The Education of Henry Adams

WASHINGTON (1850-1854)

Except for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned.  The surface was ready to take any form that education should cut into it, though Boston, with singular foresight, rejected the old designs.  What sort of education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but he escaped the evils of other standards by having no standard at all; and what was true of school was true of society.  Boston offered none that could help outside.  Every one now smiles at the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe —­ the society of the forties —­ but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water between a tide passed, and a tide to come.  Boston belonged to neither, and hardly even to America.  Neither aristocratic nor industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of acquiring form as they grew older.  Women counted for little as models.  Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at frequent intervals with some girl —­ always more or less the same little girl —­ who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her, except rather familiar and provincial manners, until they married and bore children to repeat the habit.  The idea of attaching one’s self to a married woman, or of polishing one’s manners to suit the standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered the mind of a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his parents.  From women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else.  He might not even catch the idea that women had more to give.  The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.

To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a darker side.  Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to most boys much the more interesting.  A successful blackguard must enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with vice of a very low form.  Blackguardism came constantly under boys’ eyes, and had the charm of force and freedom and superiority to culture or decency.  One might fear it, but no one honestly despised it.  Now and then it asserted itself as education more roughly than school ever did.  One of the commonest boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century, was a game of war on Boston Common.  In old days the two hostile forces were called North-Enders and South-Enders.  In 1850 the North-Enders still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a battle of the Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School, for snowball, included all the boys of the West End.  Whenever, on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften the snow, the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began in daylight with the Latin School in force, rushing their opponents down to Tremont Street, and which generally ended at dark by the Latin School dwindling in numbers and disappearing.  As the Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young blackguards grew strong.  As long as snowballs were the only weapon, no one was much hurt, but a stone may be put in a snowball, and in the dark a stick or a slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a knife.  One afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting.  The boy Henry, following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles, had taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage much depressed by seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson —­ “Bully Hig,” his school name —­ struck by a stone over the eye, and led off the field bleeding in rather a ghastly manner.  As night came on, the Latin School was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they could retreat no further without disbanding, and by that time only a small band was left, headed by two heroes, Savage and Marvin.  A dark mass of figures could be seen below, making ready for the last rush, and rumor said that a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror called Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous reputation, was going to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards forever.  Henry wanted to run away with the others, but his brother was too big to run away, so they stood still and waited immolation.  The dark mass set up a shout, and rushed forward.  The Beacon Street boys turned and fled up the steps, except Savage and Marvin and the few champions who would not run.  The terrible Conky Daniels swaggered up, stopped a moment with his body-guard to swear a few oaths at Marvin, and then swept on and chased the flyers, leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground.  The obvious moral taught that blackguards were not so black as they were painted; but the boy Henry had passed through as much terror as though he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten or twelve years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of Virginia and Maryland, he wondered whether their education on Boston Common had taught Savage and Marvin how to die.

If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not incomplete.  The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery leaders as well as to their followers.  Most of them suffered from it.  Mobs were always possible.  Henry never happened to be actually concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure to be on hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he heard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble.  Wendell Phillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth.  Theodore Parker in his pulpit was not much safer.  Worst of all, the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston —­ the sight of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his own friends obliged to line the streets under arms as State militia, in order to return a negro to slavery —­ wrought frenzy in the brain of a fifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to miss no reasonable chance of mischief.

