University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)

HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced
that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis
Adams as his Minister to England. Once more, silently,
Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head
sententiously announced many centuries before: Time had passed!
The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law prolonged its
shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as path of
education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without
education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had
asked millions they would have got no answers. No one could help.
Looking back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards,
one could only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr.
Adams once more intimated that he thought himself entitled to
the services of one of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only
one who could be spared from more serious duties, Henry packed
his trunk again without a word. He could offer no protest. Ridiculous
as he knew himself about to be in his new rôle, he was less
ridiculous than his betters. He was at least no public official, like
the thousands of improvised secretaries and generals who crowded
their jealousies and intrigues on the President. He was not a vulture
of carrion—patronage. He knew that his father's appointment
was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship;
he did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the
reasons which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could
have supplied proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the
strongest and most decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams
had chosen a private secretary far more unfit than his chief. That
Mr. Adams was unfit might well be, since it was hard to find a fit

appointment in the list of possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner
himself; and no one knew so well as this experienced Senator that
the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs of fitness was his consent
to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat in
London with no better support than Senator Sumner, at the head
of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to give him. In
the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous risk,
but never before had they taken one so desperate.

The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the unfitness
of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary
of State knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive
appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for
the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as
Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the post, or
of helping the Minister. The Assistant Secretary was inherited
from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially useless. Mr.
Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps he knew no
name to suggest; perhaps he knew too much of Washington; but
he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of strength in his son.

The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his
path by giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote
letters, it was not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at
that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people.
The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except
in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst
and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams
into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten
about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to
watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House in
the April evenings and march southward, quietly enough, with
the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with few signs
or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the harbor

to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of
the Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few
things were for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary
private secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard
steamer Niagara at East Boston to start again for Liverpool.
This time the pitcher of education had gone to the fountain once
too often; it was fairly broken; and the young man had got to
meet a hostile world without defence—or arms.

The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1,
1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal
with one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he
was alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to
Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a
palace in London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters
of introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy
was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered
how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston
in midwinter, 1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old
son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy
of adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered
how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself,
a baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as
John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He thought it
natural that the Government should send him out as an adventurer
also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could

depend on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly
not on the Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations.
Minister Adams had no friend in the Senate; he could hope
for no favors, and he asked none. He thought it right to play the
adventurer as his father and grandfather had done before him,
without a murmur. This was a lofty view, and for him answered
his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in time, the
young man realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal.
He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of adventurer,
and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the first time
America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order.
Her representatives should know how to play their rôle; they
should wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr.
Adams in 1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private
secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the
Court and Parliament of Great Britain.

One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of the
scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood
with their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him
quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same
ship. Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius.
M. Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education
profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius clay as a
teacher having no equal though possibly some rivals. No young
man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from such
lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious that, for
the next two years, the persons were few indeed who felt, or
had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government; fewest
of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they
might grumble or not; no one listened.

Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his chief
He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never

labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue,
and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence—of talking
without meaning—is never effaced. He had to begin it at once.
He was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool,
May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a family of early
Christian martyrs about to be flung into an arena of lions, under
the glad eyes of Tiberius Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston
would have laughed his peculiar Palmerston laugh at figuring as
Tiberius, he would have seen only evident resemblance in the
Christian martyrs, for he had already arranged the ceremony.

Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than
his son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought
is the affair of history and their errors concern historians. The
errors of a private secretary concerned no one but himself, and
were a large part of his education. He thought on May 12 that
he was going to a friendly Government and people, true to the
anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest profession.
For a hundred years the chief effort of his family had aimed at
bringing the Government of England into intelligent coóperations
with the objects and interests of America. His father was about
to make a new effort, and this time the chance of success was
promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle
to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself, he
was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not conceive
the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as one
of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome
everywhere in the British Islands.

