| CHAPTER XVIII
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| FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
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| THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his
son Sam to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He
taught Adams the charm of Washington spring. Education for
education, none ever compared with the delight of this. The
Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty. Rock Creek was as
wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a negro log cabin
alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and
the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle
against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the landscape
carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding
heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running
water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep
and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No
European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate
grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He
loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human. He
could not leave it, but loitered on into July, falling into the
Southern ways of the summer village about La Fayette Square, as
one whose rights of inheritance could not be questioned. Few
Americans were so poor as to question them.
| 1 | |
| In spite of the fatal deception -- or undeception -- about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington
had so much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He
loved it too much to question its value. What did he know about
its value, or what did any one know? His father knew more about
it than any one else in Boston, and he was amused to find that
his father, whose recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for
Washington much the same sentimental weakness, and described the
society about President Monroe much as his son felt the society
about President Johnson. He feared its effect on young men, with
some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his brothers; but
he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy or
Boston was not likely to deaden it.
| 2 | |
| Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every
tree. Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to
amuse him by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made
in attaining perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would
have been a success. One of these errors was the inclination of
the ecliptic; the other was the differentiation of the sexes, and
the saddest thought about the last was that it should have been
so modern. Adams, in his splenetic temper, held that both these
unnecessary evils had wreaked their worst on Boston. The climate
made eternal war on society, and sex was a species of crime. The
ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as
thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in the wrong. The
thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a story of
education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his time.
Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there
were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better
than its neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove
it, even to Adams's confusion.
| 3 | |
| Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's
character showed themselves. They were startling -- astounding --
terrifying. The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical
attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has never
been cleared up -- at least so far as to make it intelligible to
Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into the
belief that he could safely corner gold without interference from
the Government. He took a number of precautions, which he
admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also
testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have
satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any
criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting,
rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be
permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course,
without assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was
professionally inadmissible.
| 4 | |
| This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances
from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have
satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for
want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day,
such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams
jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay
Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and
with as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no
one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not
regarded as lambs.
| 5 | |
| The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work
with. Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called
Gold Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The
surface was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and
they paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his
Opera-House Palace; but the New York side of the story helped
Henry little. He needed to penetrate the political mystery, and
for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At first he
feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon
knew all that was to be known; the material for his essay was
furnished by the Government.
| 6 | |
| Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a
mystery, and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making
sure that any mystery existed. All Adams's great friends -- Fish,
Cox, Hoar, Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings -- were
precisely the persons most mystified. They knew less than Adams
did; they sought information, and frankly admitted that their
relations with the White House and the Treasury were not
confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one offered
suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although press
agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to
analyze. Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration,
and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out
at the point where any member of the Administration became
visible. Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself feared
finding out too much. He found out too much already, when he saw
in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior
of the situation, and in private assured each other that if the
President had not been caught this time, he was sure to be
trapped the next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and
double. All this was wildly exciting to Adams. That Grant should
have fallen, within six months, into such a morass -- or should
have let Boutwell drop him into it -- rendered the outlook for
the next four years -- probably eight -- possibly twelve --
mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched his
wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the
eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this,
which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems,
professions, and people, all the great active forces of society,
in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months
before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of
European diplomacy, had expected to enter an honorable career in
the press as the champion and confidant of a new Washington, and
already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping the stables
of American society clear of the endless corruption which his
second Washington was quite certain to breed.
| 7 | |
| By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government
who were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few
weeks showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather
vulgar Wall Street trap, into which, according to one's point of
view Grant had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been
misled by Grant. One could hardly doubt that both of them were
astonished and disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould nor
any other astute American mind -- still less the complex Jew --
could ever have accustomed itself to the incredible and
inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and perhaps, on the
whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if victims they
both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap which might
easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into
confusion, cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been
scandalous in a boarding-school of girls. For satirists or
comedians, the study was rich and endless, and they exploited its
corners with happy results, but a young man fresh from the rustic
simplicity of London noticed with horror that the grossest
satires on the American Senator and politician never failed to
excite the laughter and applause of every audience. Rich and poor
joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives. Society
laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except
to laugh too.
| 8 | |
| Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can
afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of
vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can
always laugh at the dead; but a young man has only one chance,
and brief time to seize it. Any one in power above him can
extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the mercy of fools and
cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive out every
active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every intelligent
man about the Government prepared to go. The people would have
liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to
content themselves by turning their backs and going to work
harder than ever on their railroads and foundries. They were
strong enough to carry even their politics. Only the helpless
remained stranded in Washington.
