The Education of Henry Adams

FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)

The old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the young New Englander was sometimes human.  Judge Hoar brought his son Sam to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well.  He taught Adams the charm of Washington spring.  Education for education, none ever compared with the delight of this.  The Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty.  Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains.  Here and there a negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel.  The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature.  The soft, full outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom.  The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental.  No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May.  He loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human.  He could not leave it, but loitered on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer village about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance could not be questioned.  Few Americans were so poor as to question them.

In spite of the fatal deception —­ or undeception —­ about Grant’s political character, Adams’s first winter in Washington had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change.  He loved it too much to question its value.  What did he know about its value, or what did any one know?  His father knew more about it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused to find that his father, whose recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for Washington much the same sentimental weakness, and described the society about President Monroe much as his son felt the society about President Johnson.  He feared its effect on young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.

Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston.  He saw Boutwells at every counter.  He found a personal grief in every tree.  Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining perfection.  Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a success.  One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought about the last was that it should have been so modern.  Adams, in his splenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst on Boston.  The climate made eternal war on society, and sex was a species of crime.  The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees.  Of course he was in the wrong.  The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his time.  Boston was trying to do the same thing.  Everywhere, except in Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object.  Every one complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there were no surroundings to complain of.  Boston kept its head better than its neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even to Adams’s confusion.

Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over, and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant’s character showed themselves.  They were startling —­ astounding —­ terrifying.  The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up —­ at least so far as to make it intelligible to Adams.  Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner gold without interference from the Government.  He took a number of precautions, which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture.  Any criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances which did satisfy him.  The plea was professionally inadmissible.

This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him.  To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent.  Charles and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences.  They risked something; no one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.

The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway was a task that might have given months of labor to the most efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with.  Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up.  The surface was in full view.  They had no trouble in Wall Street, and they paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace; but the New York side of the story helped Henry little.  He needed to penetrate the political mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet.  At first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place.  He soon knew all that was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by the Government.

Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or historians, for it lies always under suspicion.  Here was a mystery, and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any mystery existed.  All Adams’s great friends —­ Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings —­ were precisely the persons most mystified.  They knew less than Adams did; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their relations with the White House and the Treasury were not confidential.  No one volunteered advice.  No one offered suggestion.  One got no light, even from the press, although press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with their usual cynical frankness.  The Congressional Committee took a quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.  Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where any member of the Administration became visible.  Every one dreaded to press inquiry.  Adams himself feared finding out too much.  He found out too much already, when he saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching his net over Grant’s closest surroundings, and that Boutwell’s incompetence was the bottom of Gould’s calculation.  With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and double.  All this was wildly exciting to Adams.  That Grant should have fallen, within six months, into such a morass —­ or should have let Boutwell drop him into it —­ rendered the outlook for the next four years —­ probably eight —­ possibly twelve —­ mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform.  The country might outlive it, but not he.  The worst scandals of the eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption.  Only six months before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping the stables of American society clear of the endless corruption which his second Washington was quite certain to breed.

By vigorously shutting one’s eyes, as though one were an Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar Wall Street trap, into which, according to one’s point of view Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant.  One could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute American mind —­ still less the complex Jew —­ could ever have accustomed itself to the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant’s intelligence; and perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims they both were.  The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion, cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous in a boarding-school of girls.  For satirists or comedians, the study was rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with happy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of London noticed with horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator and politician never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.  Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives.  Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.  Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except to laugh too.

Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it might be to the public.  Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it.  Any one in power above him can extinguish the chance.  He is horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards.  One dull administration can rapidly drive out every active subordinate.  At Washington, in 1869-70, every intelligent man about the Government prepared to go.  The people would have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on their railroads and foundries.  They were strong enough to carry even their politics.  Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.

The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it, alone.  What he did there, no one knew.  His colleagues asked him in vain.  Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest.  The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist.  Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.

Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to serve.  He wanted no better than to serve them.  Opposition was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common with any Adams, and had never shown any warm interest about them except to drive them from public life.  If Mr. Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any newspaper-man could ask.  At all events, Adams could cling to this last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press.  He never once thought of his disaster between Seward and Sumner in 1861.  Such an accident could not occur again.  Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to be safe enough for support.  No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both his friends.

This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.  Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also to force on the Department.  This was not all.  Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished.  Besides the Department of State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and, finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a policy of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man ever approved.  For his life, Adams could not learn where to place himself among all these forces.  Officially he would have followed the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the Secretary.  Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant, but he asserted as yet no policy of his own.  As for Grant’s policy, Adams never had a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he did know, he was ready to give it ardent support.  The difficulty came only when he heard Sumner’s views, which, as he had reason to know, were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.

Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed.  To his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and ruined Grant’s policy.  Then he listened with incredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the United States.

Adams did not then know —­ in fact, he never knew, or could find any one to tell him —­ what was going on behind the doors of the White House.  He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much more than he.  The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.  President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to divine.  One point alone seemed clear to a man —­ no longer so very young —­ who had lately come from a seven years’ residence in London.  He thought he knew as much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the more perplexity to Mr. Sumner’s talk, because it opened the gravest doubts of Sumner’s sanity.  If war was his object, and Canada were worth it, Sumner’s scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled.  On the point of fact, Adams was as peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it.  When at last Mr. Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.  Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant.  A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy.  Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations.  As a party manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were unknown to him.