On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning
of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left
of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn—the sooner
the better—that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in
May, 1861, no one in England—literally to one—doubted that
Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all

were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated
Palmerston, who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the severance
as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held
his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. Lord
John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the rebel emissaries,
and had decided to recognize their belligerency before the
arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the British
Government in advance. The recognition of independence would
then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion.

Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension—
a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow.
Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The
chances were great that the whole family would turn round and
go home within a few weeks. The horizon widened out in endless
waves of confusion. When he thought over the subject in the long
leisure of later life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation had
his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be—
unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for his—
trifling though it were—was proved by his unreflecting confidence
in his father. It never entered, his mind that his father
might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent knowledge
of statesmen and diplomats extending over several generations,
he could not certainly point out another who could have
stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day,
and tedious journey to London, without once thinking of the possibility
that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the
Minister thought, and certainly his thought was not less active
than his son's, he showed no trace of excitement. His manner
was the same as ever; his mind and temper were as perfectly
balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve twitched.

The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden could
possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private
secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father

as closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into
Maurigy's Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a
London season, without a friend or even an acquaintance, he preferred
to laugh at his father's bewilderment before the waiter's
"'amhandheggsir" for breakfast, rather than ask a question or
express a doubt. His situation, if taken seriously, was too appalling
to face. Had he known it better, he would only have
thought it worse.

Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond retrieving
or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances,
a newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position,
and Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his
son had not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the
prospect looked even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator
Sumner it was so; but for the Minister, on the spot, as he came
to realize exactly where he stood, the danger was not so imminent.
Mr. Adams was always one of the luckiest of men, both in
what he achieved and in what he escaped. The blow, which prostrated
Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John Russell
had acted—had probably intended to act—kindly by him in
forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three
months, and would then have broken him down. The British
Ministers were a little in doubt still—a little ashamed of themselves
—and certain to wait the longer for their next step in
proportion to the haste of their first.

This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor.
The father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's
was absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles
Francis Adams naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies;
the only public occupation of all Adamses for a hundred
and fifty years at least, in their brief intervals of quarrelling with
State Street, had been to quarrel with Downing Street; and the

British Government, well used to a liberal unpopularity abroad,
even when officially rude liked to be personally civil. All diplomatic
agents are liable to be put, so to speak, in a corner, and are
none the worse for it. Minister Adams had nothing in especial
to complain of; his position was good while it lasted, and he had
only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such compensations.
Brought over in order to help his father, he could conceive
no way of rendering his father help, but he was clear that
his father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was social
ostracism, terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude
in the great society of London was doubly desperate because
his duties as private secretary required him to know everybody
and go with his father and mother everywhere they needed
escort. He had no friend, or even enemy, to tell him to be patient.
Had any one done it, he would surely have broken out with the
reply that patience was the last resource of fools as well as of
sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do it at once, for
his father would never so much need help again. In fact he never
gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman,
clerk, or a companion for the younger children.

He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common
in diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son could
go only as an invited guest, the most instructive conversation he
ever heard among the young men of his own age who hung about
the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!"
or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No one wanted to
discuss affairs; still less to give or get information. That was the
affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to assume work not specially
ordered from their Courts. If the American Minister was in
trouble to-day, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble yesterday.

and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would all
come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry.
Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were always
picking them up.

This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to his
vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe
with torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions
he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coutts's in Stratton
Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and
hoped that no one noticed him; another was a garden-party given
by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick,
where the American Minister and Mrs. Adams were kept
in conversation by the old Duchess till every one else went away
except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to playing leapfrog
on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty years Henry
Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly
enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another nightmare he
suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset,
a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him
to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry,
with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner.
This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned
to ashes.

When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his
solitude when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the
Times. He felt only the wish to be more private than ever, for
Bull Run was a worse diplomatic than military disaster. All this
is history and can be read by public schools if they choose; but the
curious and unexpected happened to the Legation, for the effect
of Bull Run on them was almost strengthening. They no longer
felt doubt. For the next year they went on only from week to

week, ready to leave England at once, and never assuming more
than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to see them
go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.

