Chapter XVIII. Free Fight (1869-1870)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son
Sam to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught
Adams the charm of Washington spring. Education for education, none
ever compared with the delight of this. The Potomac and its
tributaries squandered beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky
Mountains. Here and there a negro log cabin alone disturbed the
dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and
the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The
soft, full outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of
glaciers in its bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate
vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific
splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods,
were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him
the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that
marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it were
Greek and half human. He could not leave it, but loitered on into
July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer village about La
Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance could not be
questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to question them.

In spite of the fatal deception -- or undeception -- about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington had
so much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He loved it
too much to question its value. What did he know about its value, or
what did any one know? His father knew more about it than any one
else in Boston, and he was amused to find that his father, whose
recollections went back to 1820, betrayed for Washington much the
same sentimental weakness, and described the society about President
Monroe much as his son felt the society about President Johnson. He
feared its effect on young men, with some justice, since it had been
fatal to two of his brothers; but he understood the charm, and he
knew that a life in Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.

Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every tree.
Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him
by mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining
perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a
success. One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the
other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought
about the last was that it should have been so modern. Adams, in his
splenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked
their worst on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and
sex was a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond
recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in
the wrong. The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a
story of education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there
were no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better than
its neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even
to Adams's confusion.

Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's character
showed themselves. They were startling -- astounding -- terrifying.
The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould
to corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up -- at
least so far as to make it intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by
the change at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner
gold without interference from the Government. He took a number of
precautions, which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as
he also testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to
have satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any
criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting,
rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be permitted
to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without
assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was professionally
inadmissible.

This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from
the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have
satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for want
of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day, such a
dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams jumped at
it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his
ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear
of consequences. They risked something; no one could say what; but
the people about the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.

The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work
with. Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold
Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The surface was
in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and they paid their
respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace;
but the New York side of the story helped Henry little. He needed to
penetrate the political mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait
for Congress to meet. At first he feared that Congress would suppress
the scandal, but the Congressional Investigation was ordered and took
place. He soon knew all that was to be known; the material for his
essay was furnished by the Government.

Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery,
and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any
mystery existed. All Adams's great friends -- Fish, Cox, Hoar,
Evarts, Sumner, and their surroundings -- were precisely the persons
most mystified. They knew less than Adams did; they sought
information, and frankly admitted that their relations with the White
House and the Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered
advice. No one offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the
press, although press agents expressed in private the most damning
convictions with their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional
Committee took a quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and
refused to analyze. Although the fault lay somewhere on the
Administration, and could lie nowhere else, the trail always faded
and died out at the point where any member of the Administration
became visible. Every one dreaded to press inquiry. Adams himself
feared finding out too much. He found out too much already, when he
saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually succeeded in stretching
his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and that Boutwell's
incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation. With the
conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public assured
every one else that the President himself was the savior of the
situation, and in private assured each other that if the President
had not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next,
for the ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this was wildly
exciting to Adams. That Grant should have fallen, within six months,
into such a morass -- or should have let Boutwell drop him into it --
rendered the outlook for the next four years -- probably eight --
possibly twelve -- mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who
had hitched his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform.
The country might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the
eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this,
which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems,
professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in
one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this
innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy,
had expected to enter an honorable career in the press as the
champion and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a
life of wasted energy, sweeping the stables of American society clear
of the endless corruption which his second Washington was quite
certain to breed.

By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar
Wall Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view Grant
had been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant.
One could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and
disgusted by the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute
American mind -- still less the complex Jew -- could ever have
accustomed itself to the incredible and inexplicable lapses of
Grant's intelligence; and perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less
mischievous victim, if victims they both were. The same laxity that
led Gould into a trap which might easily have become the
penitentiary, led the United States Senate, the Executive departments
and the Judiciary into confusion, cross-purposes, and ill-temper that
would have been scandalous in a boarding-school of girls. For
satirists or comedians, the study was rich and endless, and they
exploited its corners with happy results, but a young man fresh from
the rustic simplicity of London noticed with horror that the grossest
satires on the American Senator and politician never failed to excite
the laughter and applause of every audience. Rich and poor joined in
throwing contempt on their own representatives. Society laughed a
vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure. Nothing
remained for a young man without position or power except to laugh
too.

Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can
afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice;
it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh
at the dead; but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to
seize it. Any one in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is
horribly at the mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration
can rapidly drive out every active subordinate. At Washington, in
1869-70, every intelligent man about the Government prepared to go.
The people would have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before
the chaos; some laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they
had to content themselves by turning their backs and going to work
harder than ever on their railroads and foundries. They were strong
enough to carry even their politics. Only the helpless remained
stranded in Washington.

The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one
who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in
it, alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him
in vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or
out of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital
interest. The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr.
Boutwell waited with confidence for society to drag his department
out of the mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.

Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to
serve. He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition was his
horror; pure waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and
Southern rebels who never had much in common with any Adams, and had
never shown any warm interest about them except to drive them from
public life. If Mr. Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the
indifference or contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish
opened the State Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much
openness as any newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could
cling to this last plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the
recognized champion of Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once
thought of his disaster between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an
accident could not occur again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and
their policy was sure to be safe enough for support. No mosquito
could be so unlucky as to be caught a second time between a Secretary
and a Senator who were both his friends.

This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved;
he saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was
delighted; but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the
winter of 1869-70, he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had
a foreign policy of his own which he proposed also to force on the
Department. This was not all. Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished.
Besides the Department of State over which he nominally presided in
the Infant Asylum on Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department
of Foreign Relations over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand
at the Capitol; and, finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign
Office in the War Department, with President Grant himself for chief,
pressing a policy of extension in the West Indies which no
Northeastern man ever approved. For his life, Adams could not learn
where to place himself among all these forces. Officially he would
have followed the responsible Secretary of State, but he could not
find the Secretary. Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and
docile towards Grant, but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As
for Grant's policy, Adams never had a chance to know fully what it
was, but, as far as he did know, he was ready to give it ardent
support. The difficulty came only when he heard Sumner's views,
which, as he had reason to know, were always commands, to be
disregarded only by traitors.

Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To
his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all
extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to
the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and
ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with incredulous stupor while
Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every
possible American claim against England, with a view of compelling
the cession of Canada to the United States.

Adams did not then know -- in fact, he never knew, or could find
any one to tell him -- what was going on behind the doors of the
White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much
more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in
Foreign Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy. President Grant let every
one go on, but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to
divine. One point alone seemed clear to a man -- no longer so very
young -- who had lately come from a seven years' residence in London.
He thought he knew as much as any one in Washington about England,
and he listened with the more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk,
because it opened the gravest doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was
his object, and Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius,
and Adams was ready to treat it seriously; but if he thought he could
obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama
Claims, he drivelled. On the point of fact, Adams was as peremptory
as Sumner on the point of policy, but he could only wonder whether
Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr. Fish did say it, a year
later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance. Adams was the more
puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both
with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson
was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General
Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals
or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a
light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he
knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party, if
separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party manager
he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were
unknown to him.

Between these great forces, where was the Administration and how
was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then it was
not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting than the
complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the
rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike
to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated
the story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till
it was denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had
as good a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed
to him a part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments
on less material than hair -- on clothes, for example, according to
Mr. Carlyle, or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz -- and nine
men in ten could hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes
or dislikes. In truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they
had nothing in common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner.
For the same reason he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave
him a chance. Even Fish could not be quite sure of Grant, except for
the powerful effect which wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's
imagination.

The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not break
in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another
quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish and Sumner,
worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet, the one whom he
had most personal interest in cultivating was Attorney General Hoar.
The Legal Tender decision, which had been the first stumbling-block
to Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened to become
something more serious than a block; it fell on one's head like a
plaster ceiling, and could not be escaped. The impending battle
between Fish and Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak
between Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington
hoping to support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the
Senate, but he never dreamed that he would be required to help in
breaking down the Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been
driven, like the rest of the world, to admit that American society
had outgrown most of its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme
Court, much as a churchman clings to his bishops, because they are
his only symbol of unity; his last rag of Right. Between the
Executive and the Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they
were at the mercy of Power. They had created the Court to protect
them from unlimited Power, and it was little enough protection at
best. Adams wanted to save the independence of the Court at least for
his lifetime, and could not conceive that the Executive should wish
to overthrow it.

Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article
on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then
published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender
clause in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with
reform, saved from Boutwell's decree of banishment such reformers as
he could find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him
the Census of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the
North American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gave
Adams his notes, and Adams completed the article.

He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and
bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic"
value, gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid
half the wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of attacking
or defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice
and the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have
been the necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at
the time the Act was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's
recollections, Adams completed the article, which appeared in the
April number of the North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for
Adams never cared to abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker
reeked of the army and the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran
away with Adams's restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained
loudly of this treatment, not without justice, but the article itself
had serious historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of
Spaulding's contention that legal tender was necessary at the time;
and the Chief Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The
Chief Justice seemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or
not, made no sign. The article had enough historical interest to
induce Adams to reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years
afterwards; but its historical value was not its point in education.
The point was that, in spite of the best intentions, the plainest
self-interest, and the strongest wish to escape further trouble, the
article threw Adams into opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was
implacable.

Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He did
this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself. Scarcely a
newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York Tribune was
one of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in every direction
marked the dissolution of temper, and the Senate Chamber became again
a scene of irritated egotism that passed ridicule. Senators
quarrelled with each other, and no one objected, but they picked
quarrels also with the Executive and threw every Department into
confusion. Among others they quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from
office.

That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at
Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule, must
have had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could only have
understood what it was. He studied, but failed. Sympathy with him was
not their weakness. Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could
hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far from inviting
attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.
Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to
help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although
they would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for.
The lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics
was the earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to
learn from its study; but the situation struck him as curious -- so
curious that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four most
powerful friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were
fighting in pairs to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign
affairs and the judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in
education?

Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or
Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The statesmen of
the old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were
personally as honest as human nature could produce. They trod with
lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially when there was good
in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the
country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on;
just as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in
money-matters, cost the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt
worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it
affected the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant,
Garfield, and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics
turned on jobs, and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined
their influence by their insistence on points of morals. Society
hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity,
pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially following the
strong. In spite of all such criticism, the public nominated Grant,
Garfield, and Blaine for the Presidency, and voted for them
afterwards, not seeming to care for the question; until young men
were forced to see that either some new standard must be created, or
none could be upheld. The moral law had expired -- like the
Constitution.

Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare,
were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it
wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men
who could work it; but it found neither. Adams had tried his own
little hands on it, and had failed. His friends had been driven out
of Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and
stared helplessly into the future.

The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he
had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history
then, and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it
even good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his
devious education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last
study in current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble
member of the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no
more, had he gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the
century. The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely
to be in 1970 The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the
eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
Politicians had tacitly given it up. Grant's administration marked
the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's political energies must henceforth
be wasted on expedients to piece out -- to patch -- or, in vulgar
language, to tinker -- the political machine as often as it broke
down. Such a system, or want of system, might last centuries, if
tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine,
it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world -- the clumsiest
-- the most inefficient

Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics -- to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or
even Mr. Sumner -- he could not honestly say that such an education,
even when it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth
anything. There were men, as yet standing on lower levels -- clever
and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine -- who took no little
pleasure in making fun of the senatorial demi-gods, and who used
language about Grant himself which the North American Review would
not have admitted. One asked doubtfully what was likely to become of
these men in their turn. What kind of political ambition was to
result from this destructive political education?

Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it.
If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new
morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An eternity of
Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds,
refused to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans laughed, and
went their way. Society paid them to be practical. Whenever society
cared to pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold
his tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic
Congressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active
assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a
college. The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young
men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want
of system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of
business.

All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen
by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various
organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He enjoyed the life
enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox;
much happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice
Chase or Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came,
he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of
April, what Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature
showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United
States Senate. Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even
the judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams
astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent to the
Capitol by the greatest possible distance, as one caught glimpses of
the dome over miles of forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on
the distant beauty of St. Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli.

Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to London
for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy," which
he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It was
the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for
publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of
revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were
not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise
success. London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it
was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and
financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the
attention in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in
full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest
ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in
any case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase he was
becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.