Editors' Preface and Preface of the Education of Henry Adams. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. Editors' Preface and Preface. Editors' Preface. This volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the same authors Mons Samishel and Chateau, was privately printed to the number of 100 copies in 1906, and sent to the persons interested for their assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was thus explained at the end of Chapter 29. Quote, any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit, the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century, 1150 to 1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything is true or untrue except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as Mons Samishel and Chateau, a study of 13th-century unity. From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label the Education of Henry Adams, a study of 20th-century multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better. The Chateau was finished and privately printed in 1904. The education proved to be more difficult. The point on which the author failed to please himself and could get no light from readers or friends was the usual one of literary form. Probably he saw it in advance, for he used to say half in jest that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's confessions, but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity. The scheme became unmanageable as he approached his end. Probably he was in fact trying only to work into it his favourite theory of history, which now fills the last three or four chapters of the education, and he could not satisfy himself with his workmanship. At all events he was still pondering over the problem in 1910 when he tried to deal with it in another way, which might be more intelligible to students. He printed a small volume called A Letter to American Teachers, which he sent to his associates in the American Historical Association, hoping to provoke some response. Before he could satisfy himself, even on this minor point, a severe illness in the spring of 1912 put an end to his literary activity forever. The matter soon passed beyond his control. In 1913 the Institute of Architects published the Manson-Michel and Châtres. Already the education had become almost as well-known as the Châtres and was frequently quoted by every book whose author requested it. The author could no longer withdraw either volume. He could no longer rewrite either, and he could not publish that which he thought unprepared and unfinished, although in his opinion the other was historically purposeless without its sequel. In the end he preferred to leave the education unpublished, avowedly incomplete, trusting that it might quietly fade from memory. According to his theory of history, as explained in chapters 33 and 34, the teacher was at best helpless, and in the immediate future silence next to good temper was the mark of sense. After Midsummer 1914 the rule was made absolute. The Massachusetts Historical Society has decided to publish the education as it was printed in 1907 with only such marginal corrections as the author made, and it does this not in opposition to the author's judgment, but only to put both volumes equally within reach of students who have occasion to consult them. Henry Cabot Lodge, September 1918 Preface Jean-Jacques Rousseau began his famous confessions by a vehement appeal to the deity. I have shown myself as I was, contemptible and vile when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so. I have unveiled my interior such as thou thyself hast seen it, eternal father. Collect about me the innumerable swarm of my fellows. Let them hear my confessions. Let them groan at my unworthiness. Let them blush at my meannesses. Let each of them discover his heart in his turn at the foot of thy throne with the same sincerity. And then let any one of them tell thee if he dares, I was a better man. Jean-Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the 18th century and has been commonly thought to have had more influence than any other teacher of his time. But his peculiar method of improving human nature has not been universally admired. Most educators of the 19th century have declined to show themselves before their scholars as objects more vile or contemptible than necessary. And even the humblest teacher hides, if possible, the faults with which nature has generously embellished us all, as it did Jean-Jacques, thinking, as most religious minds are apt to do, that the eternal father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation. As an unfortunate result, the 20th century finds few recent guides to avoid or to follow. American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond Jean-Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin to find a model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has in his personal experience turned out to be useful and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it. As educator, Jean-Jacques was in one respect easily first. He erected a monument of warning against the ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and for purposes of model to become a mannequin on which the toilette of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or unfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the mannequin as well as the clothes to fit his patron's wants. The tailor's object in this volume is to fit young men in universities or elsewhere to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency, and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers. At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask if his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy. The object to be gained is economy of his force. The training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away. The mannequin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared. It is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition. It must have the air of reality, must be taken for real, must be treated as though it had life. Who knows? Possibly it had. Under the shadow of Boston Statehouse, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the Statehouse grounds to Mount Vernon Street on the summit of Beacon Hill. And there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams. Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the temple, and circumcised in the synagogue by his uncle the High Priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer. But on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of an old established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier such safeguards as his would have secured any young man's success, and although in 1838 their value was not very great, compared with what they could have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so colonial, so troglodytic as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock, and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street, and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child of the 17th and 18th centuries when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor anyone else back to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them to change nothing as far as concerned him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child born in the year held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner, from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding, as a consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of his age, had his education and interest to himself or to others. As it happened he never got to the point of playing the game at all. He lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players. But this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident. A story of education, 70 years of it, the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel. But the practical value of the universe has never been stated in dollars.  