Chapter VII. Treason (1860-1861)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

WHEN, forty years afterwards, Henry Adams looked back over his
adventures in search of knowledge, he asked himself whether fortune
or fate had ever dealt its cards quite so wildly to any of his known
antecessors as when it led him to begin the study of law and to vote
for Abraham Lincoln on the same day.

He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded like
a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played with
all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The simile is none too
strong. Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or
intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority
wanted to go on with their occupations in peace. Not one, however
clever or learned, guessed what happened. Possibly a few Southern
loyalists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; but none
planned it.

As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another sort,
he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite
heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away. The
prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked a malicious
question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted at some shade
of prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as private
secretary during the winter in Washington, as though any young man
who could afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could
afford to read Blackstone for another winter without a master. The
young man was beyond satire, and asked only a pretext for throwing
all education to the east wind. November at best is sad, and November
at Quincy had been from earliest childhood the least gay of seasons.
Nowhere else does the uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly
on the frail wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy
November seemed temperate before the chill of a Boston January.

This was saying much, for the November of 1860 at Quincy stood
apart from other memories as lurid beyond description. Although no
one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it, and the Republicans
organized their clubs and parades as Wide-Awakes in a form military
in all things except weapons. Henry reached home in time to see the
last of these processions, stretching in ranks of torches along the
hillside, file down through the November night; to the Old House,
where Mr. Adams, their Member of Congress, received them, and, let
them pretend what they liked, their air was not that of innocence.

Profoundly ignorant, anxious, and curious, the young man packed
his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be unpacked, and
started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed since
his last visit, but very little had changed. As in 1800 and 1850, so
in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the
same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads.
The Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness
that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact;
but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was
so little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much
more, and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was
chiefly hostile, so far as it made itself felt. John Adams was better
off in Philadelphia in 1776 than his great-grandson Henry in 1860 in
Washington.

Patriotism ended by throwing a halo over the Continental
Congress, but over the close of the Thirty-sixth Congress in 1860-61,
no halo could be thrown by any one who saw it. Of all the crowd
swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely among the
most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the knowledge
possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater than his own.
Never in a long life did he seek to master a lesson so obscure. Mr.
Sumner was given to saying after Oxenstiern: "Quantula sapientia
mundus regitur!" Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but
Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him
both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly
unbalanced in mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims
of hallucination -- haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent
morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously
ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally
one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known.
They were a close society on whom the new fountains of power had
poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame.
They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in
which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.

This might be a commonplace of 1900, but in 1860 it was paradox.
The Southern statesmen were regarded as standards of statesmanship,
and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's chief offence
was his insistence on Southern ignorance, and he stood a living proof
of it. To this school, Henry Adams had come for a new education, and
the school was seriously, honestly, taken by most of the world,
including Europe, as proper for the purpose, although the Sioux
Indians would have taught less mischief. From such contradictions
among intelligent people, what was a young man to learn?

He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typical
Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had nothing to teach
or to give, except warning. Even as example to be avoided, he was too
glaring in his defiance of reason, to help the education of a
reasonable being. No one learned a useful lesson from the Confederate
school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole
field of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was
overshadowed by the cotton planters, from whom one could learn
nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker, and treason.

Perforce, the student was thrown back on Northern precept and
example; first of all, on his New England surroundings. Republican
houses were few in Washington, and Mr. and Mrs. Adams aimed to create
a social centre for New Englanders. They took a house on I Street,
looking over Pennsylvania Avenue, well out towards Georgetown -- the
Markoe house -- and there the private secretary began to learn his
social duties, for the political were confined to committee-rooms and
lobbies of the Capitol. He had little to do, and knew not how to do
it rightly, but he knew of no one who knew more.

The Southern type was one to be avoided; the New England type
was one's self. It had nothing to show except one's own features.
Setting aside Charles Sumner, who stood quite alone and was the boy's
oldest friend, all the New Englanders were sane and steady men,
well-balanced, educated, and free from meanness or intrigue -- men
whom one liked to act with, and who, whether graduates or not, bore
the stamp of Harvard College. Anson Burlingame was one exception, and
perhaps Israel Washburn another; but as a rule the New Englander's
strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered
no more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he
repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. The
character, with its force or feebleness, was familiar; one knew it to
the core; one was it -- had been run in the same mould.

There remained the Central and Western States, but there the
choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to
Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men
born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to Henry J. Raymond,
who came to view the field for the New York Times, and who was a man
of the world. The average Congressman was civil enough, but had
nothing to ask except offices, and nothing to offer but the views of
his district. The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much
more to say, being always excepting one or two genial natures,
handicapped by his own importance.

Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival
of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence of
only two men -- Sumner and Seward.

