Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  In 1875, Clover and Henry built a home of their own design, with a mansard roof, on a lot of more than nineteen acres in a wooded area purchased from J. Elliot Cabot, half a mile back from the coastline and a short walk southeast through the woods to Dr. Hooper’s house. Pitch Pine Hill, as they called it, was no Gilded Age mansion, like many other homes along the seacoast. It was, by comparison, a relatively modest hideaway, though it accommodated at least four servants and a number of guests. The rooms had odd shapes and low ceilings, and each, including the upstairs bathroom between Clover’s and Henry’s separate sleeping rooms, had a fireplace. Ceramic tiles depicting medieval castles, knights, and medallions studded the entry hall floor; elegant Morris tile work lined the many fireplaces; and Clover’s collection of china plates decorated with four-leaf clovers was displayed on the mantel in the dining room. The couple packed up their collection of English watercolors—by John Robert Cozens, Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, John Varley, and William Clarkson Stanfield, among others—to live with them seasonally in their second home. They put Henry’s large writing desk on the first floor, in a room facing the sea; it had an awning-covered porch open to the salty breezes. Clover’s upstairs room had a view of the ocean above the treetops. Her garden included Spanish roses, nasturtiums, morning glories, and beds of fragrant mignonette. She also designed a small oval-shaped pond, which was rimmed with brickwork and situated at the edge of the front lawn, just before a perilous drop-off, a wooded embankment, and the sea beyond. The pool caught the glimmer of sunlight and fleeting reflections of birds and leaves overhead. Henry boasted to Gaskell that “our new house is more than all we ever hoped. We are delighted with it and all about it. I am perfectly happy here, and potter about, trimming trees, eradicating roots and rocks, opening paths and training vines, all day, with rapture unknown to poets.” He added: “I could write a sonnet on the pleasures of picking up stones out of one’s lawn.”

  Summers meant time outdoors—swimming, weeding the garden, walking along the beach, and taking long rides on horseback through the wooded countryside. The warm-weather edition of Boston’s social whirl was slower paced than “the season,” and Clover spent long afternoons with her family. Daughter and father often met in the afternoons for a midday dinner at half past two. Sometimes Henry would join them. Or Clover and Henry would talk later in the day over tea. Clover’s sister and brother-in-law, Ellen and Whitman, often stayed at Dr. Hooper’s house, as did her brother and sister-in-law, Ned and Fanny, and their young daughters. By 1879 Ned and Fanny had five girls: Ellen, Louisa, Mabel, Fanny, and Mary, who loved to scamper back and forth between Dr. Hooper’s house and Pitch Pine Hill.

  The nieces would long remember these summer days. Mabel Hooper recalled how “a footpath, strewn with fragrant pine-needles, and bordered with ferns and lichened rocks” led to Pitch Pine Hill. For a young girl, “it was like having a private entrance into fairyland,” where her uncle and aunt “kept the keys and arranged the scenery.” Henry spent the mornings at his desk, dressed in “cool white summer clothes,” and “only the scratch of the pen would break the silence.” In the afternoons Clover and Henry appeared and their nieces watched “almost enviously—the two figures on horseback vanishing into the flickering sunlight of the woods.”

  ***

  During these early years of her marriage, Clover had no need to write letters to her family—they lived in Boston or Cambridge or were together in the summers on the North Shore. She left scant record of this time. Henry, by contrast, regularly wrote to, among others, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles Gaskell, and Sir Robert Cunliffe, Gaskell’s cousin and a friend from Henry’s days in London in the early 1860s. In 1875, Henry convinced Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, to inaugurate a graduate seminar in history, the first of its kind offered at the college. In the evening, after they dined together, Henry gathered his students before an open fire in his second-floor library on Marlborough Street to read through “German codes of the Visigoths, Burgundians, and Salian Franks” to discern how they informed Anglo-Saxon institutions, the basis of English law, and, eventually, the American legal code. He delighted in the work. “This adventure in research” made him “like a colt in tall clover,” one student remembered.

