Chapter I. Quincy (1838-1848)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the
house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs,
or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to
Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the
third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was
born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First
Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks
Adams.

Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and
circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the
name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly
branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the
coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to
offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not
enter the field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak,
ticketed through life, with the safeguards of an old, established
traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and
if one needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred
years earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young
man's success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great
compared with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident
of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so
colonial, -- so troglodytic -- as the First Church, the Boston State
House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street
and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was
so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby
long after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a
child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should
wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?
Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all,
holding such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be
one of which neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of
time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted
and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of
his parents, he would certainly have told them to change nothing as
far as concerned him. He would have been astounded by his own luck.
Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.
Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were
marked and forced, he could not refuse to play his excellent hand. He
could never make the usual plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the
situation as though he had been a party to it, and under the same
circumstances would do it again, the more readily for knowing the
exact values. To his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting
party and partner from the moment he was born to the moment he died.
Only with that understanding -- as a consciously assenting member in
full partnership with the society of his age -- had his education an
interest to himself or to others.

As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at
all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the
players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise
has no moral and little incident. A story of education -- seventy
years of it -- the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like
other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain
and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never been
stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be a
Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of
Notre Dame, every one must bear his own universe, and most persons
are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have
managed to carry theirs.

This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three
years, while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a
vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before,
to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled
over the question whether, on the doctrine of chances, he was at
liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident. No such
accident had ever happened before in human experience. For him,
alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one
created. He and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were
suddenly cut apart -- separated forever -- in act if not in
sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the
appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay; and the
telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the
news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the
Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years old ; his new
world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met his
eyes.

Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he
knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a
yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when
he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of color. The
second followed soon; a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he
developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead,
reviving only under the careful nursing of his family. When he began
to recover strength, about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been
stronger than any other pleasure or pain, for while in after life he
retained not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered
quite clearly his aunt entering the sickroom bearing in her hand a
saucer with a baked apple.

The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be
that of color and taste, although one would rather suppose that the
sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third
recollection of the child was that of discomfort. The moment he could
be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from the little
house in Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents were to
occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighboring Mount Vernon
Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never
forgot his acute distress for want of air under his blankets, or the
noises of moving furniture.

As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in
childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any
fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet
fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character,
though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it
had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever of Henry
Adams took greater and greater importance in his eyes, from the point
of view of education, the longer he lived. At first, the effect was
physical. He fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height,
and proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of
mind seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not
good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves
ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The
habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally
rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every
question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils;
the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the
horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to
society -- all these are well-known qualities of New England
character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they
seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never
make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was
morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers were the
type; he was the variation.

As far as the boy knew, the sickness did not affect him at all,
and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as
it was given; accepting its local standards without a dificulty, and
enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed
to himself quite normal, and his companions seemed always to think
him so. Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character,
and came to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that
eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from
his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime.
Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy
looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for
numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly
as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished,
and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in
the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only
resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all
force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander,
whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile
universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys
were few.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts
politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New
England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility -- a
cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it -- so that the
pleasure of hating -- one's self if no better victim offered -- was
not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child
of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of
the contrast was real and made the strongest motive of education. The
double exterior nature gave life its relative values. Winter and
summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked
two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town
was winter confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy
streets, piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made
the snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the streets became
dangerous to cross; society of uncles, aunts, and cousins who
expected children to behave themselves, and who were not always
gratified; above all else, winter represented the desire to escape
and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven
miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of
mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by
boys without knowing it.

Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the
New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more
equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the
boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the
strongest -- smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching
summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of
peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt
water and low tide on the marshes; nothing came amiss. Next to smell
came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or
touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and
the letters of a spelling-book -- the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly
revived on the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and
color as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest.
The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color.
The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by
atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New
England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early
morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a
mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June
afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored
prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then ran;
these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the cold grays
of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston winter.
With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a double
nature. Life was a double thing. After a January blizzard, the boy
who could look with pleasure into the violent snow-glare of the cold
white sunshine, with its intense light and shade, scarcely knew what
was meant by tone. He could reach it only by education.

Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two
separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was
tropical license. Whether the children rolled in the grass, or waded
in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or
fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the
salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods and the granite quarries, or
chased muskrats and hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or
mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills, summer and country were always
sensual living, while winter was always compulsory learning. Summer
was the multiplicity of nature; winter was school.

The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams
was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran
though life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring,
irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites, with growing emphasis
to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was
accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer,
town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who
pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a
man employed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two
hours' walk from Beacon Hill, it belonged in a different world. For
two hundred years, every Adams, from father to son, had lived within
sight of State Street, and sometimes had lived in it, yet none had
ever taken kindly to the town, or been taken kindly by it. The boy
inherited his double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his
great-grandfather, who had died a dozen years before his own birth:
he took for granted that any great-grandfather of his must have
always been good, and his enemies wicked; but he divined his
great-grandfather's character from his own. Never for a moment did he
connect the two ideas of Boston and John Adams; they were separate
and antagonistic; the idea of John Adams went with Quincy. He knew
his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old man of seventy-five
or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him, but except that he
heard his grandfather always called "the President," and his
grandmother "the Madam," he had no reason to suppose that his Adams
grandfather differed in character from his Brooks grandfather who was
equally kind and benevolent. He liked the Adams side best, but for no
other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer,
and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a
way inferior to Boston, and that socially Boston looked down on
Quincy. The reason was clear enough even to a five-year old child.
Quincy had no Boston style. Little enough style had either; a simpler
manner of life and thought could hardly exist, short of
cave-dwelling. The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather Adams
used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the
mantelpiece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for
servants, or of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy.
Bathrooms, water-supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array of
domestic comforts, were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already a
bathroom, a water-supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority of
Boston was evident, but a child liked it no better for that.

The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl
Street or South Street has long ago disappeared, but perhaps his
country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the
mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The President's
place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting
of the two; but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It
showed plainly enough its want of wealth. It smacked of colonial age,
but not of Boston style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he
never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish
breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century
style. He was never able to adopt it, any more than his father or
grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as
particularly hostile, for he reconciled himself to much that was
worse; but because, for some remote reason, he was born an
eighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth
century. What style it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and
its Louis Seize chairs and sofas. The panels belonged to an old
colonial Vassall who built the house; the furniture had been brought
back from Paris in 1789 or 1801 or 1817, along with porcelain and
books and much else of old diplomatic remnants; and neither of the
two eighteenth-century styles -- neither English Queen Anne nor
French Louis Seize -- was cofortable for a boy, or for any one else.
The dark mahogany had been painted white to suit daily life in winter
gloom. Nothing seemed to favor, for a child's objects, the older
forms. On the contrary, most boys, as well as grown-up people,
preferred the new, with good reason, and the child felt himself
distinctly at a disadvantage for the taste.

Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks
grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams
grandfather. Both were born in 1767, and both died in 1848. Both were
kind to children, and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to
the nineteenth centuries. The child knew no difference between them
except that one was associated with winter and the other with summer;
one with Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the
association was hardly easier. Once as a very young boy he was taken
to pass a few days with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his
aunt, but became so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours
he was brought back in disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being
seriously homesick again.

The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or
wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even
there the curse of Cain set its mark. There as elsewhere a cruel
universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous
brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush
any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he
hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through
chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity
through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task
of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science,
art, politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies
when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature
in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers.
Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never
knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of
remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a
relation, was never easy.

All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his first
serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of
will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but
instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting, left
rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a
natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not
have been much more than six years old at the time -- seven at the
utmost -- and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with
the President during the summer. What became of the rest of the
family he quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the
house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion
against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate
victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but
in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she
was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a
certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts
at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in
fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at
the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the
President's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly
came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without a word,
and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After
the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic
dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty
would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer
morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it
would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could
not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the
school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning
justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and
the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another,
until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the
centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the
President release his hand and depart.

