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HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

Henry Adams, son of Charles Francis Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, represented the literary side of this New England family, so remarkable in its varied influences upon American life. After his graduation at Harvard in 1858, he served for seven years as secretary of his father who was American minister at London, he was for a period of years a Professor of History at Harvard, and from 1870 to 1876 was editor of the North American Review. For a time he was connected with official life at Washington: few of any generation have had wider or richer contacts with the leaders of their era.

His publications were distinctive. Among them are lives of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph, and a history in nine volumes of the period covered by the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. His autobiography, first privately issued in 1907 and then published in 1918, bids fair to be his most important addition to American literature. In it, says Professor Foerster, "he retraced, with a sturdy honesty, his quest of the meaning and value of life. Combining both the modern critical temper-exemplified, among the poets, by Moody and E. A. Robinson-and a yearning for mystical rapture that reminds one of Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, together with an clusive personality and a gift of eager penetrative speech, he wrote an autobiography that reflects the later nineteenth century as vividly as Franklin's autobiography reflects the century previous. Not even the absorbing tumult of the greatest war in history preventing it from rousing a sensation among thoughtful readers and attaining a place among the 'best sellers' of the day." To the student of the later nineteenth century the book is indispensable. An excellent introduction to it is Stuart P. Sherman's "Evolution in the Adams Family" in his book Americans, 1922.

BOSTON 1

A few months after the death of John Quincy Adams, a convention of antislavery delegates met at Buffalo to or- 5 ganize a new party and named candidates for the general election in November: for President, Martin Van Buren; for VicePresident, Charles Francis Adams.

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For any American boy the fact that his to father was running for office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement, but even apart from personal bias, the year 1848, for a boy's road through life, was decisive for twenty years to come. There was never a side-path of escape. The stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776, but in the eighteenth or any earlier century, the stamp mattered less because it was stand- 20 ard, and every one bore it; while men whose lives were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had, first of all, to get rid of it, and take the stamp that belonged to their time. This was their 25

1 This extract from The Education of Henry Adams is used by permission of, and by arrange. ment with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

education. To outsiders, immigrants, adventurers, it was easy, but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change. The reason it gave was forcible. The Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors. So they were. He could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it, and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him, as it was for the graceless. Nature had given to the boy Henry a character that, in any previous century, would have led him into the Church; he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time; and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.

Thus far he had nothing to do with it; his education was chiefly inheritance, and during the next five or six years, his father alone counted for much. If he were to worry successfully through life's quicksands, he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage; but, for his father, the channel lay clear, while for himself an unknown ocean lay beyond. His father's business in life was to get past the dangers

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of the slave-power, or to fix its bounds at least. The task done, he might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage; and it mattered little to his success whether they paid it with their lives wasted on battle-fields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity. The generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old forms of education; that which had its work to do be- to tween 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new.

His father's character was therefore the larger part of his education, as far as any single person affected it, and for that rea- 15 son, if for no other, the son was always a much interested critic of his father's mind and temper. Long after his death as an old man of eighty, his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good 20 deal of difference in their points of view. To his son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams pos- 25 sessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name. For a hundred years, every newspaper scribbler had, with more or less obvious excuse, derided or abused the older Adamses for 3 want of judgment. They abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adams 35 was singular for mental poise-absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness-the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone-a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. This unusual poise of judgment and temper, ripened by age, 45 became the more striking to his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties themselves, which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range. Charles Francis Adams's memory was 50 hardly above the average; his mind was not bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or imaginative or oratorical-still less mathematical; but it worked with singular perfection, admirable self- 55 restraint, and instinctive mastery of form. Within its range it was a model.

The standards of Boston were high,

much affected by the old clerical selfrespect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual social charm. Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett, Dr. Frothingham, Dr. Palfrey, President Walker, R. W. Emerson, and other Boston ministers of the same school, would have commanded distinction in any society; but the Adamses had little or no affinity with the pulpit, and still less with its eccentric offshoots, like Theodore Parker, or Brook Farm, or the philosophy of Concord. Besides its clergy, Boston showed a literary group, led by Ticknor, Prescott, Longfellow, Motley, O. W. Holmes; but Mr. Adams was not one of them; as a rule they were much too Websterian. Even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence, especially in medicine, but Mr. Adams cared very little for science. He stood alone. He had no master-hardly even his father. He had no scholars hardly even his sons.