  The course culminated the following spring in the volume Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law (1876), with an introductory essay by Henry, followed by dissertations written by his seminar students, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young, and J. L. Laughlin. For their work, the students received the first doctorates awarded in history at Harvard. The professor could not have been happier, writing to Lodge on the occasion of Lodge’s graduation, “Nothing since I came to Cambridge has given me so much satisfaction and so unalloyed satisfaction as the completion of our baking this batch of doctors of philosophy.” He declared himself “pleased as Punch about my Ph.D’s.”

  Henry wrote too of his pursuits with Clover: they rode horses and took long walks, they gardened and attended dinners, and they ended many days in front of the fire, reading together. They got Boojum, their first long-haired Skye terrier, in 1876, four years into their marriage, and over the years they would add Pollywog, Possum, and Marquis to their ménage of dogs. A niece remembered that their “long-haired terriers were always to be seen tumbling about their feet or trotting after them on their walks.” They entertained. If Henry found Boston stultifying, once comparing the city’s social scene to “isolated groups of ice-bergs,” he often repeated to friends how he and his wife were “flourishing.”

  One extant letter by Clover, written on March 29, 1875, to Charles Gaskell, confirms her contentment. She reports on her wide interests and is clearly independent enough to do as she pleases. Earlier that morning she had read a letter from Gaskell, and in the evening, while waiting for Henry to come home from a party she had no interest in attending, she pulled out a sheet of her creamy writing paper and her pen and inkpot. “As I’ve not bored you with a letter for many months, I propose to now,” she began, telling Gaskell how she’d locked herself in Henry’s library until his return because of a spate of robberies and murders in the neighborhood. The financial panic of the previous year had put the city on edge with a rash of crime. “Robbery,” Clover explained, had gone “out of fashion because there is nothing left to steal,” replaced with “cutting throats.”

  But Clover didn’t linger long on such news. She thanked Gaskell for his letter, which reminded Henry how books by the art critic John Ruskin were going up in price—that very same day Henry had gone out to buy her all of Ruskin’s leather-bound second editions and started reading to her from Modern Painters. She regaled her correspondent with how her husband had bought her a complete set of Punch, a popular British magazine renowned for its satire. “If your unmarried conscience ever rebuked you,” she joked with the still-single Gaskell, “marry and gratify every whim.” But remember, she cautioned, to “preface the opening of every parcel with ‘my dear, I bought you a little present today.’” After trading more social gossip, she concluded, “It is very late and he cometh not.” But then she heard Henry coming in the door. With relief, she added, “oh here he is—so good night,” signing her letter rather formally as “Marian Adams.”

  If Henry James, who had known Clover since childhood, found her somewhat “toned down” by marriage from what he called her “ancient brilliance,” James’s younger sister, Alice, remarked in her inimitable way, both approving and cutting, that being married to Henry Adams had “had a good effect upon” Clover. Marriage had “added a charm, a feminine softness which was decidedly wanting before.” Perhaps Alice James noticed (and envied) what her brother couldn’t see—Clover’s newfound confidence, her diminished fear, her powerful sense of having found a place in the world.

  CHAPTER 8

  City of Conversation

  IN NOVEMBER 1877, after Clover and Henry had lived in Boston for four years, Henry announced to Charles Gaskell, “As for me and my wife, we have made a great leap in the world.” They planned to live in
Washington, D.C., for a year or two, hoping to lease their Marlborough Street home while they were away. At thirty-nine, Henry had been asked by Albert Rolaz Gallatin, who knew his reputation at the North American Review and at Harvard, to write a biography and edit the papers of his father, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant secretary of the Treasury and later the founder of New York University. Henry had suspected his time at Harvard would be limited. Though his graduate teaching had been successful, he told Gaskell the year before, “I regard my university work as essentially done. All the influence I can exercise has been exercised.” He had also given up the editorship of the influential North American Review. The October 1876 presidential election issue, detailing political corruption in Washington and the inability of reformers to do much about it, had angered the owner of the Review, James Osgood, who thought Henry had been far too partisan. Though drawn to politics by family and interest, Henry felt less and less pull to take an active part. “The more I see of official life,” he said during a brief trip to the capital in 1874, “the less I am inclined to wish to enter it.” But Washington offered a welcome change of scene, and publishing Gallatin’s papers was a chance to do research and write full-time.

