The Education of Henry Adams
first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew
all that was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by
the Government.
Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and
as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any
mystery existed. All Adams's great friends--Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts,
Sumner, and their surroundings--were precisely the persons most
mystified. They knew less than Adams did; they sought information, and
frankly admitted that their relations with the White House and the
Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one
offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although
press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie
nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where
any member of the Administration became visible. Every one dreaded to
press inquiry. Adams himself feared finding out too much. He found out
too much already, when he saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually
succeeded in stretching his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and
that Boutwell's incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation.
With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the
situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had
not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the
ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this was wildly exciting
to Adams. That Grant should have fallen, within six months, into such a
morass--or should have let Boutwell drop him into it--rendered the
outlook for the next four years--probably eight--possibly
twelve--mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched
his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth
century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched
executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man,
fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an
honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new
Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping
the stables of American society clear of the endless corruption which
his second Washington was quite certain to breed.
By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar Wall
Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view Grant had
been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant. One
could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and disgusted by
the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute American
mind--still less the complex Jew--could ever have accustomed itself to
the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and
perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if
victims they both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap
which might easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion,
cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous in a
boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the study was
rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with happy results,
but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of London noticed with
horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator and politician
never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.
Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives.
Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except to
laugh too.
Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford
to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot
be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead;
but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it. Any
one in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the
mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive
out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every
intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. The people would
have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content
themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry even
their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.
The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one
who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it,
alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him in
vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or out
of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest.
The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell
waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the
mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.
Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to serve.
He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition was his horror; pure
waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and Southern rebels
who never had much in common with any Adams, and had never shown any
warm interest about them except to drive them from public life. If Mr.
Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or
contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this last
plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of
Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought of his disaster
between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an accident could not occur
again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to
be safe enough for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be
caught a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
his friends.
This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he
saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was delighted;
but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70,
he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of
his own which he proposed also to force on the Department. This was not
all. Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on
Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations
over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a policy
of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man ever
approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place himself
among all these forces. Officially he would have followed the
responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the Secretary.
Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant,
but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy,
Adams never had a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he
did know, he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came
only when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.
Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To
his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all
extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to
the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and
ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with incredulous stupor while
Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible
American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession
of Canada to the United States.
Adams did not then know--in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him--what was going on behind the doors of the
White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much
more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign
Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy. President Grant let every one go on,
but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to divine. One point
alone seemed clear to a man--no longer so very young--who had lately
come from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the gravest
doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and Canada were worth
it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready to treat it
seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a
voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled. On the point of
fact, Adams was as peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he
could only wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad
as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and
Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel
with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as
far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a
man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner,
whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican
Party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were
unknown to him.
Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then it was
not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting than the
complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the
rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike
to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the
story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good