This problem of education started in 1838, went on for three years while the baby grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled over the question whether on the doctrine of chances he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident. No such accident had ever happened before in human experience. For him alone the old universe was thrown into the ash heap, and a new one created. He and his eighteenth-century troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut apart, separated forever, inact, if not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad. The appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay, and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington, the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the presidency. This was in May, 1844. He was six years old. His new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met his eyes. Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he knew only the colour of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when he took this earliest step in education, a lesson of colour. The second followed soon, a lesson of taste. On December 3, 1841, he developed scarlet fever. For several days he was as good as dead, reviving only under the careful nursing of his family. When he began to recover strength about January 1, 1842, his hunger must have been stronger than any other pleasure or pain. For while in afterlife he retained not the faintest recollection of his illness, he remembered quite clearly his aunt entering the sick-room bearing in her hand a saucer with a baked apple. The order of impressions retained by memory might naturally be that of colour and taste, although one would rather suppose that the sense of pain would be first to educate. In fact, the third recollection of that child was that of discomfort. The moment he could be removed, he was bundled up in blankets and carried from the Little House and Hancock Avenue to a larger one which his parents were to occupy for the rest of their lives in the neighbouring Mount Vernon Street. The season was midwinter, January 10, 1842, and he never forgot his acute distress for want of air under his blankets or the noises of moving furniture. As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness and childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection, and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success. But this fever of Henry Adams took greater and greater importance in his eyes from the point of view of education the longer he lived. At first the effect was physical. He fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height and proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of mind seemed to share in this finding-down process of scale. He was not good in a fight and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt, of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world. The tendency to regard every question is open. The hesitation to act except as a choice of evils. The shirking of responsibility. The love of line, form, quality. The horror of ennui. The passion for companionship and the antipathy to society. All these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals, but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether on the whole the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers were the type. He was the variation. As far as the boy knew the sickness did not affect him at all and he grew up in excellent health, bodily and mental, taking life as it was given, accepting its local standards without a difficulty and enjoying much of it as keenly as any other boy of his age. He seemed to himself quite normal and his companions seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came to him directly and indirectly as a result of that eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name. The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped from his greatest grandmother's birth in the odour of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature. The boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition. The duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy and generally find it so. But the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe has learned also to love the pleasure of hating. His joys were few. Politics as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organisation of hatreds and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility, a cold that froze the blood and a heat that boiled it, so that the pleasure of hating, oneself if no better victim offered, was not its rarest amusement, but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement, school, rule, discipline, straight gloomy streets piled with six feet of snow in the middle, frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or runners, thaws when the streets became dangerous to cross, society of uncles, aunts and cousins who expected children to behave themselves and who were not always gratified. Above all else winter represented the desire to escape and go free. Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless delight of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing and breathed by boys without knowing it. Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy has a wider range of emotions than boys of more equitable climates. He felt his nature crudely as it was meant. To the boy, Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest. Smell of hot pine-woods and sweet fern in the scorching summer noon, of pneumone hay, of plowed earth, of box hedges, of peaches, lilacs, syringes, of stables, barns, cow-yards, of salt-water and low tide on the marshes. Nothing came amiss. Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from penny-royal and flag-root to the shell of a pig-nut and the letters of a spelling-book. The taste of A, B, Ab, suddenly revived on the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and colour as sensual pleasures came later and were as crude as the rest. The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens colour. The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by atmosphere. His idea of pleasure and light was the blaze of a New England sun. His idea of colour was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea as he saw it a mile or two away from the Quincy Hills, the cumuli in a June afternoon sky, the strong reds and greens and purples of coloured prints and children's books, as the American colours then ran. These were ideals. The opposites or antipathies were the cold grays of November evenings and the thick muddy thaws of Boston winter. With such standards the Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. After a January blizzard the boy who could look with pleasure into the violent snow glare of the cold white sunshine with its intense light and shade, scarcely knew what was meant by tone. He could reach it only by education. Winter and summer then were two hostile lives and bred two separate natures. Winter was always the effort to live. Summer was tropical licence. Whether the children rolled in the grass or waded in the brook or swam in the salt ocean or sailed in the bay or fished for smelts in the creeks or netted minnows in the salt marshes or took to the pine woods in the granite quarries or chased muskrats and hunted snapping turtles in the swamps or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills summer and country were always sensual living while winter was always compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature. Winter was school. The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy. It was the most decisive force he ever knew. It ran through life and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems irreducible opposites with growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that for him life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty were hostile and the man who pretended they were not was in his eyes a schoolmaster that is a man employed to tell lies to little boys. Though Quincy was but two hours walk from Beacon Hill he longed in a different world. For two hundred years every Adams, from father to son had lived within sight of State Street and sometimes had lived in it. Yet none had ever taken kindly to the town or been taken kindly by it. The boy inherited his double nature. He knew as yet nothing about his great-grandfather who had died a dozen years before his own birth. He took for granted that any great-grandfather of his must always have been good and his enemies wicked. He divined his great-grandfather's character from his own. Never for a moment did he connect the two ideas of Boston and John Adams. They were separate and antagonistic. The idea of John Adams went with Quincy. He knew his grandfather John Quincy Adams only as an old man of seventy-five or eighty who was friendly and gentle with him but except that he heard his grandfather always called the President and his grandmother the Madam. He had no reason to suppose that his Adams grandfather differed in character from his brook's grandfather who was equally kind and benevolent. He liked the Adams side best but for no other reason than that it reminded him of the country, the summer and the absence of restraint. Yet he felt also that Quincy was in a way inferior to Boston and that socially Boston looked down on Quincy. The reason was clear enough even to a five-year-old child. Quincy had no Boston style. Little enough style had either a simpler manner of life and thought could hardly exist short of cave dwelling. The flint and steel with which his grandfather Adams used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantle piece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants or of an evening toilette was next to blasphemy. Bathrooms, water supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts were unknown at Quincy. Boston had already a bathroom, a water supply, a furnace, and gas. The superiority of Boston was evident but a child liked it no better for that. The magnificence of his grandfather Brooks's house in Pearl Street or South Street has long ago disappeared but perhaps his country house at Medford may still remain to show what impressed the mind of a boy in 1845 with the idea of city splendor. The president's place at Quincy was the larger and older and far the more interesting of the two but a boy felt at once its inferiority in fashion. It showed plainly enough its want of wealth, its smacked of colonial age but not of Boston's style or plush curtains. To the end of his life he never quite overcame the prejudice thus drawn in with his childish breath. He never could compel himself to care for nineteenth-century style. He was never able to adopt it any more than his father or grandfather or great-grandfather had done. Not that he felt it as particularly hostile for he reconciled himself to much that was worse. But because, for some remote reason, he was born an eighteenth-century child. The old house at Quincy was eighteenth-century. What style it had was in its Queen Anne mahogany panels and its Louis César's chairs and sofas. The panels belonged to an old colonial vassal who built the house. The furniture had been brought back from Paris in 1789 or 1801 or 1817 along with porcelain and books and much else of old diplomatic remnants. And neither of the two eighteenth-century styles neither English Queen Anne nor French Louis César was comfortable for a boy or for anyone else. The dark mahogany had been painted white to suit daily life in winter gloom. Nothing seemed to favour for a child's objects the older forms. On the contrary, most boys as well as grown-up people preferred the new with good reason and the child felt himself distinctly as an advantage for the taste. Nor had personal preference any share in his bias. The Brooks grandfather was as amiable and as sympathetic as the Adams grandfather. Both were born in 1767 and both died in 1848. Both were kind to children and both belonged rather to the eighteenth than to the nineteenth-centuries. The child knew no difference between them except that one was associated with winter and the other with summer. One with Boston, the other with Quincy. Even with Medford, the association was hardly easier. Once, as a very young boy, he was taken to pass a few days with his grandfather Brooks under charge of his aunt, but became so violently homesick that within twenty-four hours he was brought back in disgrace. Yet he could not remember ever being seriously homesick again. The attachment to Quincy was not altogether sentimental or wholly sympathetic. Quincy was not a bed of thornless roses. Even there the curse of Cain said its mark. There, as elsewhere, a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters with the best will were not enough to crush any child, everyone else conspired toward an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity has always been and must always be a task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy. But a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the cult dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly toward his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and his non-friendly terms with one's own family in such a relation was never easy. All the more singular it seemed afterward to him that his first serious contact with the president should have been a struggle of will in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy. But instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting left rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not have been much more than six years old at the time, seven at the utmost, and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the president during the summer. What became of the rest of his family he quite forgot, but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning and a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage. That is what mothers are for and boys also. But in this case the boy had his mother at disadvantage, for she was a guest and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement, protest. He was in fair way to win and was holding his own with sufficient energy at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the president's library. When the door opened and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat he took the boy's hand without a word and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on A.D. would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around somewhere before reaching the school door. But always the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission. But the old man did not stop and the boy saw all his strategic points turned one after another until he found himself seated inside the school and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the president release his hand and depart. The point was that this act contrary to the inalienable rights of boys and nullifying the social compact ought to have made him dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind the child must have recognised that the president though a tool of tyranny had done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence. He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feeling and had made no display of force. Above all he had held his tongue. During their long walk he had said nothing. He had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law. He had shown no concern in the matter hardly even a consciousness of the boy's existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling itself little about his grandson's iniquities and much about the iniquities of President Polk. But the boy could scarcely at that age feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be the vicarious victim of his own sins and he gave his grandfather credit for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form of right. He admitted even temper under protest. But the seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy which is, as everyone knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land. Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt rank or for during these three or four summers the old President's relations with the boy were friendly and almost intimate. Whether his older brothers and sisters were still more favoured he failed to remember. But he was himself admitted to a sort of familiarity which when in his turn he had reached old age rather shocked him. For it must have sometimes tried the President's patience. He hung about the library, handled the books, deranged the papers, ransacked the drawers, searched the old purses of foreign coins, drew the sword-cane, snapped the travelling pistols, upset everything in the corners and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where a row of tumblers inverted on the shelf covered caterpillars which were supposed to become moths or butterflies but never did. The madam bore with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which her husband perloined for these hatcheries. But she made protest when he carried off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peach-stones so that his roots grow but which she said he commonly forgot like the caterpillars. At that time the President rode the hobby of tree-culture and some final trees should still remain to witness it unless they have been improved off the ground. But his was a restless mind and although he took his hobby seriously and would have been annoyed had his grandchild asked whether he was bored like an English duke he probably cared more for the processes of plant and smell of peaches and pears, the best of their kind which he brought up from the garden to rot on his shelves for seed. With the inherited virtues of his puritan ancestors the little boy Henry conscientiously brought up to him in his study the finest peaches he found in the garden and ate only the less perfect. Naturally he ate more by way of compensation but the act showed that he bore no grudge. As for his grandfather he dealt a certain self-reproach for his temporary role of the schoolmaster seeing that his own career did not offer proof of the worldly advantages of docile obedience for there still exists somewhere a little volume of critically edited nursery rhymes with the boy's name in full written in the President's trembling hand on the fly-leaf. Of course there was also the Bible given to each child at birth with the proper inscription in the President's hand on the fly-leaf So many Bibles and silver mugs had to be supplied that a new house or cottage was built to hold them. It was on the hill five minutes walk above the old house with a far view eastward over Quincy Bay and northward over Boston. Till his twelfth year the child passed his summers there and his pleasures of childhood mostly centered in it. Of education he had as yet little to complain. Country schools were not very serious nothing stuck to the mind except home impressions and the sharpest were those of kindred children. But as influences that warped a mind none compared with the mere effect of the back of the President's bald head as he sat in his pew on Sundays in line with that of President Quincy who, though some ten years younger seemed to children about the same age. Before railways entered the New England town every parish church showed half a dozen of these leading citizens with grey hair the main aisle and the best pews and had sat there or in some equivalent dignity since the time of St. Augustine if not since the glacial epoch. It was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather and to read over his head the tablet in memory of a President great grandfather who had pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honour to secure the independence of his country and so forth. But boys naturally supposed without much reasoning that other boys had the equivalent of President Grandfathers and that churches would always go on with the bald headed leading citizens on the main aisle and Presidents or their equivalents on the walls. The Irish gardener once said to the child you'll be thinking you'll be President too. The causality of the remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject. To him that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea. He doubted neither about Presidents nor about churches and no one suggested at that time a doubt whether a system of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adam's more. The Madam was a little more remote than the President but more decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles, looking out on her garden with the box-walks and seemed a fragile creature to a boy who sometimes brought her a note of great pleasure in looking at her delicate face under what seemed to him very becoming caps. He liked her refined figure, her gentle voice and manner, her vague effect of not belonging there but to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture and writing desk with little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old binding labeled Peregrine Pickle or Tom Jones or Hannah Moore. Try as she might the Madam could never be Bostonian life but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age he felt drawn to it. The Madam's life had been in truth far from Boston. She was born in London in 1775, daughter of Joshua Johnson an American merchant, brother of Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland and Catherine Newth of an English family in London. Driven from England by the Revolutionary War Joshua Johnson took his family to Knot and remained till the peace. The girl, Louisa Catherine was nearly ten years old when brought back to London and her sense of nationality must have been confused. But the influence of the Johnsons and the services of Joshua obtained for him from President Washington the appointment of consul in London on the organization of the government in 1790. In 1794 President Washington appointed John Quincy Adams minister to the Hague. Then he returned to London and found the consul's house a very agreeable haunt. Louisa was then twenty. At that time and long afterwards the consul's house far more than the ministers was the center of contact for traveling Americans either official or other. The location was a shifting point between 1785 and 1815. But the consulate far down in the city near the tower was convenient and inviting. So inviting that it proved fatal to young Adams. Louisa was charming like a Romney portrait but among her many charms that of being a New England woman was not one. The defect was serious. Her future mother-in-law Abigail, a famous New England woman whose authority over her turbulent husband the second president was hardly so great as that which she exercised over her son the sixth to be was troubled by the fear that Louisa might not be made of stuff stern enough or brought up in conditions severe enough to suit a New England climate or to make an efficient wife for her paragon son. And Abigail was right on that point as on most others where sound judgment was involved. But sound judgment is sometimes a source of weakness rather than a force and John Quincy already had reason to think that his mother held sound judgments on the subject of daughters-in-law which human nature since the fall of Eve made Adams helpless to realize. Being three thousand miles away from his mother and equally far in love he married Louisa in London, July 26, 1797 and took her to Berlin to be the head of the United States legation. During three or four exciting years the young bride lived in Berlin. Whether she was happy or not whether she was content or not whether she was socially successful or not her descendants did not surely know. But in any case she could by no chance have become educated there for a life in Quincy or Boston. In 1801 the overthrow of the Federalist Party drove her and her husband to America and she became at last a member of the Quincy household. But by that time her children needed all her attention and she remained there with occasional winters in Boston and Washington till 1809. Her husband was made senator in 1803 and in 1809 was appointed minister to Russia. She went with him to St. Petersburg taking her baby Charles Francis in 1807. But broken-hearted at having to leave her two older boys behind. The life at St. Petersburg was hardly gay for her. They were far too poor to shine in that extravagant society. But she survived it, though her little baby girl did not. And in the winter of 1814 to 15 alone with the boy of seven years old crossed Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris in her travelling carriage passing through the armies and reaching Paris in the Saint-Jure Queen's return from Elba. Her husband next went to England as minister and she was for two years at the court of the Regent. In 1817 her husband came home to be Secretary of State and she lived for eight years