| CHAPTER I
| -1 | |
| QUINCY (1838-1848)
| 0 | |
| UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the
house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue
runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House
grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill;
and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February
16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle,
the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston
Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.
| 1 | |
| Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple
and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more
distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the
races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the
century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary
traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds
advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the
safeguards of an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often
irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all,
one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier, such
safeguards as his would have secured any young man's success; and
although in 1838 their value was not very great compared with
what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of
starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations
so colonial, -- so troglodytic -- as the First Church, the Boston
State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount
Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of
unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of
curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the
solution. What could become of such a child of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself
required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been
consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding
such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one
of which neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of
time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not
consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the
confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them to
change nothing as far as concerned him. He would have been
astounded by his own luck. Probably no child, born in the year,
held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game of
chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not
refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual
plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he
had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do
it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his
life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and
partner from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only
with that understanding -- as a consciously assenting member in
full partnership with the society of his age -- had his education
an interest to himself or to others.
| 2 | |
| As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game
at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors
of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which
otherwise has no moral and little incident. A story of education
-- seventy years of it -- the practical value remains to the end
in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since
the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the
universe has never been stated in dollars. Although every one
cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the
great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his own universe,
and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their
neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
| 3 | |
| This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as
a vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked
before, to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age
he puzzled over the question whether, on the doctrine of chances,
he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident.
No such accident had ever happened before in human experience.
For him, alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and
a new one created. He and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic
Boston were suddenly cut apart -- separated forever -- in act if
not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany
Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay;
and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to
Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were
nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six
years old ; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments
of the old met his eyes.
| 4 | |
| Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on
a yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old
when he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color.
The second followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841,
he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as
dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family. When
he began to recover strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger
must have been stronger than any other pleasure or pain, for
while in after life he retained not the faintest recollection of
his illness, he remembered quite clearly his aunt entering the
sickroom bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple.
| 5 | |
| The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be
that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that
the sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he
could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from
the little house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his
parents were to occupy for the rest of their lives in the
neighboring Mount Vernon Street. The season was midwinter,
January 10, 1842, and he never forgot his acute distress for want
of air under his blankets, or the noises of moving furniture.
| 6 | |
| As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in
childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under
any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially
scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in
character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to
decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but
this fever of Henry Adams took greater and greater importance in
his eyes, from the point of view of education, the longer he
lived. At first, the effect was physical. He fell behind his
brothers two or three inches in height, and proportionally in
bone and weight. His character and processes of mind seemed to
share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not good in a
fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought
to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The
habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally
rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every
question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of
evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form,
quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and
the antipathy to society -- all these are well-known qualities of
New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in
this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and
Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole,
the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for
his purpose. His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
| 7 | |
| As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking
life as it was given; accepting its local standards without a
dificulty, and enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of
his age. He seemed to himself quite normal, and his companions
seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about him
was education, not character, and came to him, directly and
indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance
which he took with his name.
| 8 | |
| The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped,
from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political
crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature;
the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance;
for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world
chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be
abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly
succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty
implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys
naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it
so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long
struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to
love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.
| 9 | |
| Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts
politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New
England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility --
a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it -- so that
the pleasure of hating -- one's self if no better victim offered
-- was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and
natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients.
The violence of the contrast was real and made the strongest
motive of education. The double exterior nature gave life its
relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and
country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought,
balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement,
school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with
six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing
under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became dangerous
to cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins who expected
children to behave themselves, and who were not always gratified;
above all else, winter represented the desire to escape and go
free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles
away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of
mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed
by boys without knowing it.
| 10 | |
| Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more
equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To
the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was
the strongest -- smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the
scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box
hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns,
cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes; nothing
came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the
taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and
flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a
spelling-book -- the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the
boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as
sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The
New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color.
