CHAPTER VII

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 pf law and to vote for Abraham Lincoln on the same day. ©
He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he re. bounded 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 Jearned, guessed what happened. Possibly a few Southern loy- alists in despair might dream it as an impossible chance; bur 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. No- vember at best is sad, and November at Quincy had been from earliest childhood the least gay of seasons. Nowhere else does ‘he uncharitable autumn wreak its spite so harshly on the frail
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wreck of the grasshopper summer; yet even a Quincy Novem, ber 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 maa packed his modest trunk again, which had not yet time to be un- packed, and started for Washington with his family. Ten years had passed since his last visit, but very little had changed. Asin 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 se- cial instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, seces- sion 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. halo over the Continental Con- gress, 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 thu knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly greatet than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master a lessol so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after Oxenstiern:
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“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 igno- rant. The. Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallu- cination — haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent mor- bid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were men- tally 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 flante. 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 intelli- gent people, what was'a young man to learn?
He could learn nothing but cross-purpose. The old and typi- cal Southern gentleman developed as cotton-planter had noth- ing to teach or to givé, 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.
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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 Ave- nue, 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. f
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 sané and steady men, well-balanced, educated, and free from mean- ness 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 Wash- burn another; but asa rule the New Englander’s strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defeat. 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, handi- rapped by his own importance.
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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 recov- ergd its tone; but perhaps eight or ten Vears of solitary existence as Senator had most to do with his development. No man, how- ever strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Sena- tor, 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 Sena- tors there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or Sum- ner 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 ora- torical power, his political experience, his representative charac- ter at the head of the whole New England contingent, and, above all, his knowledge of the world, made him the most impor- tant 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 be- trayed 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
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exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the faults of hig 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 ad- miration in the ears of each, and unaware that each would im- patiently 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 profes- sional kind, imparted to private secretary Adams on reaching Rischington: 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 fol- lowers. 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 pro- fessed 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 ind of 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 Gover- nor, as he was always called, came to dinner, alone, as one of the
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family, and the private secretary had the chance he wanted te 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 na- - ture, 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 sin- gular 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; es- sentially 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 asno 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 eould supply, and, on the whole,
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armed to return such attentions; but all must have admitted that they had invariably subordinated local to national inter- ests, and would continue to do’so, whenever forced to choose.