The Education of Henry Adams
ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already the boy knew
that the dead President could not be in it, and had even learned why he
would have been out of place there; for knowledge was beginning to come
fast. The shadow of the War of 1812 still hung over State Street; the
shadow of the Civil War to come had already begun to darken Faneuil
Hall. No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his
subject. How could he say there, to an assemblage of Bostonians in the
heart of mercantile Boston, that the only distinctive mark of all the
Adamses, since old Sam Adams's father a hundred and fifty years before,
had been their inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and
again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and
civil war, wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history
of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? How could he
whisper the word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it?
What would have been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and
Civil War?
Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early Christian.
What was he?--where was he going? Even then he felt that something was
wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been
right, for Quincy represented a moral principle--the principle of
resistance to Boston. His Adams ancestors must have been right, since
they were always hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong,
Quincy must be right! Turn the dilemma as he pleased, he still came
back on the eighteenth century and the law of Resistance; of Truth; of
Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He
could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty years had
in store, and no one could teach him; but sometimes, in his old age, he
wondered--and could never decide--whether the most clear and certain
knowledge would have helped him. Supposing he had seen a New York
stock-list of 1900, and had studied the statistics of railways,
telegraphs, coal, and steel--would he have quitted his
eighteenth-century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his
semi-clerical training, and the rest, in order to perform an expiatory
pilgrimage to State Street, and ask for the fatted calf of his
grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank?
Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages, looking
back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.
CHAPTER II
BOSTON (1848-1854)
PETER CHARDON BROOKS, the other grandfather, died January 1,
1849, bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston,
about two million dollars, to his seven surviving children: four
sons--Edward, Peter Chardon, Gorham, and Sydney; three
daughters--Charlotte, married to Edward Everett; Ann, married to
Nathaniel Frothingham, minister of the First Church; and Abigail Brown,
born April 25, 1808, married September 3, 1829, to Charles Francis
Adams, hardly a year older than herself. Their first child, born in
1830, was a daughter, named Louisa Catherine, after her Johnson
grandmother; the second was a son, named John Quincy, after his
President grandfather; the third took his father's name, Charles
Francis; while the fourth, being of less account, was in a way given to
his mother, who named him Henry Brooks, after a favorite brother just
lost. More followed, but these, being younger, had nothing to do with
the arduous process of educating.
The Adams connection was singularly small in Boston, but the
family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant, and almost
wholly of clerical New England stock. One might have sought long in
much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law more
distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett, Dr. Frothingham,
and Mr. Adams. One might have sought equally long for seven
brothers-in-law more unlike. No doubt they all bore more or less the
stamp of Boston, or at least of Massachusetts Bay, but the shades of
difference amounted to contrasts. Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly
more than Mr. Adams. One of the most ambitious of Bostonians, he had
broken bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian pulpit to take a
seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's
administration; support which, as a social consequence, led to the
marriage of the President's son, Charles Francis, with Mr. Everett's
youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck of parties which
marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many promising
careers, that of Edward Everett among the rest, but he had risen with
the Whig Party to power, had gone as Minister to England, and had
returned to America with the halo of a European reputation, and
undisputed rank second only to Daniel Webster as the orator and
representative figure of Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr.
Frothingham, belonged to the same clerical school, though in manner
rather the less clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common
with Mr. Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father,
and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but personal
relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and the innumerable
cousins went regularly to the First Church every Sunday in winter, and
slept through their uncle's sermons, without once thinking to ask what
the sermons were supposed to mean for them. For two hundred years the
First Church had seen the same little boys, sleeping more or less
soundly under the same or similar conditions, and dimly conscious of
the same feuds; but the feuds had never ceased, and the boys had always
grown up to inherit them. Those of the generation of 1812 had mostly
disappeared in 1850; death had cleared that score; the quarrels of John
Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal;
the game was considered as drawn; and Charles Francis Adams might then
have taken his inherited rights of political leadership in succession
to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors. Between him and State
Street the relation was more natural than between Edward Everett and
State Street; but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew
himself aloof and renewed the old war which had already lasted since
1700. He could not help it. With the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the
popular memory, his son and his only representative could not make
terms with the slave-power, and the slave-power overshadowed all the
great Boston interests. No doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his own,
as well as inherited, but even his children, who as yet had no
principles, could equally little follow the lead of Mr. Webster or even
of Mr. Seward. They would have lost in consideration more than they
would have gained in patronage. They were anti-slavery by birth, as
their name was Adams and their home was Quincy. No matter how much they
had wished to enter State Street, they felt that State Street never
would trust them, or they it. Had State Street been Paradise, they must
hunger for it in vain, and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as
archangel with the flaming sword, to order them away from the door.
Time and experience, which alter all perspectives, altered this
among the rest, and taught the boy gentler judgment, but even when only
ten years old, his face was already fixed, and his heart was stone,
against State Street; his education was warped beyond recovery in the
direction of Puritan politics. Between him and his patriot grandfather
at the same age, the conditions had changed little. The year 1848 was
like enough to the year 1776 to make a fair parallel. The parallel, as
concerned bias of education, was complete when, a few months after the
death of John Quincy Adams, a convention of anti-slavery delegates met
at Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for the general
election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for
Vice-President, Charles Francis Adams.
For any American boy the fact that his father was running for
office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even
apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life,
was decisive for twenty years to come. There was never a side-path of
escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776,
but in the eighteenth or any earlier century, the stamp mattered less
because it was standard, and every one bore it; while men whose lives
were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all,
to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This
was their education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was
easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it
gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral
standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could
not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and
that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the
graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any
previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited
dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely
needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back
into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.
Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was
chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father
alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's
quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but, for
his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown ocean
lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the dangers
of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task done, he
might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered
little to his success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on
battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity. The
generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old
forms of education; that which had its work to do between 1870 and 1900
needed something quite new.
His father's character was therefore the larger part of his
education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that
reason, if for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of
his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of
eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good deal of
difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the quality that
distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family
group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the
only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a
hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious
excuse, derided or abused the older Adamses for want of judgment. They
abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted
to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the
traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental
poise--absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness--the faculty of
standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone--a balance of
mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor
admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of
personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. This
unusual poise of judgment and temper, ripened by age, became the more
striking to his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties