The Education of Henry Adams
atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple,
but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an
attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of
pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern
drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with
bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed
his Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way, but
with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The softness of his
gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted with him, did not
come from Boston. His aunt was anything rather than Bostonian. He did
not wholly come from Boston himself. Though Washington belonged to a
different world, and the two worlds could not live together, he was not
sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most. Even at twelve years old he
could see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve
hundred, if by accident he should happen to live so long.
His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the
Senate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists, was
freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled a pleasant
political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's chair, which is
now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to some of the men whose
names were great in their day, and as familiar to him as his own. Clay
and Webster and Calhoun were there still, but with them a Free Soil
candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do; what struck boys
most was their type. Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as
they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman. The type
of Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate,
when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty
members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice was not so much a
vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The statesman of all periods
was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than
familiarity--on the platform as in the pulpit--and Southern pomposity,
when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and
childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the
Websterian or Conklinian pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease
there, more at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though
his acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives went
back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly to him, and
seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in
spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased
to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal enemies. Decidedly the
Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly world.
This first step in national politics was a little like the walk
before breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where even the
weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first, except that it led
to the White House. He was taken to see President Taylor. Outside, in a
paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the President's charger, was grazing,
as they entered; and inside, the President was receiving callers as
simply as if he were in the paddock too. The President was friendly,
and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he could ever recall. In
fact, what strangeness should he feel? The families were intimate; so
intimate that their friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and
all sorts of rupture. President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van
Buren and the Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of
use. As for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and,
barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or
less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he
owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He
felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter
of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if
he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in
distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor,
might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some
very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators,
Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.
Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not. No
sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country, one
could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office or
name, unless it were George Washington. That was--to all appearance
sincerely--respected. People made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made
even an effort to build Washington a monument. The effort had failed,
but one still went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr.
Adams took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave
him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards. To the
New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were
connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant
bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy
fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this
road's badness which amounted to social crime--and yet, at the end of
the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George
Washington.
Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders
do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
repeat what he was told--that George Washington stood alone. Otherwise
this third step in his Washington education would have been his last.
On that line, the problem of progress was not soluble, whatever the
optimists and orators might say--or, for that matter, whatever they
might think. George Washington could not be reached on Boston lines.
George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an
ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless
motion of every other visible point in space, he alone remained steady,
in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shifted
their bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John
Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but Mount
Vernon always remained where it was, with no practicable road to reach
it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a
Southern setting. No doubt it was much more charming, but it was the
same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, the same old patriot,
and the same old President.
The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself in
memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine; he had only
enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask himself or
his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced George
Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In practice, such trifles as
contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of
ignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to deal with
them seriously as education is fatal. Luckily Charles Francis Adams
never preached and was singularly free from cant. He may have had views
of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple
elementary fact that George Washington stood alone.
Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever,
and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century,
but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole
Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as
dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave
power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could
go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the boy
gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an
isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a
shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of
practical politics. Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century
statesmanship. America and he began, at the same time, to become aware
of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery. Even at
that early moment, a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might
meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile
sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship with
late nineteenth-century party organization. The first vague sense of
feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in 185l.
The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had
nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended on others
for machine work and money--on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who
spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse, and asked no reward.
Almost without knowing it, the subordinates ousted their employers and
created a machine which no one but themselves could run. In 1850 things
had not quite reached that point. The men who ran the small Free Soil
machine were still modest, though they became famous enough in their
own right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the other
managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts Democrats giving
the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate to the Free
Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would
have nothing to do, for such a coalition was in their eyes much like
jockeys selling a race. They did not care to take office as pay for
votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats. Theirs was a correct, not to say
noble, position; but, as a matter of fact, they took the benefit of the
sale, for the coalition chose Charles Sumner as its candidate for the
Senate, while George S. Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats.
This was the boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one;
not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the
nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too
good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles Sumner
happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between
his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him,
there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend
was right because his friend, and the boy shared the glory. The
question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted. Yet every
one saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must
be learned and understood, once for all. The boy might ignore, as a
mere historical puzzle, the question how to deduce George Washington
from the sum of all wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce
Charles Sumner from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too,
education could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the
vista.
Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his
object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could rise to
no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object in
supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator. It
was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a
millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions,
except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong, and