The Education of Henry Adams
conditions of his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was
stronger in his expressions than either of them, but with all his
self-assertion he stuck to his point, and his point was practical. He
did not, like Gladstone, box the compass of thought; "furiously
earnest," as Monckton Milnes said, "on both sides of every question";
he was rather, on the whole, a consistent conservative of the old
Commonwealth type, and seldom had to defend inconsistencies. Monckton
Milnes himself was regarded as an eccentric, chiefly by those who did
not know him, but his fancies and hobbies were only ideas a little in
advance of the time; his manner was eccentric, but not his mind, as any
one could see who read a page of his poetry. None of them, except
Milnes, was a university man. As a rule, the Legation was troubled very
little, if at all, by indiscretions, extravagances, or contradictions
among its English friends. Their work was largely judicious, practical,
well considered, and almost too cautious. The "cranks" were all rebels,
and the list was portentous. Perhaps it might be headed by old Lord
Brougham, who had the audacity to appear at a July 4th reception at the
Legation, led by Joe Parkes, and claim his old credit as "Attorney
General to Mr. Madison." The Church was rebel, but the dissenters were
mostly with the Union. The universities were rebel, but the university
men who enjoyed most public confidence--like Lord Granville, Sir George
Cornewall Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey--took infinite pains to
be neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers, as
well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a vast
majority of the English people seemed to follow the professional
eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took that direction;
Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and Gladstone, threw their
sympathies on the side which they should naturally have opposed, and
did so for no reason except their eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots
and Yorkshiremen were cautious.
This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first cause of
this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No one understood
why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent for London at the same
time that he made so good a choice as Mr. Slidell for Paris. The
Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to send to London, but few who
were less fitted than Mason. Possibly Mason had a certain amount of
common sense, but he seemed to have nothing else, and in London society
he counted merely as one eccentric more. He enjoyed a great
opportunity; he might even have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with
all society at his feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and
made the social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but
Mr. Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with Palmerston; he
drove Russell off the field; he swept the board before Cockburn; he
overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a finger against Mason, who
became his bulwark of defence.
Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake. Neither
could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must have been
unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason, President Davis
sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to Russia. Some twenty years
later, in the shifting search for the education he never found, Adams
became closely intimate at Washington with Lamar, then Senator from
Mississippi, who had grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable
and most amiable Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in
social charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all his
Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps this was a
reason why Mr. Davis sent him abroad with the others, on a futile
mission to St. Petersburg. He would have done better in London, in
place of Mason. London society would have delighted in him; his stories
would have won success; his manners would have made him loved; his
oratory would have swept every audience; even Monckton Milnes could
never have resisted the temptation of having him to breakfast between
Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishop of Oxford.
Lamar liked to talk of his brief career in diplomacy, but he
never spoke of Mason. He never alluded to Confederate management or
criticised Jefferson Davis's administration. The subject that amused
him was his English allies. At that moment--the early summer of
1863--the rebel party in England were full of confidence, and felt
strong enough to challenge the American Legation to a show of power.
They knew better than the Legation what they could depend upon: that
the law officers and commissioners of customs at Liverpool dared not
prosecute the ironclad ships; that Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone
were ready to recognize the Confederacy; that the Emperor Napoleon
would offer them every inducement to do it. In a manner they owned
Liverpool and especially the firm of Laird who were building their
ships. The political member of the Laird firm was Lindsay, about whom
the whole web of rebel interests clung--rams, cruisers, munitions, and
Confederate loan; social introductions and parliamentary tactics. The
firm of Laird, with a certain dignity, claimed to be champion of
England's navy; and public opinion, in the summer of 1863, still
inclined towards them.
Never was there a moment when eccentricity, if it were a force,
should have had more value to the rebel interest; and the managers must
have thought so, for they adopted or accepted as their champion an
eccentric of eccentrics; a type of 1820; a sort of Brougham of
Sheffield, notorious for poor judgment and worse temper. Mr. Roebuck
had been a tribune of the people, and, like tribunes of most other
peoples, in growing old, had grown fatuous. He was regarded by the
friends of the Union as rather a comical personage--a favorite subject
for Punch to laugh at--with a bitter tongue and a mind enfeebled even
more than common by the political epidemic of egotism. In all England
they could have found no opponent better fitted to give away his own
case. No American man of business would have paid him attention; yet.
the Lairds, who certainly knew their own affairs best, let Roebuck
represent them and take charge of their interests.
