The Education of Henry Adams
railways. Adams would have liked to help in building railways, but had
no education. He was not fit.
He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations,
renewing friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years old,
the man who has not yet got further than to study the situation, is
lost, or near it. He could see nothing in the situation that could be
of use to him. His friends had won no more from it than he. His brother
Charles, after three years of civil life, was no better off than
himself, except for being married and in greater need of income. His
brother John had become a brilliant political leader on the wrong side.
No one had yet regained the lost ground of the war.
He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had learned
so painfully in London was worse than useless in America where every
standard was different. Newport was charming, but it asked for no
education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer and pleasanter,
and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that society were a
kind of social partnership, like the classes at college; not education
but the subjects of education. All were doing the same thing, and
asking the same question of the future. None could help. Society seemed
founded on the law that all was for the best New Yorkers in the best of
Newports, and that all young people were rich if they could waltz. It
was a new version of the Ant and Grasshopper.
At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or had shown a
sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward Atkinson. Boston was
cool towards sons, whether prodigals or other, and needed much time to
make up its mind what to do for them--time which Adams, at thirty years
old, could hardly spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to
hire an office in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze
there alone, vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for
Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the
elevator; or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in use.
Whether this course would have offered his best chance he never knew;
it was one of the points in practical education which most needed a
clear understanding, and he could never reach it. His father and mother
would have been glad to see him stay with them and begin reading
Blackstone again, and he showed no very filial tenderness by abruptly
breaking the tie that had lasted so long. After all, perhaps Beacon
Street was as good as any other street for his objects in life;
possibly his easiest and surest path was from Beacon Street to State
Street and back again, all the days of his years. Who could tell? Even
after life was over, the doubt could not be determined.
In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path
that had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his brothers.
He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his peculiar birthright.
The mere thought of beginning life again in Mount Vernon Street lowered
the pulsations of his heart. This is a story of education--not a mere
lesson of life--and, with education, temperament has in strictness
nothing to do, although in practice they run close together. Neither by
temperament nor by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted
far away and behind his companions there; no one trusted his
temperament or education; he had to go.
Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the shortest road
to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside the social pale. No
Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced one's self as an
adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of deplorably bad judgment,
and the charges were true. The chances of ending in the gutter were, at
best, even. The risk was the greater in Adams's case, because he had no
very clear idea what to do when he got there. That he must educate
himself over again, for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile
to his old educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do
it--how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist of
the Capital--he had not an idea, and no one to teach him. The question
of money is rarely serious for a young American unless he is married,
and money never troubled Adams more than others; not because he had it,
but because he could do without it, like most people in Washington who
all lived on the income of bricklayers; but with or without money he
met the difficulty that, after getting to Washington in order to go on
the press, it was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he
could count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a
press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend on
the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily, and no
New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the death of Henry
J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was out of the question
both for political and personal reasons, and because Whitelaw Reid had
already undertaken that singularly venturesome position, amid
difficulties that would have swamped Adams in four-and-twenty hours.
Charles A. Dana had made the Sun a very successful as well as a very
amusing paper, but had hurt his own social position in doing it; and
Adams knew himself well enough to know that he could never please
himself and Dana too; with the best intentions, he must always fail as
a blackguard, and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life
to the Sun. As for the New York Herald, it was a despotic empire
admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the moment, the
New York daily press offered no field except the free-trade Holy Land
of the Evening Post under William Cullen Bryant, while beside it lay
only the elevated plateau of the New Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and
the Nation. Much as Adams liked Godkin, and glad as he was to creep
under the shelter of the Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware
that he should find there only the same circle of readers that he
reached in the North American Review.
The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then Attorney
General and living there, he would stand in solitude much like that of
London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in Boston seemed to care for
doing; he held out a hand to the young man. Whether Boston, like Salem,
really shunned strangers, or whether Evarts was an exception even in
New York, he had the social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by
nature, prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born
man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without scruple, and
accepted the world without fearing or abusing it. His wit was the least
part of his social attraction. His talk was broad and free. He laughed
where he could; he joked if a joke was possible; he was true to his
friends, and never lost his temper or became ill-natured. Like all New
Yorkers he was decidedly not a Bostonian; but he was what one might
call a transplanted New Englander, like General Sherman; a variety,
grown in ranker soil. In the course of life, and in widely different
countries, Adams incurred heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom
he had no claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps
half-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is a
large number as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily than
when Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.
Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep
gratitude, the more because his first struggle with a sleeping-car made
him doubt the value--to him--of a Pullman civilization; but he was even
more grateful for the shelter of Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the
corner of Fourteenth, where he abode in safety and content till he
found rooms in the roomless village. To him the village seemed
unchanged. Had he not known that a great war and eight years of
astonishing movement had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing
that betrayed growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the
men were the same. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of
civilization, and Adams was glad to get rid of them, for his best
chance lay in the eighteenth century.
The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an aspirant
to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately took him to
the White House and presented him to President Andrew Johnson. The
interview was brief and consisted in the stock remark common to
monarchs and valets, that the young man looked even younger than he
was. The younger man felt even younger than he looked. He never saw the
President again, and never felt a wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson
was not the sort of man whom a young reformer of thirty, with two or
three foreign educations, was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet,
musing over the interview as a matter of education, long years
afterwards, he could not help recalling the President's figure with a
distinctness that surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and
statesman sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that
had its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were
greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were supported,
lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness. To them the
universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their universe, a
Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that he never
entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he
found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery was only a part of
the Southern system, and the life of it all--the vigor--the poetry--was
its moral certainty of self. The Southerner could not doubt; and this
self-assurance not only gave Andrew Johnson the look of a true
President, but actually made him one. When Adams came to look back on
it afterwards, he was surprised to realize how strong the Executive was
in 1868--perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never
again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.
Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed little
changed in these eight years. He was the same--with a difference.
Perhaps he--unlike Henry Adams--had at last got an education, and all
he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself to doing without it.
Whatever the reason, although his manner was as roughly kind as ever,
and his talk as free, he appeared to have closed his account with the
public; he no longer seemed to care; he asked nothing, gave nothing,
and invited no support; he talked little of himself or of others, and
waited only for his discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in
these last days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in
the evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man--the only chief he ever
served even as a volunteer--recognized some personal relation, he asked
Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his rooms, and play his game
of whist there, as he did every night in his own house. Mr. Seward came
and had his whist, and Adams remembered his rough parting speech: "A
very sensible entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of
Mr. Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.
Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,