The Education of Henry Adams
perhaps the unanimity of opposition made the formal Cabinet
unnecessary; but it is certain that, within an hour or two before or
after this decision, "his lordship said [to the United States Minister]
that the policy of the Government was to adhere to a strict neutrality
and to leave this struggle to settle itself." When Mr. Adams, not
satisfied even with this positive assurance, pressed for a categorical
answer: "I asked him if I was to understand that policy as not now to
be changed; he said: Yes!"
John Morley's comment on this matter, in the "Life of
Gladstone," forty years afterwards, would have interested the Minister,
as well as his private secretary: "If this relation be accurate," said
Morley of a relation officially published at the time, and never
questioned, "then the Foreign Secretary did not construe strict
neutrality as excluding what diplomatists call good offices." For a
vital lesson in politics, Earl Russell's construction of neutrality
mattered little to the student, who asked only Russell's intent, and
cared only to know whether his construction had any other object than
to deceive the Minister.
In the grave one can afford to be lavish of charity, and
possibly Earl Russell may have been honestly glad to reassure his
personal friend Mr. Adams; but to one who is still in the world even if
not of it, doubts are as plenty as days. Earl Russell totally deceived
the private secretary, whatever he may have done to the Minister. The
policy of abstention was not settled on October 23. Only the next day,
October 24, Gladstone circulated a rejoinder to G. C. Lewis, insisting
on the duty of England, France, and Russia to intervene by
representing, "with moral authority and force, the opinion of the
civilized world upon the conditions of the case." Nothing had been
decided. By some means, scarcely accidental, the French Emperor was led
to think that his influence might turn the scale, and only ten days
after Russell's categorical "Yes!" Napoleon officially invited him to
say "No!" He was more than ready to do so. Another Cabinet meeting was
called for November 11, and this time Gladstone himself reports the
debate:
Nov. 11. We have had our Cabinet to-day and meet again
tomorrow. I am afraid we shall do little or nothing in the
business of America. But I will send you definite intelligence.
Both Lords Palmerston and Russell are right.
Nov. 12. The United States affair has ended and not well. Lord
Russell rather turned tail. He gave way without resolutely
fighting out his battle. However, though we decline for the
moment, the answer is put upon grounds and in terms which leave
the matter very open for the future.
Nov. 13. I think the French will make our answer about America
public; at least it is very possible. But I hope they may not
take it as a positive refusal, or at any rate that they may
themselves act in the matter. It will be clear that we concur
with them, that the war should cease. Palmerston gave to
Russell's proposal a feeble and half-hearted support.
Forty years afterwards, when every one except himself, who
looked on at this scene, was dead, the private secretary of 1862 read
these lines with stupor, and hurried to discuss them with John Hay, who
was more astounded than himself. All the world had been at
cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the situation, had
followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, had known none of the
facts. One would have done better to draw no conclusions at all. One's
diplomatic education was a long mistake.
These were the terms of this singular problem as they presented
themselves to the student of diplomacy in 1862: Palmerston, on
September 14, under the impression that the President was about to be
driven from Washington and the Army of the Potomac dispersed, suggested
to Russell that in such a case, intervention might be feasible. Russell
instantly answered that, in any case, he wanted to intervene and should
call a Cabinet for the purpose. Palmerston hesitated; Russell insisted;
Granville protested. Meanwhile the rebel army was defeated at Antietam,
September 17, and driven out of Maryland. Then Gladstone, October 7,
tried to force Palmerston's hand by treating the intervention as a fait
accompli. Russell assented, but Palmerston put up Sir George Cornewall
Lewis to contradict Gladstone and treated him sharply in the press, at
the very moment when Russell was calling a Cabinet to make Gladstone's
words good. On October 23, Russell assured Adams that no change in
policy was now proposed. On the same day he had proposed it, and was
voted down. Instantly Napoleon III appeared as the ally of Russell and
Gladstone with a proposition which had no sense except as a bribe to
Palmerston to replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence
on Europe, and to replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas,
if Palmerston would support France in Mexico. The young student of
diplomacy, knowing Palmerston, must have taken for granted that
Palmerston inspired this motion and would support it; knowing Russell
and his Whig antecedents, he would conceive that Russell must oppose
it; knowing Gladstone and his lofty principles, he would not doubt that
Gladstone violently denounced the scheme. If education was worth a
straw, this was the only arrangement of persons that a trained student
would imagine possible, and it was the arrangement actually assumed by
nine men out of ten, as history. In truth, each valuation was false.
Palmerston never showed favor to the scheme and gave it only "a feeble
and half-hearted support." Russell gave way without resolutely fighting
out "his battle." The only resolute, vehement, conscientious champion
of Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.