The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by
atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New
England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early
morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it
a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June
afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored
prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then
ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the
cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of
Boston winter. With such standards, the Bostonian could not but
develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a January
blizzard, the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent
snow-glare of the cold white sunshine, with its intense light and
shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it
only by education.
| 11 | |
| Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer
was tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass,
or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in
the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in
the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite
quarries, or chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the
swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and
country were always sensual living, while winter was always
compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature;
winter was school.
| 12 | |
| The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
though life, and made the division between its perplexing,
warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with
growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest
childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was
double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty,
were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his
eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to
little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours' walk from Beacon
Hill, it belonged in a different world. For two hundred years,
every Adams, from father to son, had lived within sight of State
Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had ever taken
kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited
his double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his
great-grandfather, who had died a dozen years before his own
birth: he took for granted that any great-grandfather of his must
have always been good, and his enemies wicked; but he divined his
great-grandfather's character from his own. Never for a moment
did he connect the two ideas of Boston and John Adams; they were
separate and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams went with
Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old
man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with
him, but except that he heard his grandfather always called "the
President," and his grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to
suppose that his Adams grandfather differed in character from his
Brooks grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. He liked
the Adams side best, but for no other reason than that it
reminded him of the country, the summer, and the absence of
restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way inferior to
Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The
reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child. Quincy had
no Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler manner
of life and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling.
The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams used to
light his own fires in the early morning was still on the
mantelpiece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress
for servants, or of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy.
Bathrooms, water-supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array
of domestic comforts, were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already
a bathroom, a water-supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority
of Boston was evident, but a child liked it no better for that.
| 13 | |
| The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed
the mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The
President's place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the
more interesting of the two; but a boy felt at once its
inferiority in fashion. It showed plainly enough its want of
wealth. It smacked of colonial age, but not of Boston style or
plush curtains. To the end of his life he never quite overcame
the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish breath. He never
could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century style. He was
never able to adopt it, any more than his father or grandfather
or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was
worse; but because, for some remote reason, he was born an
eighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth
century. What style it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels
and its Louis Seize chairs and sofas. The panels belonged to an
old colonial Vassall who built the house; the furniture had been
brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801 or 1817, along with
porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic remnants; and
neither of the two eighteenth-century styles -- neither English
Queen Anne nor French Louis Seize -- was cofortable for a boy, or
for any one else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to
suit daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a
child's objects, the older forms. On the contrary, most boys, as
well as grown-up people, preferred the new, with good reason, and
the child felt himself distinctly at a disadvantage for the
taste.
| 14 | |
| Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both
were kind to children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth
than to the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference
between them except that one was associated with winter and the
other with summer; one with Boston, the other with Quincy. Even
with Medford, the association was hardly easier. Once as a very
young boy he was taken to pass a few days with his grandfather
Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so violently homesick
that within twenty-four hours he was brought back in disgrace.
Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again.
| 15 | |
| The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even
there the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel
universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four
vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not
enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an
education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of
running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline
through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and
must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of
religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a
boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the
colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him
and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy
of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on
friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was
never easy.
| 16 | |
| All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his
first serious contact with the President should have been a
struggle of will, in which the old man almost necessarily
defeated the boy, but instead of leaving, as usual in such
defeats, a lifelong sting, left rather an impression of as fair
treatment as could be expected from a natural enemy. The boy met
seldom with such restraint. He could not have been much more than
six years old at the time -- seven at the utmost -- and his
mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the President
during the summer. What became of the rest of the family he quite
forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door
one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against
going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of
his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in
this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she
was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry
showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he
met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement
protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with
sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led
up to the door of the President's library, when the door opened,
and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the
boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe,
up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation
at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected
that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself
to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road
to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad
imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to
dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and
always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his
apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy
saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until
he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the
centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did
the President release his hand and depart.
| 17 | |
| The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights
of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made
him dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it
had this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of
mind, the child must have recognized that the President, though a
tool of tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certain
intelligence. He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal
feeling, and had made no display of force. Above all, he had held
his tongue. During their long walk he had said nothing; he had
uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience
and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown no concern
in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy's
existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually
troubling itself little about his grandson's iniquities, and much
about the iniquities of President Polk, but the boy could
scarcely at that age feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that
President Polk was to be the vicarious victim of his own sins,
and he gave his grandfather credit for intelligent silence. For
this forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force
as a form of right; he admitted even temper, under protest; but
the seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen
on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as every one knows, the
stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land.
