Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Henry Adams

  CLOVER HOOPER FIRST met Henry Adams in the spring of 1866 at a dinner party in London while on her Grand Tour with her father. Henry was in London, working as his father’s secretary at the American Legation, and noted their meeting in his social calendar. On a page dated May 16, 1866, he listed thirty-one dinner guests for that evening, including “Dr. & Miss Hooper.” She left no record of the occasion or what her impressions of it might have been.

  The meeting that mattered occurred nearly six years later, almost a year after Clover had written her “rhapsodies of sunshine” letter to Eleanor Shattuck. Sometime near the start of 1872, Clover, now twenty-eight, crossed paths again with Henry Adams at the Cambridge home of her sister, Ellen, and her brother-in-law Ephraim Whitman Gurney. Henry had accepted a Harvard professorship in medieval history and taken over the editorship of the North American Review from Gurney, who by now was the college’s dean of the faculty. Though he felt he knew next to nothing about medieval history, Henry had nine hours of classes and two hundred students to teach. Lonesome after moving from Washington, D.C. (where he had been a journalist), scornful of much of Boston society, overworked by the dual demands of teaching and editing the prestigious Review, and with no home of his own (he lived in a few rooms at the home of his uncle Edward Everett, in Cambridge), he found refuge at the Gurney home, his “oasis in this wilderness.” Clover had been coming to Cambridge with some regularity to visit with her sister and to study Greek with her brother-in-law. On meeting her again, Henry admitted to his youngest brother, Brooks, that he had “the design” to pursue Clover and had “driven it very steadily.”

  Whereas Clover’s family had made its name through trade, shipping, and banking, Henry’s family was one of the most famous in nineteenth-century America. As T. S. Eliot later observed, Henry Adams knew that “never in his life would he have to explain who he was.” His great-grandfather John Adams was the central architect of the young country’s government and its second president, and his grandfather John Quincy Adams, its sixth president. His father, Charles Francis Adams, served in the Massachusetts house and senate before an unsuccessful run in 1848 for vice president on the ticket of the Free Soil Party, a third party opposed to the expansion of slavery. After one term as a U.S. congressman for Massachusetts, he was named by President Lincoln to serve as minister at the Court of St. James’s. When Charles Francis Adams married Abigail Brooks in 1829, his family declared that he now would not have to worry about money—Abigail’s father, Peter Chardon Brooks, was reputedly one of the richest men in Boston.

  Henry, born in 1838, the fourth child and third son of Charles and Abigail’s seven children, inherited the name of the family’s first Henry Adams, who had immigrated to Massachusetts two hundred years before, in 1638. He also inherited the weighty mantle of familial expectation woven from many strands: political prominence, intellectual brilliance, financial affluence, and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. But these were entwined too with darker elements, which Henry’s father recognized when he wrote, “The history of my family is not a pleasant one to remember. It is one of great triumphs in the world but of deep groans within, one of extraordinary brilliancy and deep corroding mortification.” Charles Francis Adams, Henry’s father, had fared far better than many in his family. The stunning achievements of earlier generations had been followed by breakdowns and problems with alcohol. Charles Adams, the second son of John Adams, had died of alcoholism at the age of thirty in 1800. Between 1829 and 1834, John Quincy Adams’s first son, George Adams, committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight, followed by the alcoholic death of Thomas Boylston Adams, John Quincy’s youngest brother, followed by the death, also from drink, of John Quincy’s youngest son, John Adams, at thirty-one. By 1834, four years before the birth of Henry Adams, there were no paternal uncles left; of these siblings, only Charles Francis Adams survived, “the only one,” he wrote in his diary, “to keep the name and family in our branch at least from destruction.”

