The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Hay had confidence in Lincoln, but Adams watched anxiously as the new president fumbled with his white kid gloves at the inaugural ball. As far as Adams could see, Lincoln’s “long, awkward figure” and his “plain, ploughed face” showed no sign of force. Six weeks later civil war erupted, and soon afterward Lincoln asked Charles Francis to serve as American minister to England. Henry’s friendship with John Hay would have to wait.

  Lincoln charged the new minister with a delicate mission. Britain proclaimed itself neutral in the American conflict, which meant that it recognized the Confederacy as well as the Union. Certain parties in England, reasoning that a divided America would enhance the power of Britain, were agitating for British aid to the Confederacy. It fell to Charles Francis to try to preserve England’s neutrality.

  As his father’s personal secretary, Henry was not officially part of the staff of the American legation in London, but his duties gave him an insider’s view of the diplomatic chess being played on the board of the American Civil War. Canny and tactful, Charles Francis would accomplish his mission in spite of schemers and intriguers on both sides of the Atlantic. Henry watched with admiration for his father and mounting disgust for the politicians who stood in his way. Power, Henry decided, was “a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes.” Its effect was “an aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” His antipathy would last a lifetime.

  Away from the legation, Henry dined with Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, and he cultivated Sir Charles Lyell, a geologist devoted to amassing evidence for the shocking new evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. He met John Stuart Mill, the philosopher whose political ideas squared perfectly with the deepest hopes and fears of the Adams family. Mill admired democracies because they allowed the brightest and best to gain more influence than they could in hereditary aristocracies. But he fretted that representative government naturally tended toward “collective mediocrity”—the dreaded tyranny of a majority who made ignorant, self-serving decisions.

  Henry’s greatest social pleasures in England were the breakfasts and house parties given by Monckton Milnes, member of Parliament and man of letters. Voracious reader, astute critic, lover of art and books, orchestrator of “collisions” of dissonant minds, Milnes was Henry’s ideal as a host. Among the sparkling monologists in the Milnes salon, Henry was a welcome guest: “they needed a listener,” he deduced. Silent and thrilled, he heard Algernon Swinburne recite whole plays—forward and backward. Memories of these entertainments were banked for the day when Henry could orchestrate collisions in his own drawing room.

  The future did little to reveal itself to Henry Adams during his seven years in London. Working for his father and living at home left him uncomfortably suspended between adolescence and adulthood. In mild rebellion he grew a beard and kept it despite his mother’s protests. He also launched a secret campaign of defiance against his father, writing unsigned articles on British politics for American newspapers. Morally, it was an ambiguous enterprise. As secretary he had access to privileged information, exposure of which might compromise fragile negotiations and embarrass Charles Francis. Henry, longing to experiment with journalism, persuaded himself that his articles would help by presenting forceful briefs for his father’s views.

  For eight months Henry spent Saturdays in his rooms on the top floor of the legation residence, where he composed accounts of the week’s political events. His undoing was a newspaper editor unable to resist trumpeting the Adams name. But when British newspapers pounced upon the transgression, they scolded the lad less for his politics than his manners, taking deepest offense at his complaint about the “thimblefuls of ice cream and hard seed cakes” served in English ballrooms. Afraid of being caught in a more damaging act, Henry put down his pen.

  Though the minister bore the episode “very good-naturedly,” Henry knew that another episode would be his ruin “for a long time.” When Henry tried to explain his acute sense of failure to his older brother, Charles, Jr., Charles told him to stop whining. But Henry could not shake the feeling that he was “a humbug.”

  Humiliation notwithstanding, Henry’s clandestine writing taught him that he enjoyed journalism no matter how little his father thought of it, and anonymity had offered a way to practice his new craft without fear of ridicule. To a perfectionist who had dismissed several earlier literary efforts as sadly wanting—unworthy of the House of Adams—a secret apprenticeship had incalculable worth.

  Thin, thirty, and, by his own description, “very—very bald,” Henry went back to the United States with his family in the summer of 1868, when his father decided to return to private life. Determined to break away from Boston and the Adams orbit, he settled on a career in journalism, wryly admitting that it was “the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors.” New York, with its abundance of newspapers and magazines, was his ultimate destination, but he decided to go first to Washington, perhaps because he knew politics best. His father acquiesced, though he let it be known that he expected his son to grapple with “questions of public importance” and to do so “in a manner useful to the country.” Charles Francis also warned him against Washington’s “silly young women” and the time-thieving fripperies of capital society.

  On his own at last, Henry bloomed. Cabinet members took him under their wing. Congressmen granted long interviews and, when it suited their purposes, assisted his investigations. In an analysis of the 1869-70 session of Congress, which appeared in the North American Review, he delivered blistering judgments with a self-assurance that would have been unthinkable a year or two before.

  To the fledgling correspondent, it seemed that the government was out of control and no one would be held accountable. The president said he could not act because Congress would not pass laws, and Congress begged absolution because nothing could get past its fractious committees. The government was drifting, without “a course to steer, a port to seek,” and the villain was President Ulysses S. Grant. Henry derided the lumpishness of Grant’s mind and his refusal to see himself as anything more than a caretaker. Grant, Henry supposed, came as a rude shock to citizens who had expected the bold hero of Vicksburg to be a bold chief executive.

