Ridiculing the expedition became a tradition with the Federalists and their progeny. Nine decades later, Adams’s grandson Henry Adams wrote a classic history of the Jefferson administration in which he scarcely found room for the expedition. He characterized it as “creditable to American energy and enterprise,” but dismissed it as adding “little to the stock of science or wealth. . . . The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but was nothing more.” The real news from the period 1804–6, Adams wrote, wasn’t Lewis struggling against the current but Robert Fulton beginning to construct the
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