The Education of Henry Adams
man, resolved itself into "incredible grossness." He felt no rancor,
for he had won the game; he forgave, since he must admit, the
"incapacity of viewing subjects all round" which had so nearly cost him
life and fortune; he was willing even to believe. He noted, without
irritation, that Mr. Gladstone, in his confession, had not alluded to
the understanding between Russell, Palmerston, and himself; had even
wholly left out his most "incredible" act, his ardent support of
Napoleon's policy, a policy which even Palmerston and Russell had
supported feebly, with only half a heart. All this was indifferent.
Granting, in spite of evidence, that Gladstone had no set plan of
breaking up the Union; that he was party to no conspiracy; that he saw
none of the results of his acts which were clear to every one else;
granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last to
conclude--that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging
on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve--what sort of
education should have been the result of it? How should it have
affected one's future opinions and acts?
Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are
rough; its judgments rougher still. All this knowledge would not have
affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of the
individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual--a single will or intention--bent on breaking up the Union
"as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister would still have
found his interest in thinking Russell friendly and Palmerston hostile.
The individual would still have been identical with the mass. The
problem would have been the same; the answer equally obscure. Every
student would, like the private secretary, answer for himself alone.
CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and seldom
credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his own. Earl
Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy united them;
and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without being amused by his
droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart from this shadowy personal
relation, no doubt the Minister was diplomatically right; he had
nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a friend of the
Foreign Secretary, and whether Russell were true or false mattered
less, because, in either case, the American Legation could act only as
though he were false. Had the Minister known Russell's determined
effort to betray and ruin him in October, 1862, he could have scarcely
used stronger expressions than he did in 1863. Russell must have been
greatly annoyed by Sir Robert Collier's hint of collusion with the
rebel agents in the Alabama Case, but he hardened himself to hear the
same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time
went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American
Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the
nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but
after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November
12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister
Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, and asking in very plain
language for redress. Perhaps Russell's mind was naturally slow to
understand the force of sudden attack, or perhaps age had affected it;
this was one of the points that greatly interested a student, but young
men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile, which was only
in part warranted in this instance by observing that Russell's
generation were mostly senile from youth. They had never got beyond
1815. Both Palmerston and Russell were in this case. Their senility was
congenital, like Gladstone's Oxford training and High Church illusions,
which caused wild eccentricities in his judgment. Russell could not
conceive that he had misunderstood and mismanaged Minister Adams from
the start, and when after November 12 he found himself on the
defensive, with Mr Adams taking daily a stronger tone, he showed mere
confusion and helplessness.
Thus, whatever the theory, the action of diplomacy had to be
the same. Minister Adams was obliged to imply collusion between Russell
and the rebels. He could not even stop at criminal negligence. If, by
an access of courtesy, the Minister were civil enough to admit that the
escape of the Alabama had been due to criminal negligence, he could
make no such concession in regard to the ironclad rams which the Lairds
were building; for no one could be so simple as to believe that two
armored ships-of-war could be built publicly, under the eyes of the
Government, and go to sea like the Alabama, without active and
incessant collusion. The longer Earl Russell kept on his mask of
assumed ignorance, the more violently in the end, the Minister would
have to tear it off. Whatever Mr. Adams might personally think of Earl
Russell, he must take the greatest possible diplomatic liberties with
him if this crisis were allowed to arrive.
As the spring of 1863 drew on, the vast field cleared itself
for action. A campaign more beautiful--better suited for training the
mind of a youth eager for training--has not often unrolled itself for
study, from the beginning, before a young man perched in so commanding
a position. Very slowly, indeed, after two years of solitude, one began
to feel the first faint flush of new and imperial life. One was
twenty-five years old, and quite ready to assert it; some of one's
friends were wearing stars on their collars; some had won stars of a
more enduring kind. At moments one's breath came quick. One began to
dream the sensation of wielding unmeasured power. The sense came, like
vertigo, for an instant, and passed, leaving the brain a little dazed,
doubtful, shy. With an intensity more painful than that of any
Shakespearean drama, men's eyes were fastened on the armies in the
field. Little by little, at first only as a shadowy chance of what
might be, if things could be rightly done, one began to feel that,
somewhere behind the chaos in Washington power was taking shape; that
it was massed and guided as it had not been before. Men seemed to have
learned their business--at a cost that ruined--and perhaps too late. A
private secretary knew better than most people how much of the new
power was to be swung in London, and almost exactly when; but the
diplomatic campaign had to wait for the military campaign to lead. The
student could only study.
