FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)
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.