  The incumbents were furious with the upstart’s assessment, and the upstart basked in their fury. “I have smashed things generally and really exercised a distinct influence on public opinion,” he boasted. When a senator lashed back in print, Henry’s joy was complete: “To be abused by a Senator is my highest ambition.”

  The capital itself he considered “the drollest place in Christian lands.” After seven years of London formality, unformed Washington offered “an easy and delightful repose.” Cannons rolling through the streets for the four years of the Civil War had ground the pavement of the main thoroughfares to dust, rendering them even more impassable than the muddy side streets. Then, as later, society huddled around Lafayette Square, and beyond the square, “the country began.” The country Henry saw as “a long, straggling caravan, stretching loosely toward the prairies, its few score of leaders far in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in the rear, somewhere in archaic time.” Unlike New York and Boston, Washington had little wealth, which meant that men of modest means could live well and find ready acceptance by society. As for the “silly young women” disdained by his father, Henry charmed them sufficiently to win a reputation as one of the three best dancers in the capital. Journalism might be ephemeral, the nation might be dangerously adrift, but Henry Adams, for the first time in his life, enjoyed being Henry Adams.

  The only one who asked more was his father. “You shoot over the heads of most people,” Charles Francis complained. He also found Henry’s style “savoring of conceit.” Guessing that shyness compelled Henry to assume the pose of arrogance, Charles Francis warned that if he expected to influence men in public life, he would have to “remove this obstacle.”


  A younger Henry Adams would have been crushed. But with the buffer of five hundred miles between Washington and Quincy, and with abundant praise from editors and friends, Henry felt no need to alter his tone. And in spite of a growing disdain for the “dirty whirlpool” of politics, he had no desire to abandon Washington or journalism. In the summer of 1870, when the president of Harvard invited him to take a post as assistant professor of history, he promptly declined. He was flattered, he said, “but, having now chosen a career, I am determined to go on in it as far as it will lead me.”

  Two months later Harvard tried again. Henry’s brothers thought he should take the job, as did his father, who had come to regard universities as “the field of widest influence in America.” Under ordinary circumstances, the newly contented Henry Adams would have stayed in Washington, but that summer he had witnessed the unexpected death of his older sister, Louisa, who had contracted tetanus after being thrown from a carriage. Harvard was only a few miles from Quincy; perhaps his presence would soften his family’s grief. The ferocious Washington correspondent, the man who loved smashing things, came tenderly home.

  Telling an English friend of his appointment to teach medieval history, Henry confessed, “I am utterly and grossly ignorant … I gave the college fair warning of my ignorance, and the answer was that I knew just as much as anyone else in America knew on the subject.” With his ready laugh, an endearingly poor memory for dates, and his refusal to require students to memorize page after page of text for recitation, Professor Adams was an immediate favorite. He was fearless in showing his ignorance. When a student asked for a definition of “transubstantiation,” he shot back, “Good Heavens! How should I know! Look it up.” His idea of a good examination question was one he could not answer. “It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me,” he remarked to a friend. “You would be proud to know as much as they do.”

  With his teaching duties came the job of editing the North American Review, which had published several of his Washington essays. Perversely proud of its tiny circulation—four hundred at best—the magazine assumed that its subscribers included everyone who mattered. While Henry lamented that an editor was “a helpless drudge, whose successes, if he made any, belonged to his writers” and whose failure could mean bankruptcy, he quickly turned the Review into a pulpit for the reformist politics of the Adams family. He lashed out at monopolists and stock market manipulators, continued his assault on Ulysses S. Grant, and told his readers what to think of new books and scientific discoveries.

  Beyond the iron railings of Harvard Yard, he made friends he would keep for life. He saw the sensitive Jameses, William and Henry, who were beginning their careers in philosophy and literature, and dined with William Dean Howells, whose novels he praised in the Review. He also befriended the tall, austere John La Farge, an artist struggling to perfect the manufacturing technique that would start a renaissance in stained glass.

  In the spring of 1871, one of Henry’s boyhood friends, Samuel Franklin Emmons, invited him to spend the summer out west with a party conducting a geological survey for the federal government. Eager to explore a new world and to rekindle the interest in geology that had begun with Sir Charles Lyell in England, Adams headed for Wyoming in July.

  The West enthralled him. In the past he had poked fun at American crudities, but now he bragged to English friends about “country wilder than anything in Siberia.” Even the climate was enchantingly hostile, with temperatures of a hundred degrees at noon and nights cold enough to leave crusts of ice in the water pails. He wore moccasins (“though they spoil the shape of the feet”) and calmly wrote letters under the gaze of Indians on horseback.

  The most exotic human being Adams encountered in his travels was Clarence King, director of the survey. At twenty-nine, King seemed to have everything, including the influence so prized by Charles Francis Adams. His Fortieth Parallel survey, underwritten by the government, was making the first accurate maps of a large part of the West and sizing up the region’s mineral wealth, water resources, and agricultural prospects. A muscular five-foot-six, King had boundless energy and no discernible fears. He had once trapped a bear in a cave, climbed in after it, and, after coolly waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, dispatched it with a single shot.

