'tis Sixty Years Since": Address of Charles Francis Adams; Founders' Day, January 16, 1913

In January 1913, an elderly Charles Francis Adams stood before the University of South Carolina and delivered a remarkable act of reckoning. Sixty years earlier, as a young Harvard freshman, he had watched his nation tear itself apart over slavery. Now, in the twilight of his life, he reflected with striking candor on everything his generation had witnessed: the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the strange new America that had emerged from the furnace. Adams was no detached observer, he had served the Union cause, worked in the railroads, and spent decades processing how his nation's ideals had collided with its deepest sins. This is not a formal history but a personal accounting, sometimes bitter, sometimes wistful, often surprisingly honest about where America had succeeded and failed. It is the voice of a man who lived through the most transformative seventy years in American history and dared to ask whether it had all been worth it.