University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVII
PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)

THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of
low spirits new to the young man's education; due in
part to the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the
Maryland autumn, almost unendurable for its strain on one who
had toned his life down to the November grays and browns of
northern Europe. Life could not go on so beautiful and so sad.
Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore it as well as he
could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come, and he
was settled in bachelor's quarters, as modest as those of a clerk
in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown,
where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the
Russian Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new
house. Congress had met. Two or three months remained to the
old administration, but all interest centred in the new one. The
town began to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young
writer was lost. He drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn
his work under cover of the confusion. He never aspired to become
a regular reporter; he knew he should fail in trying a career
so ambitious and energetic; but he picked up friends on the press
—Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry Watterson, Sam Bowles
—all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled together in a tidal
wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to give orders.
No one seemed to know much about it. Even Senators had nothing
to say. One could only make notes and study finance.

In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements
of Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the
amusements proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions,
interests, thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington
was a poor place for education, and of course young diplomats

avoided or disliked it, but, as a rule, diplomats disliked every
place except Paris, and the world contained only one Paris. They
abused London more violently than Washington; they praised
no post under the sun; and they were merely describing three-fourths
of their stations when they complained that there were no
theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no
splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza. This
was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient
and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more
sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young
men Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few,
and greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance
of the young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a
young duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make
up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society
he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured,
almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.
Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or
jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any
sort; and the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could
not stay there a month without loving the shabby town. Even
the Washington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor
well-educated nor clever, had singular charm, and used it. According
to Mr. Adams the father, this charm dated back as far
as Monroe's administration, to his personal knowledge.

Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or
newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken
for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing.
Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for
it. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private
secretary a young man named Moorfield Storey, who became
a dangerous example of frivolity. The new Attorney-General,

E. R. Hoar, brought with him from Concord a son, Sam Hoar,
whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another impenitent was
named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down in
the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared
a world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have
reversed better in waltzing.

He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All
were profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children
to education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier
without style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier
than he had ever been before; happier than any one in the harsh
world of strenuousness could dream of. This must be taken as
background for such little education as he gained; but the life
belonged to the eighteenth century, and in no way concerned
education for the twentieth.

In such an atmosphere, one made no great pretence of hard
work. If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it;
and, if it will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus
far, no one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams
had done or could do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration,
and social pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to
go on working, as an artist goes on painting when no one buys his
pictures. Artists have done it from the beginning of time, and
will do it after time has expired, since they cannot help themselves,
and they find their return in the pride of their social superiority
as they feel it. Society commonly abets them and encourages their
attitude of contempt. The society of Washington was too simple
and Southern as yet, to feel anarchistic longings, and it never read
or saw what artists produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly
abetted them when it had the chance, and respected itself the more
for the frailty. Adams found even the Government at his service
and every one willing to answer his questions. He worked, after
a fashion; not very hard, but as much as the Government would

have required of him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work
defied frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world
ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was
he. One must not try to amuse money-lenders or investors, and
this was the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three
months to an article on the finances of the United States, just then
a subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course it
was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were still
anonymous, and the author remained unknown.

The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made
no claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a
place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow
of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank
seemed colossal—the highest in the literary world—as it had
been only five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had
flowed since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though
it brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty
pounds of pay—fifty dollars a month, measured in time and labor.

The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert
Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of
politics which he called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and
the name—he thought he had been enough in Lord Robert's
house, in days of his struggle with adversity, to excuse the theft—
and began what he meant for a permanent series of annual political
reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a political authority.
With his sources of information, and his social intimacies at
Washington, he could not help saying something that would command
attention. He had the field to himself, and he meant to
give himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the newspapers
liked it or not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a

power, once established, was more effective than all the speeches
in Congress or reports to the President that could be crammed into
the Government presses.

The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could not
be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in
October by another which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform,"
and was really a part of the same review. A good deal of authentic
history slipped into these papers. Whether any one except his
press associates ever read them, he never knew and never greatly
cared. The difference is slight, to the influence of an author,
whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred
thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five
hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870 was near at hand, which
was to mark the close of the literary epoch, when quarterlies gave
way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration; volumes to pages. The
outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and Robert Louis Stevenson
followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling brought
up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found himself
fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority,
so the quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could
surely say where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science
did not know. Truths a priori held their own against truths
purely relative. According to Lowell, Right was forever on the
Scaffold, Wrong was forever on the Throne; and most people still
thought they believed it. Adams was not the only relic of the
eighteenth century, and he could still depend on a certain number
of listeners—mostly respectable, and some rich.

Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough of
in that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculation

if this had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a
point where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers
out of ten make their errors. One may be more or less certain of
organized forces; one can never be certain of men. He belonged
to the eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his
plans. For the moment, America was more eighteenth century
than himself; it reverted to the stone age.

As education—of a certain sort—the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see
much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick
of a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the
animal's way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned
over and over again in politics since 1860.