| 9 | |
| The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every
one who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself
up in it, alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues
asked him in vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in
the Cabinet or out of it, of suggestion or information on matters
even of vital interest. The Treasury as an active influence
ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell waited with confidence for society
to drag his department out of the mire, as it was sure to do if
he waited long enough.
| 10 | |
| Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to
receive none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments
left to serve. He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition
was his horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern
Democrats and Southern rebels who never had much in common with
any Adams, and had never shown any warm interest about them
except to drive them from public life. If Mr. Boutwell turned him
out of the Treasury with the indifference or contempt that made
even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State Department
freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this
last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized
champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought
of his disaster between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an
accident could not occur again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable,
and their policy was sure to be safe enough for support. No
mosquito could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time
between a Secretary and a Senator who were both his friends.
| 11 | |
| This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he
approved; he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and
he was delighted; but when he renewed his relations with Sumner
in the winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the idea that
Sumner had a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also to
force on the Department. This was not all. Secretary Fish seemed
to have vanished. Besides the Department of State over which he
nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street,
there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations over which
Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a
policy of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man
ever approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place
himself among all these forces. Officially he would have followed
the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the
Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile
towards Grant, but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As
for Grant's policy, Adams never had a chance to know fully what
it was, but, as far as he did know, he was ready to give it
ardent support. The difficulty came only when he heard Sumner's
views, which, as he had reason to know, were always commands, to
be disregarded only by traitors.
| 12 | |
| Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed.
To his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto
on all extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St.
Thomas to the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an
alternative, and ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with
incredulous stupor while Sumner unfolded his plan for
concentrating and pressing every possible American claim against
England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the
United States.
| 13 | |
| Adams did not then know -- in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him -- what was going on behind the doors of
the White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis
knew much more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as
impenetrable in Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy.
President Grant let every one go on, but whom he supported, Adams
could not be expected to divine. One point alone seemed clear to
a man -- no longer so very young -- who had lately come from a
seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as much as
any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the
gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and
Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams
was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama
Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as
peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only
wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr. Fish
did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so
mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with
Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no
one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be
whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were
concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to
challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was
a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from
his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party manager he had not
the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were unknown to
him.
| 14 | |
| Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then
it was not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more
disconcerting than the complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish
afterwards told Adams, with the rather grim humor he sometimes
indulged in, that Grant took a dislike to Motley because he
parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the story to
Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as
good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed
to him a part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound
judgments on less material than hair -- on clothes, for example,
according to Mr. Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de
Retz -- and nine men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as
hair for their likes or dislikes. In truth, Grant disliked Motley
at sight, because they had nothing in common; and for the same
reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason he would be sure
to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish could not
be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.
| 15 | |
| The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but
another quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish
and Sumner, worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet,
the one whom he had most personal interest in cultivating was
Attorney General Hoar. The Legal Tender decision, which had been
the first stumbling-block to Adams at Washington, grew in
interest till it threatened to become something more serious than
a block; it fell on one's head like a plaster ceiling, and could
not be escaped. The impending battle between Fish and Sumner was
nothing like so serious as the outbreak between Hoar and Chief
Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to support the
Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he never
dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the
Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been driven, like
the rest of the world, to admit that American society had
outgrown most of its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme
Court, much as a churchman clings to his bishops, because they
are his only symbol of unity; his last rag of Right. Between the
Executive and the Legislature, citizens could have no Rights;
they were at the mercy of Power. They had created the Court to
protect them from unlimited Power, and it was little enough
protection at best. Adams wanted to save the independence of the
Court at least for his lifetime, and could not conceive that the
Executive should wish to overthrow it.
| 16 | |
| Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an
article on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a
volume just then published by Spaulding, the putative father of
the legal-tender clause in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who
alone sympathized with reform, saved from Boutwell's decree of
banishment such reformers as he could find place for, and he
saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census of 1870. Walker
was obliged to abandon his article for the North American in
order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his notes,
and Adams completed the article.
| 17 | |
| He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks
and bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic"
value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was
paid half the wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of
attacking or defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the
Chief Justice and the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might
afterwards have been the necessity for legal tender, there was no
necessity for it at the time the Act was passed. With the help of
the Chief Justice's recollections, Adams completed the article,
which appeared in the April number of the North American. Its
ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to abandon the knife
for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and the
Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had
serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of
Spaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the
time; and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with
conviction. The Chief Justice seemed to be pleased. The Attorney
General, pleased or not, made no sign. The article had enough
historical interest to induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of
Essays twenty years afterwards; but its historical value was not
its point in education. The point was that, in spite of the best
intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the strongest wish to
escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into opposition.
Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.
| 18 | |
| Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He
did this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself.
Scarcely a newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York
Tribune was one of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in
every direction marked the dissolution of temper, and the Senate
Chamber became again a scene of irritated egotism that passed
ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each other, and no one
objected, but they picked quarrels also with the Executive and
threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.
| 19 | |
| That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success
at Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule,
must have had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could
only have understood what it was. He studied, but failed.
Sympathy with him was not their weakness. Directly, in the form
of help, he knew he could hope as little from them as from
Boutwell. So far from inviting attachment they, like other New
Englanders, blushed to own a friend. Not one of the whole
delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to help Adams or
any other young man who did not beg for it, although they would
always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics
was the earliest of all political education, and Adams had
nothing to learn from its study; but the situation struck him as
curious -- so curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon
it. His four most powerful friends had matched themselves, two
and two, and were fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish;
Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the judiciary as prizes!
What value had the fight in education?
| 20 | |
| Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling
or Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The
statesmen of the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars
or Lamars, were personally as honest as human nature could
produce. They trod with lofty contempt on other people's jobs,
especially when there was good in them. Yet the public thought
that Sumner and Conkling cost the country a hundred times more
than all the jobs they ever trod on; just as Lamar and the old
Southern statesmen, who were also honest in money-matters, cost
the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt worried Adams
less than it worried his friends and the public, but it affected
the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant,
Garfield, and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics
turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin,
ruined their influence by their insistence on points of morals.
Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and
laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially
following the strong. In spite of all such criticism, the public
nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and
voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the question;
until young men were forced to see that either some new standard
must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
expired -- like the Constitution.
| 21 | |
| Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well
spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for
decency. What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that
would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.
Adams had tried his own little hands on it, and had failed. His
friends had been driven out of Washington or had taken to
fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the
future.
| 22 | |
| The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he
thought he had observed and all he had been told. He thought it
good history then, and he thought it better twenty years
afterwards; he thought it even good enough to reprint. As it
happened, in the process of his devious education, this "Session"
of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in current politics, and
his last dying testament as a humble member of the press. As
such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he gone on
reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The political
dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970 The
system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the
eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration
marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's political energies must
henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece out -- to patch --
or, in vulgar language, to tinker -- the political machine as
often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might
last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil
war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in
the world -- the clumsiest -- the most inefficient
| 23 | |
| Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics -- to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling
or even Mr. Sumner -- he could not honestly say that such an
education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable
heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing on
lower levels -- clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine
-- who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial
demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the
North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn.
What kind of political ambition was to result from this
destructive political education?
| 24 | |
| Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach
it. If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working,
new morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An
eternity of Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of
Jay Goulds, refused to be conceived as possible. Practical
Americans laughed, and went their way. Society paid them to be
practical. Whenever society cared to pay Adams, he too would be
practical, take his pay, and hold his tongue; but meanwhile he
was driven to associate with Democratic Congressmen and educate
them. He served David Wells as an active assistant professor of
revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a college. The
Administration drove him, and thousands of other young men, into
active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want of
system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be
absurd. No one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in
reform; the blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics
as of business.
| 25 | |
| All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew
Congressmen by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote
for his various organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He
enjoyed the life enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam
Ward or Sunset Cox; much happier than his friends Fish or J. D.
Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or Attorney General Hoar or Charles
Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best
of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin
called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more
voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the
judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams
astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent to
the Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught
glimpses of the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such
moments he pondered on the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the
steps of Ara Coeli.
| 26 | |
| Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold
Conspiracy," which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the
Edinburgh Review. It was the best piece of work he had done, but
this was not his reason for publishing it in England. The Erie
scandal had provoked a sort of revolt among respectable New
Yorkers, as well as among some who were not so respectable; and
the attack on Erie was beginning to promise success. London was a
sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it was thought well
to strike them there, where they were socially and financially
exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times
the attention in America that the same article would attract in
the North American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted
such articles in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of
copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised
free of charge, since in any case, his pay was nothing. Under the
excitement of chase he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked
it.
| 27 | |
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