Other people could afford to laugh at a young man's blunders,
but to him the best part of life was thrown away if he learned such a
lesson wrong. Henry James had not yet taught the world to read a volume
for the pleasure of seeing the lights of his burning-glass turned on
alternate sides of the same figure. Psychological study was still
simple, and at worst--or at best--English character was never subtile.
Surely no one would believe that complexity was the trait that confused
the student of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone. Under a very strong
light human nature will always appear complex and full of
contradictions, but the British statesman would appear, on the whole,
among the least complex of men.
Complex these gentlemen were not. Disraeli alone might, by
contrast, be called complex, but Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
deceived only by their simplicity. Russell was the most interesting to
a young man because his conduct seemed most statesmanlike. Every act of
Russell, from April, 1861, to November, 1862, showed the clearest
determination to break up the Union. The only point in Russell's
character about which the student thought no doubt to be possible was
its want of good faith. It was thoroughly dishonest, but strong.
Habitually Russell said one thing and did another. He seemed
unconscious of his own contradictions even when his opponents pointed
them out, as they were much in the habit of doing, in the strongest
language. As the student watched him deal with the Civil War in
America, Russell alone showed persistence, even obstinacy, in a
definite determination, which he supported, as was necessary, by the
usual definite falsehoods. The young man did not complain of the
falsehoods; on the contrary, he was vain of his own insight in
detecting them; but he was wholly upset by the idea that Russell should
think himself true.
Young Adams thought Earl Russell a statesman of the old school,
clear about his objects and unscrupulous in his methods--dishonest but
strong. Russell ardently asserted that he had no objects, and that
though he might be weak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams
leaned to Russell personally and thought him true, but officially, in
practice, treated him as false. Punch, before 1862, commonly drew
Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and afterwards as prematurely
senile, at seventy. Education stopped there. No one, either in or out
of England, ever offered a rational explanation of Earl Russell.
Palmerston was simple--so simple as to mislead the student
altogether--but scarcely more consistent. The world thought him
positive, decided, reckless; the record proved him to be cautious,
careful, vacillating. Minister Adams took him for pugnacious and
quarrelsome; the "Lives" of Russell, Gladstone, and Granville show him
to have been good-tempered, conciliatory, avoiding quarrels. He
surprised the Minister by refusing to pursue his attack on General
Butler. He tried to check Russell. He scolded Gladstone. He discouraged
Napoleon. Except Disraeli none of the English statesmen were so
cautious as he in talking of America. Palmerston told no falsehoods;
made no professions; concealed no opinions; was detected in no
double-dealing. The most mortifying failure in Henry Adams's long
education was that, after forty years of confirmed dislike, distrust,
and detraction of Lord Palmerston, he was obliged at last to admit
himself in error, and to consent in spirit--for by that time he was
nearly as dead as any of them--to beg his pardon.
Gladstone was quite another story, but with him a student's
difficulties were less because they were shared by all the world
including Gladstone himself. He was the sum of contradictions. The
highest education could reach, in this analysis, only a reduction to
the absurd, but no absurdity that a young man could reach in 1862 would
have approached the level that Mr. Gladstone admitted, avowed,
proclaimed, in his confessions of 1896, which brought all reason and
all hope of education to a still-stand:--
I have yet to record an undoubted error, the most singular and
palpable, I may add the least excusable of them all, especially
since it was committed so late as in the year 1862 when I had
outlived half a century ... I declared in the heat of the
American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation....
Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made
by a Minister of the Crown with no authority other than his
own, was not due to any feeling of partisanship for the South
or hostility to the North.... I really, though most
strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all
America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end.
... That my opinion was founded upon a false estimate of the
facts was the very least part of my fault. I did not perceive
the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a Cabinet
Minister of a power allied in blood and language, and bound to
loyal neutrality; the case being further exaggerated by the
fact that we were already, so to speak, under indictment before
the world for not (as was alleged) having strictly enforced the
laws of neutrality in the matter of the cruisers. My offence
was indeed only a mistake, but one of incredible grossness, and
with such consequences of offence and alarm attached to it,
that my failing to perceive them justly exposed me to very
severe blame. It illustrates vividly that incapacity which my
mind so long retained, and perhaps still exhibits, an
incapacity of viewing subjects all round....
Long and patiently--more than patiently--sympathetically,
did the private secretary, forty years afterwards in the twilight of a
life of study, read and re-read and reflect upon this confession. Then,
it seemed, he had seen nothing correctly at the time. His whole theory
of conspiracy--of policy--of logic and connection in the affairs of