At least four-fifths of the American people—Adams among the
rest—had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency,
and probably had been more or less affected in their choice
by the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing
could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a
great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might
be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and
commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know
how to administer. Even Washington, who was, in education and
experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to organize a
government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize
his departments. The task of bringing the Government back to
regular practices, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to
administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do it itself,
with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion, especially
in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but
the general disposition was good, and every one had echoed the
famous phrase: "Let us have peace."

Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman

one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the
type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good
intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great
respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers
had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with
a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives,
the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can't use tact
with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a
stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too little, compared
with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the
phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman
of 1869—he saw little or nothing of later ones—but he
knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If
a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question,
put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that
ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators
passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised
its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew
Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics
of nervous bucking without apparent reason. Great leaders, like
Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more
grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely
sparkled in epigram, became witty on their account; but their
egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did
permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and even
McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome
task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back
to decency.

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood
what the world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with
Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspapermen

were alive with eagerness to support the President against the
Senate. The newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double
personality; and his person feels best satisfied in its double instincts
when writing in one sense and thinking in another. All newspapermen,
whatever they wrote, felt alike about the Senate. Adams
floated with the stream. He was eager to join in the fight which
he foresaw as sooner or later inevitable. He meant to support the
Executive in attacking the Senate and taking away its two-thirds
vote and power of confirmation, nor did he much care how
it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect the revolution
in 1870 than to wait till 1920.

With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded
secret of Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered
at the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five
minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laughable
as to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long list of
Cabinet announcements not much weaker or more futile than that
of Grant, and none of them made him blush, while Grant's nominations
had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed,
not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total
misconception of life—another inconceivable false start. Yet,
unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and
his intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made
no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations
betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence.
A great soldier might be a baby politician.

Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on
May 13, 1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly,
"the incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without
absolutely saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams
had laid out for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no
thought of effectual reform could revive for at least one generation,

and he had no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could
he sail next? He had tried so many, and society had barred them
all! For the moment, he saw no hope but in following the stream
on which he had launched himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals,
were not hostile. Subsequently Grant made changes in the
list which were mostly welcome to a Bostonian—or should have
been—although fatal to Adams. The name of Hamilton Fish,
as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism and probable
deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious
joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr.
McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction
for any one resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the
name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, suggested help
and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General,
promised friendship. On the whole, the personal outlook, merely
for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful, and the political
outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant himself. No one
doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform; that his
aim had been to place his administration above politics; and until
he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on
Grant. One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so
little.

By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite
of rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table,
the two men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was
exceedingly social, though not in appearance imposing. He was
stout; his face was red, and his habits were regularly irregular;
but he was very intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an excellent
military historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary book.
Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of Grant, as
suited an officer who had been on the General's staff. As a rule,
the newspaper correspondents in Washington were unfriendly,

and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard tales that made
one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army officers were
no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow, dull, and
vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate
which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for
encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious.
He talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling
for analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally
do. Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who
acted as his patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that
was offensive about either, but he held that no one except himself
and Rawlins understood the General. To him, Grant appeared
as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but
passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he nor the rest
of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him because
of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid.
Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas into
it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves,
in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his
own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give
the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his
nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when
he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his
thought. They were not sure that he did think.

In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act
on the General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a
legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and
it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest general
the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was
rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles
Nordhoff.

Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last,

he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most
famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant
the most curious object of study among them all. About no one
did opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion
to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his
own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life
he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual
type—Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him
a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted
for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,
archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.
Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were
the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang
from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of
others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in
outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom
action was the highest stimulant—the instinct of fight. Such
men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis,
but they made short work of scholars. They had commanded
thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others. The
fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at once.

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to
follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one
must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic
habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual
calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression:
"Let us have peace!" or, "The best way to treat a bad law is to
execute it"; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to
be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one
doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly

bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it
were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken
rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of
simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual
commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree,
but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American.
What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual,
his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the
Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to
exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as
society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made
of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander
the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called
—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the
most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must
be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain
such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President
Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to
upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory
was worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams
because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant
because he was archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn
skins. Darwinists ought to conclude that America was reverting
to the stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd
than that of evolution. Grant's administration reverted to nothing.
One could not catch a trait of the past, still less of the future.
It was not even sensibly American. Not an official in it, except
perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in September,
suggested an American idea.

Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish
was almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values;
he was human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt

no prejudice whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or
person to attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable;
he was not in the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he
won confidence from the start and remained a friend to the finish.
As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily suited, and
one was still better off in the Interior Department with J. D.
Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the Treasury and Boutwell in
the Interior, one would have been quite satisfied as far as personal
relations went, while, in the Attorney-General's Office, Judge
Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and political.

The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
government been filled with them, it would have helped little
without the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the
start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles.
At thirty, one has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in
that character Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. His friends
were reformers, critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was
himself an object of suspicion. Grant had no objects, wanted no
help, wished for no champions. The Executive asked only to be
let alone. This was his meaning when he said: "Let us have
peace!"

No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to
support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He was
for sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively cheap,
for he did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government,
but on New York. All he wanted was something to support;
something that would let itself be supported. Luck went
dead against him. For once, he was fifty years in advance of his
time.