Chapter III. Washington (1850-1854)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of leaving
the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one learned
next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned.
The surface was ready to take any form that education should cut into
it, though Boston, with singular foresight, rejected the old designs.
What sort of education was stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no
idea, but he escaped the evils of other standards by having no
standard at all; and what was true of school was true of society.
Boston offered none that could help outside. Every one now smiles at
the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe -- the society of
the forties -- but the taste was only a reflection of the social
slack-water between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston
belonged to neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic
nor industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as
unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of acquiring
form as they grew older. Women counted for little as models. Every
boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at frequent intervals with
some girl -- always more or less the same little girl -- who had
nothing to teach him, or he to teach her, except rather familiar and
provincial manners, until they married and bore children to repeat
the habit. The idea of attaching one's self to a married woman, or of
polishing one's manners to suit the standards of women of thirty,
could hardly have entered the mind of a young Bostonian, and would
have scandalized his parents. From women the boy got the domestic
virtues and nothing else. He might not even catch the idea that women
had more to give. The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.

To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to most
boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard must enjoy
great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and Henry Adams
had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with vice of a very low
form. Blackguardism came constantly under boys' eyes, and had the
charm of force and freedom and superiority to culture or decency. One
might fear it, but no one honestly despised it. Now and then it
asserted itself as education more roughly than school ever did. One
of the commonest boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the
eighteenth-century, was a game of war on Boston Common. In old days
the two hostile forces were called North-Enders and South-Enders. In
1850 the North-Enders still survived as a legend, but in practice it
was a battle of the Latin School against all comers, and the Latin
School, for snowball, included all the boys of the West End.
Whenever, on a half-holiday, the weather was soft enough to soften
the snow, the Common was apt to be the scene of a fight, which began
in daylight with the Latin School in force, rushing their opponents
down to Tremont Street, and which generally ended at dark by the
Latin School dwindling in numbers and disappearing. As the Latin
School grew weak, the roughs and young blackguards grew strong. As
long as snowballs were the only weapon, no one was much hurt, but a
stone may be put in a snowball, and in the dark a stick or a
slungshot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a knife. One
afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting. The boy Henry,
following, as his habit was, his bigger brother Charles, had taken
part in the battle, and had felt his courage much depressed by seeing
one of his trustiest leaders, Henry Higginson -- "Bully Hig," his
school name -- struck by a stone over the eye, and led off the field
bleeding in rather a ghastly manner. As night came on, the Latin
School was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they
could retreat no further without disbanding, and by that time only a
small band was left, headed by two heroes, Savage and Marvin. A dark
mass of figures could be seen below, making ready for the last rush,
and rumor said that a swarm of blackguards from the slums, led by a
grisly terror called Conky Daniels, with a club and a hideous
reputation, was going to put an end to the Beacon Street cowards
forever. Henry wanted to run away with the others, but his brother
was too big to run away, so they stood still and waited immolation.
The dark mass set up a shout, and rushed forward. The Beacon Street
boys turned and fled up the steps, except Savage and Marvin and the
few champions who would not run. The terrible Conky Daniels swaggered
up, stopped a moment with his body-guard to swear a few oaths at
Marvin, and then swept on and chased the flyers, leaving the few boys
untouched who stood their ground. The obvious moral taught that
blackguards were not so black as they were painted; but the boy Henry
had passed through as much terror as though he were Turenne or Henri
IV, and ten or twelve years afterwards when these same boys were
fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of Virginia and
Maryland, he wondered whether their education on Boston Common had
taught Savage and Marvin how to die.

If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from it.
Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be actually
concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was sure to be on
hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he heard Garrison or
Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble. Wendell Phillips on a
platform was a model dangerous for youth. Theodore Parker in his
pulpit was not much safer. Worst of all, the execution of the
Fugitive Slave Law in Boston -- the sight of Court Square packed with
bayonets, and his own friends obliged to line the streets under arms
as State militia, in order to return a negro to slavery -- wrought
frenzy in the brain of a fifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy
from Quincy, who wanted to miss no reasonable chance of mischief.

One lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and
the Boston Massacre. Within Boston, a boy was first an
eighteenth-century politician, and afterwards only a possibility;
beyond Boston the first step led only further into politics. After
February, 1848, but one slight tie remained of all those that, since
1776, had connected Quincy with the outer world. The Madam stayed in
Washington, after her husband's death, and in her turn was struck by
paralysis and bedridden. From time to time her son Charles, whose
affection and sympathy for his mother in her many tribulations were
always pronounced, went on to see her, and in May, 1850, he took with
him his twelve-year-old son. The journey was meant as education, and
as education it served the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a
boy's thought in 1850. He could not remember taking special interest
in the railroad journey or in New York; with railways and cities he
was familiar enough. His first impression was the novelty of crossing
New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden
and Amboy Railroad. This was a new world; a suggestion of corruption
in the simple habits of American life; a step to exclusiveness never
approached in Boston; but it was amusing. The boy rather liked it. At
Trenton the train set him on board a steamer which took him to
Philadelphia where he smelt other varieties of town life; then again
by boat to Chester, and by train to Havre de Grace; by boat to
Baltimore and thence by rail to Washington. This was the journey he
remembered. The actual journey may have been quite different, but the
actual journey has no interest for education. The memory was all that
mattered; and what struck him most, to remain fresh in his mind all
his lifetime, was the sudden change that came over the world on
entering a slave State. He took education politically. The mere
raggedness of outline could not have seemed wholly new, for even
Boston had its ragged edges, and the town of Quincy was far from
being a vision of neatness or good-repair; in truth, he had never
seen a finished landscape; but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind.
The railway, about the size and character of a modern tram, rambled
through unfenced fields and woods, or through village streets, among
a haphazard variety of pigs, cows, and negro babies, who might all
have used the cabins for pens and styes, had the Southern pig
required styes, but who never showed a sign of care. This was the
boy's impression of what slavery caused, and, for him, was all it
taught. Coming down in the early morning from his bedroom in his
grandmother's house -- still called the Adams Building in -- F Street
and venturing outside into the air reeking with the thick odor of the
catalpa trees, he found himself on an earth-road, or village street,
with wheel-tracks meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard
by, to the white marble columns and fronts of the Post Office and
Patent Office which faced each other in the distance, like white
Greek temples in the abandoned gravel-pits of a deserted Syrian city.
Here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the streets, as
in other Southern villages, but he was chiefly attracted by an
unfinished square marble shaft, half-a-mile below, and he walked down
to inspect it before breakfast. His aunt drily remarked that, at this
rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not
guess -- having lived always in Washington -- how little the sights
of Washington had to do with its interest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an
understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he
understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a
horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more
repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave
States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He
had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had
another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with
it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense
of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the
brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in
the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not
simple, but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as
an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers,
of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent
Southern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their
mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and
man, soothed his Johnson blood. Most boys would have felt it in the
same way, but with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance. The
softness of his gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted
with him, did not come from Boston. His aunt was anything rather than
Bostonian. He did not wholly come from Boston himself. Though
Washington belonged to a different world, and the two worlds could
not live together, he was not sure that he enjoyed the Boston world
most. Even at twelve years old he could see his own nature no more
clearly than he would at twelve hundred, if by accident he should
happen to live so long.

His father took him to the Capitol and on the floor of the
Senate, which then, and long afterwards, until the era of tourists,
was freely open to visitors. The old Senate Chamber resembled a
pleasant political club. Standing behind the Vice-President's chair,
which is now the Chief Justice's, the boy was presented to some of
the men whose names were great in their day, and as familiar to him
as his own. Clay and Webster and Calhoun were there still, but with
them a Free Soil candidate for the Vice-Presidency had little to do;
what struck boys most was their type. Senators were a species; they
all wore an air, as they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons;
they were Roman. The type of Senator in 1850 was rather charming at
its best, and the Senate, when in good temper, was an agreeable body,
numbering only some sixty members, and affecting the airs of
courtesy. Its vice was not so much a vice of manners or temper as of
attitude. The statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but
even pomposity was less offensive than familiarity -- on the platform
as in the pulpit -- and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was
genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its
simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the Websterian or
Conklinian pomposity of the North. The boy felt at ease there, more
at home than he had ever felt in Boston State House, though his
acquaintance with the codfish in the House of Representatives went
back beyond distinct recollection. Senators spoke kindly to him, and
seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in
spite of slavery, even J. Q. Adams in his later years, after he
ceased to stand in the way of rivals, had few personal enemies.
Decidedly the Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly
world.

This first step in national politics was a little like the walk
before breakfast; an easy, careless, genial, enlarging stride into a
fresh and amusing world, where nothing was finished, but where even
the weeds grew rank. The second step was like the first, except that
it led to the White House. He was taken to see President Taylor.
Outside, in a paddock in front, "Old Whitey," the President's
charger, was grazing, as they entered; and inside, the President was
receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock too. The
President was friendly, and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that
he could ever recall. In fact, what strangeness should he feel? The
families were intimate; so intimate that their friendliness outlived
generations, civil war, and all sorts of rupture. President Taylor
owed his election to Martin Van Buren and the Free Soil Party. To
him, the Adamses might still be of use. As for the White House, all
the boy's family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of
Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or less at home there ever
since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for
granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation
whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in
every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted
old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in distinction.
Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be
worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some very
shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators,
Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.

