Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Young Henry had been most impressed by England on his very first visit in 1858. Like Kipling starting in California and working eastward, Adams made his landfall in Liverpool and traveled by degrees to the capital:

  Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into as one emerged—the revelation of an unknown society of the pit—made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.

  In later years, American visitors to England did not find that their first impression was of the country’s huge economic and industrial strength. But as early as 1858, that was still a commanding fact to an American. Adams reacted as a Greek islander might have done on first seeing Rome. “The most insolent structures in the world,” said Henry Adams, “were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England.”

  The insolence showed itself in innumerable ways, one of which was the encouragement of Southern expansionism in the United States. As the ally and patron of the cotton industry, and the former patron of the slave trade, Great Britain’s Establishment had a hundred and one ties of affection and emotion with the Southerners, and an equal and opposite repulsion for the tradesmen and financiers of the North. The very idea of the Southern gentleman— along the lines of caricature that Woodrow Wilson later etched— was an English simulacrum of the landed gentry and the colonial planter combined.

  Something of this sense—of superiority assumed by the British and inferiority felt by the Americans—seemed to communicate itself with renewed force to Adams when he returned to London in 1861, one month after the outbreak of the “War Between the States.” His task was to act as his father’s private secretary, and as he sadly described the situation in the third person: “In the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861, the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of Great Britain.” He was not to be disappointed by this premonition. The “Court and Parliament of Great Britain” still looked upon the United States as an upstart nation, and derived no little Schadenfreude from the contemplation of America’s difficulties:

  For a hundred years the chief effort of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into intelligent cooperation with the aims and interests of America. His father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself, he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England.

  He was soon to do so. On May 13, 1861, the British government “recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy,” which is to say, it adopted a position of feigned neutrality. According to Gladstone, this meant that Lord Palmerston “desired the severance [of the Confederacy] as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue.” Lord John Russell, at the Foreign Office, received envoys from the rebel states as if they had already established their title. In this, perhaps, there was an ironic echo of his own comment two years earlier, when he had angrily rebuked the American General Harney for occupying the Pacific coastal island of San Juan. “It is of the nature of the U.S. citizens,” Lord John had sneered, “to push themselves where they have no right to go, and it is of the nature of the U.S. government not to venture to disavow acts they cannot have the face to approve.” On that occasion, the dispute had been composed in traditional manner by sending the Prince of Wales to the White House in order to assuage President Buchanan’s lust for royal notice. But the Civil War allowed no such mollifying maneuver, and Abraham Lincoln was in any case rather indifferent to monarchy, and it was the British who consistently “failed to disavow acts” they did not “have the face to approve.”

  The relevant pages of The Education show Adams half appalled and half admiring at repeated demonstrations of British hypocrisy and double and treble dealing. When two Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British mail boat Trent by the Northern warship San Jacinto, the British coolly threatened to make this a casus belli, and sent reinforcements to Canada while openly discussing an invasion through Maine. This was to react rather fiercely, perhaps, to the Union doing what Nelson had once done. At any rate, it forced Lincoln to back down and set up a chorus of anti-Union growls in the British Tory press. Henry Adams himself was savagely denounced by Delane in The Times, and life in the clubs and drawing rooms of London was made barely supportable to him.

  Freud once wrote about “the narcissism of small differences,” pointing out how the bitterest quarrels often arise between people and groups with strongly marked external similarities, and that it is these similarities that excite the quarrel. Something like this happens quite frequently in Anglo-American relations, and it certainly seems to have exerted itself both on the British upper class and on Henry Adams. From instinctive Boston Englishman at one moment, he moved to a position where he observed:

  Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own interests, the fourth generation still could not quite persuade itself that this new British stupidity was natural.

  There, if ever, is an Old World sentiment masquerading as a New World one—the permanent ambivalence which later found expression in Adams’s letters and in the writings of Henry James. Chivvied in Mayfair, Adams discovered (temporarily) honest virtues in men like Richard Cobden and John Bright and the Yorkshireman William E. Forster, whose sturdy, unaffected, rough-hewn nature became a source of consolation. “Anarchists” though they were regarded by what Adams terms “the so-called Established orders,” they were a great prop and stay to the American legation.

