TREASON (1860-1861)
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.