So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or finished
in the character of private secretary; and as about to begin,
without further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the
Army of the Potomac where he would find most of his friends
enjoying a much pleasanter life than his own. With this idea
uppermost in his mind, he passed the summer and the autumn,
and began the winter. Any winter in London is a severe trial;
one's first winter is the most trying; but the month of December,
1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would have gorged a
glutton of gloom.

One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence
of the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram
announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British
mail-steamer was brought to the office. All three secretaries, public
and private were there—nervous as wild beasts under the
long strain on their endurance—and all three, though they
knew it to be not merely their order of departure—not merely
diplomatic rupture—but a declaration of war—broke into
shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They saw it
and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for its own moment
to strike, they were eager to strike first.

They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying
with Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams
took it, is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E.
Forster who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for
him the crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort

sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog
was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner
lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source
of comfort denied to them—he should not be private secretary
long.

He was mistaken—of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was
nothing but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate
round hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal
to him which left no trace on the Legation records. One of these,
and to him the most important, was to put an end forever to the
idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an independent and free
citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he had kept up his
relations with the American press. He had written pretty frequently
to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with
the two or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News,
the Star, the weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them news
and views that should have a certain common character, and prevent
clash. He had even gone down to Manchester to study the
cotton famine, and wrote a long account of his visit which his
brother Charles had published in the Boston Courier. Unfortunately
it was printed with his name, and instantly came back upon
him in the most crushing shape possible—that of a long, satirical
leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did not know
its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the Legation, and
lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he instantly learned
the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one of the traditional
busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London since
1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them all
they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to
tell Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a

moment Adams thought his "usefulness" at an end in other respects
than in the press, but a day or two more taught him the
value of obscurity. He was totally unknown; he had not even a
club; London was empty; no one thought twice about the Times
article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and the world
had other persons—such as President Lincoln, Secretary Seward,
and Commodore Wilkes—for constant and favorite objects
of ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be
useful again. The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His
education at least had reached the point of seeing its own proportions.
"Surtout point de zèle!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession
for a Minister's son to pursue, as a volunteer manipulator,
among Trent Affairs and rebel cruisers. He wrote no more letters
and meddled with no more newspapers, but he was still young,
and felt unkindly towards the editor of the London Times.

Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent
Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its surprise,
still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this
delay—which he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense—no
reason for changing his opinion about the views of the British
Government, he had no choice but to sit down again at his table,
and go on copying papers, filing letters, and reading newspaper
accounts of the incapacity of Mr. Lincoln and the brutality of
Mr. Seward—or vice versa. The heavy months dragged on and
winter slowly turned to spring without improving his position or
spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the end of life, he
never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During this tedious
winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of
sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the
guest of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.

His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers, although
old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were
strong allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be

kinder than Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Grosvenor
Street were certainly the best in London; but none offered
a refuge to compare with Mount Felix, and, for the first time,
the refuge was a liberal education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of
the women to whom an intelligent boy attaches himself as closely
as he can. Henry Adams was not a very intelligent boy, and he
had no knowledge of the world, but he knew enough to understand
that a cub needed shape. The kind of education he most required
was that of a charming woman, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis, a dozen
years older than himself, could have good-naturedly trained a
school of such, without an effort, and with infinite advantage to
them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of Portland Place.
During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this social polar
winter, the single source of warmth and light.

Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such pressure,
life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made
common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was
merely flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the
younger members of the household, it was not quite so with the
Minister and Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they
gained foothold. For some reason partly connected with American
sources, British society had begun with violent social prejudice
against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders
except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been
for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British
mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests,
the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself
that this new British prejudice was natural The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something
to do with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall.
Naturally the Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness.
Had Lincoln and Seward been the ruffians supposed, the
average Englishman would have liked them the better. The exceedingly
quiet manner and the unassailable social position of

Minister Adams in no way conciliated them. They chose to ignore
him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord John Russell set the
example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly treated; politically
he was negligible; he was there to be put aside. London and
Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln and
his hirelings disappear in one vast débâcle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister
Adams would vanish with the rest.