The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights
of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him
dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had
this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind, the
child must have recognized that the President, though a tool of
tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence.
He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, and had
made no display of force. Above all, he had held his tongue. During
their long walk he had said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of
revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of
resistance to law; he had shown no concern in the matter; hardly even
a consciousness of the boy's existence. Probably his mind at that
moment was actually troubling itself little about his grandson's
iniquities, and much about the iniquities of President Polk, but the
boy could scarcely at that age feel the whole satisfaction of
thinking that President Polk was to be the vicarious victim of his
own sins, and he gave his grandfather credit for intelligent silence.
For this forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force
as a form of right; he admitted even temper, under protest; but the
seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen on the
stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as every one knows, the stoniest
glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land.

Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old President's
relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether his
older brothers and sisters were still more favored he failed to
remember, but he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity which,
when in his turn he had reached old age, rather shocked him, for it
must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung about the
library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the
drawers; searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins;
drew the sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything
in the corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where
a row of tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars which
were supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never did. The
Madam bore with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which her husband
purloined for these hatcheries; but she made protest when he carried
off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that
he might see the roots grow, but which, she said, he commonly forgot
like the caterpillars.

At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture, and
some fine old trees should still remain to witness it, unless they
have been improved off the ground; but his was a restless mind, and
although he took his hobbies seriously and would have been annoyed
had his grandchild asked whether he was bored like an English duke,
he probably cared more for the processes than for the results, so
that his grandson was saddened by the sight and smell of peaches and
pears, the best of their kind, which he brought up from the garden to
rot on his shelves for seed. With the inherited virtues of his
Puritan ancestors, the little boy Henry conscientiously brought up to
him in his study the finest peaches he found in the garden, and ate
only the less perfect. Naturally he ate more by way of compensation,
but the act showed that he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather, it
is even possible that he may have felt a certain self-reproach for
his temporary role of schoolmaster -- seeing that his own career did
not offer proof of the worldly advantages of docile obedience -- for
there still exists somewhere a little volume of critically edited
Nursery Rhymes with the boy's name in full written in the President's
trembling hand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible,
given to each child at birth, with the proper inscription in the
President's hand on the fly-leaf; while their grandfather Brooks
supplied the silver mugs.

So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied, that a new
house, or cottage, was built to hold them. It was "on the hill," five
minutes' walk above "the old house," with a far view eastward over
Quincy Bay, and northward over Boston. Till his twelfth year, the
child passed his summers there, and his pleasures of childhood mostly
centred in it. Of education he had as yet little to complain. Country
schools were not very serious. Nothing stuck to the mind except home
impressions, and the sharpest were those of kindred children; but as
influences that warped a mind, none compared with the mere effect of
the back of the President's bald head, as he sat in his pew on
Sundays, in line with that of President Quincy, who, though some ten
years younger, seemed to children about the same age. Before railways
entered the New England town, every parish church showed half-a-dozen
of these leading citizens, with gray hair, who sat on the main aisle
in the best pews, and had sat there, or in some equivalent dignity,
since the time of St. Augustine, if not since the glacial epoch. It
was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather, and to
read over his head the tablet in memory of a President
great-grandfather, who had "pledged his life, his fortune, and his
sacred honor" to secure the independence of his country and so forth;
but boys naturally supposed, without much reasoning, that other boys
had the equivalent of President grandfathers, and that churches would
always go on, with the bald-headed leading citizens on the main
aisle, and Presidents or their equivalents on the walls. The Irish
gardener once said to the child: "You'll be thinkin' you'll be
President too!" The casuality of the remark made so strong an
impression on his mind that he never forgot it. He could not remember
ever to have thought on the subject; to him, that there should be a
doubt of his being President was a new idea. What had been would
continue to be. He doubted neither about Presidents nor about
Churches, and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a system
of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams
more.

The Madam was a little more remote than the President, but more
decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles,
looking out on her garden with the box walks, and seemed a fragile
creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note or a message, and
took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what
seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure ; her
gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but
to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with
little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old
binding, labelled "Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More."
Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her
cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he
felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from Boston.
She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua Johnson, an
American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland;
and Catherine Nuth, of an English family in London. Driven from
England by the Revolutionary War, Joshua Johnson took his family to
Nantes, where they remained till the peace. The girl Louisa Catherine
was nearly ten years old when brought back to London, and her sense
of nationality must have been confused; but the influence of the
Johnsons and the services of Joshua obtained for him from President
Washington the appointment of Consul in London on the organization of
the Government in 1790. In 1794 President Washington appointed John
Quincy Adams Minister to The Hague. He was twenty-seven years old
when he returned to London, and found the Consul's house a very
agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty.

