| CHAPTER VII
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| TREASON (1860-1861)
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| WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether
fortune or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any
of his known antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of
law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.
| 1 | |
| He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded
like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which
played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The
simile is none too strong. Not one man in America wanted the
Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted
secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their
occupations in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed
what happened. Possibly a few Southern loyalists in despair might
dream it as an impossible chance; but none planned it.
| 2 | |
| As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another
sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics,
quite heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted
away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father
asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he
hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son
to act as private secretary during the winter in Washington, as
though any young man who could afford to throw away two winters
on the Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for another
winter without a master. The young man was beyond satire, and
asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the east wind.
November at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from
earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does
the uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail
wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy November
seemed temperate before the chill of a Boston January.
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| This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although
no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the
Republicans organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a
form military in all things except weapons. Henry reached home in
time to see the last of these processions, stretching in ranks of
torches along the hillside, file down through the November night;
to the Old House, where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress,
received them, and, let them pretend what they liked, their air
was not that of innocence.
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| Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked,
and started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed
since his last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and
1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same
forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms,
and sloughs for roads. The Government had an air of social
instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right
of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession
was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from.
The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December,
1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far
as it made itself felt. John Adams was better off in Philadelphia
in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in Washington.
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| Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in
1860-61, no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all
the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was
surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly
that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly
greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master
a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after
Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern
talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself
seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and
ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in
mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of
hallucination -- haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent
morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were
mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree
rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains
of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like
oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson
of the way in which excess of power worked when held by
inadequate hands.
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| This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was
paradox. The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of
statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles
Sumner's chief offence was his insistence on Southern ignorance,
and he stood a living proof of it. To this school, Henry Adams
had come for a new education, and the school was seriously,
honestly, taken by most of the world, including Europe, as proper
for the purpose, although the Sioux Indians would have taught
less mischief. From such contradictions among intelligent people,
what was a young man to learn?
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| He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to
teach or to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided,
he was too glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the
education of a reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson
from the Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at
one sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac
was shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton planters, from
whom one could learn nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker,
and treason.
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| Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings.
Republican houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams
aimed to create a social centre for New Englanders. They took a
house on I Street, looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out
towards Georgetown -- the Markoe house -- and there the private
secretary began to learn his social duties, for the political
were confined to committee-rooms and lobbies of the Capitol. He
had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly, but he knew
of no one who knew more.
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| The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the
boy's oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady
men, well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue
-- men whom one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or
not, bore the stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one
exception, and perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the
New Englander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a
defect. He offered no more target for love than for hate; he
attracted as little as he repelled; even as a machine, his motion
seemed never accelerated. The character, with its force or
feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to the core; one was it --
had been run in the same mould.
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| There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself
to Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few
other men born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to
Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for the New York
Times, and who was a man of the world. The average Congressman
was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, and
nothing to offer but the views of his district. The average
Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being
always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his
own importance.
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| Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence
of only two men -- Sumner and Seward.
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| Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and,
after his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite
recovered its tone; but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary
existence as Senator had most to do with his development. No man,
however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or
Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic
stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of
attitude forever, as though they mesmerized the subject. Yet even
among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank
South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or
Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became
Shakespearian and bouffe -- as Godkin used to call it -- like
Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at
least the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism. He justly
thought, as Webster had thought before him, that his great
services and sacrifices, his superiority in education, his
oratorical power, his political experience, his representative
character at the head of the whole New England contingent, and,
above all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most
important member of the Senate; and no Senator had ever saturated
himself more thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the body.
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| Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one
Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and
still more seldom likes to be told of it. Even the greatest
Senators seemed to inspire little personal affection in each
other, and betrayed none at all. Sumner had a number of rivals
who held his judgment in no high esteem, and one of these was
Senator Seward. The two men would have disliked each other by
instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was created
only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the
faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of
either. That the public service must suffer was certain, but what
were the sufferings of the public service compared with the risks
run by a young mosquito -- a private secretary -- trying to buzz
admiration in the ears of each, and unaware that each would
impatiently slap at him for belonging to the other? Innocent and
unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, the
private secretary courted both.
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| Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a
professional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on
reaching Washington, was that the President-elect, Abraham
Lincoln, had selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and
that Seward was to be the medium for communicating his wishes to
his followers. Every young man naturally accepted the wishes of
Mr. Lincoln as orders, the more because he could see that the new
President was likely to need all the help that several million
young men would be able to give, if they counted on having any
President at all to serve. Naturally one waited impatiently for
the first meeting with the new Secretary of State.
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| Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed
to be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been
Senator since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had
separated him from the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry
light of the first Free Soil faith, the ways of New York politics
Thurlow Weed had not won favor; but the fierce heat which welded
the Republican Party in 1856 melted many such barriers, and when
Mr. Adams came to Congress in December, 1859, Governor Seward
instantly renewed his attitude of family friend, became a daily
intimate in the household, and lost no chance of forcing his
fresh ally to the front.
