The education of Henry Adams; an autobiography. |
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| III. | CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850–1854) |
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| XXXV. |
 | CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850–1854) The education of Henry Adams; |  |
CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850–1854)
EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit
of leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the
world, and if one learned next to nothing, the little one
did learn needed not to be unlearned. The surface was ready
to take any form that education should cut into it, though Boston,
with singular foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort of
education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but
he escaped the evils of other standards by having no standard at
all; and what was true of school was true of society. Boston offered
none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad
taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe—the society of the
forties—but the taste was only a reflection of the social slackwater
between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged
to neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic
nor industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly
as unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of
acquiring form as they grew older. Women counted for little as
models. Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at frequent
intervals with some girl—always more or less the same little
girl—who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her, except
rather familiar and provincial manners, until they married and
bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching one's
self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to suit the
standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered the mind
of a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his parents.
From women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else.
He might not even catch the idea that women had more to give.
The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.
To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
most boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard
must enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and
Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with
vice of a very low form. Blackguardism came constantly under
boys' eyes, and had the charm of force and freedom and superiority
to culture or decency. One might fear it, but no one honestly
despised it. Now and then it asserted itself as education more
roughly than school ever did. One of the commonest boy-games
of winter, inherited directly from the eighteenth-century, was a
game of war on Boston Common. In old days the two hostile
forces were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In 1850 the
North-Enders still survived as a legend, but in practice it was a
battle of the Latin School against all comers, and the Latin School,
for snowball, included all the boys of the West End. Whenever,
on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften the snow,
the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began in
daylight with the Latin School in force, rushing their opponents
down to Tremont Street, and which generally ended at dark by
the Latin School dwindling in numbers and disappearing. As the
Latin School grew weak, the roughs and young blackguards grew
strong. As long as snowballs were the only weapon, no one was
much hurt, but a stone may be put in a snowball, and in the dark
a stick or a slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a
knife. One afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting. The
boy Henry, following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles,
had taken part in the battle, and had felt his courage much depressed
by seeing one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson
—"Bully Hig," his school name—struck by a stone over the
eye, and led off the field bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As
night came on, the Latin School was steadily forced back to the
Beacon Street Mall where they could retreat no further without
disbanding, and by that time only a small band was left, headed
by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark mass of figures could be
a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a grisly terror called
Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous reputation, was going
to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards forever. Henry
wanted to run away with the others, but his brother was too big
to run away, so they stood still and waited immolation. The dark
mass set up a shout, and rushed forward. The Beacon Street
boys turned and fled up the steps, except Savage and Marvin
and the few champions who would not run. The terrible Conky
Daniels swaggered up, stopped a moment with his body-guard to
swear a few oaths at Marvin, and then swept on and chased the
flyers, leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground.
The obvious moral taught that blackguards were not so black as
they were painted; but the boy Henry had passed through as much
terror as though he were Turenne or Henri IV, and ten or twelve
years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling
on all the battle-fields of Virginia and Maryland, he wondered
whether their education on Boston Common had taught Savage
and Marvin how to die.
If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from
it. Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be
actually concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure
to be on hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he
heard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble.
Wendell Phillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth.
Theodore Parker in his pulpit was not much safer. Worst of all,
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston—the sight
of Court Square packed with bayonets, and his own friends obliged
to line the streets under arms as State militia, in order to return a
negro to slavery-wrought frenzy in the brain of a fifteen-year-old,
eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted to miss no
reasonable chance of mischief.
One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an eighteenth-century
politician, and afterwards only a possibility; beyond
Boston the first step led only further into politics. After
February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since
1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam
stayed in Washington, after her husband's death, and in her
turn was struck by paralysis and bedridden. From time to time
her son Charles, whose affection and sympathy for his mother in
her many tribulations were always pronounced, went on to see
her, and in May, 1850, he took with him his twelve-year-old son.
The journey was meant as education, and as education it served
the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a boy's thought in
1850. He could not remember taking special interest in the railroad
journey or in New York; with railways and cities he was
familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty of crossing
New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the
Camden and Amboy Railroad. This was a new world; a suggestion
of corruption in the simple habits of American life; a step to
exclusiveness never approached in Boston; but it was amusing.
The boy rather liked it. At Trenton the train set him on board
a steamer which took him to Philadelphia where he smelt other
varieties of town life; then again by boat to Chester, and by train
to Havre de Grace; by boat to Baltimore and thence by rail to
Washington. This was the journey he remembered. The actual
journey may have been quite different, but the actual journey has
no interest for education. The memory was all that mattered; and
what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime,
was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a
slave State. He took education politically. The mere raggedness
of outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even Boston had
its ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from being a
vision of neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never seen a
finished landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind.
rambled through unfenced fields and woods, or through village
streets, among a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and negro babies,
who might all have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the
Southern pig required styes, but who never showed a sign of care.
