| CHAPTER XVI
| -1 | |
| THE PRESS (1868)
| 0 | |
| AT ten o'clock of a July night, in heat that made the tropical
rain-shower simmer, the Adams family and the Motley family
clambered down the side of their Cunard steamer into the
government tugboat, which set them ashore in black darkness at
the end of some North River pier. Had they been Tyrian traders of
the year B.C. 1000 landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar,
they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so
changed from what it had been ten years before. The historian of
the Dutch, no longer historian but diplomatist, started up an
unknown street, in company with the private secretary who had
become private citizen, in search of carriages to convey the two
parties to the Brevoort House. The pursuit was arduous but
successful. Towards midnight they found shelter once more in
their native land.
| 1 | |
| How much its character had changed or was changing, they could
not wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter,
the land itself knew no more than they. Society in America was
always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and
understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist
about in search of its tail. Society offered the profile of a
long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely towards the
prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its
millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear,
somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage over
Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction,
while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several
contradictory movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia
should be polarized or oriented towards the same point, America
might easily lose her lead. Meanwhile each newcomer needed to
slip into a place as near the head of the caravan as possible,
and needed most to know where the leaders could be found.
One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the
last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies --
coal, iron, steam -- a distinct superiority in power over the old
industrial elements -- agriculture, handwork, and learning; but
the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties
resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain,
to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own
trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage;
a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His
world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow --
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs -- but
had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than
he -- American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans
and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil
war. He made no complaint and found no fault with his time; he
was no worse off than the Indians or the buffalo who had been
ejected from their heritage by his own people; but he vehemently
insisted that he was not himself at fault. The defeat was not due
to him, nor yet to any superiority of his rivals. He had been
unfairly forced out of the track, and must get back into it as
best he could.
| 2 | |
| One comfort he could enjoy to the full. Little as he might be
fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at
his father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he.
All were equally survivals from the forties -- bric-a-brac from
the time of Louis Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments
that had been more or less suited to the colonial architecture,
but which never had much value in Desbrosses Street or Fifth
Avenue. They could scarcely have earned five dollars a day in any
modern industry. The men who commanded high pay were as a rule
not ornamental. Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked
social charm. Doubtless the country needed ornament -- needed it
very badly indeed -- but it needed energy still more, and capital
most of all, for its supply was ridiculously out of proportion to
its wants. On the new scale of power, merely to make the
continent habitable for civilized people would require an
immediate outlay that would have bankrupted the world. As yet, no
portion of the world except a few narrow stretches of western
Europe had ever been tolerably provided with the essentials of
comfort and convenience; to fit out an entire continent with
roads and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit of the
entire planet. Such an estimate seemed outrageous to a Texan
member of Congress who loved the simplicity of nature's noblemen;
but the mere suggestion that a sun existed above him would
outrage the self-respect of a deep-sea fish that carried a
lantern on the end of its nose. From the moment that railways
were introduced, life took on extravagance.
| 3 | |
| Thus the belated reveller who landed in the dark at the
Desbrosses Street ferry, found his energies exhausted in the
effort to see his own length. The new Americans, of whom he was
to be one, must, whether they were fit or unfit, create a world
of their own, a science, a society, a philosophy, a universe,
where they had not yet created a road or even learned to dig
their own iron. They had no time for thought; they saw, and could
see, nothing beyond their day's work; their attitude to the
universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish. Above all,
they naturally and intensely disliked to be told what to do, and
how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods from
the abstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology. They
knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite
new.
| 4 | |
| All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as
little as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he
knew, the less he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and
seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but
the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.
They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at
hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste
immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years
before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious
expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving
everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing
else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having
cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw
itself on that which stood first -- its roads. The field was
vast; altogether beyond its power to control offhand; and society
dropped every thought of dealing with anything more than the
single fraction called a railway system. This relatively small
part of its task was still so big as to need the energies of a
generation, for it required all the new machinery to be created
-- capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power-houses,
technical knowledge, mechanical population, together with a
steady remodelling of social and political habits, ideas, and
institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions.