  Clover had traveled to Washington after the war, and she’d accompanied Henry for a brief visit there in 1874. During their next trip, in early February of 1875, they were invited by and stayed with Clover’s Uncle Sam Hooper, by now a longtime congressman from Massachusetts. Hooper was lonely because his immediate family had left for a tour of Europe, but by the time the Adamses arrived, he had also fallen dangerously ill with pneumonia. He died several days later, on February 14. With his immediate family away, Clover and Henry had to, as Henry wrote, “assume control of everything,” helping coordinate a state funeral at the Capitol. There is no record of Clover’s impressions of these tumultuous weeks.

  But Clover surely knew, from conversation with her family and her own experience there, that living in the capital, with its foreign diplomats and politicians, scientists and writers, made it possible to meet and talk with a broad range of people. A move to Washington meant she and Henry would be entering a wider social world. If she worried about leaving her father behind in Boston for the winter months, she did not say. She could be sure that Ned and Fanny, and Ellen and Whitman Gurney, who all lived nearby in Cambridge, would take good care of him.

  Henry resigned his teaching position and, in early November of 1877, he and Clover moved to Washington and leased Sam Hooper’s large house at 1501 H Street, which had been purchased by William Corcoran, the art dealer and philanthropist who owned much of the real estate bordering Lafayette Square. Clover thought it a “charming old ranch,” with its climbing wisteria and “superb rose trees” planted in front. On arriving, she hired three servants to get the place up to her standards. They scrubbed floors and whitewashed walls until she found the house satisfactory, declaring, once the work was finished, that she felt “as if we were millionaires.” She had a knack for setting up a comfortable, pleasing home. Henry joshed with her that it was the first time he felt “like a gentleman,” and he later gave her credit, telling Gaskell she had created a home that was “always amusing and interesting.”

  The neighborhood of the Square, next to the White House, was the city’s most exclusive. Friends lived nearby. George Bancroft, the widely admired historian of the multivolume History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent, and his wife, Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, who’d taken part in Margaret Fuller’s Conversations, along with Clover’s mother, lived a short walk west down H Street in a generously proportioned, old-fashioned house. Emily Beale, several years younger than Clover, lived across the street in the old Decatur house with her parents, General and Mrs. Edward Beale. Emily soon became a frequent and “uncommonly lively” guest, though Clover was occasionally wary of her aggressive chattiness and sometimes kept her at a slight remove. Carl Schurz, a former senator from Missouri, now secretary of the interior under the narrowly elected Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes, often stopped by for tea on his walk home. He was one of Clover’s favorite visitors. She loved to hear Schurz, a German immigrant with a kindly manner, play her piano, especially Chopin: “the instrument seems like a wonderful human voice under his hands.”

  The city of Washington had been transformed since the Civil War. That conflict and a rapidly growing population had strained its antiquated infrastructure. As one Cleveland newspaper writer wryly noted, it was as if “a whirlwind had picked up some great town, mixed the big houses up with the little ones, then cast the whole together in one miscellaneous mass, keeping intact only the city streets.” Not long ago, midwestern politicians had agitated to move the seat of government west to St. Louis. But by the early 1870s, “Boss” Shepherd, the governor of the District of Columbia, had imposed order and transformed the capital into a more modern metropolis. Sewers were dug and canals filled in; horse-drawn streetcars and cabs provided more efficient ways to move through the city. Scores of newly planted trees shaded mile after mile of spacious new sidewalks and wide asphalt-paved streets. Horse-drawn street-cleaning machines whirred through, equipped with large brooms of stiff twigs to brush away dirt and horse manure. “What had been a most unsightly place three years ago,” President Grant had declared in 1873, was “rapidly assuming the appearance of a capital of which the nation may well be proud.”