At that time, and long afterwards, the Consul's house, far more
than the Minister's, was the centre of contact for travelling
Americans, either official or other. The Legation was a shifting
point, between 1785 and 1815; but the Consulate, far down in the
City, near the Tower, was convenient and inviting; so inviting that
it proved fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming, like a Romney
portrait, but among her many charms that of being a New England woman
was not one. The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law,
Abigail, a famous New England woman whose authority over her
turbulent husband, the second President, was hardly so great as that
which she exercised over her son, the sixth to be, was troubled by
the fear that Louisa might not be made of stuff stern enough, or
brought up in conditions severe enough, to suit a New England
climate, or to make an efficient wife for her paragon son, and
Abigail was right on that point, as on most others where sound
judgment was involved; but sound judgment is sometimes a source of
weakness rather than of force, and John Quincy already had reason to
think that his mother held sound judgments on the subject of
daughters-in-law which human nature, since the fall of Eve, made
Adams helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his
mother, and equally far in love, he married Louisa in London, July
26, 1797, and took her to Berlin to be the head of the United States
Legation. During three or four exciting years, the young bride lived
in Berlin; whether she was happy or not, whether she was content or
not, whether she was socially successful or not, her descendants did
not surely know; but in any case she could by no chance have become
educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow
of the Federalist Party drove her and her husband to America, and she
became at last a member of the Quincy household, but by that time her
children needed all her attention, and she remained there with
occasional winters in Boston and Washington, till 1809. Her husband
was made Senator in 1803, and in 1809 was appointed Minister to
Russia. She went with him to St. Petersburg, taking her baby, Charles
Francis, born in 1807; but broken-hearted at having to leave her two
older boys behind. The life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her;
they were far too poor to shine in that extravagant society; but she
survived it, though her little girl baby did not, and in the winter
of 1814-15, alone with the boy of seven years old, crossed Europe
from St. Petersburg to Paris, in her travelling-carriage, passing
through the armies, and reaching Paris in the Cent Jours after
Napoleon's return from Elba. Her husband next went to England as
Minister, and she was for two years at the Court of the Regent. In
1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State, and she lived
for eight years in F Street, doing her work of entertainer for
President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable
years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in 1829, she
had earned the right to be tired and delicate, but she still had
fifteen years to serve as wife of a Member of the House, after her
husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that the little
Henry, her grandson, first remembered her, from 1843 to 1848, sitting
in her panelled room, at breakfast, with her heavy silver teapot and
sugar-bowl and cream-jug, which still exist somewhere as an heirloom
of the modern safety-vault. By that time she was seventy years old or
more, and thoroughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world. To
the boy she seemed singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray,
presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany; an
exotic, like her Sevres china; an object of deference to every one,
and of great affection to her son Charles; but hardly more Bostonian
than she had been fifty years before, on her wedding-day, in the
shadow of the Tower of London.

Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old husband,
the President, to impress on a boy's mind, the standards of the
coming century. She was Louis Seize, like the furniture. The boy knew
nothing of her interior life, which had been, as the venerable
Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw, one of severe stress and
little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might come
some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, those
rebellions against law and discipline, which marked more than one of
her descendants; but he might even then have felt some vague
instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of
the primal sin, the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was
not of pure New England stock, but half exotic. As a child of Quincy
he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he
inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half
Marylander by birth, had hardly seen Boston till he was ten years
old, when his parents left him there at school in 1817, and he never
forgot the experience. He was to be nearly as old as his mother had
been in 1845, before he quite accepted Boston, or Boston quite
accepted him.