  While the future Admiral Mahan was on blockade duty off the coast of the Confederacy, Laird’s yard at Liverpool was constructing vessels for the rebel side to employ against him. The best-known of these, the Alabama, completed around the time of the Trent incident, was to send over fifty Union ships to the bottom while the pretense of neutrality went on. “Lord Russell’s replies to Mr. Adams’s notes were discourteous in their indifference, and, to an irritable young private secretary of twenty-four, were insolent in their disregard of truth.” “Insolent”—like the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. Adams had further to endure, after the second battle of Bull Run, hearing one Cabinet minister gaily remark to another at a Palace reception: “So the Federals have got another hiding!” He had to put up with Thackeray’s maudlin diatribe in favor of chivalry and Southern womanhood, delivered in lachrymose tones at a reception at Sir Henry Holland’s, and the anti-Lincoln oaths of his former idol Carlyle. All this, and the daily gloatings of The Times as the Union cause bled and suffered. Small wonder that he “wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the Earth. Never could any good come from that besotted race!”

  As Lincoln and Seward began to establish a kind of mastery over the situation, with the Emancipation Proclamation and with superior generalship, the British policy declined in proportion. Which is to say that it moved from the sham of neutrality to active partisanship for the Confederacy. The decision was signaled by crocodile tears for the mounting casualty lists on both sides and pious talk about international intervention to bring about a “settlement.” On September 17, 1862, Russell wrote to Palmerston:

  Whether the Federal army is destroyed or not, it is clear that it is driven back to Washington and has made no progress as
such in subduing the insurgent States. Such being the case, I agree with you that the time is come for offering mediation to the United States Government with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Confederates. I agree further that in case of failure, we ought ourselves to recognise the Southern States as an independent State.

  Behind the formalities of this initiative there lurked rather more than diplomatic judgment, as a later paragraph made clear:

  We ought to make ourselves safe in Canada, not by sending more troops there, but by concentrating those we have in a few defensible posts before the winter sets in.

  The fact that Palmerston was uncharacteristically cautious in his reply did little to dull the rage of Adams, who was to be even more shocked, in his chapter sarcastically entitled “Political Morality,” by the behavior of Mr. Gladstone. This paragon of the English virtues made a speech in Newcastle, prompted by his own professed concern for “the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire,” in which he made a show of yielding to the utilitarian principle of “facts”:

  We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation.

  Robert E. Lee had incontestably made an army, but the Confederate navy was made in England, and well Mr. Gladstone knew it. The future “Grand Old Man” even gave his imprimatur to a backstairs deal with Napoleon III, whereby the patron of Maximilian made “a proposition which had no sense except as a bribe for Palmerston to replace America, from pole to pole, in her old dependence on Europe, and to replace England in her old sovereignty of the seas, if Palmerston would support France in Mexico.” That, allowing for Adams’s archaic use of “replace” to mean “restore” or “return,” was putting it neatly. In 1896, Gladstone himself was to publish an apology for his partiality, regretting “such an utterance from a Cabinet Minister of a power allied in blood and language.” Of course, by those definitions both South and North had been so allied, but by 1896 that could be forgotten and, as we have seen, by 1896 the ties of “blood and language” were coming back into the height of fashion.

  The Schadenfreude was soon to be an American quality. As Grant and Sherman brought the superior economic and military sinews of the North into play (as Adams’s nemesis Karl Marx had foreseen they would), the British began to make themselves more agreeable. Vicksburg and Gettysburg became great names, and Adams recorded exultingly: “During the July days, Londoners were stupid with unbelief. They were learning from the Yankees how to fight.” This lesson was also driven home in diplomacy. Lord John Russell was told in terms by Adams Sr. that if the two warships being completed for the Confederates in Liverpool were allowed to follow the Alabama, there would be war. Russell, after an infinity of hemming and hawing, told the Admiralty: “It is of the utmost importance and urgency that the ironclads building at Birkenhead should not go to America to break the blockade.”

  With this letter, Britain in effect gave up trying to forestall, weaken, or abort the consolidation of “America” as a continental union. Adams was free to resume at least one of his pursuits, which was a love affair with the English and with the idea of Anglo-American rapprochement—the roles of mentor and student, senior and junior partner, being reversed.

  Trite though it may be to describe Adams’s emotions about England as symptomatic of a love-hate relationship, that is what they were. His increasing familiarity with the country, often expressed in terms of contempt, also contained a rather languidly expressed commitment to its well-being. On his first sight of the country in 1858, he was awed by Eaton Hall

  as Thackeray or Dickens would have felt in the presence of a Duke. The very name of Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty, gilded rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the terraces; the gardens; the landscape— the sense of superiority in the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart, above Americans and shopkeepers.

  Leaving England’s shores at the end of the American Civil War, he found that it was only London, with its homes and hansom cabs, that he missed.

  He felt no sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their country houses; he had become English to the point of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of American youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes.

