The Education of Henry Adams
thus crudely, the idea sounds derisive; but, as a matter of fact,
several thousand Americans passed much of their time there on this
understanding. They sought to take share in every function that was
open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because they
were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious
education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms,
without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better
in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two
sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and
the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, and the Varietes and
the Gymnase; for the Brohans and Bressant, Rose Cheri and Gil Perez,
and other lights of the stage. His friends were good to him. Life was
amusing. Paris rapidly became familiar. In a month or six weeks he
forgot even to disapprove of it; but he studied nothing, entered no
society, and made no acquaintance. Accidental education went far in
Paris, and one picked up a deal of knowledge that might become useful;
perhaps, after all, the three months passed there might serve better
purpose than the twenty-one months passed elsewhere; but he did not
intend it--did not think it--and looked at it as a momentary and
frivolous vacation before going home to fit himself for life.
Therewith, after staying as long as he could and spending all the money
he dared, he started with mixed emotions but no education, for home.
CHAPTER VII
TREASON (1860-1861)
WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune or
fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known
antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of law and to vote
for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.
He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played
with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The simile is none
too strong. Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or
intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority
wanted to go on with their occupations in peace. Not one, however
clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly a few Southern
loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; but none
planned it.
As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite
heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away. The
prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked a malicious
question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted at some shade of
prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as private secretary
during the winter in Washington, as though any young man who could
afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could afford to read
Blackstone for another winter without a master. The young man was
beyond satire, and asked only a pretext for throwing all education to
the east wind. November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been
from earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does the
uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail wreck of
the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November seemed temperate
before the chill of a Boston January.
This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although no one
believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the Republicans
organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a form military in
all things except weapons. Henry reached home in time to see the last
of these processions, stretching in ranks of torches along the
hillside, file down through the November night; to the Old House, where
Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress, received them, and, let them
pretend what they liked, their air was not that of innocence.
Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked, and
started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed since his
last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and 1850, so in
1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same
unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads. The
Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that
went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but
right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so
little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more,
and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly
hostile, so far as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in
Philadelphia in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in
Washington.
Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61,
no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all the crowd
swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely among the
most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the knowledge
possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater than his own. Never
in a long life did he seek to master a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner
was given to saying after Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus
regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams
found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both
unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly
unbalanced in mind--fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination--haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent morbid
excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of
the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided,
ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a
close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of
wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young
student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power
worked when held by inadequate hands.
This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's
chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance, and he stood a
living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams had come for a new
education, and the school was seriously, honestly, taken by most of the
world, including Europe, as proper for the purpose, although the Sioux
Indians would have taught less mischief. From such contradictions among
intelligent people, what was a young man to learn?
He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach or
to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too
glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education of a
reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson from the Confederate
school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole field
of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed
by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn nothing but bad
temper, bad manners, poker, and treason.
Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings. Republican
houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams aimed to create a
social centre for New Englanders. They took a house on I Street,
looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out towards Georgetown--the
Markoe house--and there the private secretary began to learn his social
duties, for the political were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies
of the Capitol. He had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly,
but he knew of no one who knew more.
The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the boy's
oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady men,
well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue--men whom
one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or not, bore the
stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one exception, and
perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the New Englander's
strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no
more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he
repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. The
character, with its force or feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to
the core; one was it--had been run in the same mould.
There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to
Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men
born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to Henry J. Raymond,
who came to view the field for the New York Times, and who was a man of
the world. The average Congressman was civil enough, but had nothing to
ask except offices, and nothing to offer but the views of his district.
The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say,
being always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
own importance.
Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence of
only two men--Sumner and Seward.
Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and, after
his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite recovered its tone;
but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary existence as Senator had
most to do with his development. No man, however strong, can serve ten
years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything
else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a
certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the
subject. Yet even among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from
the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay,
or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
Shakespearian and bouffe--as Godkin used to call it--like Malvolio.
Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the merit
of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly thought, as Webster
had thought before him, that his great services and sacrifices, his
superiority in education, his oratorical power, his political
experience, his representative character at the head of the whole New
England contingent, and, above all, his knowledge of the world, made
him the most important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever
saturated himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the
body.
Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator
seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom
likes to be told of it. Even the greatest Senators seemed to inspire
little personal affection in each other, and betrayed none at all.
Sumner had a number of rivals who held his judgment in no high esteem,
and one of these was Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked
each other by instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was
created only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of either.