The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the
railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself.
| 5 | |
| Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act as
though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the new
start. His brother Charles had determined to strike for the
railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; and they hoped to
play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they found
no one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of
a so-called education, they had still to discover the
worthlessness of so-called social connection. No young man had a
larger acquaintance and relationship than Henry Adams, yet he
knew no one who could help him. He was for sale, in the open
market. So were many of his friends. All the world knew it, and
knew too that they were cheap; to be bought at the price of a
mechanic. There was no concealment, no delicacy, and no illusion
about it. Neither he nor his friends complained; but he felt
sometimes a little surprised that, as far as he knew, no one,
seeking in the labor market, ever so much as inquired about their
fitness. The want of solidarity between old and young seemed
American. The young man was required to impose himself, by the
usual business methods, as a necessity on his elders, in order to
compel them to buy him as an investment. As Adams felt it, he was
in a manner expected to blackmail. Many a young man complained to
him in after life of the same experience, which became a matter
of curious reflection as he grew old. The labor market of good
society was ill-organized.
| 6 | |
| Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor. A peculiar
and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had
changed much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no
longer dined at two o'clock; one could no longer skate on Back
Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth five millions or more as
something not incredible. Yet the place seemed still simple, and
less restless-minded than ever before. In the line that Adams had
chosen to follow, he needed more than all else the help of the
press, but any shadow of hope on that side vanished instantly.
The less one meddled with the Boston press, the better. All the
newspapermen were clear on that point. The same was true of
politics. Boston meant business. The Bostonians were building
railways. Adams would have liked to help in building railways,
but had no education. He was not fit.
| 7 | |
| He passed three or four months thus, visiting relations,
renewing friendships, and studying the situation. At thirty years
old, the man who has not yet got further than to study the
situation, is lost, or near it. He could see nothing in the
situation that could be of use to him. His friends had won no
more from it than he. His brother Charles, after three years of
civil life, was no better off than himself, except for being
married and in greater need of income. His brother John had
become a brilliant political leader on the wrong side. No one had
yet regained the lost ground of the war.
| 8 | |
| He went to Newport and tried to be fashionable, but even in the
simple life of 1868, he failed as fashion. All the style he had
learned so painfully in London was worse than useless in America
where every standard was different. Newport was charming, but it
asked for no education and gave none. What it gave was much gayer
and pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in
that society were a kind of social partnership, like the classes
at college; not education but the subjects of education. All were
doing the same thing, and asking the same question of the future.
None could help. Society seemed founded on the law that all was
for the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, and that all
young people were rich if they could waltz. It was a new version
of the Ant and Grasshopper.
| 9 | |
| At the end of three months, the only person, among the hundreds
he had met, who had offered him a word of encouragement or had
shown a sign of acquaintance with his doings, was Edward
Atkinson. Boston was cool towards sons, whether prodigals or
other, and needed much time to make up its mind what to do for
them -- time which Adams, at thirty years old, could hardly
spare. He had not the courage or self-confidence to hire an
office in State Street, as so many of his friends did, and doze
there alone, vacuity within and a snowstorm outside, waiting for
Fortune to knock at the door, or hoping to find her asleep in the
elevator; or on the staircase, since elevators were not yet in
use. Whether this course would have offered his best chance he
never knew; it was one of the points in practical education which
most needed a clear understanding, and he could never reach it.
His father and mother would have been glad to see him stay with
them and begin reading Blackstone again, and he showed no very
filial tenderness by abruptly breaking the tie that had lasted so
long. After all, perhaps Beacon Street was as good as any other
street for his objects in life; possibly his easiest and surest
path was from Beacon Street to State Street and back again, all
the days of his years. Who could tell? Even after life was over,
the doubt could not be determined.
| 10 | |
| In thus sacrificing his heritage, he only followed the path
that had led him from the beginning. Boston was full of his
brothers. He had reckoned from childhood on outlawry as his
peculiar birthright. The mere thought of beginning life again in
Mount Vernon Street lowered the pulsations of his heart. This is
a story of education -- not a mere lesson of life -- and, with
education, temperament has in strictness nothing to do, although
in practice they run close together. Neither by temperament nor
by education was he fitted for Boston. He had drifted far away
and behind his companions there; no one trusted his temperament
or education; he had to go.
| 11 | |
| Since no other path seemed to offer itself, he stuck to his
plan of joining the press, and selected Washington as the
shortest road to New York, but, in 1868, Washington stood outside
the social pale. No Bostonian had ever gone there. One announced
one's self as an adventurer and an office-seeker, a person of
deplorably bad judgment, and the charges were true. The chances
of ending in the gutter were, at best, even. The risk was the
greater in Adams's case, because he had no very clear idea what
to do when he got there. That he must educate himself over again,
for objects quite new, in an air altogether hostile to his old
educations, was the only certainty; but how he was to do it --
how he was to convert the idler in Rotten Row into the lobbyist
of the Capital -- he had not an idea, and no one to teach him.
