The Education of Henry Adams
cleared the board, and, at the end of July, 1863, Minister Adams was
ready to deal with Earl Russell or Lord Palmerston or Mr. Gladstone or
Mr. Delane, or any one else who stood in his way; and by the necessity
of the case, was obliged to deal with all of them shortly.
Even before the military climax at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
the Minister had been compelled to begin his attack; but this was
history, and had nothing to do with education. The private secretary
copied the notes into his private books, and that was all the share he
had in the matter, except to talk in private.
No more volunteer services were needed; the volunteers were in
a manner sent to the rear; the movement was too serious for
skirmishing. All that a secretary could hope to gain from the affair
was experience and knowledge of politics. He had a chance to measure
the motive forces of men; their qualities of character; their
foresight; their tenacity of purpose.
In the Legation no great confidence was felt in stopping the
rams. Whatever the reason, Russell seemed immovable. Had his efforts
for intervention in September, 1862, been known to the Legation in
September, 1863 the Minister must surely have admitted that Russell
had, from the first, meant to force his plan of intervention on his
colleagues. Every separate step since April, 1861, led to this final
coercion. Although Russell's hostile activity of 1862 was still
secret--and remained secret for some five-and-twenty years--his animus
seemed to be made clear by his steady refusal to stop the rebel
armaments. Little by little, Minister Adams lost hope. With loss of
hope came the raising of tone, until at last, after stripping Russell
of every rag of defence and excuse, he closed by leaving him loaded
with connivance in the rebel armaments, and ended by the famous
sentence: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship
that this is war!"
What the Minister meant by this remark was his own affair; what the
private secretary understood by it, was a part of his education. Had
his father ordered him to draft an explanatory paragraph to expand the
idea as he grasped it, he would have continued thus:--
"It would be superfluous: 1st. Because Earl Russell not only
knows it already, but has meant it from the start. 2nd Because it is
the only logical and necessary consequence of his unvarying action. 3d.
Because Mr. Adams is not pointing out to him that 'this is war,' but is
pointing it out to the world, to complete the record."
This would have been the matter-of-fact sense in which the
private secretary copied into his books the matter-of-fact statement
with which, without passion or excitement, the Minister announced that
a state of war existed. To his copying eye, as clerk, the words, though
on the extreme verge of diplomatic propriety, merely stated a fact,
without novelty, fancy, or rhetoric. The fact had to be stated in order
to make clear the issue. The war was Russell's war--Adams only accepted
it.
Russell's reply to this note of September 5 reached the
Legation on September 8, announcing at last to the anxious secretaries
that "instructions have been issued which will prevent the departure of
the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." The members of the modest
Legation in Portland Place accepted it as Grant had accepted the
capitulation of Vicksburg. The private secretary conceived that, as
Secretary Stanton had struck and crushed by superior weight the rebel
left on the Mississippi, so Secretary Seward had struck and crushed the
rebel right in England, and he never felt a doubt as to the nature of
the battle. Though Minister Adams should stay in office till he were
ninety, he would never fight another campaign of life and death like
this; and though the private secretary should covet and attain every
office in the gift of President or people, he would never again find
education to compare with the life-and-death alternative of this
two-year-and-a-half struggle in London, as it had racked and
thumb-screwed him in its shifting phases; but its practical value as
education turned on his correctness of judgment in measuring the men
and their forces. He felt respect for Russell as for Palmerston because
they represented traditional England and an English policy, respectable
enough in itself, but which, for four generations, every Adams had
fought and exploited as the chief source of his political fortunes. As
he understood it, Russell had followed this policy steadily, ably, even
vigorously, and had brought it to the moment of execution. Then he had
met wills stronger than his own, and, after persevering to the last
possible instant, had been beaten. Lord North and George Canning had a
like experience. This was only the idea of a boy, but, as far as he
ever knew, it was also the idea of his Government. For once, the
volunteer secretary was satisfied with his Government. Commonly the
self-respect of a secretary, private or public, depends on, and is
proportional to, the severity of his criticism, but in this case the
English campaign seemed to him as creditable to the State Department as
the Vicksburg campaign to the War Department, and more decisive. It was
well planned, well prepared, and well executed. He could never discover
a mistake in it. Possibly he was biassed by personal interest, but his
chief reason for trusting his own judgment was that he thought himself
to be one of only half a dozen persons who knew something about it.
When others criticised Mr. Seward, he was rather indifferent to their
opinions because he thought they hardly knew what they were talking
about, and could not be taught without living over again the London
life of 1862. To him Secretary Seward seemed immensely strong and
steady in leadership; but this was no discredit to Russell or
Palmerston or Gladstone. They, too, had shown power, patience and
steadiness of purpose. They had persisted for two years and a half in
their plan for breaking up the Union, and had yielded at last only in
the jaws of war. After a long and desperate struggle, the American
Minister had trumped their best card and won the game.