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| A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the
family, and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to
watch him as carefully as one generally watches men who dispose
of one's future. A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise
macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and
clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual
cigar, offered a new type -- of western New York -- to fathom; a
type in one way simple because it was only double -- political
and personal; but complex because the political had become
nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the
features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off
restraint, or seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the
world he threw it off, like a politician, for effect. In both
cases he chose to appear as a free talker, who loathed pomposity
and enjoyed a joke; but how much was nature and how much was
mask, he was himself too simple a nature to know. Underneath the
surface he was conventional after the conventions of western New
York and Albany. Politicians thought it unconventionality.
Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought it
charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who,
though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He
noticed that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was
large; he generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship;
he did not require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual
-- almost singular and quite eccentric -- he had some means,
unknown to other Senators, of producing the effect of
unselfishness.
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| Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be
rigid, but the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple
enough when it chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had
been attacked in succession as no better than political
mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth, in his standard history, went so far
as to echo with approval the charge that treachery was hereditary
in the family. Any Adams had at least to be thick-skinned,
hardened to every contradictory epithet that virtue could supply,
and, on the whole, armed to return such attentions; but all must
have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to
national interests, and would continue to do so, whenever forced
to choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his father had done,
as his father had followed the steps of John Adams, and no doubt
thereby earned his epithets.
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| The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the
edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his
masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guessing;
even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing
motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which
he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of
simple-minded surprise. Critics who know ultimate truth will
pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in
man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and he never saw quite
so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one knows the
story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and the
conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion
made the sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and
concentrated education.
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| Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the
Government, they must make sure of a government to administer,
and that this chance depended on the action of Virginia. The
whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort of the
cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new
President to keep Virginia in. Governor Seward representing the
Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr. Adams took the
lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary knew, the
party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty,
of dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open
eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after
Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no
secession now, you and I are ruined."
| 20 | |
| They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries
had nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that
side a secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The
sudden arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and
the language of his inaugural address, were the final term of the
winter's tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in
the matter forever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more
interest in the appearance of another private secretary, of his
own age, a young man named John Hay, who lighted on LaFayette
Square at the same moment. Friends are born, not made, and Henry
never mistook a friend except when in power. From the first
slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as
a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of
their paths; but, for the moment, his own task ended on March 4
when Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were shifted upon new
shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to Blackstone. He had
tried to make himself useful, and had exerted energy that seemed
to him portentous, acting in secret as newspaper correspondent,
cultivating a large acquaintance and even haunting ballrooms
where the simple, old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant even
in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to
nothing for education, because no one could teach; all were as
ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done, or how to do
it; all were trying to learn and were more bent on asking than on
answering questions. The mass of ignorance in Washington was
lighted up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top to bottom,
broke down.
| 21 | |
| From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military
figure that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked
it, or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young
Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of
his estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He saw Mr.
Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural
Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He
saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind,
absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid
gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any
other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of
becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a
private secretary; above all a lack of apparent force. Any
private secretary in the least fit for his business would have
thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much
education as the new President but that all the education he
could get would not be enough.
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| As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in
March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who
thought they knew something were more in error than those who
knew nothing. Education was matter of life and death, but all the
education in the world would have helped nothing. Only one man in
Adams's reach seemed to him supremely fitted by knowledge and
experience to be an adviser and friend. This was Senator Sumner;
and there, in fact, the young man's education began; there it
ended.
| 23 | |
| Going over the experience again, long after all the great
actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In
the effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would
have liked much to know whether he could have helped it. He had
necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted
that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he
supposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled
all personal doubts. He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator
Sumner privately denounced the course, regarded Mr. Adams as
betraying the principles of his life, and broke off relations
with his family.
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| Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the
profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are
sudden strains that permanently warp the mind. He cared little or
nothing about the point in discussion; he was even willing to
admit that Sumner might be right, though in all great emergencies
he commonly found that every one was more or less wrong; he liked
lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he
felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened
a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he
found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political
instinct, with out waiting further experiment -- as he took for
granted that arsenic poisoned -- the rule that a friend in power
is a friend lost.
| 25 | |
| On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or
afterwards, but his education -- for good or bad -- made an
enormous stride. One has to deal with all sorts of unexpected
morals in life, and, at this moment, he was looking at hundreds
of Southern gentlemen who believed themselves singularly honest,
but who seemed to him engaged in the plainest breach of faith and
the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they did not disturb his
education. History told of little else; and not one rebel
defection -- not even Robert E. Lee's -- cost young Adams a
personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.
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| This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education,
down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to
him hardly what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March,
1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led
to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering
between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,
helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. Even before the
traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarms that
darkened the ground, and tore the carrion of political patronage
into fragments and gobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of
the White House. Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or
was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or
Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public.
Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the
young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six
weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of
such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and
ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South,
before the country could recover its balance and movement. Henry
was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only wait
for he knew not what, to send him he knew not where.
| 27 | |
| With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return
with his father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and,
with childlike docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of
Horace Gray in Court Street, to begin again: "My Lords and
Gentlemen"; dozing after a two o'clock dinner, or waking to
discuss politics with the future Justice. There, in ordinary
times, he would have remained for life, his attempt at education
in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed.
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