  Charles Francis Adams had found that being the son of a famed father and grandfather was daunting, confiding in his diary at the start of his political career that, “strange as it may seem, the distinction of my name and family has been the thing most in my way.” His son would at times feel likewise, though he would become his generation’s most well-known Adams: an accomplished historian who changed how the study of history was practiced in America and a revered public intellectual. By any measure, Henry Adams was a success. But, like his father before him, he found that his family history cast a long shadow, and he would join his immense talent to a brooding insistence on failure, which found its most profound and ironic expression in his posthumously published The Education of Henry Adams (1918).

  Henry Adams stood no more than five foot three inches tall; it is likely that a childhood bout of scarlet fever stunted his growth. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he held himself in a commanding way. Trim and well proportioned, he was known for his stride—he would stick out his chest and walk with markedly erect posture, which made him somehow seem taller. He had the habit of thrusting his hands into his pockets when friends approached him or when pacing in front of his students. His fine features were accented by piercing dark eyes and a voice that combined the slightest British burr with a somewhat nasal tone. Impeccably dressed, he was already, in his words, “very—very bald” by the time he got to know Clover in his early thirties. He could be moody, shy, relentlessly introspective, and pessimistic. A master with words—even his earliest letters shine with detail and interest—he thought most emotions were best left unexpressed. He had prodigious work habits and a childlike curiosity concerning just about everything. He enjoyed fine food and cigars; devoured books of every sort, finishing off three detective novels a day when traveling; hated argument for the sake of argument; relished gossip and chat; and had a flair for making fair-minded judgments, which made him his family’s preferred counselor. Both his mother and father admitted at various times that Henry was their favorite child, the one they felt closest to.

  Henry had grown up in both Boston and Quincy. The family lived at 57 Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill for most of the year; its second-floor library held a collection of over eighteen thousand books. Summers were spent ten miles south in Quincy, in a hilltop house not far from the Adams family manse. Because his father was a legal resident of Quincy and his Brooks grandfather owned the title to the Mount Vernon Street home, Henry was ineligible for attending Boston’s prestigious Latin school. He went instead to a private Latin school at 20 Boylston Street, just outside the city limits. In 1854 he went on to Harvard, following his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. After graduating in 1858—he gave the Class Day oration, on the dangers of greed—he studied languages, principally German and French, and the law at universities in Berlin and Dresden. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Henry and his father were antislavery and staunchly pro-Union. A founding member of the new Republican Party, which had been formed in 1854 to stop the expansion of slavery into the territories, Charles Francis Adams urged a measure of caution in containing Slave Power in order to avoid the catastrophe of disunion and all-out civil war. This view stood in contrast to the firebrand antislavery rhetoric of Charles Sumner, family friend, senator from Massachusetts, and putative head of the Radical faction of the Republican Party, who urged the destruction of slavery at any cost and who dined many Sundays at the Adams table at Mount Vernon Street.

  Though twenty-three when the war started, a prime age to serve, Henry did not enlist, as did so many of his classmates from Harvard and his older brother Charles, who would go on to fight at Gettysburg as captain of a cavalry unit, ascending by the end of his career to the rank of brevet brigadier general. On hearing of his brother’s enlistment, Henry wrote to Charles, “One of us ought to go.” If the younger brother ever felt he missed out by stepping back from the cataclysm of his generation, he rarely spoke of it.

  Henry was working as a jo
urnalist until the spring of 1861, when President Lincoln appointed his father, then a U.S. congressman, as minister to England. Henry went along as his father’s private secretary, and there he met various leading lights of the time: John Stuart Mill, Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father), Charles Dickens, the poets Charles Swinburne and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For a time, he wrote an anonymous column for the New York Times as its London correspondent. He remembered these years in London with his father, from 1861 until 1868, as “a golden time,” later musing to his closest English friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell, that sailing to England in 1861 had been, perhaps, “the biggest piece of luck I ever had.” When Henry returned at the age of thirty to a much-changed America, he again worked as a journalist, writing articles for the North American Review, The Nation, and the New York Evening Post, among other publications. But his biting criticism of the rampant corruption in President Grant’s administration made him some enemies and prevented him from participating more directly in politics. When Ephraim Whitman Gurney, together with Charles Eliot, president of the college, asked Henry to return to Harvard, he could hardly refuse. His father encouraged him, writing that “it is the teacher who can make the greatest mark, who will make himself all powerful.”