in F Street doing her work of entertainer for President Monroe's administration. Next she lived four miserable years in the White House. When that chapter was closed in 1829 she had earned the right to be tired and delicate. She lived fifteen years to serve as wife of a member of the House after her husband went back to Congress in 1833. Then it was that the little Henry her grandson first remembered her from 1843 to 1848 sitting in her paneled room at breakfast with her heavy silver teapot and sugar bowl and cream jug which still exists somewhere as an heirloom of the modern safety vault. By that time she was seventy years old or more and thoroughly weary out of a stormy world. To the boy she seemed singularly peaceful a vision of silver grey presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne Mahogany an exotic like herself with China an object of deference to everyone and of great affection to her son Charles but hardly more Bostonian than she had been fifty years before on her wedding day in the shadow of the Tower of London. Such a figure was even less fitted than that of her old husband, the President on a boy's mind the standards of the coming century. She was, Louis says, like the furniture. The boy knew nothing of her interior life which had been, as the venerable Abigail, long since at peace, foresaw one of severe stress and little pure satisfaction. He never dreamed that from her might come some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations those rebellions against law and discipline which marked more than one of her descendants. But he might even then have felt some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin the fall from grace the curse of Abel that he was not of pure New England stock but half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half Marylander by birth, had hardly seen Boston till he was ten years old when his parents left him there at school in 1817 and he never forgot the experience. He was to be nearly as old as his mother had been in 1845 before he quite accepted Boston, or Boston quite accepted him. A boy who began his education in these surroundings with physical strength inferior to that of his brothers and with a certain delicacy of mind and bone, ought rightly to have felt at home in the 18th century and should, in proper self-respect handled against the standards of the 19th. The atmosphere of his first ten years must have been very like that of his grandfather at the same age from 1767 till 1776 barring the Battle of Bunker Hill and even as late as 1846 the Battle of Bunker Hill remained actual. The tone of Boston society was colonial. The true Bostonian always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards. Far from concealing it as a weakness he was proud of it as his strength. The 18th century ruled society long after 1850. Perhaps the boy began to shake it off rather earlier than most of his mates. Indeed this prehistoric stage of education ended rather abruptly with his tenth year. One winter morning he was conscious of a certain confusion in the house in Mount Vernon Street and gathered from such words as he could catch that the President, who happened to be then staying there on his way to Washington and hurt himself. Then he heard the word paralysis. After that day he came to associate the word with the figure of his grandfather in a tall-backed invalid armchair on one side of the spare bedroom fireplace and one of his old friends, Dr. Parkman or P. P. F. de Grande on the other side, both dozing. The end of this first or ancestral and revolutionary chapter came on February 21, 1848 and the month of February brought life and death as a family habit when the 18th century as an actual and living companion vanished. If the scene on the floor of the house when the old President fell struck the still simple-minded American public with a sensation unusually dramatic, its effect on a ten-year-old boy whose boy life was fading away with the life of his grandfather could not be slight. One had to pay for revolutionary patriots, grandfathers and grandmothers, presidents, diplomats, Queen Anne Mahogany and Louis says chairs as well as for Stuart portraits. Such things warp young life. Americans commonly believed that they ruined it and perhaps the practical common sense of the American mind judged right. Many a boy might be ruined by much less than the emotions of the funeral service in the Quincy Church with its surroundings of national respect and family pride. On another dramatic chance it happened that the clergymen of the parish, Dr. Lunt was an unusual pulpit orator the ideal of a somewhat austere intellectual type such as the school of Buckminster and Channing inherited from the old congregational clergy. His extraordinarily refined appearance his dignity of manner, his deeply cadenced voice, his remarkable English and his fine appreciation gave to the funeral service a character that left an overwhelming impression on the boy's mind. He was to see many great functions, funerals and festivals in afterlife till his only thought was to see no more but he never again witnessed anything nearly so impressive to him as the last services at Quincy over the body of one president and the ashes of another. The effect of the Quincy service was deepened by the official ceremony which afterward took place in Fannell Hall when the boy was taken to hear his uncle Edward Everett deliver a eulogy. Like all Mr. Everett's orations it was an admirable piece of oratory such as only an admirable orator and scholar could create too good for a ten-year-old boy to appreciate at its value but already the boy knew that the dead president could not be in it and had even learned why he would have been out of place there for knowledge was beginning to come fast. The shadow of the war of 1812 still hung over State Street the shadow of the Civil War to come and had begun to darken Fannell Hall. No rhetoric could have reconciled Mr. Everett's audience to his subject. How could he say there to an assemblage of Bostonians in the heart of mercantile Boston that the only distinctive mark of all the Adams' since old Sam Adams' father a hundred and fifty years before had been their inherited quarrel with State Street which had again and again broken out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds wholesale banishments and confiscations until the history of Florence was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston. How could he whisper the word Hartford Convention before the men who had made it? What could have been said had he suggested the chance of secession and civil war? Thus already at ten years old the boy found himself standing face-to-face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early Christian. What was he? Where was he going? Even then he felt that something was wrong but he concluded that it must be Boston. Quincy had always been right for Quincy represented a moral principle the principle of resistance to Boston. His Adams' ancestors must have been right since they were always hostile to State Street. If State Street was wrong Quincy must be right. Turn the dilemma as he pleased he still came back on the 18th century and the law of resistance of truth, of duty and of freedom. He was a ten-year-old priest and politician. He could under no circumstances have guessed what the next fifty years had in store and no one could teach him. But sometimes in his old age he wondered and could never decide whether the most clear and certain knowledge would have helped him. Supposing he had seen a New York stock list of 1900 and had studied the statistics of railways, telegraphs, coal and steel. Would he have quitted his 18th century, his ancestral prejudices, his abstract ideals, his semi-clerical training and the rest in order to perform an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street and ask for the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks and a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank? Sixty years afterwards he was still unable to make up his mind. Each course had its advantages. But the material advantages looking back seemed to lie wholly in State Street. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of the Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams this LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Boston 1848-1854 Peter Chardon Brooks the other grandfather died January 1st, 1849 bequeathing what was supposed to be the largest estate in Boston about two million dollars to his seven surviving children four sons Edward Peter Chardon Gorham and Sidney three daughters Charlotte married to Edward Everett Anne married to Nathaniel Frothingham minister to the First Church and Abigail Brown born April 25, 1808 married September 3, 1829 to Charles Francis Adams hardly a year older than herself their first child born in 1830 was a daughter named Louisa Catherine after her Johnson Grandmother the second was a son named John Quincy after his President Grandfather the third took his father's name Charles Francis while the fourth being of less account was in a way given to his mother who named him Henry Brooks after her favorite brother just lost more followed but these being younger had nothing to do with the importance of educating the Adams connection was singularly small in Boston but the family of Brooks was singularly large and even brilliant and almost holy of clerical New England stock one might have sought long in much larger and older societies for three brothers-in-law more distinguished or more scholarly than Edward Everett, Dr. Frothingham and Mr. Adams one might have sought equally long like. No doubt they all bore more or less the stamp of Boston or at least of Massachusetts Bay but the shades of difference amounted to contrasts Mr. Everett belonged to Boston hardly more than Mr. Adams one of the most ambitious of Bostonians he had broken bounds early in life by leaving the Unitarian Pulpit to take a seat in Congress where he had given valuable support to J. Q. Adams's administration support which as a social consequence led to the marriage of the president's son Charles Francis with Mr. Everett's younger sister-in-law Abigail Brooks the wreck of parties which marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had interfered with many promising careers that of Edward Everett among the rest but he had risen with the Whig party to power had gone as minister to England and had returned to America with the halo of a European reputation and undisputed rank second only to Daniel Webster as the orator and representative figure of Boston the other brother-in-law Dr. Frotheringham belonged to the same clerical school though in manner rather the less clerical of the two neither of them had much in common with Mr. Adams who was a younger man greatly biased by his father and by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street but personal relations were friendly as far as a boy could see and the innumerable cousins went regularly to the first church every Sunday and winter and slept through their uncle's sermons without once thinking to ask what the sermons were supposed to mean for them for two hundred years the first church had seen the same little boys sleeping more or less soundly under the same or similar conditions and dimly conscious of the same feuds but the feuds had never ceased and the boys had always grown up to inherit them those of the generation of 1812 had mostly disappeared in 1850 death had cleared that score the quarrels of John Adams and those of John Quincy Adams were no longer acutely personal the game was considered as drawn and Charles Francis Adams might then have taken his inherited rights of political leadership in succession to Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett, his seniors between him and State Street the relation was more natural than between Edward Everett and State Street but instead of doing so Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof and renewed the old war which had already lasted since 1700 he could not help it with the record of J. Q. Adams fresh in the popular memory his son and his only representative could not make terms with the slave power and the slave power overshadowed all the great Boston interests no doubt Mr. Adams had principles of his own as well as inherited but even his children who has yet had no principles little follow the lead of Mr. Webster or even of Mr. Seward they would have lost in consideration more than they would have gained in patronage they were anti-slavery by birth as their name was Adams and their home was Quincy no matter how much they had wished to enter State Street they felt that State Street never would trust them or they it had State Street been paradise they must hunger for it in vain and it hardly needed Daniel Webster to act as archangel with the flaming sword to order them away from the door time and experience which alter all perspectives altered this among the rest and taught the boy gentler judgment but even when only ten years old his face was already fixed and his heart was stone against State Street his education was warped beyond recovery in the direction of Puritan politics between him and his Patriot grandfather at the same age the conditions had changed little the year 1848 was like enough to the year 1776 to make a fair parallel the parallel as concerned bias of education was complete when a few months after the death of John Quincy Adams a convention of anti-slavery delegates met at Buffalo to organize a new party and named candidates for the general election in November for President Martin Van Buren for Vice President Charles Francis Adams for any American boy the fact that his father was running for office would have dwarfed for the time every other excitement but even apart from personal bias the year 1848 for a boy's road through life was decisive for twenty years to come there was never a side path of escape the stamp of 1848 was almost as indelible as the stamp of 1776 but in the 18th or any earlier century the stamp mattered less because it was standard and everyone bore it while men whose lives were to fall in the generation between 1865 and 1900 had first of all to get rid of it and take the stamp that belonged to their time this was their education to outsiders, immigrants, adventurers it was easy but the old Puritan nature rebelled against change the reason it gave was forcible the Puritan thought his thought higher and his moral standards better than those of his successors so they were he could not be convinced that moral standards had nothing to do with it and that utilitarian morality was good enough for him as it was for the graceless nature had given to the boy Henry a character that in any previous century would have led him into the church he inherited dogma and a priori thought from the beginning of time and he scarcely needed a violent reaction like anti-slavery politics to sweep him back into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war thus far he had nothing to do with it his education was chiefly inheritance and during the next five or six years his father alone counted for much if he were to worry successfully through life's quicksands he must depend chiefly on his father's pilotage but for his father the channel lay clear while for himself an unknown ocean lay beyond his father's business in life was to get past the dangers of the slave power or to fix its bounds at least the task done he might be content to let his sons pay for the pilotage and it mattered little to his success whether they paid for it with their lives wasted on battlefields or in misdirected energies and lost opportunity the generation that lived from 1840 to 1870 could do very well with the old forms of education that which had its work to do between 1870 and 1900 needed something quite new his father's character was therefore the larger part of his education as far as any single person affected it and for that reason if for no other the son was always a much interested critic of his father's mind and temper long after his death as an old man of 80 his sons continued to discuss this subject with a good deal of difference in their points of view to his son Henry the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family group in his opinion Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name for a hundred years every newspaper scribbler had with more or less obvious excuse derided or abused the older