This was the boy's impression of what slavery caused, and, for
him, was all it taught. Coming down in the early morning from
his bedroom in his grandmother's house—still called the Adams
Building—in F Street and venturing outside into the air reeking
with the thick odor of the catalpa trees, he found himself
on an earth-road, or village street, with wheel-tracks meandering
from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble
columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office which
faced each other in the distance, like white Greek temples in the
abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city. Here and there
low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as in other
Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished
square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and he walked down to
inspect it before breakfast. His aunt drily remarked that, at this
rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not
guess—having lived always in Washington—how little the
sights of Washington had to do with its interest.
The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding
of himself. The more he was educated, the less he understood.
Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror;
a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more
repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave
States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious!
He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had
another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to
do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more;
the sense of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again;
and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population
hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The
on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy
itself. The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness,
the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the
streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the
freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his
Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the same way,
but with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The softness
of his gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted
with him, did not come from Boston His aunt was anything
rather than Bostonian. He did not wholly come from Boston
himself. Though Washington belonged to a different world, and
the two worlds could not live together, he was not sure that he
enjoyed the Boston world most. Even at twelve years old he could
see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve hundred,
if by accident he should happen to live so long.
His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the Senate,
which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists,
was freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled
a pleasant political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's
chair, which is now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to
some of the men whose names were great in their day, and as
familiar to him as his own. Clay and Webster and Calhoun were
there still, but with them a Free Soil candidate for the Vice-Presidency
had little to do; what struck boys most was their type.
Senators were a species; they all wore an air, as they wore a blue
dress coat or brass buttons; they were Roman. The type of
Senator in 1850 was rather charming at its best, and the Senate,
When in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only
some sixty members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice
was not so much a vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The
statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity
was less offensive then familiarity—on the platform as
in the pulpit—and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was
quite a different thing from the Websterian or Conklinian
pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease there, more
at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though his
acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives
went back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly
to him, and seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially;
and, in spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years,
after he ceased to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal
enemies. Decidedly the Senate, pro-slavery though it were,
seemed a friendly world.
This first step in national politics was a little like the walk before
breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where
even the weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first,
except that it led to the White House. He was taken to see President
Taylor. Outside, in a paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the
President's charger, was grazing, as they entered; and inside, the
President was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock
too. The President was friendly, and the boy felt no sense of
strangeness that he could ever recall. In fact, what strangeness
should he feel? The families were intimate; so intimate that their
friendliness outlived generations, civil war, and all sorts of rupture.
President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van Buren and the
Free Soil Party. To him, the Adamses might still be of use. As
for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and,
barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more
or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought
he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in
it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President
was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two
in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who,
was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots,
or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about,
were likely to be. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and such
things were swarming in every street.
Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not.
No sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole
country, one could hardly have met with an admission of respect
for any office or name, unless it were George Washington. That
was—to all appearance sincerely—respected. People made pilgrimages
to Mount Vernon and made even an effort to build
Washington a monument. The effort had failed, but one still
went to Mount Vernon, although it was no easy trip. Mr. Adams
took the boy there in a carriage and pair, over a road that gave
him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards.
To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean
face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system.
Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was
clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and
slavery was the cause of this road's badness which amounted to
social crime—and yet, at the end of the road and product of
the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.
Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders do,
or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
repeat what he was told—that George Washington stood alone.
Otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have
been his last. On that line, the problem of progress was not
soluble, whatever the optimists and orators might say—or, for
that matter, whatever they might think. George Washington
could not be reached on Boston lines. George Washington was a
primary, or, if Virginians liked it better, an ultimate relation, like
the Pole Star, and amid the endless restless motion of every other
visible point in space, he alone remained steady, in the mind of
Henry Adams, to the end. All the other points shifted their
bearings; John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, even John
Marshall, took varied lights, and assumed new relations, but
road to reach it; and yet, when he got there, Mount Vernon was
only Quincy in a Southern setting. No doubt it was much more
charming, but it was the same eighteenth-century, the same old
furniture, the same old patriot, and the same old President.
The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself
in memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine;
he had only enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to
ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that
deduced George Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In
practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set
aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man; but
any attempt to deal with them seriously as education is fatal.
Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was singularly
free from cant. He may have had views of his own, but he
let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact
that George Washington stood alone.
Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than
ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth
century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery
drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism, The
boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own
ancestors. The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and
Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and
ran off into emotion; but, as the boy gradually found his surroundings
change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in a hostile
universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he
began to learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics.
Thus far he had seen nothing but eighteenth-century statesmanship.
America and he began, at the same time, to become aware
of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery.
that he might meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile
sixteenth-century principles and eighteenth-century statesmanship
with late nineteenth-century party organization. The first vague
sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in
1851.