One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and the Boston Massacre.  Within Boston, a boy was first an eighteenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility; beyond Boston the first step led only further into politics.  After February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since 1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world.  The Madam stayed in Washington, after her husband’s death, and in her turn was struck by paralysis and bedridden.  From time to time her son Charles, whose affection and sympathy for his mother in her many tribulations were always pronounced, went on to see her, and in May, 1850, he took with him his twelve-year-old son.  The journey was meant as education, and as education it served the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a boy’s thought in 1850.  He could not remember taking special interest in the railroad journey or in New York; with railways and cities he was familiar enough.  His first impression was the novelty of crossing New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden and Amboy Railroad.  This was a new world; a suggestion of corruption in the simple habits of American life; a step to exclusiveness never approached in Boston; but it was amusing.  The boy rather liked it.  At Trenton the train set him on board a steamer which took him to Philadelphia where he smelt other varieties of town life; then again by boat to Chester, and by train to Havre de Grace; by boat to Baltimore and thence by rail to Washington.  This was the journey he remembered.  The actual journey may have been quite different, but the actual journey has no interest for education.  The memory was all that mattered; and what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime, was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a slave State.  He took education politically.  The mere raggedness of outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had its ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a vision of neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a finished landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind.  The railway, about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled through unfenced fields and woods, or through village streets, among a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and negro babies, who might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care.  This was the boy’s impression of what slavery caused, and, for him, was all it taught.  Coming down in the early morning from his bedroom in his grandmother’s house —­ still called the Adams Building in —­ F Street and venturing outside into the air reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office which faced each other in the distance, like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city.  Here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and he walked down to inspect it before breakfast.  His aunt drily remarked that, at this rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not guess —­ having lived always in Washington —­ how little the sights of Washington had to do with its interest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding of himself.  The more he was educated, the less he understood.  Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness!  Contact made it only more repulsive.  He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil.  Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious!  He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another side.  The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas.  The impression was not simple, but the boy liked it:  distinctly it remained on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself.  The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his Johnson blood.  Most boys would have felt it in the same way, but with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance.  The softness of his gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted with him, did not come from Boston.  His aunt was anything rather than Bostonian.  He did not wholly come from Boston himself.  Though Washington belonged to a different world, and the two worlds could not live together, he was not sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most.  Even at twelve years old he could see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve hundred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.

His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the Senate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists, was freely open to visitors.  The old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant political club.  Standing behind the Vice-President’s chair, which is now the Chief Justice’s, the boy was presented to some of the men whose names were great in their day, and as familiar to him as his own.  Clay and Webster and Calhoun were there still, but with them a Free Soil candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do; what struck boys most was their type.  Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman.  The type of Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate, when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty members, and affecting the airs of courtesy.  Its vice was not so much a vice of manners or temper as of attitude.  The statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than familiarity —­ on the platform as in the pulpit —­ and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the Websterian or Conklinian pomposity of the North.  The boy felt at ease there, more at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though his acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives went back beyond distinct recollection.  Senators spoke kindly to him, and seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal enemies.  Decidedly the Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly world.

This first step in national politics was a little like the walk before breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where even the weeds grew rank.  The second step was like the first, except that it led to the White House.  He was taken to see President Taylor.  Outside, in a paddock in front, “Old Whitey,” the President’s charger, was grazing, as they entered; and inside, the President was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock too.  The President was friendly, and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he could ever recall.  In fact, what strangeness should he feel?  The families were intimate; so intimate that their friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and all sorts of rupture.  President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van Buren and the Free Soil Party.  To him, the Adamses might still be of use.  As for the White House, all the boy’s family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson’s reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built.  The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it.  He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents.  A President was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in distinction.  Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some very shady characters were likely to be.  Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.

Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not.  No sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country, one could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office or name, unless it were George Washington.  That was —­ to all appearance sincerely —­ respected.  People made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made even an effort to build Washington a monument.  The effort had failed, but one still went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip.  Mr. Adams took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards.  To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system.  Bad roads meant bad morals.  The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it.  Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road’s badness which amounted to social crime —­ and yet, at the end of the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.

Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise.  He had only to repeat what he was told —­ that George Washington stood alone.  Otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have been his last.  On that line, the problem of progress was not soluble, whatever the optimists and orators might say —­ or, for that matter, whatever they might think.  George Washington could not be reached on Boston lines.  George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless motion of every other visible point in space, he alone remained steady, in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end.  All the other points shifted their bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but Mount Vernon always remained where it was, with no practicable road to reach it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a Southern setting.  No doubt it was much more charming, but it was the same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, the same old patriot, and the same old President.

The boy took to it instinctively.  The broad Potomac and the coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself in memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine; he had only enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced George Washington from the sum of all wickedness.  In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to deal with them seriously as education is fatal.  Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was singularly free from cant.  He may have had views of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact that George Washington stood alone.

Life was not yet complicated.  Every problem had a solution, even the negro.  The boy went back to Boston more political than ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth.  Slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism.  The boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors.  The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes.  Education could go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics.  Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century statesmanship.  America and he began, at the same time, to become aware of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery.  Even at that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship with late nineteenth-century party organization.  The first vague sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in 185l.