Adams's for want of judgment they abused Charles Francis for his judgment naturally they never attempted to assign values to either that was the children's affair but the traits were real Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority of jealousy of personal motives from any source even under great pressure this unusual poise of judgment and temper ripened by age became the more striking to his son Henry as he learned to measure the mental faculties themselves which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the average his mind was not bold like his grandfathers or restless like his fathers or imaginative or oratorical still less mathematical but it worked with singular perfection admirable self-restraint and instinctive mastery of form within its range it was a model the standards of Boston were high much affected by the old clerical self-respect which gave the Unitarian clergy unusual social charm Dr. Channing, Mr. Everett Dr. Frothingham Dr. Palfrey, President Walker R. W. Emerson and other Boston ministers of the same school would have commanded distinction in any society but the Adams's had little or no affinity with the pulpit and still less with its eccentric offshoots like Theodore Parker or Brooke Farm or The Philosophy of Conquered besides its clergy Boston showed a literary group led by Tickner, Prescott, Longfellow Motley, O. W. Holmes but Mr. Adams was not one of them as a rule they were much too Websterian even in science Boston could claim a certain eminence especially in medicine but Mr. Adams cared very little of a science he stood alone he had no master or brother he had no scholars hardly even his sons almost alone among his Boston contemporaries he was not English in feeling or in sympathies perhaps a hundred years of acute hostility to England has something to do with this family trait but in his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace of snobbishness he was one of the exceedingly small of Americans to whom an English duke or Duchess seemed to be indifferent and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence this was it is true rather the tone of English society in his time but Americans were largely responsible for changing it and Mr. Adams had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he did not feel the sentiment never did his son see him flatter or vilify or show a sign of envy or jealousy or vanity or self-conceit never a tone of arrogance never a gesture of pride the same thing might perhaps have been said of John Quincy Adams but in him his associates averred that it was accompanied by mental restlessness and often by lamentable want of judgment no one ever charged Charles Francis Adams with this fault the critics charged him with just the opposite defect they called him cold no doubt such perfect poise such intuitive self-adjustment was not maintained by nature without a sacrifice of the qualities which would have upset it no doubt too that even his restless-minded introspective self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the model before their eyes a coarser instrument would have impressed them more average human nature is very coarse and its ideals must necessarily be average the world never loved perfect poise what the world does love is commonly absence of poise for it has to be amused Napoleon's and Andrew Jackson's amused but it is not amused by perfect balance had Mr. Adams's nature been cold he would have followed Mr. Webster Mr. Everett, Mr. Seward and Mr. Winthrop in the lines of party discipline and self-interest had it been less balanced than it was he would have gone with Mr. Garrison Mr. Phillips, Mr. Edmund Quincy and Theodore Parker into secession between the two paths he found an intermediate one distinctive and characteristic he set up a party of his own this political party became a chief influence in the education of the boy Henry in the six years, 1848 to 1854 and violently affected his character at that moment when character is plastic the group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself and whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street numbered only three Dr. John G. Palfrey Richard H. Dana and Charles Sumner Dr. Palfrey was the oldest and in spite of his clerical education was to a boy often the most agreeable for his talk was lighter and his range wider than that of the others he had wit or humour and the give and take of dinner table exchange born to be a man of the world he forced himself to be clergyman professor or statesman while like every other true Bostonian he yearned for the ease of the Athenaeum Club in Paul Mall or the combination room at Trinity Dana at first suggested the opposite he effected to be still before the mast a direct rather bluff vigorous semen and only as one got to know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a day labourer deliberately hardening his skin to the burden as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey undoubtedly he succeeded for his mind and will were robust but he might have said what his life long friend William M. Everetts used to say I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do but the things I don't like to do Dana's ideal of life was to be a great Englishman with a seat on the front benches of the House of Commons until he should be promoted to the Wolfsack beyond all with the social status that should place him above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances but he forced himself to take life as it came and he suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline by mere force of will of the four men Dana was the most marked without dogmatism or self-assertion he seemed always to be fully in sight a figure that completely filled a well-defined space he too talked well and his mind worked close to its subject as a lawyer should but disguise and silence it as he liked he was aristocratic to the tenth generation in that respect and in that only Charles Sumner was like him but Sumner in almost every other quality was quite different from his three associates altogether out of line he too adored English standards but his ambition led him to rival the career of Edmund Burke no young Bostonian of his time had made so brilliant a start but rather in the steps of Edward Everett than in Daniel Webster as an orator he had achieved a triumph by his oration against war but Boston admired him chiefly for his social success in England and on the continent success that gave to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never acquired by domestic sanctity Mr. Sumner, both by interest and instinct, felt the value of his English connection and cultivated it the more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the passions of politics he was rarely without a pocket full of letters from duchesses or noblemen in England having sacrificed to principle his social position in America he clung the more closely to his foreign attachments the Free Soil Party fared ill in Beacon Street the social arbiters of Boston George Tickner and the rest had to admit, however unwillingly the Soil leaders could not mingle with the friends and followers of Mr. Webster Sumner was socially ostracized and so for that matter were Paul Free Dana, Russell, Adams and all the other avowed anti-slavery leaders but for them it mattered less because they had houses and families of their own while Sumner had neither wife nor household and though the most socially ambitious of all and the most hungry for what used to be called polite society he could enter hardly half a dozen houses in Boston Longfellow stood by him in Cambridge and even in Beacon Street he could always take refuge in the house of Mr. Lodge but few days passed when he did not pass some time in Mount Vernon Street even with that his solitude was glacial and reacted on his character he had nothing but himself to think about his superiority was indeed real and incontestable he was the classical ornament of the anti-slavery party their pride in him was unbounded and their admiration outspoken the boy Henry worshiped him and if he ever regarded any older man as a personal friend it was Mr. Sumner the relation of Mr. Sumner in the household was far closer than any relation