“Clover gained flesh”: HA to RWH, November 10, 1872, Letters, vol. 2, 153.
“dimly lighted streets”: MHA to RWH, November 23, 1872, LMHA, 59.
[>] “competent and faithful”: MHA to RWH, March 1, 1873, LMHA, 78.
“We saw them”: MHA to RWH, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 61.
“the air [is] bracing”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 63.
“tried to write”: MHA to RWH, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 60.
“One day is so like”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 63.
“letter-writing is not”: MHA to Fanny Chapin Hooper, December 14, 1872, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
not to “show”: MHA to RWH, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 64.
“which they balance” . . . “miserable”: MHA to RWH, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 64.
[>] “I must confess” . . . “shortcomings”: MHA to RWH, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 65–66.
“I never seem to get”: MHA to RWH, January 3, 1873, LMHA, 66.
“How true it is”: MHA to RWH, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 75. Clover made this statement about herself when she got tired of looking at Egyptian antiquities, frustrated that she didn’t understand more about what she was seeing.
Clover and Henry strolled: They also picnicked with the Roosevelts from New York, who were traveling in their chartered dahabeah directly ahead; their young son Teddy, at fourteen, had a voice his mother described as “a sharp, ungreased squeak.” Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1979), 36.
[>] “The wind is not purer”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, October 7, 1839, in Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–66), 260.
“Dear, sweet Ellen Hooper”: Anna Hazard Barker Ward to ESH, August 15, 1848, Swann.
“I doubt if we find”: MHA to RWH, January 24, 1873, LMHA, 67–68.
“working like a beaver” . . . “we have yet seen”: MHA to RWH, February 5, 1873, LMHA, 71.
“we waited” . . . “on the river”: MHA to RWH, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 74, 76.
[>] one photograph of Henry: “Interior of Dahabieh ‘Isis,’” Photographer unknown, n.d., from HA Photograph Collection, 40.160, MHS.
“bought many nice things” . . . “grows on us”: MHA to RWH, March 11, 1872, LMHA, 80.
“How much we have lived” . . . “faculty of memory”: MHA to Anna Hazard Barker Ward, March 15, 1873, Papers of Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Hazard Barker Ward, MS Am 1465 (5), Houghton. Clover and Henry were in Alexandria on March 10, were sailing on the Mediterranean on March 11, and arrived at the Bay of Naples on Saturday, March 15. See LMHA, 80–85.
Henry James apparently did not perceive Clover’s troubles on the Nile, but rather thought that she’d gained health from her travels. He wrote to his father in March 1873 from Rome that “the Clover Adamses have been here for a week, the better for Egypt . . . I saw them last P.M., and they are better and laden with material treasures.” HJ to Henry James Sr., March 28, 1873, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 360.
“sun rise between” . . . “early morning mist”: MHA to RWH, March 16, 1873, LMHA, 85.
[>] “path lying between”: MHA to RWH, March 29, 1873, LMHA, 89.
“stuffs and accessories”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 95.
“very clever”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 96.
“à la française”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 98.
“very pretty”: MHA to RWH, April 20, 1873, LMHA, 99.
“swell part”: MHA to RWH, May 14, 1873, LMHA, 102.
“If I were a boy”: MHA to RWH, June 1, 1873, LMHA, 108.
“England is charming” . . . “good-humouredly”: MHA to RWH, June 29, 1873, LMHA, 127.
[>] “enjoyed much”: MHA to RWH, July 23, 1873, LMHA, 134.
Part II: “Very Much Together”
CHAPTER 7. A Place in the World
[>] “pulled her down” . . . “a small Boston world”: HA to CMG, August 12, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 178.
“quite unchanged”: EWH to CST, August 19, 1873, Swann.
“I want you to send”: MHA to EHG, October 27, 1872, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] She and Henry hung many: HA to CMG, December 8, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 183.
They kept a watercolor: HA to Charles Eliot Norton, April 15, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 191.
“excites frantic applause”: HA to CMG, December 8, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 183.
“My wife is very well”: HA to CMG, October 26, 1873, Letters, vol. 2, 180.
[>] “nearly all surplus”: HA to CMG, June 14, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 275.
“keep the thread”: HA, review of The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, by William Stubbs, North American Review, vol. 119, no. 244 (1874): 233–34, as quoted in Middle Years, 61.
“the reader ought to be”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 25, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 195.
He would read aloud: HA to Simon Newcomb, December 23, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 245.
“while writing before”: J. Laurence Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 69, no. 1 (January 1921): 582.
“I have been hard worked”: HA to CMG, June 22, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 193.
[>] “farm and woodland”: Joseph E. Garland, The North Shore: A Social History of Summers Among the Noteworthy, Fashionable, Rich, Eccentric, and Ordinary on Boston’s Gold Coast, 1823–1929 (Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 1998), 33.
“into the depths”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, July 6, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 199.