Life never could know more than a single such climax. In that
form, education reached its limits. As the first great blows began to
fall, one curled up in bed in the silence of night, to listen with
incredulous hope. As the huge masses struck, one after another, with
the precision of machinery, the opposing mass, the world shivered. Such
development of power was unknown. The magnificent resistance and the
return shocks heightened the suspense. During the July days Londoners
were stupid with unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to
fight.
An American saw in a flash what all this meant to England, for
one's mind was working with the acceleration of the machine at home;
but Englishmen were not quick to see their blunders. One had ample time
to watch the process, and had even a little time to gloat over the
repayment of old scores. News of Vicksburg and Gettysburg reached
London one Sunday afternoon, and it happened that Henry Adams was asked
for that evening to some small reception at the house of Monckton
Milnes. He went early in order to exchange a word or two of
congratulation before the rooms should fill, and on arriving he found
only the ladies in the drawing-room; the gentlemen were still sitting
over their wine. Presently they came in, and, as luck would have it,
Delane of the Times came first. When Milnes caught sight of his young
American friend, with a whoop of triumph he rushed to throw both arms
about his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. Men of later birth who knew
too little to realize the passions of 1863--backed by those of
1813--and reenforced by those of 1763--might conceive that such
publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came from Boston and
called himself shy; but that evening, for the first time in his life,
he happened not to be thinking of himself. He was thinking of Delane,
whose eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. Delane
probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes's foolery; he had never heard
of young Adams, and never dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed
in the Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the mind
of the American Minister's son, for the British mind is the slowest of
all minds, as the files of the Times proved, and the capture of
Vicksburg had not yet penetrated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas.
Even if he had read Adams's thought, he would have felt for it only the
usual amused British contempt for all that he had not been taught at
school. It needed a whole generation for the Times to reach Milnes's
standpoint.
Had the Minister's son carried out the thought, he would surely
have sought an introduction to Delane on the spot, and assured him that
he regarded his own personal score as cleared off--sufficiently
settled, then and there--because his father had assumed the debt, and
was going to deal with Mr. Delane himself. "You come next!" would have
been the friendly warning. For nearly a year the private secretary had
watched the board arranging itself for the collision between the
Legation and Delane who stood behind the Palmerston Ministry. Mr. Adams
had been steadily strengthened and reenforced from Washington in view
of the final struggle. The situation had changed since the Trent
Affair. The work was efficiently done; the organization was fairly
complete. No doubt, the Legation itself was still as weakly manned and
had as poor an outfit as the Legations of Guatemala or Portugal.
Congress was always jealous of its diplomatic service, and the Chairman
of the Committee of Foreign Relations was not likely to press
assistance on the Minister to England. For the Legation not an
additional clerk was offered or asked. The Secretary, the Assistant
Secretary, and the private secretary did all the work that the Minister
did not do. A clerk at five dollars a week would have done the work as
well or better, but the Minister could trust no clerk; without express
authority he could admit no one into the Legation; he strained a point
already by admitting his son. Congress and its committees were the
proper judges of what was best for the public service, and if the
arrangement seemed good to them, it was satisfactory to a private
secretary who profited by it more than they did. A great staff would
have suppressed him. The whole Legation was a sort of improvised,
volunteer service, and he was a volunteer with the rest. He was rather
better off than the rest, because he was invisible and unknown. Better
or worse, he did his work with the others, and if the secretaries made
any remarks about Congress, they made no complaints, and knew that none
would have received a moment's attention.
If they were not satisfied with Congress, they were satisfied
with Secretary Seward. Without appropriations for the regular service,
he had done great things for its support. If the Minister had no
secretaries, he had a staff of active consuls; he had a well-organized
press; efficient legal support; and a swarm of social allies permeating
all classes. All he needed was a victory in the field, and Secretary
Stanton undertook that part of diplomacy. Vicksburg and Gettysburg