  Professor Adams was, by all accounts, a brilliant teacher—innovative, inspiring, and original. He had been hired to teach medieval history, about which he felt “utterly and grossly ignorant,” as he told Gaskell. But he walked into his classrooms of a hundred or more students armed not with mere historical facts but with a completely new way of teaching—asking questions, demanding that his students think for themselves, engaging in debate with both rigor and humor. One student, Edward Channing, a future historian at Harvard, called him the “greatest teacher” he’d ever known, and another, Henry Cabot Lodge, among the first students to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. in history, would model his own teaching on that of his favorite professor. Lodge recalled how Henry had eschewed lecturing and preferred a more Socratic method, an approach Lodge would carry into his own teaching: “I allotted to each man a certain number of questions on the syllabus,” Lodge would remember, and “sent him to the library and had him come in with his results and lecture to me.” Although Henry didn’t inspire his students to divulge personal confidences—one student described Professor Adams as “a man of pure intellect” and not someone “a person in deep trouble” would confide in for “advice and sympathy”—he was surely on their side. He set up a system of putting library books on reserve for his students to use, an innovation at the time, and urged the library to arrange tables in the library where students could study.

  But, like Clover, Henry was at loose ends in Boston. He found teaching exhausting and he loathed college politics. He would write letters and lectures at the back of the faculty room as he endured the tedium of lengthy meetings. Society wore him out. He despised how the Brahmin class “cultivated their genealogies,” and, with his parents living nearby at 57 Mount Vernon Street in Boston, he had a complicated family situation of his own to deal with at close range.

  Henry was particularly burdened by his mother’s nervous fears and debility. Mrs. Adams, lively but pampered, had been a social ornament when young. What had charmed her wealthy father, P. C. Brooks, had also captivated her husband—her buoyancy, her love of conversation, her open affection. But following marriage and the birth of seven children within fifteen years (a boy, Arthur, three years younger than Henry, had died at the age of five), Mrs. Adams found little to engage her beyond her family. Simmering unhappiness had become tightly braided with chronic physical debility—crushing headaches, sleeplessness, and constant noises in her ears.

  Mrs. Adams’s many complaints were complicated, no doubt, by the horrifying loss of her oldest child, Louisa Catherine Adams. Sister Lou, as she was known, had been bright but discontented, sparring frequently with her exacting parents, who were often mystified by her erratic behavior—she once said that life at Mount Vernon Street “makes me so unhappy, that sometimes I feel as if I should go away and never come home.” She fled Boston with her husband, Charles Kuhn, in 1864 to live in Europe, settling in Florence. In the summer of 1870, while on holiday in Bagni di Lucca, Sister Lou was in a carriage accident that left her with a badly crushed foot. Henry, who was vacationing at the time in England, rushed to her side. She died of tetanus on July 13 after suffering through several weeks of convulsions and lockjaw. As Henry wrote to a friend, her last days had been “fearfully trying.” She was thirty-eight. When Henry returned to Quincy, his parents preferred not to ask him too much about Sister Lou’s last days—as Mrs. Adams said to Henry, those days were “too awful to dwell on.”

  Fourteen months later, in mid-November 1871, Henry’s father was called back into public life by President Grant, who appointed him as arbiter for a dispute between the United States and Great Britain. It involved warships, in particular the Alabama, which had been built in England and sent over for use by the Confederacy, a clear violation of Britain’s wartime neutrality. Mr. Adams would be overseas a long time, accompanied only by Brooks, Henry’s youngest brother, because Mrs. Adams refused to take the ocean voyage in her state of health. Henry was to be his mother’s principal caretaker while his father was away, a role his sense of duty made difficult to resist.

