After leading the Fifth into Richmond in early April 1865, Adams briefly thought better of his men, for once forgoing racist terms when describing the moment to his family. “What a piece of luck it was,” Adams mused. “That I, after all these years of fighting and toil and danger, of doubt, discouragement and almost despair, should as an emblem of the results of this war, lead into Richmond a regiment of black cavalry.” That decency quickly passed, however, after white Virginians complained that some of his cavalrymen were guilty of theft, a charge Adams was inclined to believe. Characterizing his troopers as “curious cattle,” impervious to “threat or punishment,” Adams suspected that black soldiers lacked basic morality, and he complained that at least one-third of his recruits were “the damnedest thieves and rascals alive.”
Adams devoted his postwar years to a career in railroads, eventually serving as president of the Union Pacific. Although Adams proved to be an honest robber baron, the position was a curious one for a family bred to public service, and after being forced out by financier Jay Gould in 1890, Adams’s thoughts returned to the war and race. In 1902 he published a collection of essays, under the title Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers. Adams’s article on the Confederate general was part of the emerging Lost Cause mythology that Lee was a reluctant secessionist and an antislavery Virginian who wished only to heal the nation’s wounds after 1865.
The piece, together with Adams’s insistence that a statue to Lee be erected in Washington, caught the attention of influential Virginians. President George Denny of Washington and Lee University invited Adams to come south as the keynote speaker for the January 1907 centennial celebrations of Lee’s birth. In his lengthy speech, Adams claimed that the foolish “African-and-brother doctrines” of the “Uncle Tom period,” had promoted the “sheerest of delusions” during the Reconstruction era. As he concluded, the all-white audience rose in applause, with many standing in line to shake his hand. It was gratifying, Adams thought, to have pleased “so many good people—so simple, straightforward, and genuine.” Mary Custis Lee, the general’s aged, unmarried daughter, wrote that people were praising Charles Francis Adams as one of the “greatest men” in America. Lyon Tyler, the president of the College of William and Mary and one of President John Tyler’s fifteen white children, wrote to Adams that were the matter “left to the South, the Adams family would have the honor of having another representative in the President’s Chair.”