[>] “our new house is more”: HA to CMG, June 14, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 276. I want to thank Harrison Smithwick and his mother, Mrs. Frances Smithwick, who gave me a tour of Clover and Henry’s Beverly Farms home, which still has many of its original design elements.
“a footpath” . . . “sunlight of the woods”: Mabel La Farge, Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres by Henry Adams, with a Niece’s Memories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 7–8.
[>] graduate seminar in history: For a complete listing of Henry’s courses at Harvard, see Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 340–41.
“German codes” . . . “colt in tall clover”: Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” 580.
“Nothing since I came to Cambridge”: HA to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 30, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 280–281.
“long-haired terriers”: La Farge, Letters to a Niece, 7.
“isolated groups”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 216. “I am flourishing as ever and growing in dignity and age. My wife is as well as I”: HA to CMG, March 26, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 189; “My wife is flourishing”: HA to CMG, June 22, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 194; “my wife flourishes like the nasturtiums which are my peculiar joy”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, July 6, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 200; “we are and have been very well and flourishing”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 217.
[>] “As I’ve not bored you” . . . “Marian Adams”: MHA to CMG, March 29, 1875, Adams.
“toned down”: Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London: 1870–1880 (New York: Avon Books, paperback reprint 1978; originally published 1962), 375; “had a good effect”: Rayburn S. Moore, “The Letters of Alice James to Anne Ashburner, 1873–78: The Joy of Engagement (Part 1),” Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 27, no. 1 (2001): 34.
CHAPTER 8. City of Conversation
[>] “As for me and my wife”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
“my university work”: HA to CMG, Sept. 8, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 293.
The October 1876 presidential election: For more on Henry’s last issue of the North American Review and on his dispute with James Osgood, see Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America, 79–86.
“The more I see”: HA to CMG, February 13, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 188.
[>] “assume control of everyth
ing”: HA to CMG, February 15, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 217.
“charming old ranch”: MHA to RWH, August 24, 1879, LMHA, 170.
“as if we were”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“like a gentleman”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams; “always amusing”: HA to CMG, May 30, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 338.
[>] “uncommonly lively”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams. Eugenia Kaledin states that Emily and Clover would have a falling out later in their friendship but does not cite where she found evidence for any quarrel or misunderstanding. Mrs. Henry Adams, 183. It is somewhat clearer from Clover’s letters that she found Emily entertaining and fun-loving but did not feel close to her nor take her particularly seriously.
“the instrument seems like”: MHA to RWH, February 3, 1878, Adams.
“a whirlwind had picked up”: As quoted in Frank G. Carpenter, Carp’s Washington (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960), 5.
“What had been a most unsightly”: As quoted in Kenneth R. Bowling, “From ‘Federal Town’ to ‘National Capital’: Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction of Washington, D.C.,” Washington History (Spring/Summer 2002): 16. For an explanation of the proposal to remove the capital to St. Louis, see Fergus Bordewich, Washington: The Making of the American Capital (New York: Armistad, 2008), 272–75.
Washington had always teetered: See Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C.: From Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. 2–5. For a description of post–Civil War racial politics, see also Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. 291–338.
[>] “a slaveocracry” . . . “her right”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams.
“a foul contagion”: As quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 134.
“always seemed a most iniquitous”: As quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 104.
“the archbishop of antislavery”: HA to CFA Jr., December 26, 1860, Letters, vol. 1, 213. CFA had been given the nickname “archbishop of antislavery” by Thomas Corwin, a Republican congressman from Ohio.
[>] “no food and no clothes”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“only place in America” . . . “complete”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
surprisingly “complete”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 326.
“City of Conversation”: Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 329.
“a lovely path” . . . “in summer”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams Papers, MHS.
“Sundays wouldn’t come so fast”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“new possibilities for us”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams.
[>] “I’ve been working” . . . “on opposite stools”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1877, Adams. George Cruikshank illustrated several novels by Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop.
“written on the backs” . . . “till now”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“a hieroglyphic world”: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ed. Laura Dluzynski Quinn (New York: Penguin Group, 1996; originally published 1920), 36.
“Politeness is power”: As quoted in Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., After the Civil War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 73.
“composed, in so great a degree”: Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (Lancaster, PA: Inquirer Printing and Publishing Co., 1873), 3–4.
“In this social vortex”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
[>] “a discipline worthy”: MHA to RWH, March 3, 1878, Adams.
“I think I’d best announce”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“The ‘calling’ nuisance”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 1881, LMHA, 271–72.
“sighed for his pines”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“It’s very cozy”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“state secrets”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1877, Adams.
“charming old house” . . . “under her chin”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.
[>] “quite nice looking”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.
“a late carouse” . . . “vegetation!”: MHA to RWH, December 10, 1878, Adams.
“more agreeable than most”: HA to Mary Dwight Parkman, February 20, 1879, Letters, vol. 2, 353.
“being the king of ‘Vulgaria’”: MHA to RWH, December 15, 1878, Adams.
