation, the insistence of seeing the site of historical examination within a surrounding context of world history. Of course historians gesture at such contexts reflexively,
but Adams had insisted that Jefferson’s America had also been an America bound to Napoleon’s and William Pitt’s divided Europe.
Like the America of 1800, Tahiti before 1767 had been managed by local oligarchies,
with identifiable principles of law and power succession. Only James Cook’s English expectation of the existence of a monarchy could disrupt the settled order of things in Tahiti,
permitting someone outside of the previously existing order to move into that anomalous
and disruptive power. Adams’s History had instructed him in the strategies for dominance
of British overseas power. At the same time that Napoleon was disposed to perceive the
Americans as covert allies with the British, linked by language and persisting commercial ties, regardless of British interference with American shipping both by edict and by
boarding American vessels at sea, the United States resorted to drastic counter-imperialist measures to frustrate both European adversaries, culminating in the War of 1812,
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a belated and desperate effort to preserve the young nation’s standing in a world long
convulsed in imperial conflict. To be sure, recourse to self-protection against imperialism
would be more problematic in Tahiti. Adams’s two histories together constitute an early
version of the critique of imperialism.
Ormond Seavey was born and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota. He graduated from Carleton College cum laude with distinction in English. His graduate career at Columbia University was punctuated with a tour of duty in the U.S. Marine Corps. He has taught at the
George Washington University since 1976. He is the author of Becoming Benjamin Franklin:
The Autobiography and the Life and Henry Adams in Washington: Linking the Personal
and Public Lives of America’s Man of Letters. He is the editor of the Oxford paperback collection of Franklin writings titled Autobiography and Selected Writings. His wife Nina Gilden
Seavey is a prominent documentary filmmaker.

Résumé
« Henry Adams et l’Histoire : les États-Unis et Tahiti »
Épuisé par les efforts déployés pour achever les neuf volumes de son ouvrage, The
History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison, Henry Adams quitte Washington, D.C., pour effectuer le voyage qui
le conduira à Tahiti. Là-bas, il trouve non pas un refuge contre l’histoire, mais une autre
histoire complexe, préservée en grande partie dans les souvenirs de la cheffesse Arii Taimai. De diverses manières, l’Histoire d’Adams lui fournit une matrice pour ses perceptions
de l’histoire à Tahiti. Malgré les différences évidentes entre un État-nation constitué d’un
demi-continent et une île de la taille de Tahiti, il appliquera à son traitement de Tahiti son
innovation la plus audacieuse et la plus systématique : l’insistance à considérer le site qui
fait l’objet de l’analyse historique dans le contexte global de l’histoire mondiale. Bien entendu, les historiens établissent instinctivement des références à de tels contextes, mais
Adams avait insisté sur le fait que l’Amérique de Jefferson avait également été une Amérique liée à l’Europe divisée de Napoléon et William Pitt.
Comme l’Amérique de 1800, Tahiti avant 1767 avait été gérée par des oligarchies
locales, avec des principes identifiables de droit et de succession au pouvoir. Seules les attentes anglaises, en la personne de James Cook, quant à l’existence d’une monarchie pouvaient perturber l’ordre établi à Tahiti, en permettant à une personne, étrangère à l’ordre
en place, d’accéder à ce pouvoir anormal et perturbateur. L’Histoire d’Adams lui avait enseigné les rouages des stratégies de domination de la puissance britannique outre-mer.
Alors même que Napoléon avait tendance à considérer les Américains comme des alliés
secrets des Britanniques, du fait du lien linguistique et de la préservation de rapports
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commerciaux entre les deux nations, en dépit de l’ingérence britannique en matière de
transport maritime américain, tant par édit que par arraisonnement des navires américains en mer, les États-Unis ont eu recours à des mesures anti-impérialistes drastiques
pour contrecarrer les agissements des deux adversaires européens, tensions qui atteignirent leur paroxysme lors de la guerre de 1812, effort tardif et désespéré de la part de la
jeune nation de maintenir sa position dans un monde longtemps secoué par les conflits
impériaux. Certes, le recours à l’autoprotection contre l’impérialisme était plus problématique à Tahiti. Prises ensemble, les deux histoires d’Adams constituent une première
version de la critique de l’impérialisme.
Né à Hibbing, dans le Minnesota, Ormond Seavey est diplômé avec distinction du
Carleton College (cum laude). Sa carrière universitaire débute à l’Université Columbia, interrompue par une période de service dans le Corps des Marines des États-Unis. Professeur à
l’Université George Washington depuis 1976, il est l’auteur de Becoming Benjamin Franklin:
The Autobiography and the Life ainsi que de Henry Adams in Washington: Linking the Personal and Public Lives of America’s Man of Letters. Il est l’éditeur de la collection de livres
de poche Oxford des écrits de Franklin intitulée Autobiography and Selected Writings. Son
épouse Nina Gilden Seavey est une réalisatrice de documentaires de premier plan.

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Fait partie de Henry Adams and History: The United States and Tahiti - Ormond Seavey