A boy who began his education in these surroundings, with
physical strength inferior to that of his brothers, and with a
certain delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home
in the eighteenth century and should, in proper self-respect, have
rebelled against the standards of the nineteenth. The atmosphere of
his first ten years must have been very like that of his grandfather
at the same age, from 1767 till 1776, barring the battle of Bunker
Hill, and even as late as 1846, the battle of Bunker Hill remained
actual. The tone of Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian
always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English
standards; far from concealing it as a weakness, he was proud of it
as his strength. The eighteenth century ruled society long after
1850. Perhaps the boy began to shake it off rather earlier than most
of his mates.

Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather abruptly
with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a certain
confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street, and gathered, from
such words as he could catch, that the President, who happened to be
then staying there, on his way to Washington, had fallen and hurt
himself. Then he heard the word paralysis. After that day he came to
associate the word with the figure of his grandfather, in a
tall-backed, invalid armchair, on one side of the spare bedroom
fireplace, and one of his old friends, Dr. Parkman or P. P. F.
Degrand, on the other side, both dozing.

The end of this first, or ancestral and Revolutionary, chapter
came on February 21, 1848 -- and the month of February brought life
and death as a family habit -- when the eighteenth century, as an
actual and living companion, vanished. If the scene on the floor of
the House, when the old President fell, struck the still
simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually dramatic,
its effect on a ten-year-old boy, whose boy-life was fading away with
the life of his grandfather, could not be slight. One had to pay for
Revolutionary patriots; grandfathers and grandmothers; Presidents;
diplomats; Queen Anne mahogany and Louis Seize chairs, as well as for
Stuart portraits. Such things warp young life. Americans commonly
believed that they ruined it, and perhaps the practical common-sense
of the American mind judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much
less than the emotions of the funeral service in the Quincy church,
with its surroundings of national respect and family pride. By
another dramatic chance it happened that the clergyman of the parish,
Dr. Lunt, was an unusual pulpit orator, the ideal of a somewhat
austere intellectual type, such as the school of Buckminster and
Channing inherited from the old Congregational clergy. His
extraordinarily refined appearance, his dignity of manner, his deeply
cadenced voice, his remarkable English and his fine appreciation,
gave to the funeral service a character that left an overwhelming
impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many great functions --
funerals and festival -- in after-life, till his only thought was to
see no more, but he never again witnessed anything nearly so
impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the body of one
President and the ashes of another.

The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official
ceremony which afterwards took place in Faneuil Hall, when the boy
was taken to hear his uncle, Edward Everett, deliver a Eulogy. Like
all Mr. Everett's orations, it was an admirable piece of oratory,
such as only an admirable orator and scholar could create; too good
for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value; but already the
boy knew that the dead President could not be in it, and had even
learned why he would have been out of place there; for knowledge was
beginning to come fast. The shadow of the War of 1812 still hung over
State Street; the shadow of the Civil War to come had already begun
to darken Faneuil Hall. No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr.
Everett's audience to his subject. How could he say there, to an
assemblage of Bostonians in the heart of mercantile Boston, that the
only distinctive mark of all the Adamses, since old Sam Adams's
father a hundred and fifty years before, had been their inherited
quarrel with State Street, which had again and again broken out into
riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and civil war, wholesale
banishments and confiscations, until the history of Florence was
hardly more turbulent than that of Boston? How could he whisper the
word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it? What would
have been said had he suggested the chance of Secession and Civil
War?

Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing
face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early
Christian. What was he? -- where was he going? Even then he felt that
something was wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy
had always been right, for Quincy represented a moral principle --
the principle of resistance to Boston. His Adams ancestors must have
been right, since they were always hostile to State Street. If State
Street was wrong, Quincy must be right! Turn the dilemma as he
pleased, he still came back on the eighteenth century and the law of
Resistance; of Truth; of Duty, and of Freedom. He was a ten-year-old
priest and politician. He could under no circumstances have guessed
what the next fifty years had in store, and no one could teach him;
but sometimes, in his old age, he wondered -- and could never decide
-- whether the most clear and certain knowledge would have helped
him. Supposing he had seen a New York stock-list of 1900, and had
studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal, and steel --
would he have quitted his eighteenth-century, his ancestral
prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training, and the
rest, in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street,
and ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship
in the Suffolk Bank?

Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind.
Each course had its advantages, but the material advantages, looking
back, seemed to lie wholly in State Street.