This situation made Minister Adams an exception among diplomats.
European rulers for the most part fought and treated as
members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of
total extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for
a year at least, regarded the Washington Government as dead,
and its Ministers as nullities. Minister Adams was better received
than most nullities because he made no noise. Little by little,
in private, society took the habit of accepting him, not so much,
as a diplomat, but rather as a member of opposition, or an eminent
counsel retained for a foreign Government. He was to be
received and considered; to be cordially treated as, by birth and
manners, one of themselves. This curiously English way of getting
behind a stupidity gave the Minister every possible advantage
over a European diplomat. Barriers of race, language, birth,
habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart in order
to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams
apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society
few Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double
personality and corresponding double weight.

The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock
of the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton
Milnes and William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him.
Both Milnes and Forster needed support and were greatly relieved
to be supported. They saw what the private secretary in
May had overlooked, the hopeless position they were in if the
American Minister made a mistake, and, since his strength was

theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all the world their estimate
of the Minister's character. Between them the Minister was
almost safe.

One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences
of different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London,
possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for
in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a
large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes.
Every bore was used to talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes,"
the "cool of the evening"; and of course he himself affected social
eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who
knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men—
of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation
to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian
mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high
intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had
written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which
were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made
speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high
for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who
went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had
the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social position
of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house in Upper
Brook Street to which most clever people were exceedingly glad
of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no one liked to
decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous to show timidity
than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strong critic,
an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, but
above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved the
contacts—perhaps the collisions—of society. Not even Henry
Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff.
Milnes was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its
refinement and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.

Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or Venables,
or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E.
Forster stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever
to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was
quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or
political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety;
he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of
self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to
hold dear—the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal,
emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if
only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry, but he was a
Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and emotional he must
have been, or he could never have persuaded a daughter of Dr.
Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace of base metal;
honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and made
himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do,
partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly
because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new
member, he needed a field.

Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership,
and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament
as for work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in
England began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look
on as his true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action,
and even the private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam
of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly
Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal as
ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not exactly
light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters in
England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle
even Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.

In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen,
and even in Parliament they had no large following. They were

classed as enemies of order,—anarchists,—and anarchists they
were if hatred of the so-called established orders made them so.
About them was no sort of political timidity. They took bluntly
the side of the Union against Palmerston whom they hated.
Strangers to London society, they were at home in the American
Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking always with reckless
freedom. Cobden was the milder and more persuasive; Bright
was the more dangerous to approach; but the private secretary
delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them talk
the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
House.

With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a
little ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather companions.
The old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned
out to be an annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of
Argyll was one of the most valuable friends the Minister found,
both politically and socially, and the Duchess was as true as her
mother. Even the private secretary shared faintly in the social
profit of this relation, and never forgot dining one night at the
Lodge, and finding himself after dinner engaged in instructing
John Stuart Mill about the peculiar merits of an American protective
system. In spite of all the probabilities, he convinced
himself that it was not the Duke's claret which led him to this
singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it was the fault of Mr.
Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his point of view.
Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in that respect
the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary
had to admit that though at other periods of life he was
sufficiently and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could
never recall a single occasion during this trying year, when he
had to complain of rudeness.

Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either
men or women; although not even this rule was quite exact,
for Frederick Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made
Devonshire House almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent
Americanism created a certain cordiality with the Stanleys of
Alderley whose house was one of the most frequented in London.
Lome, too, the future Argyll, was always a friend. Yet the regular
course of society led to more literary intimacies. Sir Charles
Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which young Adams
was asked, and with which his friendly relations never ceased for
near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came
into close alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors
after the death of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary
occasionally saw a face he knew, although he made no more effort
of any kind, but silently waited the end. Whatever might be the
advantages of social relations to his father and mother, to him the
whole business of diplomacy and society was futile. He meant
to go home.