The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had nothing to do with machinery.  Websters or Sewards depended on others for machine work and money —­ on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse, and asked no reward.  Almost without knowing it, the subordinates ousted their employers and created a machine which no one but themselves could run.  In 1850 things had not quite reached that point.  The men who ran the small Free Soil machine were still modest, though they became famous enough in their own right.  Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the other managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts Democrats giving the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate to the Free Soilers.  With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would have nothing to do, for such a coalition was in their eyes much like jockeys selling a race.  They did not care to take office as pay for votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats.  Theirs was a correct, not to say noble, position; but, as a matter of fact, they took the benefit of the sale, for the coalition chose Charles Sumner as its candidate for the Senate, while George S. Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats.  This was the boy’s first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one; not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too good to take part, but not too good to take profit.  Charles Sumner happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him, there was none.  He entered into no casuistry on the matter.  His friend was right because his friend, and the boy shared the glory.  The question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted.  Yet every one saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must be learned and understood, once for all.  The boy might ignore, as a mere historical puzzle, the question how to deduce George Washington from the sum of all wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce Charles Sumner from the sum of political corruption.  On that line, too, education could go no further.  Tammany Hall stood at the end of the vista.

Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to anti-slavery principles, and that he did it.  Henry Adams could rise to no such moral elevation.  He was only a boy, and his object in supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator.  It was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a millionaire.  He could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions, except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong, and this he was never willing to do, for the consequences of this admission were worse than those of the other.  Thus, before he was fifteen years old, he had managed to get himself into a state of moral confusion from which he never escaped.  As a politician, he was already corrupt, and he never could see how any practical politician could be less corrupt than himself.

Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice.  At the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize, though the press shouted it at him from every corner, and though the Mount Vernon Street conclave agreed with the press; yet he could not plead ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict, he never cared to defend the coalition.  Boy as he was, he knew enough to know that something was wrong, but his only interest was the election.  Day after day, the General Court balloted; and the boy haunted the gallery, following the roll-call, and wondered what Caleb Cushing meant by calling Mr. Sumner a “one-eyed abolitionist.”  Truly the difference in meaning with the phrase “one-ideaed abolitionist,” which was Mr. Cushing’s actual expression, is not very great, but neither the one nor the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy, who never could have made the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together, or mistaking Caleb Cushing’s relation to either.  Temper ran high at that moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one or two votes.  At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent crowd in the gallery, Henry heard the vote announced which gave Sumner the needed number.  Slipping under the arms of the bystanders, he ran home as hard as he could, and burst into the dining-room where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family.  He enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected; it was probably the proudest moment in the life of either.

The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers of boys and men in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm.  He knew few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were what he called pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of white silk ribbon round his own arm by way of showing that his friend Mr. Sumner was not wholly alone.  This little piece of bravado passed unnoticed; no one even cuffed his ears; but in later life he was a little puzzled to decide which symbol was the more correct.  No one then dreamed of four years’ war, but every one dreamed of secession.  The symbol for either might well be matter of doubt.

This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the political climax.  The boy, like a million other American boys, was a politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else.  He should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of George Washington, a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march.  On the contrary, he was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself shut out of Boston as though he were an exile; he never thought of himself as a Bostonian; he never looked about him in Boston, as boys commonly do wherever they are, to select the street they like best, the house they want to live in, the profession they mean to practise.  Always he felt himself somewhere else; perhaps in Washington with its social ease; perhaps in Europe; and he watched with vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the Cunard steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day might be, as though the steamers were offering to take him away, which was precisely what they were doing.

Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when Henry Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas were more than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathematical result of conditions old as history and fixed as fate —­ invariable sequence in man’s experience.  The only idea which would have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind.  This was the thought of going westward and growing up with the country.  That he was not in the least fitted for going West made no objection whatever, since he was much better fitted than most of the persons that went.  The convincing reason for staying in the East was that he had there every advantage over the West.  He could not go wrong.  The West must inevitably pay an enormous tribute to Boston and New York.  One’s position in the East was the best in the world for every purpose that could offer an object for going westward.  If ever in history men had been able to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway systems were already laid out.  Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.

At any other moment in human history, this education, including its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but quite the best.  Society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed.  Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself.  He had all he wanted.  He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more.  He finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his knowledge.  Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old.  Only on looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1.  He found himself unable to give a sure answer.  The calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.  The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed.  Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all.  He knew not even where or how to begin.