The Education of Henry Adams
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what should
have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State Department had
ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the Treasury had taken its
place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a man new to politics--Hugh
McCulloch--not a person of much importance in the eyes of practical
politicians such as young members of the press meant themselves to
become, but they all liked Mr. McCulloch, though they thought him a
stop-gap rather than a force. Had they known what sort of forces the
Treasury was to offer them for support in the generation to come, they
might have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams
was fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he ever
cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the idea that
McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to represent
everything that one liked least. He was no politician, he had no party,
and no power. He was not fashionable or decorative. He was a banker,
and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf
feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the
helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by
mockery. The world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker
would ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to
Washington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at all,
for he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow five thousand
dollars of any bank in America. The banker never would trust him, and
he would never trust the banker. To him, the banking mind was
obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the more surprise at finding
McCulloch the broadest, most liberal, most genial, and most practical
public man in Washington.
There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in chaos;
every part of it required reform; the utmost experience, tact, and
skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No one knew how well
McCulloch did it until his successor took it in charge, and tried to
correct his methods. Adams did not know enough to appreciate
McCulloch's technical skill, but he was struck at his open and generous
treatment of young men. Of all rare qualities, this was, in Adams's
experience, the rarest. As a rule, officials dread interference. The
strongest often resent it most. Any official who admits equality in
discussion of his official course, feels it to be an act of virtue;
after a few months or years he tires of the effort. Every friend in
power is a friend lost. This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be
taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions exist,
and McCulloch was one of them.
McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and
infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early political
education. He had neither past nor future, and could afford to be
careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded by all the active
and intelligent young men in the country. Full of faith, greedy for
work, eager for reform, energetic, confident, capable, quick of study,
charmed with a fight, equally ready to defend or attack, they were
unselfish, and even--as young men went--honest. They came mostly from
the army, with the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank
Barlow, Frank Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press,
and much of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas. No
one denied the need for reform. The whole government, from top to
bottom, was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated and the
instability of what was improvised. The currency was only one example;
the tariff was another; but the whole fabric required reconstruction as
much as in 1789, for the Constitution had become as antiquated as the
Confederation. Sooner or later a shock must come, the more dangerous
the longer postponed. The Civil War had made a new system in fact; the
country would have to reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.
One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but no
one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant, universal
nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests upheld it.
McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with large
good-nature and willing sympathy--outside of parties, jobs, bargains,
corporations or intrigues--which Adams never was to meet again.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War
had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer type
were not always docile under control, but they were handy in a fight.
Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them. He found
himself much at home with them--more at home than he ever had been
before, or was ever to be again--in the atmosphere of the Treasury. He
had no strong party passion, and he felt as though he and his friends
owned this administration, which, in its dying days, had neither
friends nor future except in them.
These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme Court was
about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge Curtis had been
employed to argue against the constitutional power of the Government to
make an artificial standard of value in time of peace. Evarts was
anxious to fix on a line of argument that should have a chance of
standing up against that of Judge Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He
did not know which foot to put forward. About to deal with Judge
Curtis, the last of the strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could
risk no chances. In doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to
discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day,
driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.
Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all,
more solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to treat Mr.
Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts himself expressed
for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like most young men, he was
much of a doctrinaire, and the question was, in any event, rather
historical or political than legal. He could easily maintain, by way of
argument, that the required power had never been given, and that no
sound constitutional reason could possibly exist for authorizing the
Government to overthrow the standard of value without necessity, in
time of peace. The dispute itself had not much value for him, even as
education, but it led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice
himself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation and his
articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be intimate with
the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and strongest leaders of
the Free Soil Party, had claims to his personal regard; for the old
Free Soilers were becoming few. Like all strong-willed and
self-asserting men, Mr. Chase had the faults of his qualities. He was
never easy to drive in harness, or light in hand. He saw vividly what
was wrong, and did not always allow for what was relatively right. He
loved power as though he were still a Senator. His position towards
Legal Tender was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he had been its
author; as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused no
great pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper correspondent,
but it served as a subject for letters, and the Chief Justice was very
willing to win an ally in the press who would tell his story as he
wished it to be read. The intimacy in Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly,
and the alliance was no small help to the comforts of a struggling
newspaper adventurer in Washington. No matter what one might think of
his politics or temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high
senatorial rank, if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable ally.
As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As
though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise, dropped
back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams enjoyed
accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was fifty-seven;
he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and he felt
a sort of amused curiosity to be treated once more as a child. At best,
the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter, and in this case
it bristled with thorns, for Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not
been the most delicate of his ruptured relations, and he was liable to
be sensitive in many ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in
constant mind; yet it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a new
study of political humanity. The younger man knew that the meeting
would have to come, and was ready for it, if only as a newspaper need;
but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one, as Adams
conceived. He learned something--a piece of practical education worth
the effort--by watching Sumner's behavior. He could see that many
thoughts--mostly unpleasant--were passing through his mind, since he
made no inquiry about any of Adams's family, or allusion to any of his
friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present. To him,
Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic,
perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of
others; a politician without party; a writer without principles; an
office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this was, for his
purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and would be likely to do
him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted it all; expected to be
kept at arm's length; admitted that the reasons were just. He was the
more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations.
He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked
to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La
Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study
and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes
even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.
On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his
solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society;
but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the
calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing
them; it contained nothing but itself. The images from without, the
objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesy until
the mental surface was ruffled, but never became part of the thought.
Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he
would have ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected,
as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more
aggressively egoistic than other Senators--Conkling, for instance--but
that with him the disease had affected the whole mind; it was chronic
and absolute; while, with other Senators for the most part, it was
still acute.
Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful; perhaps
quite the most useful of all these great authorities who were the
stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the accumulated capital of a
Silurian age. A few months or years more, and they were gone. In 1868,