Every one thought alike whether they had ancestors or not. No
sort of glory hedged Presidents as such, and, in the whole country,
one could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office
or name, unless it were George Washington. That was -- to all
appearance sincerely -- respected. People made pilgrimages to Mount
Vernon and made even an effort to build Washington a monument. The
effort had failed, but one still went to Mount Vernon, although it
was no easy trip. Mr. Adams took the boy there in a carriage and
pair, over a road that gave him a complete Virginia education for use
ten years afterwards. To the New England mind, roads, schools,
clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order
or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this
Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was
wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road's badness which
amounted to social crime -- and yet, at the end of the road and
product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington.

Luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders
do, or this boy might have become prematurely wise. He had only to
repeat what he was told -- that George Washington stood alone.
Otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have been
his last. On that line, the problem of progress was not soluble,
whatever the optimists and orators might say -- or, for that matter,
whatever they might think. George Washington could not be reached on
Boston lines. George Washington was a primary, or, if Virginians
liked it better, an ultimate relation, like the Pole Star, and amid
the endless restless motion of every other visible point in space, he
alone remained steady, in the mind of Henry Adams, to the end. All
the other points shifted their bearings; John Adams, Jefferson,
Madison, Franklin, even John Marshall, took varied lights, and
assumed new relations, but Mount Vernon always remained where it was,
with no practicable road to reach it; and yet, when he got there,
Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a Southern setting. No doubt it was
much more charming, but it was the same eighteenth-century, the same
old furniture, the same old patriot, and the same old President.

The boy took to it instinctively. The broad Potomac and the
coons in the trees, the bandanas and the box-hedges, the bedrooms
upstairs and the porch outside, even Martha Washington herself in
memory, were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine; he had
only enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask
himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced
George Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In practice, such
trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the
faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man; but any attempt to
deal with them seriously as education is fatal. Luckily Charles
Francis Adams never preached and was singularly free from cant. He
may have had views of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy
himself with the simple elementary fact that George Washington stood
alone.

Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution, even
the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever, and
his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but
took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole
Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy thought as
dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors. The Slave
power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes. Education could
go no further in that course, and ran off into emotion; but, as the
boy gradually found his surroundings change, and felt himself no
longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of
herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish, he began to learn the first
and easier lessons of practical politics. Thus far he had seen
nothing but eighteenth-century statesmanship. America and he began,
at the same time, to become aware of a new force under the innocent
surface of party machinery. Even at that early moment, a rather slow
boy felt dimly conscious that he might meet some personal
difficulties in trying to reconcile sixteenth-century principles and
eighteenth-century statesmanship with late nineteenth-century party
organization. The first vague sense of feeling an unknown living
obstacle in the dark came in 185l.

The Free Soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as
already said, to the statesman class, and, like Daniel Webster, had
nothing to do with machinery. Websters or Sewards depended on others
for machine work and money -- on Peter Harveys and Thurlow Weeds, who
spent their lives in it, took most of the abuse, and asked no reward.
Almost without knowing it, the subordinates ousted their employers
and created a machine which no one but themselves could run. In 1850
things had not quite reached that point. The men who ran the small
Free Soil machine were still modest, though they became famous enough
in their own right. Henry Wilson, John B. Alley, Anson Burlingame,
and the other managers, negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts
Democrats giving the State to the Democrats and a seat in the Senate
to the Free Soilers. With this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman
friends would have nothing to do, for such a coalition was in their
eyes much like jockeys selling a race. They did not care to take
office as pay for votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats. Theirs was a
correct, not to say noble, position; but, as a matter of fact, they
took the benefit of the sale, for the coalition chose Charles Sumner
as its candidate for the Senate, while George S. Boutwell was made
Governor for the Democrats. This was the boy's first lesson in
practical politics, and a sharp one; not that he troubled himself
with moral doubts, but that he learned the nature of a flagrantly
corrupt political bargain in which he was too good to take part, but
not too good to take profit. Charles Sumner happened to be the
partner to receive these stolen goods, but between his friend and his
father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him, there was none. He
entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend was right because
his friend, and the boy shared the glory. The question of education
did not rise while the conflict lasted. Yet every one saw as clearly
then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must be learned and
understood, once for all. The boy might ignore, as a mere historical
puzzle, the question how to deduce George Washington from the sum of
all wickedness, but he had himself helped to deduce Charles Sumner
from the sum of political corruption. On that line, too, education
could go no further. Tammany Hall stood at the end of the vista.