The question of money is rarely serious for a young American
unless he is married, and money never troubled Adams more than
others; not because he had it, but because he could do without
it, like most people in Washington who all lived on the income of
bricklayers; but with or without money he met the difficulty
that, after getting to Washington in order to go on the press, it
was necessary to seek a press to go on. For large work he could
count on the North American Review, but this was scarcely a
press. For current discussion and correspondence, he could depend
on the New York Nation; but what he needed was a New York daily,
and no New York daily needed him. He lost his one chance by the
death of Henry J. Raymond. The Tribune under Horace Greeley was
out of the question both for political and personal reasons, and
because Whitelaw Reid had already undertaken that singularly
venturesome position, amid difficulties that would have swamped
Adams in four-and-twenty hours. Charles A. Dana had made the Sun
a very successful as well as a very amusing paper, but had hurt
his own social position in doing it; and Adams knew himself well
enough to know that he could never please himself and Dana too;
with the best intentions, he must always fail as a blackguard,
and at that time a strong dash of blackguardism was life to the
Sun. As for the New York Herald, it was a despotic empire
admitting no personality but that of Bennett. Thus, for the
moment, the New York daily press offered no field except the
free-trade Holy Land of the Evening Post under William Cullen
Bryant, while beside it lay only the elevated plateau of the New
Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation. Much as Adams liked
Godkin, and glad as he was to creep under the shelter of the
Evening Post and the Nation, he was well aware that he should
find there only the same circle of readers that he reached in the
North American Review.
| 12 | |
| The outlook was dim, but it was all he had, and at Washington,
except for the personal friendship of Mr. Evarts who was then
Attorney General and living there, he would stand in solitude
much like that of London in 1861. Evarts did what no one in
Boston seemed to care for doing; he held out a hand to the young
man. Whether Boston, like Salem, really shunned strangers, or
whether Evarts was an exception even in New York, he had the
social instinct which Boston had not. Generous by nature,
prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born
man-of-the-world, Evarts gave and took liberally, without
scruple, and accepted the world without fearing or abusing it.
His wit was the least part of his social attraction. His talk was
broad and free. He laughed where he could; he joked if a joke was
possible; he was true to his friends, and never lost his temper
or became ill-natured. Like all New Yorkers he was decidedly not
a Bostonian; but he was what one might call a transplanted New
Englander, like General Sherman; a variety, grown in ranker soil.
In the course of life, and in widely different countries, Adams
incurred heavy debts of gratitude to persons on whom he had no
claim and to whom he could seldom make return; perhaps
half-a-dozen such debts remained unpaid at last, although six is
a large number as lives go; but kindness seldom came more happily
than when Mr. Evarts took him to Washington in October, 1868.
| 13 | |
| Adams accepted the hospitality of the sleeper, with deep
gratitude, the more because his first struggle with a
sleeping-car made him doubt the value -- to him -- of a Pullman
civilization; but he was even more grateful for the shelter of
Mr. Evarts's house in H Street at the corner of Fourteenth, where
he abode in safety and content till he found rooms in the
roomless village. To him the village seemed unchanged. Had he not
known that a great war and eight years of astonishing movement
had passed over it, he would have noticed nothing that betrayed
growth. As of old, houses were few; rooms fewer; even the men
were the same. No one seemed to miss the usual comforts of
civilization, and Adams was glad to get rid of them, for his best
chance lay in the eighteenth century.
| 14 | |
| The first step, of course, was the making of acquaintance, and
the first acquaintance was naturally the President, to whom an
aspirant to the press officially paid respect. Evarts immediately
took him to the White House and presented him to President Andrew
Johnson. The interview was brief and consisted in the stock
remark common to monarchs and valets, that the young man looked
even younger than he was. The younger man felt even younger than
he looked. He never saw the President again, and never felt a
wish to see him, for Andrew Johnson was not the sort of man whom
a young reformer of thirty, with two or three foreign educations,
was likely to see with enthusiasm; yet, musing over the interview
as a matter of education, long years afterwards, he could not
help recalling the President's figure with a distinctness that
surprised him. The old-fashioned Southern Senator and statesman
sat in his chair at his desk with a look of self-esteem that had
its value. None doubted. All were great men; some, no doubt, were
greater than others; but all were statesmen and all were
supported, lifted, inspired by the moral certainty of rightness.
To them the universe was serious, even solemn, but it was their
universe, a Southern conception of right. Lamar used to say that
he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern
system until he found that slavery could not stand a war. Slavery
was only a part of the Southern system, and the life of it all --
the vigor -- the poetry -- was its moral certainty of self. The
Southerner could not doubt; and this self-assurance not only gave
Andrew Johnson the look of a true President, but actually made
him one. When Adams came to look back on it afterwards, he was
surprised to realize how strong the Executive was in 1868 --
perhaps the strongest he was ever to see. Certainly he never
again found himself so well satisfied, or so much at home.
| 15 | |
| Seward was still Secretary of State. Hardly yet an old man,
though showing marks of time and violence, Mr. Seward seemed
little changed in these eight years. He was the same -- with a
difference. Perhaps he -- unlike Henry Adams -- had at last got
an education, and all he wanted. Perhaps he had resigned himself
to doing without it. Whatever the reason, although his manner was
as roughly kind as ever, and his talk as free, he appeared to
have closed his account with the public; he no longer seemed to
care; he asked nothing, gave nothing, and invited no support; he
talked little of himself or of others, and waited only for his
discharge. Adams was well pleased to be near him in these last
days of his power and fame, and went much to his house in the
evenings when he was sure to be at his whist. At last, as the end
drew near, wanting to feel that the great man -- the only chief
he ever served even as a volunteer -- recognized some personal
relation, he asked Mr. Seward to dine with him one evening in his
rooms, and play his game of whist there, as he did every night in
his own house. Mr. Seward came and had his whist, and Adams
remembered his rough parting speech: "A very sensible
entertainment!" It was the only favor he ever asked of Mr.
Seward, and the only one he ever accepted.
| 16 | |
| Thus, as a teacher of wisdom, after twenty years of example,
Governor Seward passed out of one's life, and Adams lost what
should have been his firmest ally; but in truth the State
Department had ceased to be the centre of his interest, and the
Treasury had taken its place. The Secretary of the Treasury was a
man new to politics -- Hugh McCulloch -- not a person of much
importance in the eyes of practical politicians such as young
members of the press meant themselves to become, but they all
liked Mr. McCulloch, though they thought him a stop-gap rather
than a force. Had they known what sort of forces the Treasury was
to offer them for support in the generation to come, they might
have reflected a long while on their estimate of McCulloch. Adams
was fated to watch the flittings of many more Secretaries than he
ever cared to know, and he rather came back in the end to the
idea that McCulloch was the best of them, although he seemed to
represent everything that one liked least. He was no politician,
he had no party, and no power. He was not fashionable or
decorative. He was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the
narrow prejudice which the serf feels to his overerseer; for he
knew he must obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only
their helplessness when they tempered obedience by mockery. The
world, after 1865, became a bankers' world, and no banker would
ever trust one who had deserted State Street, and had gone to
Washington with purposes of doubtful credit, or of no credit at
all, for he could not have put up enough collateral to borrow
five thousand dollars of any bank in America. The banker never
would trust him, and he would never trust the banker. To him, the
banking mind was obnoxious; and this antipathy caused him the
more surprise at finding McCulloch the broadest, most liberal,
most genial, and most practical public man in Washington.
| 17 | |
| There could be no doubt of it. The burden of the Treasury at
that time was very great. The whole financial system was in
chaos; every part of it required reform; the utmost experience,
tact, and skill could not make the machine work smoothly. No one
knew how well McCulloch did it until his successor took it in
charge, and tried to correct his methods. Adams did not know
enough to appreciate McCulloch's technical skill, but he was
struck at his open and generous treatment of young men. Of all
rare qualities, this was, in Adams's experience, the rarest. As a
rule, officials dread interference. The strongest often resent it
most. Any official who admits equality in discussion of his
official course, feels it to be an act of virtue; after a few
months or years he tires of the effort. Every friend in power is
a friend lost. This rule is so nearly absolute that it may be
taken in practice as admitting no exception. Apparent exceptions
exist, and McCulloch was one of them.
| 18 | |
| McCulloch had been spared the gluttonous selfishness and
infantile jealousy which are the commoner results of early
political education. He had neither past nor future, and could
afford to be careless of his company. Adams found him surrounded
by all the active and intelligent young men in the country. Full
of faith, greedy for work, eager for reform, energetic,
confident, capable, quick of study, charmed with a fight, equally
ready to defend or attack, they were unselfish, and even -- as
young men went -- honest. They came mostly from the army, with
the spirit of the volunteers. Frank Walker, Frank Barlow, Frank
Bartlett were types of the generation. Most of the press, and
much of the public, especially in the West, shared their ideas.
No one denied the need for reform. The whole government, from top
to bottom, was rotten with the senility of what was antiquated
and the instability of what was improvised. The currency was only
one example; the tariff was another; but the whole fabric
required reconstruction as much as in 1789, for the Constitution
had become as antiquated as the Confederation. Sooner or later a
shock must come, the more dangerous the longer postponed. The
Civil War had made a new system in fact; the country would have
to reorganize the machinery in practice and theory.
| 19 | |
| One might discuss indefinitely the question which branch of
government needed reform most urgently; all needed it enough, but
no one denied that the finances were a scandal, and a constant,
universal nuisance. The tariff was worse, though more interests
upheld it. McCulloch had the singular merit of facing reform with
large good-nature and willing sympathy -- outside of parties,
jobs, bargains, corporations or intrigues -- which Adams never
was to meet again.
| 20 | |
| Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. The Civil War
had bred life. The army bred courage. Young men of the volunteer
type were not always docile under control, but they were handy in
a fight. Adams was greatly pleased to be admitted as one of them.
He found himself much at home with them -- more at home than he
ever had been before, or was ever to be again -- in the
atmosphere of the Treasury. He had no strong party passion, and
he felt as though he and his friends owned this administration,
which, in its dying days, had neither friends nor future except
in them.
| 21 | |
| These were not the only allies; the whole government in all its
branches was alive with them. Just at that moment the Supreme
Court was about to take up the Legal Tender cases where Judge
Curtis had been employed to argue against the constitutional
power of the Government to make an artificial standard of value
in time of peace. Evarts was anxious to fix on a line of argument
that should have a chance of standing up against that of Judge
Curtis, and was puzzled to do it. He did not know which foot to
put forward. About to deal with Judge Curtis, the last of the
strong jurists of Marshall's school, he could risk no chances. In
doubt, the quickest way to clear one's mind is to discuss, and
Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving,
dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He
needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.
| 22 | |
| Adams was flattered at being an anvil, which is, after all,
more solid than the hammer; and he did not feel called on to
treat Mr. Evarts's arguments with more respect than Mr. Evarts
himself expressed for them; so he contradicted with freedom. Like
most young men, he was much of a doctrinaire, and the question
was, in any event, rather historical or political than legal. He
could easily maintain, by way of argument, that the required
power had never been given, and that no sound constitutional
reason could possibly exist for authorizing the Government to
overthrow the standard of value without necessity, in time of
peace. The dispute itself had not much value for him, even as
education, but it led to his seeking light from the Chief Justice
himself. Following up the subject for his letters to the Nation
and his articles in the North American Review, Adams grew to be
intimate with the Chief Justice, who, as one of the oldest and
strongest leaders of the Free Soil Party, had claims to his
personal regard; for the old Free Soilers were becoming few. Like
all strong-willed and self-asserting men, Mr. Chase had the
faults of his qualities. He was never easy to drive in harness,
or light in hand. He saw vividly what was wrong, and did not
always allow for what was relatively right. He loved power as
though he were still a Senator. His position towards Legal Tender
was awkward. As Secretary of the Treasury he had been its author;
as Chief Justice he became its enemy. Legal Tender caused no
great pleasure or pain in the sum of life to a newspaper
correspondent, but it served as a subject for letters, and the
Chief Justice was very willing to win an ally in the press who
would tell his story as he wished it to be read. The intimacy in
Mr. Chase's house grew rapidly, and the alliance was no small
help to the comforts of a struggling newspaper adventurer in
Washington. No matter what one might think of his politics or
temper, Mr. Chase was a dramatic figure, of high senatorial rank,
if also of certain senatorial faults; a valuable ally.
| 23 | |
| As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met
Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him.