| 18 | |
| Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old
President's relations with the boy were friendly and almost
intimate. Whether his older brothers and sisters were still more
favored he failed to remember, but he was himself admitted to a
sort of familiarity which, when in his turn he had reached old
age, rather shocked him, for it must have sometimes tried the
President's patience. He hung about the library; handled the
books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers; searched the
old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the
sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in
the corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where
a row of tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars
which were supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never
did. The Madam bore with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which
her husband purloined for these hatcheries; but she made protest
when he carried off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns
or peachstones that he might see the roots grow, but which, she
said, he commonly forgot like the caterpillars.
| 19 | |
| At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless
they have been improved off the ground; but his was a restless
mind, and although he took his hobbies seriously and would have
been annoyed had his grandchild asked whether he was bored like
an English duke, he probably cared more for the processes than
for the results, so that his grandson was saddened by the sight
and smell of peaches and pears, the best of their kind, which he
brought up from the garden to rot on his shelves for seed. With
the inherited virtues of his Puritan ancestors, the little boy
Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the finest
peaches he found in the garden, and ate only the less perfect.
Naturally he ate more by way of compensation, but the act showed
that he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it is even
possible that he may have felt a certain self-reproach for his
temporary role of schoolmaster -- seeing that his own career did
not offer proof of the worldly advantages of docile obedience --
for there still exists somewhere a little volume of critically
edited Nursery Rhymes with the boy's name in full written in the
President's trembling hand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was
also the Bible, given to each child at birth, with the proper
inscription in the President's hand on the fly-leaf; while their
grandfather Brooks supplied the silver mugs.
| 20 | |
| So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill,"
five minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view
eastward over Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his
twelfth year, the child passed his summers there, and his
pleasures of childhood mostly centred in it. Of education he had
as yet little to complain. Country schools were not very serious.
Nothing stuck to the mind except home impressions, and the
sharpest were those of kindred children; but as influences that
warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of the back of
the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on Sundays, in
line with that of President Quincy, who, though some ten years
younger, seemed to children about the same age. Before railways
entered the New England town, every parish church showed
half-a-dozen of these leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat
on the main aisle in the best pews, and had sat there, or in some
equivalent dignity, since the time of St. Augustine, if not since
the glacial epoch. It was unusual for boys to sit behind a
President grandfather, and to read over his head the tablet in
memory of a President great-grandfather, who had "pledged his
life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" to secure the
independence of his country and so forth; but boys naturally
supposed, without much reasoning, that other boys had the
equivalent of President grandfathers, and that churches would
always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens on the main
aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on the walls. The
Irish gardener once said to the child: "You'll be thinkin' you'll
be President too!" The casuality of the remark made so strong an
impression on his mind that he never forgot it. He could not
remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him, that there
should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea. What had
been would continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents
nor about Churches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt
whether a system of society which had lasted since Adam would
outlast one Adams more.
| 21 | |
| The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but more
decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles,
looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a
fragile creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a
message, and took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate
face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her
refined figure ; her gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of
not belonging there, but to Washington or to Europe, like her
furniture, and writing-desk with little glass doors above and
little eighteenth-century volumes in old binding, labelled
"Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More." Try as she
might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her cross
in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he
felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from
Boston. She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua
Johnson, an American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson
of Maryland; and Catherine Nuth, of an English family in London.
Driven from England by the Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took
his family to Nantes, where they remained till the peace. The
girl Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years old when brought back
to London, and her sense of nationality must have been confused;
but the influence of the Johnsons and the services of Joshua
obtained for him from President Washington the appointment of
Consul in London on the organization of the Government in 1790.
In 1794 President Washington appointed John Quincy Adams Minister
to The Hague. He was twenty-seven years old when he returned to
London, and found the Consul's house a very agreeable haunt.
Louisa was then twenty.
| 22 | |
| At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling
Americans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting
point, between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the
City, near the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting
that it proved fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a
Romney portrait, but among her many charms that of being a New
England woman was not one. The defect was serious. Her future
mother-in-law, Abigail, a famous New England woman whose
authority over her turbulent husband, the second President, was
hardly so great as that which she exercised over her son, the
sixth to be, was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be
made of stuff stern enough, or brought up in conditions severe
enough, to suit a New England climate, or to make an efficient
wife for her paragon son, and Abigail was right on that point, as
on most others where sound judgment was involved; but sound
judgment is sometimes a source of weakness rather than of force,
and John Quincy already had reason to think that his mother held
sound judgments on the subject of daughters-in-law which human
nature, since the fall of Eve, made Adams helpless to realize.
