Chapter XVII. President Grant (1869)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

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

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

Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial or
newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken for
granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing.
Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.
Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young
man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of
frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him
from Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey.
Another impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came
far down in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have
spared a world of superannuated history, science, or politics, to
have reversed better in waltzing.

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

In such an atmosphere, one made no great presence of hard work.
If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it
will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus far, no
one had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams had done or
could do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration, and
social pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to go on
working, as an artist goes on painting when no one buys his pictures.
Artists have done it from the beginning of time, and will do it after
time has expired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find
their return in the pride of their social superiority as they feel
it. Society commonly abets them and encourages their attitude of
contempt. The society of Washington was too simple and Southern as
yet, to feel anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what
artists produced elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when
it had the chance, and respected itself the more for the frailty.
Adams found even the Government at his service, and every one willing
to answer his questions. He worked, after a fashion; not very hard,
but as much as the Government would have required of him for nine
hundred dollars a year; and his work defied frivolity. He got more
pleasure from writing than the world ever got from reading him, for
his work was not amusing, nor was he. One must not try to amuse
moneylenders or investors, and this was the class to which he began
by appealing. He gave three months to an article on the finances of
the United States, just then a subject greatly needing treatment; and
when he had finished it, he sent it to London to his friend Henry
Reeve, the ponderous editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably
thought it good; at all events, he said so; and he printed it in
April. Of course it was reprinted in America, but in England such
articles were still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.

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

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

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

Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if
this had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point
where he always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten
make their errors. One may be more or less certain of organized
forces; one can never be certain of men. He belonged to the
eighteenth century, and the eighteenth century upset all his plans.
For the moment, America was more eighteenth century than himself; it
reverted to the stone age.

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

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

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

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope that
any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians would
raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by reason,
all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the world
expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more
serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with
eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The
newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his
person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in
one sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they
wrote, felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He
was eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate
and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor
did he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to
effect the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920..

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

Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13,
1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the
incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without absolutely
saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out
for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no thought of
effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had
no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could he sail next? He
had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For the moment,
he saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched
himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.
Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome
to a Bostonian -- or should have been -- although fatal to Adams. The
name of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme
conservatism and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S.
Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat
lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite
of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total
extinction for any one resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the
name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, suggested help
and comfort; while that of Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised
friendship. On the whole, the personal outlook, merely for literary
purposes, seemed fairly cheerful, and the political outlook, though
hazy, still depended on Grant himself. No one doubted that Grant's
intention had been one of reform; that his aim had been to place his
administration above politics; and until he should actually drive his
supporters away, one might hope to support him. One's little lantern
must therefore be turned on Grant. One seemed to know him so well,
and really knew so little.

By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the
two men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly
social, though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was
red, and his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very
intelligent, a good newspaper-man, and an excellent military
historian. His life of Grant was no ordinary book. Unlike most
newspaper-men, he was a friendly critic of Grant, as suited an
officer who had been on the General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper
correspondents in Washington were unfriendly, and the lobby
sceptical. From that side one heard tales that made one's hair stand
on end, and the old West Point army officers were no more flattering.
All described him as vicious, narrow, dull, and vindictive. Badeau,
who had come to Washington for a consulate which was slow to reach
him, resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became
irritable, besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and
showed a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a
true literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still
more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he said nothing,
even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but he held that
no one except himself and Rawlins understood the General. To him,
Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when
awake, but passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he nor
the rest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him
because of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed
torpid. Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas
into it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves,
in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his own,
without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the
orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his
nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when he
would act. They could never follow a mental process in his thought.
They were not sure that he did think.

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

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

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

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to
follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must
stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic
habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State
Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre,
to commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!"
or, "The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of
such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their
sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as
when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that
Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this
suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant
it was a measure of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed
the same intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the
same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the
American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as
usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the
Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to
exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as
society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of
education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great
and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called -- and should
actually and truly be -- the highest product of the most advanced
evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as
Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress
of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone
evidence enough to upset Darwin.

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

Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was not
unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish was
almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values; he was
human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no prejudice
whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or person to
attract regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; he was not in
the least magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidence from
the start and remained a friend to the finish. As far as concerned
Mr. Fish, one felt rather happily suited, and one was still better
off in the Interior Department with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had
been in the Treasury and Boutwell in the Interior, one would have
been quite satisfied as far as personal relations went, while, in the
Attorney-General's Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible
ideal, both personal and political.

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

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