The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster,
had nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended
on others for machine work and money—on Peter Harveys and
Thurlow Weeds, who spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse,
and asked no reward. Almost without knowing it, the subordinates
ousted their employers and created a machine which no one
but themselves could run. In 1850 things had not quite reached
that point. The men who ran the small Free Soil machine were
still modest, though they became famous enough in their own
right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame, and the
other managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts
Democrats giving the State to the Democrats and a seat in the
Senate to the Free Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his
statesman friends would have nothing to do, for such a coalition
was in their eyes much like jockeys selling a race. They did not
care to take office as pay for votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats.
Theirs was a correct, not to say noble, position; but, as a matter
of fact, they took the benefit of the sale, for the coalition chose
Charles Sumner as its candidate for the Senate, while George S.
Boutwell was made Governor for the Democrats. This was the
boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one; not that
he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the
nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was
too good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles
Sumner happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods,
But between his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction,
and, for him, there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the
shared the glory. The question of education did not rise while the
conflict lasted. Yet every one saw as clearly then as afterwards
that a lesson of some sort must be learned and understood, once
for all. The boy might ignore, as a mere historical puzzle, the
question how to deduce George Washington from the sum of all
wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce Charles Sumner
from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too, education
could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the vista.
Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his object
in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could
rise to no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object
in supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator.
It was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend
a millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral
conclusions, except by admitting that he and his father and
Sumner were wrong, and this he was never willing to do, for the
consequences of this admission were worse than those of the other.
Thus, before he was fifteen years old, he had managed to get himself
into a state of moral confusion from which he never escaped.
As a politician, he was already corrupt, and he never could see
how any practical politician could be less corrupt than himself.
Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At
the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize,
though the press shouted it at him from every corner, and though
the Mount Vernon Street conclave agreed with the press; yet
he could not plead ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict,
he never cared to defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew
enough to know that something was wrong, but his only interest
was the election. Day after day, the General Court balloted;
and the boy haunted the gallery, following the roll-call, and wonered
what Caleb Cushing meant by calling Mr. Sumner a "one-eyed
abolitionist." Truly the difference in meaning with the phrase
is not very great, but neither the one nor the other seemed
to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy, who never could have made
the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together, or mistaking
Caleb Cushing's relation to either. Temper ran high at that
moment, while Sumner every day missed his election by only one
or two votes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing among the silent
crowd in the gallery, Henry heard the vote announced which gave
Sumner the needed number. Slipping under the arms of the bystanders,
the ran home as hard as he could, and burst into the diningroom
where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family. He
enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected; it was
probably the proudest moment in the life of either.
The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers
of boys and men in the streets wearing black crape on their arm.
He knew few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were
what he called pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of
white silk ribbon round his own arm by way of showing that his
friend Mr. Sumner was not wholly alone. This little piece of
bravado passed unnoticed; no one even cuffed his ears; but in
later life he was a little puzzled to decide which symbol was the
more correct. No one then dreamed of four years' war, but every
one dreamed of secession. The symbol for either might well be
matter of doubt.
This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was
a politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else.
He should have been, like his grandfather, a protégé of George
Washington, a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing
to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march. On the
contrary, he was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself shut out
of Boston as though he were an exile; he never thought of himself
as a Bostonian; he never looked about him in Boston, as boys
commonly do wherever they are, to select the street they like best,
Always he felt himself somewhere else; perhaps in Washington
with its social ease; perhaps in Europe; and he watched with
vague unrest from the Quincy hills the smoke of the Cunard
steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon, and disappearing
every other Saturday or whatever the day might be, as though the
steamers were offering to take him away, which was precisely what
they were doing.
Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when
Henry Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas
were more than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathematical
result of conditions old as history and fixed as fate—
invariable sequence in man's experience. The only idea which
would have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind.
This was the thought of going westward and growing up with the
country. That he was not in the least fitted for going West made
no objection whatever, since he was much better fitted than most
of the persons that went. The convincing reason for staying in
the East was that he had there every advantage over the West.
He could not go wrong. The West must inevitably pay an enormous
tribute to Boston and New York. One's position in the East
was the best in the world for every purpose that could offer an
object for going westward. If ever in history men had been able
to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, the citizens
of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway
systems were already laid out. Neither to a politician nor to a
business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West
promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in
plenty.
At any other moment in human history, this education, including
its political and literary bias, would have been not only good,
but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men
so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased
He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He
finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault
with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his
father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known
at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years later, at
his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twentieth
century, he wondered whether, on the whole, the boy of 1854
stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1. He
found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was
clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought,
but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials
like religion ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the
concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American
boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The
education he had received bore little relation to the education he
needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education
at all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
| CHAPTER III
WASHINGTON (1850–1854) The education of Henry Adams; | |