Being three thousand miles away from his mother, and equally far
in love, he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797, and took her
to Berlin to be the head of the United States Legation. During
three or four exciting years, the young bride lived in Berlin;
whether she was happy or not, whether she was content or not,
whether she was socially successful or not, her descendants did
not surely know; but in any case she could by no chance have
become educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the
overthrow of the Federalist Party drove her and her husband to
America, and she became at last a member of the Quincy household,
but by that time her children needed all her attention, and she
remained there with occasional winters in Boston and Washington,
till 1809. Her husband was made Senator in 1803, and in 1809 was
appointed Minister to Russia. She went with him to St.
Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles Francis, born in 1807; but
broken-hearted at having to leave her two older boys behind. The
life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her; they were far too
poor to shine in that extravagant society; but she survived it,
though her little girl baby did not, and in the winter of
1814-15, alone with the boy of seven years old, crossed Europe
from St. Petersburg to Paris, in her travelling-carriage, passing
through the armies, and reaching Paris in the Cent Jours after
Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next went to England as
Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of the Regent.
In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and she
lived for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer
for President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four
miserable years in the White House. When that chapter was closed
in 1829, she had earned the right to be tired and delicate, but
she still had fifteen years to serve as wife of a Member of the
House, after her husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it
was that the little Henry, her grandson, first remembered her,
from 1843 to 1848, sitting in her panelled room, at breakfast,
with her heavy silver teapot and sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which
still exist somewhere as an heirloom of the modern safety-vault.
By that time she was seventy years old or more, and thoroughly
weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To the boy she seemed
singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her
old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an exotic, like her
Sevres china; an object of deference to every one, and of great
affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian than she
had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the shadow of
the Tower of London.
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| Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old
husband, the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards
of the coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture.
The boy knew nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the
venerable Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe
stress and little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from
her might come some of those doubts and self-questionings, those
hesitations, those rebellions against law and discipline, which
marked more than one of her descendants; but he might even then
have felt some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit
from her the seeds of the primal sin, the fall from grace, the
curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New England stock, but
half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian,
but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of
Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had
hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old, when his parents
left him there at school in 1817, and he never forgot the
experience. He was to be nearly as old as his mother had been in
1845, before he quite accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted
him.
| 24 | |
| A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a
certain delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at
home in the eighteenth century and should, in proper
self-respect, have rebelled against the standards of the
nineteenth. The atmosphere of his first ten years must have been
very like that of his grandfather at the same age, from 1767 till
1776, barring the battle of Bunker Hill, and even as late as
1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of
Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in
self-abasement before the majesty of English standards; far from
concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it as his strength.
The eighteenth century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the
boy began to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates.
| 25 | |
| Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather
abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious
of a certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and
gathered, from such words as he could catch, that the President,
who happened to be then staying there, on his way to Washington,
had fallen and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis.
After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of
his grandfather, in a tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side
of the spare bedroom fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr.
Parkman or P. P. F. Degrand, on the other side, both dozing.
| 26 | |
| The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848 -- and the month of February brought
life and death as a family habit -- when the eighteenth century,
as an actual and living companion, vanished. If the scene on the
floor of the House, when the old President fell, struck the still
simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually
dramatic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was
fading away with the life of his grandfather, could not be
slight. One had to pay for Revolutionary patriots; grandfathers
and grandmothers; Presidents; diplomats; Queen Anne mahogany and
Louis Seize chairs, as well as for Stuart portraits. Such things
warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they ruined it,
and perhaps the practical common-sense of the American mind
judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the
emotions of the funeral service in the Quincy church, with its
surroundings of national respect and family pride. By another
dramatic chance it happened that the clergyman of the parish, Dr.
Lunt, was an unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat
austere intellectual type, such as the school of Buckminster and
Channing inherited from the old Congregational clergy. His
extraordinarily refined appearance, his dignity of manner, his
deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English and his fine
appreciation, gave to the funeral service a character that left
an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many
great functions -- funerals and festival -- in after-life, till
his only thought was to see no more, but he never again witnessed
anything nearly so impressive to him as the last services at
Quincy over the body of one President and the ashes of another.
| 27 | |
| The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the
boy was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a
Eulogy. Like all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable
piece of oratory, such as only an admirable orator and scholar
could create; too good for a 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?
| 28 | |
| 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?
| 29 | |
| 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.
| 30 | |
|