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.
CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY
(1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced
that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his
Minister to England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back
on its shelf. As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many
centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief
day; the Common Law prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The
law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in April, 1861,
leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world,
to begin a new life without education at all. They asked few
questions, but if they had asked millions they would have got no
answers. No one could help. Looking back on this moment of crisis,
nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only shake one's white
beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more intimated that he
thought himself entitled to the services of one of his sons, and he
indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared from more
serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word. He
could offer no protest.
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