Alvey Augustus Adee was born on November 27, 1842 in Astoria, New York, United States, the fifth and youngest child of Fleet Surgeon Augustus Adee, U. S. N. , and Amelia Kinnaird Graham. His father belonged to a solid Westchester family with a Huguenot strain. His mother's father was David Graham, Irish patriot of Scotch affiliations, Pittsburgh preacher, and New York lawyer, whose interest in Robert Emmet occasioned his removal to this country.
Adee never went to school or college; however, he received an honorary A. M. from Yale in 1888.
Adee traveled abroad, became an accomplished linguist and a distinguished Shakespearean, contributed prose and verse to the press, and set out to be a civil engineer--under the tutelage of his uncle Charles Kinnaird Graham, surveyor of the port of New York. It was through another uncle, however, that he stumbled upon his true profession.
A firm friend and conspicuous client of the criminal lawyer John Graham was Major-General D. E. Sickles, whom President Grant in 1869 made minister to Spain. Sickles invited Adee to go with him as his private secretary. The eight years he spent in Madrid, where the congenial secretary of legation he succeeded in 1870 chanced to be a young man named John Hay, laid the foundation of Adee's vast diplomatic experience. At five different times during this stormy period he acted as chargé d'affaires ad interim.
He was not in charge when the Virginius affair threatened war in 1873. He was, however, when Boss Tweed of New York, having escaped from the guard in whose company he was enjoying an airing out of Ludlow Street Jail, set sail from Cuba in 1876, under an assumed name, for Vigo. The United States then had no extradition treaty with Spain. But the chargé who spoke Spanish so well and steered so tactfully between revolutions had established a position for himself; and at his request the Spanish authorities made him a present of the mysterious passenger on the Carmen--who was promptly returned to Ludlow Street on board an American frigate. The tactful chargé was the first to suggest the Extradition Convention and Protocol of 1877.
In August 1877 Adee handed over his legation to James Russell Lowell and returned to America. He had intended to retire to private life, for his strenuous years in Spain had told upon his health and he now contemplated the care-free life of a banker. Among the dispatches on every conceivable subject which he signed at the rate of one a day for every day he was in charge, those on currency and exchange prove that a Shakespearean may not be incapable of fathoming the mysteries of high finance. But Madrid was not the only place where he had established a reputation. His tact, his diligence, his dignified style, not to speak of his skill in apprehending fugitives from justice, had been noted by Secretary Hamilton Fish, who doubtless mentioned them to his successor W. M. Evarts. At any rate, Secretary Evarts offered Adee a "temporary" position in the Department of State, where he would be relieved of responsibility and free to exercise his special talent for drafting state papers--or to resign.
Thus began, accidentally once more, the second stage of a career which was to become legendary in the annals of Washington. In 1878 Evarts made him chief of the Diplomatic Bureau, in charge of correspondence with legations.
In 1882 President Arthur appointed him third assistant secretary of state. In 1886 he was promoted to be second assistant secretary, which he was for thirty-six years. He preferred a post less conspicuous but less subject to political and social pressure. As it was he frequently assumed the duties of acting secretary, and in September 1898 spanned as secretary of state ad interim the interval between the departure of Justice Day and Hay's arrival.
The only time he ever consented to appear at an international conference was in 1914. Happening to be in France, on his vacation, he accepted an emergency assignment to the conference on Spitzbergen, then sitting at Oslo. His credentials were dated the day before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and the conference rose on July 30.
Unable to cross the German frontier, Adee spent a fortnight in helping disentangle the legation at Copenhagen from the confusion which beset every diplomatic establishment in those troubled days, and finally succeeded in making his way to the north of Scotland. He was then in his seventy-second year.
The only book he ever published was an edition of King Lear (1890), being Volume X of The Bankside Shakespeare (1888-1906), published by the Shakespeare Society of New York.
He continued to serve the department for ten years longer, remaining at his desk until a week before his death.
Member of the Shakespeare Society of New York
His conscientiousness and his versatility would have availed little without his wide reading, his immense experience, his prodigious memory, his intimacy with the records, workings, and personalities of the department, his quick wit, his gift for the turn and tone of a phrase.
He was human enough to have a temper, as rash or stupid subordinates knew to their cost, and journalists found him a far from loquacious informant; yet no one could be more appreciative of good work, more urbane, or readier to turn off an importunate question with a laugh.
To keep himself fit he long rode a bicycle, taking it nearly every spring to Europe for an unconventional tour, and in his later years he kept a canoe on the Potomac.
He also took a scientific interest in lenses, acquiring the proficiency of a professional with the camera and the microscope. With their aid he became an expert in the study of diatoms, of which he discovered several new species.
It was perhaps this interest in scientific and mechanical things which caused him who had spent so many painful hours with a pen, to introduce typewriters into the department in the eighties, and in the nineties to permit the innovation of typing a diplomatic note.
Adee never married.
