The Education of Henry Adams
pang; but Sumner's struck home.
This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to him
hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March, 1861,
offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The
process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds,
one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing. Washington was
a dismal school. Even before the traitors had flown, the vultures
descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and tore the
carrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of fat and
lean, on the very steps of the White House. Not a man there knew what
his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception,
Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the
public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to
the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such
as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand
million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country
could recover its balance and movement. Henry was a helpless victim,
and, like all the rest, he could only wait for he knew not what, to
send him he knew not where.
With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return with his
father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with childlike
docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of Horace Gray in Court
Street, to begin again: "My Lords and Gentlemen"; dozing after a two
o'clock dinner, or waking to discuss politics with the future Justice.
There, in ordinary times, he would have remained for life, his attempt
at education in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.
CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister to
England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf.
As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before:
Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law
prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as
path of education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without
education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked
millions they would have got no answers. No one could help. Looking
back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could
only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of
his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared
from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word.
He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in
his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least
no public official, like the thousands of improvised secretaries and
generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President.
He was not a vulture of carrion--patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship; he
did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons
which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could have supplied
proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most
decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a private
secretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might
well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of
possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well
as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs
of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than Senator
Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to
give him. In the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous
risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate.
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary of State
knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the
editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago
Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as Charley Wilson, who
had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the Minister.
The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard
worker, but socially useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find
efficient help; perhaps he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too
much of Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by
giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote letters, it was
not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was
engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was
no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into
service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred
thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all
helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves
of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before
Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly
enough, with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with
few signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the
Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were
for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private
secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at
East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of
education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly
broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without
defence--or arms.
The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1,
1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if
the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in
a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone. Had Secretary
Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and
four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained
secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family
and the whole peerage, the private secretary would have been cabin-boy
still, with the extra burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate
person in the party, having for master only his father who never
fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American
diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered
how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778,
on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John
Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had
hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809,
had sailed for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope
with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of
an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He
thought it natural that the Government should send him out as an
adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend
on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no
friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he asked none.
He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and
grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty
view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys,
and when, in time, the young man realized what had happened, he felt it
as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of
adventurer, and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the
first time America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order.
Her representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861,
the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose
stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of
Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood with
their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they
sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary
Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clay in the
diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than the
private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though
possibly some rivals. No young man, not in Government pay, could be
asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was
notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government;
fewest of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they might
grumble or not; no one listened.
Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never
labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and
it affected him for life. The habit of reticence--of talking without
meaning--is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already
an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went
instantly up to London: a family of early Christian martyrs about to be
flung into an arena of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius
Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar
Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only
evident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already
arranged the ceremony.
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair
of history and their errors concern historians. The errors of a private
secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his
education. He thought on May 12 that he was going to a friendly
Government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had
been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief effort
of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into
intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His
father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent
obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself,
he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not