Mr. Alley, one of the strictest of moralists, held that his
object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic Party to
anti-slavery principles, and that he did it. Henry Adams could rise
to no such moral elevation. He was only a boy, and his object in
supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a Senator. It
was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a
millionaire. He could never find a way of escaping immoral
conclusions, except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner
were wrong, and this he was never willing to do, for the consequences
of this admission were worse than those of the other. Thus, before he
was fifteen years old, he had managed to get himself into a state of
moral confusion from which he never escaped. As a politician, he was
already corrupt, and he never could see how any practical politician
could be less corrupt than himself.

Apology, as he understood himself, was cant or cowardice. At the
time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize, though the
press shouted it at him from every corner, and though the Mount
Vernon Street conclave agreed with the press; yet he could not plead
ignorance, and even in the heat of the conflict, he never cared to
defend the coalition. Boy as he was, he knew enough to know that
something was wrong, but his only interest was the election. Day
after day, the General Court balloted; and the boy haunted the
gallery, following the roll-call, and wondered what Caleb Cushing
meant by calling Mr. Sumner a "one-eyed abolitionist." Truly the
difference in meaning with the phrase "one-ideaed abolitionist,"
which was Mr. Cushing's actual expression, is not very great, but
neither the one nor the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumner to the
boy, who never could have made the error of classing Garrison and
Sumner together, or mistaking Caleb Cushing's relation to either.
Temper ran high at that moment, while Sumner every day missed his
election by only one or two votes. At last, April 24, 1851, standing
among the silent crowd in the gallery, Henry heard the vote announced
which gave Sumner the needed number. Slipping under the arms of the
bystanders, he ran home as hard as he could, and burst into the
dining-room where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family. He
enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected; it was
probably the proudest moment in the life of either.

The next day, when the boy went to school, he noticed numbers of
boys and men in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm. He knew
few Free Soil boys in Boston; his acquaintances were what he called
pro-slavery; so he thought proper to tie a bit of white silk ribbon
round his own arm by way of showing that his friend Mr. Sumner was
not wholly alone. This little piece of bravado passed unnoticed; no
one even cuffed his ears; but in later life he was a little puzzled
to decide which symbol was the more correct. No one then dreamed of
four years' war, but every one dreamed of secession. The symbol for
either might well be matter of doubt.

This triumph of the Mount Vernon Street conclave capped the
political climax. The boy, like a million other American boys, was a
politician, and what was worse, fit as yet to be nothing else. He
should have been, like his grandfather, a protege of George
Washington, a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing to do but
look directly ahead, follow orders, and march. On the contrary, he
was not even a Bostonian; he felt himself shut out of Boston as
though he were an exile; he never thought of himself as a Bostonian;
he never looked about him in Boston, as boys commonly do wherever
they are, to select the street they like best, the house they want to
live in, the profession they mean to practise. Always he felt himself
somewhere else; perhaps in Washington with its social ease; perhaps
in Europe; and he watched with vague unrest from the Quincy hills the
smoke of the Cunard steamers stretching in a long line to the
horizon, and disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day
might be, as though the steamers were offering to take him away,
which was precisely what they were doing.

Had these ideas been unreasonable, influences enough were at
hand to correct them; but the point of the whole story, when Henry
Adams came to look back on it, seemed to be that the ideas were more
than reasonable; they were the logical, necessary, mathematical
result of conditions old as history and fixed as fate -- invariable
sequence in man's experience. The only idea which would have been
quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind. This was the thought of
going westward and growing up with the country. That he was not in
the least fitted for going West made no objection whatever, since he
was much better fitted than most of the persons that went. The
convincing reason for staying in the East was that he had there every
advantage over the West. He could not go wrong. The West must
inevitably pay an enormous tribute to Boston and New York. One's
position in the East was the best in the world for every purpose that
could offer an object for going westward. If ever in history men had
been able to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance, the
citizens of the great Eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their
railway systems were already laid out. Neither to a politician nor to
a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West
promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in
plenty.

At any other moment in human history, this education, including
its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but
quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so
endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and
not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He saw no reason
for thinking that any one else had more. He finished with school, not
very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his
knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather,
or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only on
looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and
pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether,
on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or
to that of the year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer.
The calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of
twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons for
thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in
history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except
perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1
than to the year 1900. The education he had received bore little
relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of 1900,
he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or how to
begin.