  Professor Henry Brooks Adams of Harvard in about 1875, when he was in his late thirties.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  An aesthete with a particular fondness for painting, King saw to it that photographers and landscape painters accompanied the survey, and he strove to give his camps an air of refinement. In the evening, after a long, gritty day in the field, he donned silk hose, gleaming shoes, and a suit freshly pressed by his valet. Materializing at the campfire, he looked to an astonished Henry Adams like “a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush.” When a visitor teased the geologist about his fancy duds and the overweening ambition of his chuck-wagon, King treated him to a haughty lecture: “It is all very well for you, who lead a civilized life nine or ten months in the year, and only get into the field for a few weeks at a time, to let yourself down to the pioneer level … But I, who have been for years constantly in the field, would have, lost my good habits altogether if I had not taken every possible opportunity to practice them.”

  On meeting Clarence King, Adams felt the same instant connection he had experienced when he shook hands with John Hay. Friendship with King “was never a matter of growth or doubt,” Adams said. It was whole from the start.

  Back in Cambridge for his second year of teaching, Henry resumed a budding relationship with the Hoopers, a family whose Bay Colony roots went as deep as his own. Though he had known them for years, he owed the new closeness to Ephraim Whitman Gurney, dean of the Harvard faculty and husband of Ellen Hooper. Through the Gurneys Henry came to know Ellen’s brother Edward (Ned) and sister Marian, called Clover by family and friends. Born September 13, 1843, Clover was the youngest of the Hoopers. At five-feet-two, she stood two inches shorter than Henry. With her large nose, full cheeks, and prominent chin, she was not pretty, but she possessed highly developed artistic tastes and a wit so adroit that Henry Adams dove into love. As he told one of his brothers, “On coming to know Clover Hooper, I found her so far away superior to any woman I had ever met, that I did not think it worthwhile to resist … the devil and all his imps couldn’t resist the fascination of a clever woman who chooses to be loved.” On February 27, 1872, while his parents were far away in Europe, Henry asked Clover to marry him.

  Marian (“Clover”) Hooper at Beverly Farms in 1869. She was twenty-six.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  2

  A Charming Blue

  On Thursday, June 27, 1872, a party of thirteen gathered at the summer home of Dr. Robert Hooper in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, for the wedding of his daughter Marian to Henry Brooks Adams. “The ceremony lasted in the neighborhood of two minutes,” the groom’s brother Charles grumbled in a letter to their father. The luncheon that followed lacked a seating plan, the champagne was insufficiently chilled and meagerly dispensed, the main dish mere roast chicken—served cold and carved by the bride. In all, Charles sniffed, “the aspect of affairs tended toward the common-place.”

  To the bride and groom, it had been a splendid day. The thermometers on Boston’s North Shore registered a comfortable sixty-five degrees, a gentle wind ruffled the sea, gray skies deepened the soft blues of the Morris wallpaper in the parlor. From the abbreviated exchange of vows to the informality of the meal, everything had gone in accordance with the couple’s wishes. Thanking her father in a note written the next day, Clover said she and Henry thought the occasion “went off charmingly.” The new husband pronounced the event “very jolly” and fancied that he and his wife had “established a precedent for quiet weddings.”

  The mean-spirited review filed by Charles Adams had less to do with the absence of the Hooper family’s social finesse than with Clover’s presence in Henry’s
life. Before Henry fell in love, he and Charles had been fellow knights in a glorious crusade. With the North American Review as their lance they had attacked the chicanery of railroad magnates and Wall Street manipulators, and they had worked zealously to make their father a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1872. By denying Ulysses S. Grant a second term, they dreamed not only of adding a third president to the Adams dynasty but of ridding the country of political and financial corruption. In choosing the summer of 1872 as the moment to begin a honeymoon year abroad, Henry dramatically abandoned his brother on the family battleground.

  Charles had a further reason to be upset. On hearing of Henry’s engagement to Clover, he had burst out, “Heavens!—no—they’re all crazy as coots. She’ll kill herself, just like her aunt!” The aunt, Susan Sturgis Bigelow, had taken arsenic at twenty-eight, ending her own life and that of an unborn child. Another aunt, Carrie Sturgis Tappan, was considered highly eccentric if not unstable, and Clover’s mother, the fragile Ellen Sturgis Hooper, had died of tuberculosis in her mid-thirties.

  The family’s tragic history had not been concealed from Henry. “I know better than anyone the risks I run,” he told his younger brother Brooks. “But I have weighed them carefully and accept them.” He claimed not to care what the world thought of the marriage as long as people left him alone. But the truth was that he worried deeply about the reactions of family and friends. Fearing that Clover would fall victim to the savage candor that passed for conversation in the Adams household, he put Brooks on notice: “I shall expect you to be very kind to Clover, and not rough, for that is not her style.” Describing his fiancée to an English friend, he seemed bent on exposing every flaw, as if to disarm all possible opposition in advance.