  Washington had always teetered, in culture and custom, between North and South. With almost 150,000 residents in the early 1870s, the capital was half the size of Boston, and African Americans comprised almost 40 percent of the population. Tens of thousands of emancipated slaves had migrated to Lincoln’s capital during the war and after, joining a smaller group of long-time residents led by a coterie of black leaders who agitated for school reform, started newspapers, worked in federal jobs, and, for a time, held political office. But the dreams of postwar unity between whites and blacks were short-lived. As the aims of Reconstruction collapsed in the mid-1870s, blacks found themselves excluded from leadership roles and confronted by virulent racism; they had to live in separate communities, attend separate schools, and worship on Sunday mornings in separate churches.

  Clover made little comment on such matters. She did have sharp words for the attitude of William Henry Trescot, a lawyer from South Carolina who’d been sent to Washington to represent the state’s interests in Reconstruction. At a dinner party Trescot told Clover that he thought “a slaveocracy the only perfect form of human society,” an idea she found appalling. When Trescot tried to garner Clover’s sympathy for an upper-class southern woman who’d been reduced to baking and selling bread to feed her family, Clover wanted to tell Trescot that such poverty “serves her right.” But she bit her tongue and said nothing.

  Both the Adams and Hooper families had long advocated for the abolition of slavery. John Adams, a conservative Federalist, detested the institution. He thought slavery “a foul contagion in the human character.” His wife, Abigail Adams, had a visceral hatred of it, saying that slavery “always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are robbing the Negroes of, who have as good a right to freedom as we have!” John Quincy Adams, after his one term as president, worked tirelessly as a congressman, despite threats and charges of treason, to rescind a gag rule in the House of Representatives that barred abolitionist petitions from being heard in Congress. In 1845, at the age of seventy-eight, he succeeded. At one point in his career, Henry’s father, Charles Francis Adams, came to be known as “the archbishop of antislavery.” Once the Republican Party was founded, in 1854, the Adamses became staunch members of the party. While not as well known for activism, the Hoopers too were Republicans and strongly antislavery, donating money and doing work to support and educate freed slaves.

  After the war, Clover had done work for the Howard Industrial School for Colored Women and Girls in Cambridge, which was devoted to the education of freed slaves. Yet she had litt
le direct knowledge of African American life beyond what her brother had told her of his war work. Most of her servants in Washington were black, but their world, separate and unequal, was beyond her ken. Soon after moving to Washington, Clover did help a family living in an abandoned cabin by the Potomac River. They had “no food and no clothes,” Clover explained in a letter, and to her horror, the city had “no organized system of relief.” But this family, which had been reduced to abject poverty after the war, was white.

  What drew Clover and Henry to Washington was its growing cosmopolitanism, a combination of politics and culture unlike that of any other city in the country. Henry declared Washington the “only place in America . . . where life offers variety.” Politicians from every region gathered during the congressional term, and foreign diplomats, writers, scientists, and artists played their part in this diverse and ever-changing crosscurrent of people. Though not as large as London, Paris, or Rome, Washington was, as Henry said, surprisingly “complete.” Henry James agreed and aptly called the capital a “City of Conversation,” one marked by an unmatched drive and intensity.

  In mid-December of 1877, a month after they arrived, Clover and Henry took a three-hour drive in an open carriage through Rock Creek Park, a short distance from the White House. The weather, almost balmy, with plenty of sun, proved enticing to the two Bostonians, accustomed as they were to the long, cold, and dark New England winters. Clover and Henry, now married five and a half years, got out of their black carriage and walked farther up the creek on “a lovely path” covered with tulip and beech trees to sit together on a tree trunk, dangling their feet over the water below. To Clover’s astonishment, the December weather was “as if in summer.” She enjoyed her first months in Washington so much, she wanted time itself to slow down, wishing that “Sundays wouldn’t come so fast. Not because I must write a letter but because I hate to see the ‘milk going out of the bowl.’” As she told her father, life promised “new possibilities for us.”