American Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. Mr. Adams had
recently returned from England where he had given at Oxford University a
series of lectures on the Civil War and had been so fortunate as to
obtain copies, made under the scholarly supervision of Mr. Worthington
C. Ford, of a great mass of correspondence from the Foreign Office files
in the Public Record Office and from the private papers in the
possession of various families.

The first half of the year 1914 was spent with Mr. Adams at Washington
and at South Lincoln, in preparing the "Life." Two volumes were
completed, the first by Mr. Adams carrying the story to 1848, the
second by myself for the period 1848 to 1860. For the third volume I
analysed and organized the new materials obtained in England and we were
about to begin actual collaboration on the most vital period of the
"Life" when Mr. Adams died, and the work was indefinitely suspended,
probably wisely, since any completion of the "Life" by me would have
lacked that individual charm in historical writing so markedly
characteristic of all that Mr. Adams did. The half-year spent with Mr.
Adams was an inspiration and constitutes a precious memory.

The Great War interrupted my own historical work, but in 1920 I returned
to the original plan of a work on "Great Britain and the American Civil
War" in the hope that the English materials obtained by Mr. Adams might
be made available to me. When copies were secured by Mr. Adams in 1913 a
restriction had been imposed by the Foreign Office to the effect that
while studied for information, citations and quotations were not
permissible since the general diplomatic archives were not yet open to
students beyond the year 1859. Through my friend Sir Charles Lucas, the
whole matter was again presented to the Foreign Office, with an exact
statement that the new request was in no way related to the proposed