WASHINGTON (1850-1854)
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.