Almost alone among his Boston contemporaries, he was not English in feeling or in sympathies. Perhaps a hundred years of acute hostility to England had something to do with this family trait; but in his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke or duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true, rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of pride!

The same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy Adams, but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied by mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment. No one ever charged Charles Francis

Adams with this fault. The critics charged him with just the opposite defect. They called him cold. No doubt, such perfect poise-such intuitive self-adjustment-was not maintained by nature without a sacrifice of the qualities which would

have upset it. No doubt, too, that even
his restless-minded, introspective, self-
conscious children who knew him best
were much too ignorant of the world and
of human nature to suspect how rare and 5
complete was the model before their eyes.
A coarser instrument would have im-
pressed them more. Average human na-
ture is very coarse, and its ideals must
necessarily be average. The world never to
loved perfect poise. What the world does
love is commonly absence of poise, for it
has to be amused. Napoleons and Andrew
Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused
by perfect balance. Had Mr. Adams's na- 15
ture been cold, he would have followed
Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward,
and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of party.
discipline and self-interest. Had it been
less balanced than it was, he would have ao
gone with Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell
Phillips, Mr. Edmund Quincy, and Theo-
dore Parker, into secession. Between the
two paths he found an intermediate one,'
distinctive and characteristic-he set up a 25
party of his own.

might have said what his lifelong friend William M. Evarts used to say: "I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don't like to do." Dana's ideal of life was to be a great Englishman, with a seat on the front benches of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to the woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the four men, Dana was the most marked. Without dogmatism or selfassertion, he seemed always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a welldefined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked close to its subject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and silence. it as he liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth generation.

In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him, but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different from his three associates-altogether out of line. He, too, adored English standards, but his ambition led him to rival the career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had made so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Everett than of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a triumph by his oration against war; but Boston admired him chiefly for his social success in England and on the Continent; success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never acquired by domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and instinct, felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the passions of politics.

This political party became a chief influence in the education of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected his character at the mo- 30 ment when character is plastic. The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, 35 Richard H. Dana, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his clerical education, was to a boy often the most agreeable, for his talk was lighter and his range wider than that of 40 the others; he had wit, or humor, and the give-and-take of dinner-table exchange. Born to be a man of the world, he forced himself to be clergyman, professor, or statesman, while, like every other true 45 He was rarely without a pocket-full of Bostonian, he yearned for the ease of the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall or the Combination Room at Trinity. Dana at first suggested the opposite; he affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, 50 vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, 55 as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust, but he

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letters from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sacrificed to principle. his social position in America, he clung the more closely to his foreign attachments. The Free Soil Party fared ill in Beacon Street. The social arbiters of BostonGeorge Ticknor and the rest-had to admit, however unwillingly, that the Free Soil leaders could not mingle with the friends and followers of Mr. Webster. Sumner was socially ostracized, and so, for that matter, were Palfrey, Dana, Russell, Adams and all the other avowed anti

the newspapers, to try to be dull in some different way from that of his greatgrandfather. Yet the discussions in the Boston Whig were carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and his opponent, and appealed to much the same society and the same habit of mind. The boy got as little education, fitting him for his own time, from the one as from the other, and he got no more from his contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types of the past.

slavery leaders, but for them it mattered less, because they had houses and families of their own; while Sumner had neither wife nor household, and, though the most socially ambitious of all, and the most 5 hungry for what used to be called polite society, he could enter hardly half-a-dozen houses in Boston. Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge, and even in Beacon Street he could always take refuge in the to house of Mr. Lodge, but few days passed when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon Street. Even with that, his solitude was glacial, and reacted on his character. He had nothing but himself to 15 fessions. Lawyers, physicians, profesthink about. His superiority was, indeed, real and incontestable; he was the classical ornament of the anti-slavery party; their pride in him was unbounded, and their admiration outspoken.