  In Henry’s family the key partnership was not between his mother and his father, but between his father and himself. Henry’s older brothers, John Quincy and Charles Francis Jr., had married and started families of their own. As the third son, and one who was unmarried and who lived nearby, Henry was more available to help out at home. His father would later admit in his diary that Henry was “one of my trusted supports,” a dependency that may have become more pronounced with the increasing instability of Mrs. Adams.

  By early January of 1872, Henry was living full-time at his parents’ house in Boston to help his younger sister, Mary, their mother’s daily attendant; he traveled to Cambridge only to teach. He tried to maintain his composure in his correspondence with his father, assuring him that the problem with his mother “is merely that her nervous system does not recover its balance readily.” She had always hated being apart from her husband. Henry resisted asking for rescue and did not request that his father return, as did his older brothers and his sister, who likely feared that their mother’s misery was worsening. Faced with such intense emotions, Henry didn’t quite know what action to take. When Mr. Adams asked Henry whether he should come home, Henry demurred: “I don’t propose to offer any opinion on the subject.” Again he assured his father that “if you can’t return, we will get along somehow.” The next week, however, he admitted to “a very uncomfortable week. Mamma has her good days and her bad days, but her best are by no means gay and her worst are very bad.” “Her difficulty,” Henry explained, was that she had “nothing to occupy her mind, to counteract the influence of unpleasant ideas. Hence the merest trifle upsets her, and a wakeful night seems to her a life-long career.” He also played down his mother’s suffering, whatever its origins, to make it seem more bearable: “In all this there is nothing that seems to me very serious, though of course it makes life rather intolerable and has a most unfortunate effect on everyone’s nerves.”

  In his reply, Mr. Adams told Henry what the son already knew: “I have great reliance on the calmness of your judgment and the clearness of your perceptions.”

  Six weeks after this tumult with his parents, in the early evening of February 27, 1872, Henry Adams proposed marriage to Clover Hooper. He found her “so far away superior to any woman I had ever met, that I did not think it worth while to resist.” Announcing his engagement to Brooks, he wrote,

  I am engaged to be married. There! What do you say to that? I fancy your horror and incredulity. The fact, however, is indisputable, and you had better here lay down this letter and try to guess the person. Who do you say? Clara Gardner? No! Nanny Wharton? No. It is, however, a Bostonian. You know her, I believe, a little. You are partly res
ponsible, too, for the thing, for I think you were the first person who ever suggested it. I remember well that in our walks last spring you discussed it. Yes! It is Clover Hooper.

  Henry found Clover quick and expressive, witty, athletic, and unafraid of a challenge. It probably helped that she seemed so different from his mother. Henry chose her not despite but because of her directness and intelligence. He bragged that they were “happy as ideal lovers should be,” and later observed that Clover “has a certain vein of personality which approaches excentricity [sic]. This is very attractive to me, but then I am absurdly in love.”

  Clover’s family welcomed Henry into the fold. He had already spent many evenings at the Gurney home, and he would enjoy a genial connection with Dr. Hooper. But the reverse was not true. In a congratulatory note, Dr. Holmes assured his friend Mr. Adams that he had great confidence in the match, saying, “I am sure you cannot but be happy by the prospect of receiving Miss Hooper, whom we have found and you will find so worthy of love and esteem, into your family.” Holmes added that “every body seems to be delighted with” the engagement. But the Adamses were not so sure. Henry’s father confided in his diary how the engagement had “surprised” him, though he recognized Clover had a favorable “reputation among her friends, which could be desired at the outset.” Henry’s brother Charles Francis Jr. found Clover hard to understand, and Mrs. Adams would complain that Clover sat on her daybed, clutching a pillow in her lap. And from the start, Charles worried about Clover’s mental balance, blurting out, when Henry had told the family of his engagement, “Heavens!—no!—they’re all crazy as coots.” Henry reacted little to his family’s response. Perhaps their diffidence concerning Clover helped him pull away from their strong influence and their need of him.