With Roebuck's doings, the private secretary had no concern
except that the Minister sent him down to the House of Commons on June
30, 1863, to report the result of Roebuck's motion to recognize the
Southern Confederacy. The Legation felt no anxiety, having Vicksburg
already in its pocket, and Bright and Forster to say so; but the
private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the
left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with
astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big
mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered
Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with
Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a
friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The
manner counted for more than the words. The scene was interesting, but
the result was not in doubt.
All the more sharply he was excited, near the year 1879, in
Washington, by hearing Lamar begin a story after dinner, which, little
by little, became dramatic, recalling the scene in the House of
Commons. The story, as well as one remembered, began with Lamar's
failure to reach St. Petersburg at all, and his consequent detention in
Paris waiting instructions. The motion to recognize the Confederacy was
about to be made, and, in prospect of the debate, Mr. Lindsay collected
a party at his villa on the Thames to bring the rebel agents into
relations with Roebuck. Lamar was sent for, and came. After much
conversation of a general sort, such as is the usual object or resource
of the English Sunday, finding himself alone with Roebuck, Lamar, by
way of showing interest, bethought himself of John Bright and asked
Roebuck whether he expected Bright to take part in the debate: "No,
sir!" said Roebuck sententiously; "Bright and I have met before. It was
the old story--the story of the sword-fish and the whale! NO, sir! Mr.
Bright will not cross swords with me again!"
Thus assured, Lamar went with the more confidence to the House
on the appointed evening, and was placed under the gallery, on the
right, where he listened to Roebuck and followed the debate with such
enjoyment as an experienced debater feels in these contests, until, as
he said, he became aware that a man, with a singularly rich voice and
imposing manner, had taken the floor, and was giving Roebuck the most
deliberate and tremendous pounding he ever witnessed, "until at last,"
concluded Lamar, "it dawned on my mind that the sword-fish was getting
the worst of it."
Lamar told the story in the spirit of a joke against himself
rather than against Roebuck; but such jokes must have been unpleasantly
common in the experience of the rebel agents. They were surrounded by
cranks of the worst English species, who distorted their natural
eccentricities and perverted their judgment. Roebuck may have been an
extreme case, since he was actually in his dotage, yet this did not
prevent the Lairds from accepting his lead, or the House from taking
him seriously. Extreme eccentricity was no bar, in England, to extreme
confidence; sometimes it seemed a recommendation; and unless it caused
financial loss, it rather helped popularity.
The question whether British eccentricity was ever strength
weighed heavily in the balance of education. That Roebuck should
mislead the rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright's
courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people
themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want of
courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance of
the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as that of the
rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a
prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in
England that could be reached by a blow, and when he could not reach
the individual he struck the class, or when the class was too small for
him, the whole people of England. At times he had the whole country on
his back. He could not act on the defensive; his mind required attack.
Even among friends at the dinner-table he talked as though he were
denouncing them, or someone else, on a platform; he measured his
phrases, built his sentences, cumulated his effects, and pounded his
opponents, real or imagined. His humor was glow, like iron at dull
heat; his blow was elementary, like the thrash of a whale.
One day in early spring, March 26, 1863, the Minister requested
his private secretary to attend a Trades-Union Meeting at St. James's
Hall, which was the result of Professor Beesly's patient efforts to
unite Bright and the Trades-Unions on an American platform. The
secretary went to the meeting and made a report which reposes somewhere
on file in the State Department to this day, as harmless as such
reports should be; but it contained no mention of what interested young
Adams most--Bright's psychology. With singular skill and oratorical
power, Bright managed at the outset, in his opening paragraph, to
insult or outrage every class of Englishman commonly considered
respectable, and, for fear of any escaping, he insulted them repeatedly