University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII
TREASON (1860–1861)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 workrooms,
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.

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 idées 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.

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?

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.

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.

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 Summer, 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, familiar; one knew it
to the core; one was it—had been run in the same mould.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and of
Thurlow Weed had not won favor; but the fierce heat which
welded the Republican Party in 1856 melted many 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 La Fayctte 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, without
waiting further experiment—as he took for granted that
arsenic poisoned—the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

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.

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.