The Education of Henry Adams
exactly light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters
in England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle even
Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed as
enemies of order,--anarchists,--and anarchists they were if hatred of
the so-called established orders made them so. About them was no sort
of political timidity. They took bluntly the side of the Union against
Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers to London society, they were at
home in the American Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking
always with reckless freedom. Cobden was the milder and more
persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to approach; but the private
secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them
talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
House.
With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a little
ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather companions. The
old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an
annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the
most valuable friends the Minister found, both politically and
socially, and the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private
secretary shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and
never forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret
which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it
was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his
point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in
that respect the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary
had to admit that though at other periods of life he was sufficiently
and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single
occasion during this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either men
or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick
Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House
almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent Americanism created a
certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderley whose house was one of
the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was
always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary
intimacies. Sir Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which
young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close
alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors after the death
of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary occasionally saw a
face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind, but silently
waited the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to
his father and mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and
society was futile. He meant to go home.
CHAPTER IX
FOES OR FRIENDS (1862)
OF the year 1862 Henry Adams could never think without a
shudder. The war alone did not greatly distress him; already in his
short life he was used to seeing people wade in blood, and he could
plainly discern in history, that man from the beginning had found his
chief amusement in bloodshed; but the ferocious joy of destruction at
its best requires that one should kill what one hates, and young Adams
neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends the rebels, while he
wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth. Never could
any good come from that besotted race! He was feebly trying to save his
own life. Every day the British Government deliberately crowded him one
step further into the grave. He could see it; the Legation knew it; no
one doubted it; no one thought of questioning it. The Trent Affair
showed where Palmerston and Russell stood. The escape of the rebel
cruisers from Liverpool was not, in a young man's eyes, the sign of
hesitation, but the proof of their fixed intention to intervene. Lord
Russell's replies to Mr. Adams's notes were discourteous in their
indifference, and, to an irritable young private secretary of
twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard of truth. Whatever forms
of phrase were usual in public to modify the harshness of invective, in
private no political opponent in England, and few political friends,
hesitated to say brutally of Lord John Russell that he lied. This was
no great reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the
intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that
Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant
did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was hideous and
unendurable.
The Minister, no doubt, endured it, but he had support and
consideration, while his son had nothing to think about but his friends
who were mostly dying under McClellan in the swamps about Richmond, or
his enemies who were exulting in Pall Mall. He bore it as well as he
could till midsummer, but, when the story of the second Bull Run
appeared, he could bear it no longer, and after a sleepless night,
walking up and down his room without reflecting that his father was
beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home into
the army. His mother seemed to be less impressed by the announcement
than by the walking over her head, which was so unlike her as to
surprise her son. His father, too, received the announcement quietly.
No doubt they expected it, and had taken their measures in advance. In
those days, parents got used to all sorts of announcements from their
children. Mr. Adams took his son's defection as quietly as he took Bull
Run; but his son never got the chance to go. He found obstacles
constantly rising in his path. The remonstrances of his brother
Charles, who was himself in the Army of the Potomac, and whose opinion
had always the greatest weight with Henry, had much to do with delaying
action; but he felt, of his own accord, that if he deserted his post in
London, and found the Capuan comforts he expected in Virginia where he
would have only bullets to wound him, he would never forgive himself
for leaving his father and mother alone to be devoured by the wild
beasts of the British amphitheatre. This reflection might not have
stopped him, but his father's suggestion was decisive. The Minister
pointed out that it was too late for him to take part in the actual
campaign, and that long before next spring they would all go home
together.
The young man had copied too many affidavits about rebel
cruisers to miss the point of this argument, so he sat down again to
copy some more. Consul Dudley at Liverpool provided a continuous
supply. Properly, the affidavits were no business of the private
secretary, but practically the private secretary did a second
secretary's work, and was glad to do it, if it would save Mr. Seward
the trouble of sending more secretaries of his own selection to help
the Minister. The work was nothing, and no one ever complained of it;
not even Moran, the Secretary of Legation after the departure of
Charley Wilson, though he might sit up all night to copy. Not the work,
but the play exhausted. The effort of facing a hostile society was bad
enough, but that of facing friends was worse. After terrific disasters
like the seven days before Richmond and the second Bull Run, friends
needed support; a tone of bluff would have been fatal, for the average
mind sees quickest through a bluff; nothing answers but candor; yet
private secretaries never feel candid, however much they feel the
reverse, and therefore they must affect candor; not always a simple act
when one is exasperated, furious, bitter, and choking with tears over
the blunders and incapacity of one's Government. If one shed tears,
they must be shed on one's pillow. Least of all, must one throw extra
strain on the Minister, who had all he could carry without being
fretted in his family. One must read one's Times every morning over
one's muffin without reading aloud--"Another disastrous Federal
Defeat"; and one might not even indulge in harmless profanity.
Self-restraint among friends required much more effort than keeping a
quiet face before enemies. Great men were the worst blunderers. One day
the private secretary smiled, when standing with the crowd in the
throne-room while the endless procession made bows to the royal family,
at hearing, behind his shoulder, one Cabinet Minister remark gaily to
another: "So the Federals have got another licking!" The point of the
remark was its truth. Even a private secretary had learned to control
his tones and guard his features and betray no joy over the "lickings"
of an enemy--in the enemy's presence.
London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial;
it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham
Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more
devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men, English
society seemed demented. Defence was useless; explanation was vain; one
could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's best friends were as
unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality
and Seward's ferocity became a dogma of popular faith. The last time
Henry Adams saw Thackeray, before his sudden death at Christmas in
1863, was in entering the house of Sir Henry Holland for an evening
reception. Thackeray was pulling on his coat downstairs, laughing
because, in his usual blind way, he had stumbled into the wrong house
and not found it out till he shook hands with old Sir Henry, whom he
knew very well, but who was not the host he expected. Then his tone
changed as he spoke of his--and Adams's--friend, Mrs. Frank Hampton, of
South Carolina, whom he had loved as Sally Baxter and painted as Ethel
Newcome. Though he had never quite forgiven her marriage, his warmth of
feeling revived when he heard that she had died of consumption at
Columbia while her parents and sister were refused permission to pass
through the lines to see her. In speaking of it, Thackeray's voice
trembled and his eyes filled with tears. The coarse cruelty of Lincoln
and his hirelings was notorious. He never doubted that the Federals
made a business of harrowing the tenderest feelings of
women--particularly of women--in order to punish their opponents. On
quite insufficient evidence he burst into violent reproach. Had Adams
carried in his pocket the proofs that the reproach was unjust, he would
have gained nothing by showing them. At that moment Thackeray, and all
London society with him, needed the nervous relief of expressing
emotion; for if Mr. Lincoln was not what they said he--was what were
they?
For like reason, the members of the Legation kept silence, even
in private, under the boorish Scotch jibes of Carlyle. If Carlyle was
wrong, his diatribes would give his true measure, and this measure
would be a low one, for Carlyle was not likely to be more sincere or
more sound in one thought than in another. The proof that a philosopher
does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers