The Education of Henry Adams
leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle in the best
pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity, since the time
of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It was unusual for
boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and to read over his head
the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather, who had "pledged
his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" to secure the independence
of his country and so forth; but boys naturally supposed, without much
reasoning, that other boys had the equivalent of President
grandfathers, and that churches would always go on, with the
bald-headed leading citizens on the main aisle, and Presidents or their
equivalents on the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child:
"You'll be thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casuality of the
remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot
it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him,
that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea.
What had been would continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents
nor about Churches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a
system of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams
more.
The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but more
decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles,
looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a fragile
creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a message, and
took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what
seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure; her
gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but
to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with
little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old
binding, labelled "Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More."
Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her
cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he
felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from Boston.
She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American
merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland; and Catherine
Nuth, of an English family in London. Driven from England by the
Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took his family to Nantes, where they
remained till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years
old when brought back to London, and her sense of nationality must have
been confused; but the influence of the Johnsons and the services of
Joshua obtained for him from President Washington the appointment of
Consul in London on the organization of the Government in 1790. In 1794
President Washington appointed John Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague.
He was twenty-seven years old when he returned to London, and found the
Consul's house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.
At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling
Americans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting point,
between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the City, near
the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that it proved
fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Romney portrait, but
among her many charms that of being a New England woman was not one.
The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New
England woman whose authority over her turbulent husband, the second
President, was hardly so great as that which she exercised over her
son, the sixth to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be
made of stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe enough,
to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient wife for her
paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as on most others
where sound judgment was involved; but sound judgment is sometimes a
source of weakness rather than of force, and John Quincy already had
reason to think that his mother held sound judgments on the subject of
daughters-in-law which human nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams
helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his mother,
and equally far in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797,
and took her to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation.
During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in Berlin;
whether she was happy or not, whether she was content or not, whether
she was socially successful or not, her descendants did not surely
know; but in any case she could by no chance have become educated there
for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow of the Federalist
Party drove her and her husband to America, and she became at last a
member of the Quincy household, but by that time her children needed
all her attention, and she remained there with occasional winters in
Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803,
and in 1809 was appointed Minister to Russia. She went with him to St.
Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis, born in 1807; but
broken-hearted at having to leave her two older boys behind. The life
at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her; they were far too poor to
shine in that extravagant society; but she survived it, though her
little girl baby did not, and in the winter of 1814-15, alone with the
boy of seven years old, crossed Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris, in
her travelling-carriage, passing through the armies, and reaching Paris
in the Cent Jours after Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next
went to England as Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of
the Regent. In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and
she lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer
for President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable
years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in 1829, she had
earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she still had fifteen
years to serve as wife of a Member of the House, after her husband went
back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that the little Henry, her
grandson, first remembered her, from 1843 to 1848, sitting in her
panelled room, at breakfast, with her heavy silver teapot and
sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still exist somewhere as an heirloom of
the modern safety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or
more, and thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the
boy she seemed singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding
over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she had
been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow of the Tower
of London.
Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old
husband, the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of
the coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The boy
knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the venerable
Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and little
pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might come some of
those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, those rebellions
against law and discipline, which marked more than one of her
descendants; but he might even then have felt some vague instinctive
suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin,
the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New
England stock, but half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true
Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint
of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had
hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when his parents left him
there at school in 1817, and he never forgot the experience. He was to
be nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845, before he quite
accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him.
A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a certain
delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in the
eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have rebelled
against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmosphere of his first
ten years must have been very like that of his grandfather at the same
age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle of Bunker Hill, and even
as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of
Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in
self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from
concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength. The
eighteenth century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began
to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates.
Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather
abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a
certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and gathered,
from such words as he could catch, that the President, who happened to
be then staying there, on his way to Washington, had fallen and hurt
himself. Then he heard the word paralysis. After that day he came to
associate the word with the figure of his grandfather, in a
tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side of the spare bedroom
fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr. Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand,
on the other side, both dozing.
The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848--and the month of February brought life and
death as a family habit--when the eighteenth century, as an actual and
living companion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of the House,
when the old President fell, struck the still simple-minded American
public with a sensation unusually dramatic, its effect on a
ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away with the life of his
grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary
patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen
Anne mahogany and Louis Seize chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits.
Such things warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they
ruined it, and perhaps the practical common-sense of the American mind
judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions
of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its surroundings of
national respect and family pride. By another dramatic chance it
happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr. Lunt, was an unusual
pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual type, such
as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited from the old
Congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance, his
dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English
and his fine appreciation, gave to the funeral service a character that
left an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many
great functions--funerals and festival--in after-life, till his only
thought was to see no more, but he never again witnessed anything
nearly so impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the
body of one President and the ashes of another.
The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the boy was
taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy. Like all Mr.
Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of oratory, such as only
an admirable orator and scholar could create; too good for a