The boy Henry worshipped him, and if he ever regarded any older man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner. The relation of Mr. Sumner in the household was far closer than any relation of blood. 25 None of the uncles approached such intimacy. Sumner was the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product of nature and art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority which defied imitation, 30 To the twelve-year-old boy, his father, Dr. Palfrey, Mr. Dana, were men, more or less like what he himself might become; but Mr. Sumner was a different orderheroic.

Down to 1850, and even later, New England society was still directed by the pro

sors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church. In politics the system required 20 competent expression; it was the old Ciceronian idea of government by the best that produced the long line of New England statesmen. They chose men to represent them because they wanted to be well represented, and they chose the best they had. Thus Boston chose Daniel Webster, and Webster took, not as pay, but as honorarium, the cheques raised for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons, Perkinses, Amorys, Searses, Brookses, Lawrences, and so on, who begged him to represent them. Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to Webster. Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett. Charles Sumner aspired to break the succession, but not the system. The Adamses had never been, for any length of time, a part of this State succession; they had preferred the national service, and had won all their distinction outside the State, but they too had required State support and had commonly received it. The little group of men in Mount Vernon Street were an offshoot of this system; they were statesmen, not politicians; they guided public opinion, but were little guided by it.

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As the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old, his father gave him a writingtable in one of the alcoves of his Boston library, and there, winter after winter, Henry worked over his Latin Grammar 40 and listened to those four gentlemen discussing the course of anti-slavery politics. The discussions were always serious; the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously; and they were habitual because Mr. Adams 45 had undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen, who came to discuss its policy and expression. At the same time Mr. Adams was editing the "Works" of his grandfather John Adams, 50 and made the boy read texts for proofcorrection. In after years his father sometimes complained that, as a reader of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, Henry had shown very little consciousness of punctuation; but the boy regarded this part of school life only as a warning, if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in

He

Had

The boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation in such air. took for granted that this sort of world, more or less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was the world which he was to fit. he known Europe he would have learned 55 no better. The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of

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the same upper-class bourgeoisie that felt.
instinctive cousinship with the Boston of
Ticknor, Prescott, and Motley. Even the
typical grumbler Carlyle, who cast doubts
on the real capacity of the middle class,
and who at times thought himself ec-
centric, found friendship and alliances in
Boston-still more in Concord. The sys-
tem had proved so successful that even
Germany wanted to try it, and Italy 10
yearned for it. England's middle-class
government was the ideal of human pro-
gress.

Even the violent reaction after 1848,
and the return of all Europe to military 15
practices, never for a moment shook the
true faith. No one, except Karl Marx,
foresaw radical change. What announced
it? The world was producing sixty or
seventy million tons of coal, and might be 20
using nearly a million steam-horse-power,
just beginning to make itself felt. All ex-
perience since the creation of man, all
divine revelation of human science, con-
spired to deceive and betray a twelve-year- 25
old boy who took for granted that his
ideas, which were alone respectable, would
be alone respected.

trine, but taught, or tried to teach, the
means of leading a virtuous, useful, un-
selfish life, which they held to be sufficient
for salvation. For them, difficulties might
be ignored; doubts were waste of thought;
nothing exacted solution.
exacted solution. Boston had
solved the universe; or had offered and
realized the best solution yet tried. The
problem was worked out.

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwar's entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life. The faculty of turning away one's eyes as one approaches a chasm is not unusual, and Boston showed, under the lead of Mr. Webster, how successfully it could be done in politics; but in politics a certain number of men did at least protest. In religion and philosophy no one protested. Such protest as was made took forms more simple than the 50 silence, like the deism of Theodore Parker, and of the boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham, who distressed his father and scandalized Beacon Street by avowing scepticism that seemed to solve no old problems, and to raise many new ones. The less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was, from an old-world point of view, less serious. It was naïf.

Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it was 30 classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide, Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked-Suffrage, 35 Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

"Were half the power that fills the world
with terror,

Were half the wealth bestowed on
camps and courts,

Given to redeem the human mind from

error,

There were no need of arsenals nor
forts."

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Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston who 55 controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled. They proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doc

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