The Education of Henry Adams
a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a
part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
material than hair--on clothes, for example, according to Mr. Carlyle,
or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz--and nine men in ten could
hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes. In
truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in
common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason
he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish
could not be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.
The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another
quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish and Sumner,
worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet, the one whom he
had most personal interest in cultivating was Attorney General Hoar.
The Legal Tender decision, which had been the first stumbling-block to
Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened to become
something more serious than a block; it fell on one's head like a
plaster ceiling, and could not be escaped. The impending battle between
Fish and Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between
Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to
support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he
never dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the
Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been driven, like the
rest of the world, to admit that American society had outgrown most of
its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme Court, much as a
churchman clings to his bishops, because they are his only symbol of
unity; his last rag of Right. Between the Executive and the
Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they were at the mercy of
Power. They had created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power,
and it was little enough protection at best. Adams wanted to save the
independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not
conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.
Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article
on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then
published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender clause
in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with reform,
saved from Boutwell's decree of banishment such reformers as he could
find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census
of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the North
American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his
notes, and Adams completed the article.
He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and
bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic" value,
gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid half the
wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of attacking or
defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and
the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the
necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time
the Act was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the
North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to
abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and
the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious
historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of Spaulding's
contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief
Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The Chief Justice
seemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no
sign. The article had enough historical interest to induce Adams to
reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its
historical value was not its point in education. The point was that, in
spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the
strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into
opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.
Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He did
this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself. Scarcely a
newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York Tribune was one
of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the
dissolution of temper, and the Senate Chamber became again a scene of
irritated egotism that passed ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each
other, and no one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the
Executive and threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.
That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at
Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule, must have
had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could only have
understood what it was. He studied, but failed. Sympathy with him was
not their weakness. Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could
hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far from inviting
attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.
Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to
help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they
would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was the
earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to learn
from its study; but the situation struck him as curious--so curious
that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four most powerful
friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were fighting in pairs
to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the
judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in education?
Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or
Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The statesmen of the
old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were
personally as honest as human nature could produce. They trod with
lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially when there was good
in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the
country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just
as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in
money-matters, cost the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt
worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it
affected the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield,
and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence
by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated, wavered,
oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the
weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite of all such
criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the
Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the
question; until young men were forced to see that either some new
standard must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
expired--like the Constitution.
Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare,
were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it
wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who
could work it; but it found neither. Adams had tried his own little
hands on it, and had failed. His friends had been driven out of
Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared
helplessly into the future.
The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he
had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history then,
and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even
good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his devious
education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in
current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of
the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he
gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The
political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970.
The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century
fabric of a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given
it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
out--to patch--or, in vulgar language, to tinker--the political machine
as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last
centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as
a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world--the
clumsiest--the most inefficient.
Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics--to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even
Mr. Sumner--he could not honestly say that such an education, even when
it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything.
There were men, as yet standing on lower levels--clever and amusing men
like Garfield and Blaine--who took no little pleasure in making fun of
the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
which the North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn. What
kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive
political education?
Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it.
If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new
morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An eternity of
Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused
to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans laughed, and went
their way. Society paid them to be practical. Whenever society cared to
pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold his
tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic
Congressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active
assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a
college. The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young
men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want
of system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the