Between these great forces, where was the Administration and how was one to support it?  One must first find it, and even then it was not easily caught.  Grant’s simplicity was more disconcerting than the complexity of a Talleyrand.  Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle.  Adams repeated the story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was denied.  Adams saw no reason why it should be denied.  Grant had as good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a part of it.  Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less material than hair —­ on clothes, for example, according to Mr. Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz —­ and nine men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes.  In truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner.  For the same reason he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance.  Even Fish could not be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant’s imagination.

The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish and Sumner, worried him even more.  Of all members of the Cabinet, the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating was Attorney General Hoar.  The Legal Tender decision, which had been the first stumbling-block to Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened to become something more serious than a block; it fell on one’s head like a plaster ceiling, and could not be escaped.  The impending battle between Fish and Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between Hoar and Chief Justice Chase.  Adams had come to Washington hoping to support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he never dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the Supreme Court.  Although, step by step, he had been driven, like the rest of the world, to admit that American society had outgrown most of its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme Court, much as a churchman clings to his bishops, because they are his only symbol of unity; his last rag of Right.  Between the Executive and the Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they were at the mercy of Power.  They had created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power, and it was little enough protection at best.  Adams wanted to save the independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.

Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender clause in 1861.  Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with reform, saved from Boutwell’s decree of banishment such reformers as he could find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census of 1870.  Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the North American in order to devote himself to the Census.  He gave Adams his notes, and Adams completed the article.

He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.  He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone.  If the banks and bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted “intrinsic” value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic.  He had no notion of attacking or defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and the Court.  Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time the Act was passed.  With the help of the Chief Justice’s recollections, Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the North American.  Its ferocity was Walker’s, for Adams never cared to abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams’s restraint.  The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of Spaulding’s contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with conviction.  The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased.  The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no sign.  The article had enough historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not its point in education.  The point was that, in spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into opposition.  Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.

Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams went on, drifting further and further from the Administration.  He did this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself.  Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline.  The New York Tribune was one of the most criminal.  Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the dissolution of temper, and the Senate Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism that passed ridicule.  Senators quarrelled with each other, and no one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive and threw every Department into confusion.  Among others they quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.

That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at Washington, should be the first victims of Grant’s lax rule, must have had some meaning for Adams’s education, if Adams could only have understood what it was.  He studied, but failed.  Sympathy with him was not their weakness.  Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could hope as little from them as from Boutwell.  So far from inviting attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.  Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for.  The lesson of education was not there.  The selfishness of politics was the earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to learn from its study; but the situation struck him as curious —­ so curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon it.  His four most powerful friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the judiciary as prizes!  What value had the fight in education?

Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander.  The stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value?  The statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could produce.  They trod with lofty contempt on other people’s jobs, especially when there was good in them.  Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost the country a civil war.  This painful moral doubt worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected the whole field of politics for twenty years.  The newspapers discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield, and Blaine.  If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs, and some of Adams’s best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals.  Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially following the strong.  In spite of all such criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the question; until young men were forced to see that either some new standard must be created, or none could be upheld.  The moral law had expired —­ like the Constitution.

Grant’s administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency, but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare, were ruined in saying so.  The world cared little for decency.  What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.  Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed.  His friends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to fisticuffs.  He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.

The result was a review of the Session for the July North American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he had observed and all he had been told.  He thought it good history then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint.  As it happened, in the process of his devious education, this “Session” of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of the press.  As such, he stood by it.  He could have said no more, had he gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century.  The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.  Politicians had tacitly given it up.  Grant’s administration marked the avowal.  Nine-tenths of men’s political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out —­ to patch —­ or, in vulgar language, to tinker —­ the political machine as often as it broke down.  Such a system, or want of system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world —­ the clumsiest —­ the most inefficient

Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not guess.  Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most triumphant results of politics —­ to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even Mr. Sumner —­ he could not honestly say that such an education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything.  There were men, as yet standing on lower levels —­ clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine —­ who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the North American Review would not have admitted.  One asked doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn.  What kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the attainment of a working political system.  Society needed to reach it.  If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented.  An eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible.  Practical Americans laughed, and went their way.  Society paid them to be practical.  Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate them.  He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a college.  The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want of system, which took possession of the President.  Every hope or thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd.  No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.

All this was excessively amusing.  Adams never had been so busy, so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd.  He knew Congressmen by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen.  He wrote for his various organs all sorts of attacks and defences.  He enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner.  When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin called “the vast maternity” of nature showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.  Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.  They were, as a rule, less good company.  Adams astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage.  At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter’s and the steps of Ara Coeli.

Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London for the season.  He had finished his New York “Gold Conspiracy,” which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review.  It was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for publishing it in England.  The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise success.  London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and financially exposed.  The tactics suited him in another way, for any expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the attention in America that the same article would attract in the North American.  Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full.  Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any case, his pay was nothing.  Under the excitement of chase he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.