Sumner was then fifty years old. Since his election as Senator
in 1851 he had passed beyond the reach of his boy friend, and, after
his Brooks injuries, his nervous system never quite recovered its
tone; but perhaps eight or ten years of solitary existence as Senator
had most to do with his development. No man, however strong, can
serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit
for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect
of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they
mesmerized the subject. Yet even among Senators there were degrees in
dogmatism, from the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of
Webster, Benton, Clay, or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases,
like Conkling, it became Shakespearian and bouffe -- as Godkin used
to call it -- like Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the
rest, but he had at least the merit of qualities that warranted
dogmatism. He justly thought, as Webster had thought before him, that
his great services and sacrifices, his superiority in education, his
oratorical power, his political experience, his representative
character at the head of the whole New England contingent, and, above
all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most important member
of the Senate; and no Senator had ever saturated himself more
thoroughly with the spirit and temper of the body.

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a
superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator
seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more
seldom likes to be told of it. Even the greatest Senators seemed to
inspire little personal affection in each other, and betrayed none at
all. Sumner had a number of rivals who held his judgment in no high
esteem, and one of these was Senator Seward. The two men would have
disliked each other by instinct had they lived in different planets.
Each was created only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one
were the faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain
of either. That the public service must suffer was certain, but what
were the sufferings of the public service compared with the risks run
by a young mosquito -- a private secretary -- trying to buzz
admiration in the ears of each, and unaware that each would
impatiently slap at him for belonging to the other? Innocent and
unsuspicious beyond what was permitted even in a nursery, the private
secretary courted both.

Private secretaries are servants of a rather low order, whose
business is to serve sources of power. The first news of a
professional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching
Washington, was that the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had
selected Mr. Seward for his Secretary of State, and that Seward was
to be the medium for communicating his wishes to his followers. Every
young man naturally accepted the wishes of Mr. Lincoln as orders, the
more because he could see that the new President was likely to need
all the help that several million young men would be able to give, if
they counted on having any President at all to serve. Naturally one
waited impatiently for the first meeting with the new Secretary of
State.

Governor Seward was an old friend of the family. He professed to
be a disciple and follower of John Quincy Adams. He had been Senator
since 1849, when his responsibilities as leader had separated him
from the Free Soil contingent, for, in the dry light of the first
Free Soil faith, the ways of New York politics Thurlow Weed had not
won favor; but the fierce heat which welded the Republican Party in
1856 melted many such barriers, and when Mr. Adams came to Congress
in December, 1859, Governor Seward instantly renewed his attitude of
family friend, became a daily intimate in the household, and lost no
chance of forcing his fresh ally to the front.

A few days after their arrival in December, 1860, the Governor,
as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the family,
and the private secretary had the chance he wanted to watch him as
carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one's future. A
slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose;
shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand
manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type -- of
western New York -- to fathom; a type in one way simple because it
was only double -- political and personal; but complex because the
political had become nature, and no one could tell which was the mask
and which the features. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off
restraint, or seemed to throw it off, in reality, while in the world
he threw it off, like a politician, for effect. In both cases he
chose to appear as a free talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a
joke; but how much was nature and how much was mask, he was himself
too simple a nature to know. Underneath the surface he was
conventional after the conventions of western New York and Albany.
Politicians thought it unconventionality. Bostonians thought it
provincial. Henry Adams thought it charming. From the first sight, he
loved the Governor, who, though sixty years old, had the youth of his
sympathies. He noticed that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal;
his talk was large; he generalized; he never seemed to pose for
statesmanship; he did not require an attitude of prayer. What was
more unusual -- almost singular and quite eccentric -- he had some
means, unknown to other Senators, of producing the effect of
unselfishness.

Superficially Mr. Seward and Mr. Adams were contrasts;
essentially they were much alike. Mr. Adams was taken to be rigid,
but the Puritan character in all its forms could be supple enough
when it chose; and in Massachusetts all the Adamses had been attacked
in succession as no better than political mercenaries. Mr. Hildreth,
in his standard history, went so far as to echo with approval the
charge that treachery was hereditary in the family. Any Adams had at
least to be thick-skinned, hardened to every contradictory epithet
that virtue could supply, and, on the whole, armed to return such
attentions; but all must have admitted that they had invariably
subordinated local to national interests, and would continue to do
so, whenever forced to choose. C. F. Adams was sure to do what his
father had done, as his father had followed the steps of John Adams,
and no doubt thereby earned his epithets.

The inevitable followed, as a child fresh from the nursery
should have had the instinct to foresee, but the young man on the
edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his
masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guessing; even
at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing motives;
he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood
amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-minded
surprise. Critics who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on
history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his
own ignorance, and he never saw quite so much of it as in the winter
of 1860-61. Every one knows the story; every one draws what
conclusion suits his temper, and the conclusion matters now less than
though it concerned the merits of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden;
but in 1861 the conclusion made the sharpest lesson of life; it was
condensed and concentrated education.

Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the Government,
they must make sure of a government to administer, and that this
chance depended on the action of Virginia. The whole ascendancy of
the winter wavered between the effort of the cotton States to drag
Virginia out, and the effort of the new President to keep Virginia
in. Governor Seward representing the Administration in the Senate
took the lead; Mr. Adams took the lead in the House; and as far as a
private secretary knew, the party united on its tactics. In offering
concessions to the border States, they had to run the risk, or incur
the certainty, of dividing their own party, and they took this risk
with open eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner,
after Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no
secession now, you and I are ruined."

They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of the
historians who tell their story; their private secretaries had
nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that side a
secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The sudden
arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and the language
of his inaugural address, were the final term of the winter's
tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in the matter
forever. Perhaps he felt, even then, a good deal more interest in the
appearance of another private secretary, of his own age, a young man
named John Hay, who lighted on LaFayette Square at the same moment.
Friends are born, not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except
when in power. From the first slight meeting in February and March,
1861, he recognized Hay as a friend, and never lost sight of him at
the future crossing of their paths; but, for the moment, his own task
ended on March 4 when Hay's began. The winter's anxieties were
shifted upon new shoulders, and Henry gladly turned back to
Blackstone. He had tried to make himself useful, and had exerted
energy that seemed to him portentous, acting in secret as newspaper
correspondent, cultivating a large acquaintance and even haunting
ballrooms where the simple, old-fashioned, Southern tone was pleasant
even in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treason. The sum was next to
nothing for education, because no one could teach; all were as
ignorant as himself; none knew what should be done, or how to do it;
all were trying to learn and were more bent on asking than on
answering questions. The mass of ignorance in Washington was lighted
up by no ray of knowledge. Society, from top to bottom, broke
down.

From this law there was no exception, unless, perhaps, that of
old General Winfield Scott, who happened to be the only military
figure that looked equal to the crisis. No one else either looked it,
or was it, or could be it, by nature or training. Had young Adams
been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of his
estimate of the new President, he would have lost. He saw Mr. Lincoln
but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of
course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long,
awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and
in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that
expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar
Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated
and of needing education that tormented a private secretary; above
all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit
for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living
needed so much education as the new President but that all the
education he could get would not be enough.

As far as a young man of anxious temperament could see, no one
in Washington was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in
March were fitted for the duties in April. The few people who thought
they knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.
Education was matter of life and death, but all the education in the
world would have helped nothing. Only one man in Adams's reach seemed
to him supremely fitted by knowledge and experience to be an adviser
and friend. This was Senator Sumner; and there, in fact, the young
man's education began; there it ended.

Going over the experience again, long after all the great actors
were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered. In the effort
to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked much
to know whether he could have helped it. He had necessarily followed
Seward and his father; he took for granted that his business was
obedience, discipline, and silence; he supposed the party to require
it, and that the crisis overruled all personal doubts. He was
thunderstruck to learn that Senator Sumner privately denounced the
course, regarded Mr. Adams as betraying the principles of his life,
and broke off relations with his family.

Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long
life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the
profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden
strains that permanently warp the mind. He cared little or nothing
about the point in discussion; he was even willing to admit that
Sumner might be right, though in all great emergencies he commonly
found that every one was more or less wrong; he liked lofty moral
principle and cared little for political tactics; he felt a profound
respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened a chasm in life that
never closed, and as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably
taking for granted, as a political instinct, with out waiting further
experiment -- as he took for granted that arsenic poisoned -- the
rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.

On his own score, he never admitted the rupture, and never
exchanged a word with Mr. Sumner on the subject, then or afterwards,
but his education -- for good or bad -- made an enormous stride. One
has to deal with all sorts of unexpected morals in life, and, at this
moment, he was looking at hundreds of Southern gentlemen who believed
themselves singularly honest, but who seemed to him engaged in the
plainest breach of faith and the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they
did not disturb his education. History told of little else; and not
one rebel defection -- not even Robert E. Lee's -- cost young Adams a
personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.

This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education, down
to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seemed to him hardly
what he wanted. The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered
education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The
process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two
worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing.
Washington was a dismal school. Even before the traitors had flown,
the vultures descended on it in swarms that darkened the ground, and
tore the carrion of political patronage into fragments and gobbets of
fat and lean, on the very steps of the White House. Not a man there
knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without
exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the
cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give
no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he;
within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the
uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million
lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and
South, before the country could recover its balance and movement.
Henry was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only
wait for he knew not what, to send him he knew not where.

With the close of the session, his own functions ended. Ceasing
to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return with
his father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with
childlike docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of Horace
Gray in Court Street, to begin again: "My Lords and Gentlemen";
dozing after a two o'clock dinner, or waking to discuss politics with
the future Justice. There, in ordinary times, he would have remained
for life, his attempt at education in treason having, like all the
rest, disastrously failed.