  Some of this may have been written for effect—after all, he had shown some earlier acquaintance with English manners by the mere fact of being “a Bostonian.” And it seems clear that on his return to America, he used English reserve and superiority as a sort of protective carapace against the surrounding vulgarity. Post-Lincoln America was a disappointment to Adams; a decided disappointment with its corruption, vulgarity, and place seeking. The word “gilded,” used by Adams to express the summit of English refinement, became appropriated by Mark Twain to describe the gross grandeur of the emerging American century. In Washington, Adams surrounded himself with an English-style set, seeking refuge from the brittle New World in the affectations of the Old (and thus making his large individual contribution to a pose which can still be observed among Americans of a certain type).

  After his wife’s suicide in particular, Adams’s home took on the appearance of an Englishman’s bachelor retreat inhabited by an avuncular ogre. He kept up a circle of polished, cynical, worldly, snobbish, well-connected friends. He sponsored a series of “nieces-in-wish,” most of whom were charming and accomplished in their way and most of whom married English lords in deference to the new imperatives of the day. Martha Cameron, daughter of neighbors on Lafayette Square, wed the Hon. Ronald Lindsay, younger son of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Then there were the “three Marys” who adorned his famous noonday breakfast receptions. Mary Leiter became Lady Curzon, Mary Endicott married Joseph Chamberlain, and Mary Grant became Mrs. William Oswald Charlton, thus furnishing Adams with every kind of British entrée. Of his grown-up companions, the preferred trio were John Hay, an Anglicized American, Henry Cabot Lodge, virtually an Americanized Englishman, and Cecil Spring-Rice, an English diplomat who formed extensive attachments in America. These three men were a considerable reinforcement to Theodore Roosevelt, who was a frequent guest at the house and who reciprocated with invitations to the Executive Mansion across the way. He, too, shared the foible of thinking in threes and called Hay, Lodge, and Adams “the Three Musketeers of Culture.”

  Less amenable to frivolity, and less keen on reclusive pursuits, was Henry’s brother Brooks Adams. He considered himself to be of the elect rather than of the elite and espoused a sternly determinist worldview. Brooks was very fond of terms like “decadence” and had a strict cyclical view of the rise and fall of great powers. One of his fixed determinations was that England was in eclipse, and that by exploiting this fact the United States could achieve destiny. Where Henry Adams was Anglophile, albeit at times despairing of his love, Brooks was almost Anglophobic. He would have scorned the idea that there was any emotion in this attitude; for him it was a predestinate fact that Britain had sunk into apathy and impotence, and thus deserved to be stripped of her preeminence. Sometimes, this dogmatism could be interesting, and often got as far as a kind of vulgar Marxism. In analyzing why the British Establishment had never quite made up its mind to support the Confederacy outright, he boldly opined:

  Hitherto, speaking broadly, the landed gentry had predominated, but, if the franchise were to be extended widely, none could tell whither power might migrate. Certainly, it would not remain with those who had enjoyed it. Therefore the aristocracy assuming that if the South should prevail the enfranchisement of the proletariat might be indefinitely postponed, the proletariat accepting it as axiom that their fortunes were bound up with t
he fortunes of the North.

  There is an echo, at least, of what Henry Adams had noticed when Gladstone spoke of “violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire,” where English workers sacrificed to side with the Union in spite of the short-term influence of the cotton interests.

  In his books The Law of Civilization and Decay and America’s Economic Supremacy (both published by the newly transatlanticized firm of Macmillan), Brooks Adams struck the same chord with relentless monotony. In an extraordinary essay, with the giveaway title of “Natural Selection in Literature,” he illustrated the decline of England by contrasting the manliness and martial nobility of Sir Walter Scott with the miserable hesitation and scruple of Charles Dickens. Of the latter he said, pityingly, that “the nearest approach to an attempt at the heroic in behalf of any of his lovers, was the street brawl between Nicholas Nickleby and Sir Mulberry Hawk.” He scorned Dickens because that author “seldom undertook to describe the gentleman, the soldier, or the adventurer, and when he did, he unconsciously caricatured them because he knew those temperaments only by their antagonism to his own.” (We can see in this the ancestry of today’s school of muscular American criticism, directed at writers like E. M. Forster or Joseph Heller and surging from the pens of Joseph Epstein and Norman Podhoretz. In The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams announced that “one of the first signs of advancing civilizations is the fall in the value of women in men’s eyes.”) Adams took signs of femininity and sloth as symptomatic of a declining imperial will. Of the Boer War and its early reverses for the Crown he wrote: