| CHAPTER XVII
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| PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)
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| THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to
the November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not
go on so beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or
knew it. He bore it as well as he could, and when he picked
himself up, winter had come, and he was settled in bachelor's
quarters, as modest as those of a clerk in the Departments, far
out on G Street, towards Georgetown, where an old Finn named
Dohna, who had come out with the Russian Minister Stoeckel long
before, had bought or built a new house. Congress had met. Two or
three months remained to the old administration, but all interest
centred in the new one. The town began to swarm with
office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He drifted
among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of the
confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but
he picked up friends on the press -- Nordhoff, Murat Halstead,
Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles -- all reformers, and all mixed and
jumbled together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for
General Grant to give orders. No one seemed to know much about
it. Even Senators had nothing to say. One could only make notes
and study finance.
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| In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements of
Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the
amusements proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions,
interests, thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington was a
poor place for education, and of course young diplomats avoided
or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked every place
except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris. They abused
London more violently than Washington; they praised no post under
the sun; and they were merely describing three-fourths of their
stations when they complained that there were no theatres, no
restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no splendor,
and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza. This was all
true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient and
temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more
sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men
Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few, and
greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance of the
young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a young
duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make up, and a
ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society he had ever
seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost
genial, in the softness of a Washington spring. Society went on
excellently well without houses, or carriages, or jewels, or
toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort; and
the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could not stay
there a month without loving the shabby town. Even the Washington
girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor
clever, had singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams
the father, this charm dated back as far as Monroe's
administration, to his personal knowledge.
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| Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial
or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be
taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details
matter nothing. Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim
thanked God for it. Politics and reform became the detail, and
waltzing the profession. Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had
as private secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who
became a dangerous example of frivolity. The new
Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a
son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another
impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far
down in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have
spared a world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to
have reversed better in waltzing.
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| He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All were
profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to
education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier
without style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier
than he had ever been before; happier than any one in the harsh
world of strenuousness could dream of. This must be taken as
background for such little education as he gained; but the life
belonged to the eighteenth century, and in no way concerned
education for the twentieth.
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| In such an atmosphere, one made no great presence of hard work.
If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if
it will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus
far, no one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams
had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was for social
consideration, and social pleasure was his pay. For this he was
willing to go on working, as an artist goes on painting when no
one buys his pictures. Artists have done it from the beginning of
time, and will do it after time has expired, since they cannot
help themselves, and they find their return in the pride of their
social superiority as they feel it. Society commonly abets them
and encourages their attitude of contempt. The society of
Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists
produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it
had the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty.
Adams found even the Government at his service, and every one
willing to answer his questions. He worked, after a fashion; not
very hard, but as much as the Government would have required of
him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defied
frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever
got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he.
One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and this was
the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months to
an article on the finances of the United States, just then a
subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course
it was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were
still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.
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| The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a
place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow
of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank
seemed colossal -- the highest in the literary world -- as it had
been only five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed
since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though it
brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty
pounds of pay -- fifty dollars a month, measured in time and
labor.
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| The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert
Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of
politics which he called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and
the name -- he thought he had been enough in Lord Robert's house,
in days of his struggle with adversity, to excuse the theft --
and began what he meant for a permanent series of annual
political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a political
authority. With his sources of information, and his social
intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that
would command attention. He had the field to himself, and he
meant to give himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the
newspapers liked it or not, they would have to reckon with him;
for such a power, once established, was more effective than all
the speeches in Congress or reports to the President that could
be crammed into the Government presses.
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| The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could
not be condensed into a single article, and had to be
supplemented in October by another which bore the title of "Civil
Service Reform," and was really a part of the same review. A good
deal of authentic history slipped into these papers. Whether any
one except his press associates ever read them, he never knew and
never greatly cared. The difference is slight, to the influence
of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by
five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he
reaches the five hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870 was near
at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch, when
quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration;
volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard
Kipling brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual,
Adams found himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of
belated wanderers kept him company, and they produced on each
other the effect or illusion of a public opinion. They straggled
apart, at longer and longer intervals, through the procession,
but they were still within hearing distance of each other. The
drift was still superficially conservative. Just as the Church
spoke with apparent authority, of the quarterlies laid down an
apparent law, and no one could surely say where the real
authority, or the real law, lay. Science lid not know. Truths a
priori held their own against truths surely relative. According
to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was forever
on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he
could still depend on a certain number of listeners -- mostly
respectable, and some rich.
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| Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if
this had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point
where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of
ten make their errors. One may be more or less certain of
organized forces; one can never be certain of men. He belonged to
the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his
plans. For the moment, America was more eighteenth century than
himself; it reverted to the stone age.
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| As education -- of a certain sort -- the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see
much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of
a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the
animal's way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned
over and over again in politics since 1860.
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| At least four-fifths of the American people -- Adams among the
rest -- had united in the election of General Grant to the
Presidency, and probably had been more or less affected in their
choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington.
Nothing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a
great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might
be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and
commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know
how to administer. Even Washington, who was, in education and
experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organize a
government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize
his departments. The task of bringing the Government back to
regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to
administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it
itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion,
especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every
one had echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."
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| Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman
one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One
never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and
public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for
the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none
at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet
officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives,
the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact with a
Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and
hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, compared with
the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase
somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869
-- he saw little or nothing of later ones -- but he knew a
shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question,
put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever
sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators
passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised
its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew
Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics
of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, like
Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more
grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely
sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their
egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did
permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even
McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to
decency.
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| Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or
politicians would raise the character of government; and by
instinct if not by reason, all the world united on Grant. The
Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silence
for a struggle with Grant more serious than that with Andrew
Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with eagerness to support the
President against the Senate. The newspaper-man is, more than
most men, a double personality; and his person feels best
satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and
thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt
alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the
Senate and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of
confirmation, nor did he much care how it should be done, for he
thought it safer to effect the revolution in 1870 than to wait
till 1920..
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| With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded
secret of Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at
the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five
minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so
laughable as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long
list of Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than
that of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant's
nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed,
not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total
misconception of life -- another inconceivable false start. Yet,
unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no
secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's
nominations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his
incompetence. A great soldier might be a baby politician.
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| Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May
13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly,
"the incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without
absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which
Adams had laid out for himself in the future. After such a
miscarriage, no thought of effectual reform could revive for at
least one generation, and he had no fancy for ineffectual
politics. What course could he sail next? He had tried so many,
and society had barred them all! For the moment, he saw no hope
but in following the stream on which he had launched himself. The
new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile. Subsequently Grant
made changes in the list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian
-- or should have been -- although fatal to Adams. The name of
Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme
conservatism and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George
S. Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a
somewhat lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as
the opposite of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain
words, total extinction for any one resembling Henry Adams. On
the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the
Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar,
as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly
cheerful, and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended
on Grant himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been
one of reform; that his aim had been to place his administration
above politics; and until he should actually drive his supporters
away, one might hope to support him. One's little lantern must
therefore be turned on Grant. One seemed to know him so well, and
really knew so little.
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| By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table,
the two men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was
exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing. He was
stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular;
but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an
excellent military historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary
book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of
Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the General's staff.
As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington were
unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point
army officers were no more flattering. All described him as
vicious, narrow, dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to
Washington for a consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted
more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became irritable,
besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and showed
a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true
literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still
more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he said
nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but
he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the
General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy,
immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose.
He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant
succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others
would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not
directly, but by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In
the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming
conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry
it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They
could never measure his character or be sure when he would act.
They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They
were not sure that he did think.
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| In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act
on the General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a
legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large,
and it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest
general the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was
rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or
Charles Nordhoff.
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| Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a
dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by
no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious
object of study among them all. About no one did opinions differ
so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A
single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the
fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met
with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type
-- Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the
more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for
nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,
archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.
Adam, according to legend, was such a man.
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| In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were
the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from
the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of
others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in
outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom
action was the highest stimulant -- the instinct of fight. Such
men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the
Pteraspis , but they made short work of scholars. They had
commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in
others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect
at once.
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| Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to
follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one
must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less
sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same
intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for
expression: "Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad
law is to execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences
generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he
made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a
particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city
if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure
of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same
intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same
degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the
American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as
usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like
the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no
right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea
that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution,
and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called -- and should actually and truly be -- the highest product
of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One
must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain
such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President
Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset
Darwin.
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| Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because
he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he
was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins.
Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting to the
stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that
of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing. One
could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future. It
was not even sensibly American. Not an official in it, except
perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in September,
suggested an American idea.
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| Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish
was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values;
he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no
prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or
person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable;
he was not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he
won confidence from the start and remained a friend to the
finish. As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily
suited, and one was still better off in the Interior Department
with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury and
Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as
far as personal relations went, while, in the Attorney-General's
Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both
personal and political.
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| The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
government been filled with them, it would have helped little
without the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the
start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only
barnacles. At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle,
but even in that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen.
His friends were reformers, critics, doubtful in party
allegiance, and he was himself an object of suspicion. Grant had
no objects, wanted no help, wished for no champions. The
Executive asked only to be let alone. This was his meaning when
he said: "Let us have peace! "
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| No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration
to support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He
was for sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively
cheap, for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on
the Government, but on New York. All he wanted was something to
support; something that would let itself be supported. Luck went
dead against him. For once, he was fifty years in advance of his
time.
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