Again and again, in after life, he went back over the ground to
see whether he could detect error on either side. He found none. At
every stage the steps were both probable and proved. All the more he
was disconcerted that Russell should indignantly and with growing
energy, to his dying day, deny and resent the axiom of Adams's whole
contention, that from the first he meant to break up the Union. Russell
affirmed that he meant nothing of the sort; that he had meant nothing
at all; that he meant to do right; that he did not know what he meant.
Driven from one defence after another, he pleaded at last, like
Gladstone, that he had no defence. Concealing all he could
conceal--burying in profound secrecy his attempt to break up the Union
in the autumn of 1862--he affirmed the louder his scrupulous good
faith. What was worse for the private secretary, to the total derision
and despair of the lifelong effort for education, as the final result
of combined practice, experience, and theory--he proved it.
Henry Adams had, as he thought, suffered too much from Russell
to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this
admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's death
was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died
in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. During the Alabama
controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872, his course as Foreign
Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he had been compelled to see
England pay more than L3,000,000 penalty for his errors. On the other
hand, he brought forward--or his biographer for him--evidence tending
to prove that he was not consciously dishonest, and that he had, in
spite of appearances, acted without collusion, agreement, plan, or
policy, as far as concerned the rebels. He had stood alone, as was his
nature. Like Gladstone, he had thought himself right.
In the end, Russell entangled himself in a hopeless ball of
admissions, denials, contradictions, and resentments which led even his
old colleagues to drop his defence, as they dropped Gladstone's; but
this was not enough for the student of diplomacy who had made a certain
theory his law of life, and wanted to hold Russell up against himself;
to show that he had foresight and persistence of which he was unaware.
The effort became hopeless when the biography in 1889 published papers
which upset all that Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education;
yet he sat down once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he
could unravel the skein.
Of the obstinate effort to bring about an armed intervention,
on the lines marked out by Russell's letter to Palmerston from Gotha,
17 September, 1862, nothing could be said beyond Gladstone's plea in
excuse for his speech in pursuance of the same effort, that it was "the
most singular and palpable error," "the least excusable," "a mistake of
incredible grossness," which passed defence; but while Gladstone threw
himself on the mercy of the public for his speech, he attempted no
excuse for Lord Russell who led him into the "incredible grossness" of
announcing the Foreign Secretary's intent. Gladstone's offence,
"singular and palpable," was not the speech alone, but its cause--the
policy that inspired the speech. "I weakly supposed ... I really,
though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness."
Whatever absurdity Gladstone supposed, Russell supposed nothing of the
sort. Neither he nor Palmerston "most strangely believed" in any
proposition so obviously and palpably absurd, nor did Napoleon delude
himself with philanthropy. Gladstone, even in his confession, mixed up
policy, speech, motives, and persons, as though he were trying to
confuse chiefly himself.
There Gladstone's activity seems to have stopped. He did not
reappear in the matter of the rams. The rebel influence shrank in 1863,
as far as is known, to Lord Russell alone, who wrote on September 1
that he could not interfere in any way with those vessels, and thereby
brought on himself Mr. Adams's declaration of war on September 5. A
student held that, in this refusal, he was merely following his policy
of September, 1862, and of every step he had taken since 1861.
The student was wrong. Russell proved that he had been feeble,
timid, mistaken, senile, but not dishonest. The evidence is convincing.
The Lairds had built these ships in reliance on the known opinion of
the law-officers that the statute did not apply, and a jury would not
convict. Minister Adams replied that, in this case, the statute should
be amended, or the ships stopped by exercise of the political power.
Bethell rejoined that this would be a violation of neutrality; one must
preserve the status quo. Tacitly Russell connived with Laird, and, had
he meant to interfere, he was bound to warn Laird that the defect of
the statute would no longer protect him, but he allowed the builders to
go on till the ships were ready for sea. Then, on September 3, two days
before Mr. Adams's "superfluous" letter, he wrote to Lord Palmerston
begging for help; "The conduct of the gentlemen who have contracted for
the two ironclads at Birkenhead is so very suspicious,"--he began, and
this he actually wrote in good faith and deep confidence to Lord
Palmerston, his chief, calling "the conduct" of the rebel agents
"suspicious" when no one else in Europe or America felt any suspicion
about it, because the whole question turned not on the rams, but on the
technical scope of the Foreign Enlistment Act,--"that I have thought it
necessary to direct that they should be detained," not, of course,