The Education of Henry Adams

THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)

Minister Adams troubled himself little about what he did not see of an enemy.  His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by seeing too much.  Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his own.  Earl Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them; and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams.  Apart from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or false mattered less, because, in either case, the American Legation could act only as though he were false.  Had the Minister known Russell’s determined effort to betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely used stronger expressions than he did in 1863.  Russell must have been greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier’s hint of collusion with the rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation.  As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American Minister as serious.  He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain language for redress.  Perhaps Russell’s mind was naturally slow to understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it; this was one of the points that greatly interested a student, but young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only in part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell’s generation were mostly senile from youth.  They had never got beyond 1815 Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case.  Their senility was congenital, like Gladstone’s Oxford training and High Church illusions, which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment.  Russell could not conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams from the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere confusion and helplessness.

Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be the same.  Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between Russell and the rebels.  He could not even stop at criminal negligence.  If, by an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil enough to admit that the escape of the Alabama had been due to criminal negligence, he could make no such concession in regard to the ironclad rams which the Lairds were building; for no one could be so simple as to believe that two armored ships-of-war could be built publicly, under the eyes of the Government, and go to sea like the Alabama, without active and incessant collusion.  The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of assumed ignorance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would have to tear it off.  Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.

As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself for action.  A campaign more beautiful —­ better suited for training the mind of a youth eager for training —­ has not often unrolled itself for study, from the beginning, before a young man perched in so commanding a position.  Very slowly, indeed, after two years of solitude, one began to feel the first faint flush of new and imperial life.  One was twenty-five years old, and quite ready to assert it; some of one’s friends were wearing stars on their collars; some had won stars of a more enduring kind.  At moments one’s breath came quick.  One began to dream the sensation of wielding unmeasured power.  The sense came, like vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed, doubtful, shy.  With an intensity more painful than that of any Shakespearean drama, men’s eyes were fastened on the armies in the field.  Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of what might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel that, somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking shape; that it was massed and guided as it had not been before.  Men seemed to have learned their business —­ at a cost that ruined —­ and perhaps too late.  A private secretary knew better than most people how much of the new power was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to lead.  The student could only study.

Life never could know more than a single such climax.  In that form, education reached its limits.  As the first great blows began to fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with incredulous hope.  As the huge masses struck, one after another, with the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world shivered.  Such development of power was unknown.  The magnificent resistance and the return shocks heightened the suspense.  During the July days Londoners were stupid with unbelief.  They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.

An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for one’s mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at home; but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders.  One had ample time to watch the process, and had even a little time to gloat over the repayment of old scores.  News of Vicksburg and Gettysburg reached London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened that Henry Adams was asked for that evening to some small reception at the house of Monckton Milnes.  He went early in order to exchange a word or two of congratulation before the rooms should fill, and on arriving he found only the ladies in the drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting over their wine.  Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it, Delane of the Times came first.  When Milnes caught sight of his young American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks.  Men of later birth who knew too little to realize the passions of 1863 —­ backed by those of 1813 —­ and reenforced by those of 1763 —­ might conceive that such publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, for the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of himself.  He was thinking of Delane, whose eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes’s embrace.  Delane probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes’s foolery; he had never heard of young Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind of the American Minister’s son, for the British mind is the slowest of all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane’s thick cortex of fixed ideas.  Even if he had read Adams’s thought, he would have felt for it only the usual amused British contempt for all that he had not been taught at school.  It needed a whole generation for the Times to reach Milnes’s standpoint.

Had the Minister’s son carried out the thought, he would surely have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured him that he regarded his own personal score as cleared off —­ sufficiently settled, then and there —­ because his father had assumed the debt, and was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself.  “You come next!” would have been the friendly warning.  For nearly a year the private secretary had watched the board arranging itself for the collision between the Legation and Delane who stood behind the Palmerston Ministry.  Mr. Adams had been steadily strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view of the final struggle.  The situation had changed since the Trent Affair.  The work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly complete.  No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and had as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.  Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to press assistance on the Minister to England.  For the Legation not an additional clerk was offered or asked.  The Secretary, the Assistant Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the Minister did not do.  A clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work as well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk; without express authority he could admit no one into the Legation; he strained a point already by admitting his son.  Congress and its committees were the proper judges of what was best for the public service, and if the arrangement seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private secretary who profited by it more than they did.  A great staff would have suppressed him.  The whole Legation was a sort of improvised, volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest.  He was rather better off than the rest, because he was invisible and unknown.  Better or worse, he did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made any remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that none would have received a moment’s attention.

If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied with Secretary Seward.  Without appropriations for the regular service, he had done great things for its support.  If the Minister had no secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-organized press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies permeating all classes.  All he needed was a victory in the field, and Secretary Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy.  Vicksburg and Gettysburg cleared the board, and, at the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was ready to deal with Earl Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Delane, or any one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity of the case, was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.

Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was history, and had nothing to do with education.  The private secretary copied the notes into his private books, and that was all the share he had in the matter, except to talk in private.

No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for skirmishing.  All that a secretary could hope to gain from the affair was experience and knowledge of politics.  He had a chance to measure the motive forces of men; their qualities of character; their foresight; their tenacity of purpose.

In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the rams.  Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable.  Had his efforts for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation in September, 1863 the Minister must surely have admitted that Russell had, from the first, meant to force his plan of intervention on his colleagues.  Every separate step since April, 1861, led to this final coercion.  Although Russell’s hostile activity of 1862 was still secret —­ and remained secret for some five-and-twenty years —­ his animus seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel armaments.  Little by little, Minister Adams lost hope.  With loss of hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous sentence:  “It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war!”

What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education.  Had his father ordered him to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the idea as he grasped it, he would have continued thus:—­

“It would be superfluous:  1st.  Because Earl Russell not only knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it is the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying action. 3d.  Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that ‘this is war,’ but is pointing it out to the world, to complete the record.”

This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced that a state of war existed.  To his copying eye, as clerk, the words, though on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety, merely stated a fact, without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric.  The fact had to be stated in order to make clear the issue.  The war was Russell’s war—­Adams only accepted it.

Russell’s reply to this note of September 5 reached the Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries that “instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool.”  The members of the modest Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had accepted the capitulation of Vicksburg.  The private secretary conceived that, as Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of the battle.  Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and death like this; and though the private secretary should covet and attain every office in the gift of President or people, he would never again find education to compare with the life-and-death alternative of this two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, as it had racked and thumb-screwed him in its shifting phases; but its practical value as education turned on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men and their forces.  He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because they represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes.  As he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably, even vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution.  Then he had met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering to the last possible instant, had been beaten.  Lord North and George Canning had a like experience.  This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he ever knew, it was also the idea of his Government.  For once, the volunteer secretary was satisfied with his Government.  Commonly the self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive.  It was well planned, well prepared, and well executed.  He could never discover a mistake in it.  Possibly he was biassed by personal interest, but his chief reason for trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself to be one of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it.  When others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were talking about, and could not be taught without living over again the London life of 1862.  To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or Palmerston or Gladstone.  They, too, had shown power, patience and steadiness of purpose.  They had persisted for two years and a half in their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at last only in the jaws of war.  After a long and desperate struggle, the American Minister had trumped their best card and won the game.

Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to see whether he could detect error on either side.  He found none.  At every stage the steps were both probable and proved.  All the more he was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with growing energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of Adams’s whole contention, that from the first he meant to break up the Union.  Russell affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort; that he had meant nothing at all; that he meant to do right; that he did not know what he meant.  Driven from one defence after another, he pleaded at last, like Gladstone, that he had no defence.  Concealing all he could conceal —­ burying in profound secrecy his attempt to break up the Union in the autumn of 1862 —­ he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good faith.  What was worse for the private secretary, to the total derision and despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result of combined practice, experience, and theory —­ he proved it.

Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this admission really favored him.  Not until long after Earl Russell’s death was the question reopened.  Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889.  During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872, his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he had been compelled to see England pay more than L3,000,000 penalty for his errors.  On the other hand, he brought forward —­ or his biographer for him —­ evidence tending to prove that he was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in spite of appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or policy, as far as concerned the rebels.  He had stood alone, as was his nature.  Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.

In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone’s; but this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had made a certain theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell up against himself; to show that he had foresight and persistence of which he was unaware.  The effort became hopeless when the biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could unravel the skein.

Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention, on the lines marked out by Russell’s letter to Palmerston from Gotha, 17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Gladstone’s plea in excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same effort, that it was “the most singular and palpable error,” “the least excusable,” “a mistake of incredible grossness,” which passed defence; but while Gladstone threw himself on the mercy of the public for his speech, he attempted no excuse for Lord Russell who led him into the “incredible grossness” of announcing the Foreign Secretary’s intent.  Gladstone’s offence, “singular and palpable,” was not the speech alone, but its cause —­ the policy that inspired the speech.  “I weakly supposed . . .  I really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness.”  Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the sort.  Neither he nor Palmerston “most strangely believed” in any proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon delude himself with philanthropy.  Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up policy, speech, motives, and persons, as though he were trying to confuse chiefly himself.

There Gladstone’s activity seems to have stopped.  He did not reappear in the matter of the rams.  The rebel influence shrank in 1863, as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on September 1 that he could not interfere in any way with those vessels, and thereby brought on himself Mr. Adams’s declaration of war on September 5.  A student held that, in this refusal, he was merely following his policy of September, 1862, and of every step he had taken since 1861.

The student was wrong.  Russell proved that he had been feeble, timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest.  The evidence is convincing.  The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known opinion of the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a jury would not convict.  Minister Adams replied that, in this case, the statute should be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise of the political power.  Bethell rejoined that this would be a violation of neutrality; one must preserve the status quo.  Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had he meant to interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of the statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders to go on till the ships were ready for sea.  Then, on September 3, two days before Mr. Adams’s “superfluous” letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston begging for help; “The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted for the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious,” —­ he began, and this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence to Lord Palmerston, his chief, calling “the conduct” of the rebel agents “suspicious” when no one else in Europe or America felt any suspicion about it, because the whole question turned not on the rams, but on the technical scope of the Foreign Enlistment Act, —­ “that I have thought it necessary to direct that they should be detained,” not, of course, under the statute, but on the ground urged by the American Minister, of international obligation above the statute.  “The Solicitor General has been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy though not of strict law.  We shall thus test the law, and, if we have to pay damages, we have satisfied the opinion which prevails here as well as in America that that kind of neutral hostility should not be allowed to go on without some attempt to stop it.”

For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent’s ground, after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned by Russell’s old attacks on himself, Palmerston met the appeal with wonderful loyalty.  “On consulting the law officers he found that there was no lawful ground for meddling with the ironclads,” or, in unprofessional language, that he could trust neither his law officers nor a Liverpool jury; and therefore he suggested buying the ships for the British Navy.  As proof of “criminal negligence” in the past, this suggestion seemed decisive, but Russell, by this time, was floundering in other troubles of negligence, for he had neglected to notify the American Minister.  He should have done so at once, on September 3.  Instead he waited till September 4, and then merely said that the matter was under “serious and anxious consideration.”  This note did not reach the Legation till three o’clock on the afternoon of September 5 —­ after the “superfluous” declaration of war had been sent.  Thus, Lord Russell had sacrificed the Lairds:  had cost his Ministry the price of two ironclads, besides the Alabama Claims —­ say, in round numbers, twenty million dollars —­ and had put himself in the position of appearing to yield only to a threat of war.  Finally he wrote to the Admiralty a letter which, from the American point of view, would have sounded youthful from an Eton schoolboy:  —­

September 14, 1863. 
  My dear duke:  —­

    It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads
  building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the
  blockade.  They belong to Monsieur Bravay of Paris.  If you will
  offer to buy them on the part of the Admiralty you will get
  money’s worth if he accepts your offer; and if he does not, it
  will be presumptive proof that they are already bought by the
  Confederates.  I should state that we have suggested to the
  Turkish Government to buy them; but you can easily settle that
  matter with the Turks. . . .

The hilarity of the secretaries in Portland Place would have been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private secretary’s diplomatic education forty years after he had supposed it complete.  They made a picture different from anything he had conceived and rendered worthless his whole painful diplomatic experience.

To reconstruct, when past sixty, an education useful for any practical purpose, is no practical problem, and Adams saw no use in attacking it as only theoretical.  He no longer cared whether he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much of it as he wanted; but he found in the “Life of Gladstone” (II, 464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for curious thought.  “I always hold,” said Mr. Gladstone, “that politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend”; and he added, by way of strengthening it:  “For my own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or two.”

  Earl Russell was certainly not one of the two.

Henry Adams thought he also had understood one or two; but the American type was more familiar.  Perhaps this was the sufficient result of his diplomatic education; it seemed to be the whole.