New England in the Republic, 1776-1850 was published by Little, Brown in 1926, completing Adams’s trilogy on the history of New England. This volume covers the most complex period: the decades in which New England transformed from a revolutionary region into the most conservative section of the country (opposing the War of 1812, flirting with secession at the Hartford Convention, resisting Jacksonian democracy) before reinventing itself as the moral conscience of the nation through the abolitionist movement, educational reform, and the literary flowering of the Transcendentalist era.
Adams traces these contradictions with characteristic skepticism: New England’s moral authority was real (the abolitionist movement was genuinely courageous), but it coexisted with economic self-interest (New England manufacturers benefited from protective tariffs that Southern planters opposed) and cultural condescension (the assumption that New England values were American values, and that other regions were deficient to the extent that they differed).
The trilogy as a whole represents Adams’s most sustained scholarly achievement — a comprehensive revisionist history of the region that had traditionally told America’s story to itself, examined with the detachment of an outsider (Adams was born in Brooklyn, not Boston) and the rigor of a researcher who insisted on primary sources over received tradition.
Collecting New England in the Republic
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1926): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $8–$20
- Complete trilogy set: $80–$200