“march to the sea”: MHA to RWH, December 10, 1882, LMHA, 406–7.
“uproarious laughter”: J. Laurence Laughlin, “Some Recollections of Henry Adams,” 582.
“so proud of her”: Margaret (Terry) Winthrop Chanler, Roman Spring (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1934), 303.
[>] “Mr. Evarts” . . . “he orates too much”: MHA to RWH, December 29, 1878, Adams.
“For a middle aged”: MHA to RWH, February 2, 1879, Adams.
“wits for a week”: HA to CMG, February 9, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 247.
“So we came home” . . . “superb roses”: MHA to RWH, November 25, 1877, Adams.
[>] “to report to duty”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
“Hear me, my chiefs!”: Chief Joseph, as quoted in Kent Nerburn, Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 268; see also Elliot West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
“he saw the Indians” . . . “their bonnets behind”: MHA to RWH, December 9, 1877, Adams.
[>] “How long Oh!”: MHA to RWH, January 26, 1879, Adams.
“A propos to nothing”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
“charming, most sympathetic” . . . “bearded face”: MHA to RWH, April 11, 1880, Adams.
“Mrs. Adams, didn’t your husband”: MHA to RWH, December 28, 1879, LMHA, 223.
“forty-three miles”: MHA to RWH, March 3, 1878, Adams.
“midnight cigars” . . . “left to do it”: MHA to RWH, July 11, 1880, Adams.
Dr. Hooper wrote back: The reasons why Dr. Hooper’s letters to Clover do not survive may have to do with Clover. She wrote to John Hay in 1882, “I do not keep letters.” MHA to JH, June 13, 1882, Adams.
[>] “stood under” . . . “any feelings”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1877, Adams.
“like a gentleman”: MHA to RWH, November 18, 1877, Adams.
“annoying pin” . . . “too old to reform”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams.
“Brooks [an] injustice”: MHA to RWH, January 13, 1878, Adams.
“never quote” . . . “Burn this!”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1878, Adams.
[>] “I feel as if”: CFA, Diary, October 17, 1877, Adams.
“I have no feelings”: CFA, Diary, May 20, 1879, Adams.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams thought: Tension between Clover and her in-laws also may have to do with the increasing misery in the elder Adamses’ marriage, which had escalated in the summer of 1876, when Mrs. Adams injured her foot. She went for a cure in the fall at a New York hotel, where her daily treatments included long conversations with her physicians, gentle exercise, and the administration of electricity. Mr. Adams traveled with her to New York but then quickly returned to Quincy and Boston, and in Mrs. Adams’s daily letters to him, the first one dated December 1, 1876, she alternately complains about her accommodations, her slow progress, and the horrible winter weather. At one point she wished the doctors would “let the walking alone,” declaring that “I don’t care one cent about walking—all I ask is freedom from pain.”
Lonely and discouraged, she begged her husband to come back, telling him how she longed for nothing but him, scolding him for putting her off, furious with how he announced he was coming to see her but then changed his mind. The more she harangued him, the more miserable she felt. On December 6
she admitted, “This is a horrid letter in all respects, but you won’t mind will you? For I love you dearly, even if [I] am old and ugly and lame and homesick.” But the next week she felt abandoned and unloved, writing that “I wish you loved me half as well as I do you, such unequal feelings make life an uneven piece of patchwork.” After she pulled for his sympathy, she lashed out, and the more she did so, the more Mr. Adams resisted. By December 13, Mrs. Adams wrote in a fury, “It is four weeks today since you left here and I can only say if I had been told that you would let that time pass with such a short distance between us and I here under such circumstances I could not have believed it . . . The weather had nothing to do with my depression for when I don’t walk I am better. It was my slow progress and disappointment to your constant delay in coming on.” Mr. Adams—patient and encouraging—was also passive and unyielding, admitting in his diary, “My defect is want of flexibility.” She could be resigned and realistic—“we are too old to change either your nature or mine.” But when they separated again the next April so she could have more treatments, she reacted with rage: “You can’t understand my feelings our natures are so entirely different and you are well at home and do not depend in the least on me. It shall never happen again.” Abigail Brooks Adams to CFA, December 1, 1876–April 6, 1877, Adams. The early years of the elder Adams marriage are particularly well described by Paul C. Nagel in his Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 244–77.
“I am told on high authority”: MHA to RWH, March 31, 1878, Adams.
“Your postal card”: MHA to RWH, April 7, 1878, Adams.
[>] “a laconic line”: MHA to RWH, February 23, 1879, Adams.
“icing ourselves”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, June 17, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 340.
“winter quarters”: HA to CMG, November 28, 1878, Letters, vol. 2, 348.
“wild with joy”: MHA to RWH, November 3, 1878, Adams.
their “experiment”: HA to CMG, September 8, 1876, Letters, vol. 2, 327.
“very much together”: HA to CMG, November 25, 1877, Letters, vol. 2, 327.
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