As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of
friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise,
dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams
enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was
fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever
dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be treated
once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken relations is
a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns, for
Sumner's quarrel with Mr. Adams had not been the most delicate of
his ruptured relations, and he was liable to be sensitive in many
ways that even Bostonians could hardly keep in constant mind; yet
it interested and fascinated Henry Adams as a new study of
political humanity. The younger man knew that the meeting would
have to come, and was ready for it, if only as a newspaper need;
but to Sumner it came as a surprise and a disagreeable one, as
Adams conceived. He learned something -- a piece of practical
education worth the effort -- by watching Sumner's behavior. He
could see that many thoughts -- mostly unpleasant -- were passing
through his mind, since he made no inquiry about any of Adams's
family, or allusion to any of his friends or his residence
abroad. He talked only of the present. To him, Adams in
Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic, perhaps a
spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of others;
a politician without party; a writer without principles; an
office-seeker certain to beg for support. All this was, for his
purposes, true. Adams could do him no good, and would be likely
to do him all the harm in his power. Adams accepted it all;
expected to be kept at arm's length; admitted that the reasons
were just. He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a
renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost
confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at
Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette
Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and
informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes
even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of
omniscience.
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| On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams
ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner
felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved
educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's
mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects
images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
The images from without, the objects mechanically perceived by
the senses, existed by courtesy until the mental surface was
ruffled, but never became part of the thought. Henry Adams roused
no emotion; if he had roused a disagreeable one, he would have
ceased to exist. The mind would have mechanically rejected, as it
had mechanically admitted him. Not that Sumner was more
aggressively egoistic than other Senators -- Conkling, for
instance -- but that with him the disease had affected the whole
mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Senators for
the most part, it was still acute.
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| Perhaps for this very reason, Sumner was the more valuable
acquaintance for a newspaper-man. Adams found him most useful;
perhaps quite the most useful of all these great authorities who
were the stock-in-trade of the newspaper business; the
accumulated capital of a Silurian age. A few months or years
more, and they were gone. In 1868, they were like the town
itself, changing but not changed. La Fayette Square was society.
Within a few hundred yards of Mr. Clark Mills's nursery monument
to the equestrian seat of Andrew Jackson, one found all one's
acquaintance as well as hotels, banks, markets and national
government. Beyond the Square the country began. No rich or
fashionable stranger had yet discovered the town. No literary or
scientific man, no artist, no gentleman without office or
employment, had ever lived there. It was rural, and its society
was primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a
great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps
one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of
world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse
tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every
pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met
to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express.
The State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on
Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing his
architectural infant asylum next the White House. The value of
real estate had not increased since 1800, and the pavements were
more impassable than the mud. All this favored a young man who
had come to make a name. In four-and-twenty hours he could know
everybody; in two days everybody knew him.
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| After seven years' arduous and unsuccessful effort to explore
the outskirts of London society, the Washington world offered an
easy and delightful repose. When he looked round him, from the
safe shelter of Mr. Evarts's roof, on the men he was to work with
-- or against -- he had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired
education was useless, and the other tenth harmful. He would have
to begin again from the beginning. He must learn to talk to the
Western Congressman, and to hide his own antecedents. The task
was amusing. He could see nothing to prevent him from enjoying
it, with immoral unconcern for all that had gone before and for
anything that might follow. The lobby offered a spectacle almost
picturesque. Few figures on the Paris stage were more
entertaining and dramatic than old Sam Ward, who knew more of
life than all the departments of the Government together,
including the Senate and the Smithsonian. Society had not much to
give, but what it had, it gave with an open hand. For the moment,
politics had ceased to disturb social relations. All parties were
mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water. The
Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of education.
All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.
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