The Education of Henry Adams
volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling
brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found
himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, or the
quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could surely say
where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science did not know.
Truths a priori held their own against truths surely relative.
According to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was
forever on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he could
still depend on a certain number of listeners--mostly respectable, and
some rich.
Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this
had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point where he
always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten make their
errors. One may be more or less certain of organized forces; one can
never be certain of men. He belonged to the eighteenth century, and the
eighteenth century upset all his plans. For the moment, America was
more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted to the stone age.
As education--of a certain sort--the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see much
education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule.
The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way.
This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in
politics since 1860.
At least four-fifths of the American people--Adams among the
rest--had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency,
and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the
parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more
obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the
soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he
pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million
or a million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even
Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller,
had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersons and
Hamiltons to organize his departments. The task of bringing the
Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and
mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was
ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the
confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every one had
echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."
Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one
would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never
expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public
spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower
House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed,
one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and
tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke
out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog!
You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too
little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he
thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average
Congressman of 1869--he saw little or nothing of later ones--but he
knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question, put
in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a
week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.
The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but
faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole
Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent
reason. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be
burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them;
even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their
account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.
They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and
even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.
Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the
world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more
serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with
eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The
newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his
person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one
sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote,
felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate
and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did
he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect
the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920.
With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of
Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness
of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his
intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed
of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much
weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him
blush, while Grant's nominations had the singular effect of making the
hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made
another total misconception of life--another inconceivable false start.
Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of
saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations betrayed his
intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier
might be a baby politician.
Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13,
1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the
incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without absolutely
saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out
for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no thought of
effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had
no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could he sail next? He
had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For the moment, he
saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched
himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.
Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome
to a Bostonian--or should have been--although fatal to Adams. The name
of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism
and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke;
Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch,
and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one
resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as
Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of
Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful,
and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant
himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform;
that his aim had been to place his administration above politics; and
until he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on Grant.
One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so little.
By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two
men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly social,
though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and
his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a
good newspaper-man, and an excellent military historian. His life of
Grant was no ordinary book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a
friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the
General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington
were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army
officers were no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow,
dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a
consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey
for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He
talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for
analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do.
Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his
patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive
about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins
understood the General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent
energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in
repose. He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why
Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would
systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but
by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would
announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the
discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the
energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his
character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a
mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.
In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act on the
General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his
portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to
add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen
since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was rather delicate; infinitely
superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.
Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen