The Education of Henry Adams
That the public service must suffer was certain, but what were the
sufferings of the public service compared with the risks run by a young
mosquito--a private secretary--trying to buzz admiration in the ears of
each, and unaware that each would impatiently slap at him for belonging
to the other? Innocent and unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even
in a nursery, the private secretary courted both.
Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a professional
kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching Washington, was
that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for
his Secretary of State, and that Seward was to be the medium for
communicating his wishes to his followers. Every young man naturally
accepted the wishes of Mr. Lincoln as orders, the more because he could
see that the new President was likely to need all the help that several
million young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for the
first meeting with the new Secretary of State.
Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed
to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been Senator
since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had separated him from
the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry light of the first Free Soil
faith, the ways of New York politics Thurlow Weed had not won favor;
but the fierce heat which welded the Republican Party in 1856 melted
many such barriers, and when Mr. Adams came to Congress in December,
1859, Governor Seward instantly renewed his attitude of family friend,
became a daily intimate in the household, and lost no chance of forcing
his fresh ally to the front.
A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family,
and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as
carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one's future. A
slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose;
shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand
manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type--of western
New York--to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only
double--political and personal; but complex because the political had
become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, or
seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world he threw it off,
like a politician, for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a
free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was
nature and how much was mask, he was himself too simple a nature to
know. Underneath the surface he was conventional after the conventions
of western New York and Albany. Politicians thought it
unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams
thought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who,
though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed
that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he
generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not
require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual--almost singular
and quite eccentric--he had some means, unknown to other Senators, of
producing the effect of unselfishness.
Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be rigid, but
the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple enough when it
chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had been attacked in
succession as no better than political mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in
his standard history, went so far as to echo with approval the charge
that treachery was hereditary in the family. Any Adams had at least to
be thick-skinned, hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue
could supply, and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but
all must have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced to
choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done, as his
father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt thereby
earned his epithets.
The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the edge
of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his masters on
their various paths he made no pretence of guessing; even at that age
he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing motives; he knew only
his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood amazed, and his
innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-minded surprise. Critics
who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that
Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and
he never saw quite so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one
knows the story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and
the conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits of
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion made the
sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and concentrated education.
Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the Government,
they must make sure of a government to administer, and that this chance
depended on the action of Virginia. The whole ascendancy of the winter
wavered between the effort of the cotton States to drag Virginia out,
and the effort of the new President to keep Virginia in. Governor
Seward representing the Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr.
Adams took the lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary
knew, the party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty, of
dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open eyes. As
Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after Mr. Adams and
he had made their speeches: "If there's no secession now, you and I are
ruined."
They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries had
nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that side a
secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The sudden arrival
of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and the language of his
inaugural address, were the final term of the winter's tactics, and
closed the private secretary's interest in the matter forever. Perhaps
he felt, even then, a good deal more interest in the appearance of
another private secretary, of his own age, a young man named John Hay,
who lighted on LaFayette Square at the same moment. Friends are born,
not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From
the first slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay
as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4 when
Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new shoulders,
and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had tried to make
himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed to him portentous,
acting in secret as newspaper correspondent, cultivating a large
acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms where the simple,
old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even in the atmosphere of
conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to nothing for education,
because no one could teach; all were as ignorant as himself; none knew
what should be done, or how to do it; all were trying to learn and were
more bent on asking than on answering questions. The mass of ignorance
in Washington was lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top
to bottom, broke down.
From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military figure
that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked it, or was
it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young Adams been told
that his life was to hang on the correctness of his estimate of the new
President, he would have lost. He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the
melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked
anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a
plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently
worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither
self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the
same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that
tormented a private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought,
as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new
President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.
As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in March
were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who thought they
knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.
Education was matter of life and death, but all the education in the
world would have helped nothing. Only one man in Adams's reach seemed
to him supremely fitted by knowledge and experience to be an adviser
and friend. This was Senator Sumner; and there, in fact, the young
man's education began; there it ended.
Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In the
effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked
much to know whether he could have helped it. He had necessarily
followed Seward and his father; he took for granted that his business
was obedience, discipline, and silence; he supposed the party to
require it, and that the crisis overruled all personal doubts. He was
thunderstruck to learn that Senator Sumner privately denounced the
course, regarded Mr. Adams as betraying the principles of his life, and
broke off relations with his family.
Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest
lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that
permanently warp the mind. He cared little or nothing about the point
in discussion; he was even willing to admit that Sumner might be right,
though in all great emergencies he commonly found that every one was
more or less wrong; he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for
political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but
the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life
lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
instinct, with out waiting further experiment--as he took for granted
that arsenic poisoned--the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.
On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or afterwards,
but his education--for good or bad--made an enormous stride. One has to
deal with all sorts of unexpected morals in life, and, at this moment,
he was looking at hundreds of Southern gentlemen who believed
themselves singularly honest, but who seemed to him engaged in the
plainest breach of faith and the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they
did not disturb his education. History told of little else; and not one
rebel defection--not even Robert E. Lee's--cost young Adams a personal