of blood none of the uncles approached such intimacy Sumner was the boy's ideal of greatness the highest product of nature and art the only fault of such a model was its superiority which defied imitation to the twelve-year-old boy his father, Dr. Paul Free Mr. Dana were men more or less what he himself might become but Mr. Sumner was a different order heroic as the boy grew up to be ten or twelve years old his father gave him a writing table in one of the alcoves of his Boston library and there winter after winter Henry worked over his Latin grammar and listened to these four gentlemen discussing the course of anti-slavery politics the discussions were always serious the Free Soil Party took itself quite seriously and they were habitual because Mr. Adams had undertaken to edit a newspaper as the organ of these gentlemen who came to discuss its policy and expression at the same time Mr. Adams was editing the works of his grandfather John Adams and made the boy read texts for proof correction in after years his father sometimes complained that as a reader of Novan Gluss and Massachusetts Henry had shown very little consciousness of punctuation but the boy regarded this part of school life only as a warning if he ever grew up to write dull discussions in the newspapers to try to be dull in some different way from that of his great grandfather yet the discussions in the Boston Whig were carried on in much the same style as those of John Adams and his opponent and appealed to much the same society in the same habit of mind the boy got as little education fitting him for his own time from the one as from the other in contact with the gentlemen themselves who were all types of the past down to 1850 and even later New England society was still directed by the professions lawyers, physicians professors, merchants were classes and acted not as individuals but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church in politics the system required competent expression it was the old Ciceronian idea of government by the best long line of New England statesmen they chose men to represent them because they wanted to be well represented and they chose the best they had thus Boston chose Daniel Webster and Webster took not as pay but as honorarium the checks raised for him by Peter Harvey from the Appletons Perkins's Amory's Sears's Brooks's Lawrence's and so on who begged him to represent them Edward Everett held the rank in regular succession to Webster Robert C. Winthrop claimed succession to Everett Charles Sumner aspired to break the succession but not the system the Adams's had never been for any length of time a part of this state succession they had preferred the national service and had won all their distinction outside the state but they too had required state support and had commonly received it the little group of men in Mount Vernon Street were an offshoot of this system they were statesmen not politicians they guided public opinion the boy naturally learned only one lesson from his saturation in such air he took for granted that this sort of world more or less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay was the world which he was to fit had he known Europe he would have learned no better the Paris of Louis-Philippe Guiseau and de Tocqueville as well as the London of Robert Peel Macaulay and John Stuart Mill were but varieties of the same middle-class bourgeoisie that felt instinctive cousinship with the Boston of Tickner, Prescott and Motley even the typical grumbler Carl Isle who cast doubts on the real capacity of the middle-class and who at times thought himself eccentric found friendship and alliances in Boston still more and conquered the system had proved so successful that even Germany wanted to try it and Italy yearned for it England's middle-class government was the ideal of human progress even the violent reaction after 1848 and the return of all Europe to military practices never for a moment shook the true faith no one except Carl Marx foresaw radical change what announced it? the world was producing 60 or 70 million tons of coal and might be using nearly a million steam horsepower just beginning to make itself felt all experience since the creation of man all divine revelation and science conspired to deceive and betray a 12-year-old boy who took for granted that his ideas which were alone respectable would be alone respected viewed from Mount Vernon Street the problem of life was as simple as it was classic politics offered no difficulties for there the moral law was a sure guide social perfection was also sure because human nature worked for good and three instruments were all she asked suffrage, common schools and press on these points doubt was forbidden education was divine and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection were half the power that fills the world with terror were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts given to redeem the human mind from error there were no need of arsenals nor forts nothing quieted doubt so completely is the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy in uniform excellence for excellence of life and character moral and intellectual the score of Unitarian clergymen about Boston who controlled society and Harvard College were never excelled they proclaimed as their merit that they insisted on no doctrine but taught or tried to teach the means of leading a virtuous, useful, unselfish life which they held to be sufficient for salvation for them difficulties might be ignored doubts were waste of thought nothing exacted solution had solved the universe or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried the problem was worked out of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man this disappearance of religion puzzled him most the boy went church twice every Sunday he was taught to read his Bible and he learned religious poetry by heart he believed in a mild dayism he prayed he went through all the forms but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real even the mild discipline of the Unitarian church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment and never afterwards entered a church the religious instinct had vanished and could not be revived although one made in later life many efforts to recover it that the most powerful emotion of man next to the sexual should disappear might be a personal defect of his own but that the most intelligent society led by the most intelligent clergy in the most moral conditions he ever knew should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time were not worth discussing seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life the faculty of turning away one's eyes as one approaches a chasm is not unusual and Boston showed under the lead of Mr. Webster how successfully it could be done in politics but in politics a certain number of men did at least protest in religion and philosophy no one protested such protest as was made took forms more simple than the silence like the deism of Theodore Parker and of the boy's own cousin Octavius Frothingham who distressed his father and scandalized Beacon Street by avowing skeptism that seemed to solve no old problems and to raise many new ones the less aggressive protest of Ralph Waldo Emerson was from an old world point of view less serious, it was naïve the children reached manhood without knowing religion and with the certainty that dogma metaphysics and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing so one sided in education could have been possible in no other country or time but it became almost of necessity as the children grew up they exaggerated the literary and the political interests they joined in the dinner table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear almost every day table talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again the eldest child, Louisa was one of the most sparkling creatures her brothers met in a long and varied experience of bright women the oldest son, John, was afterwards regarded as one of the best talkers of society and perhaps the most popular man in the state though apt to be on the unpopular side Paul Fri and Dana could be entertaining when they pleased and though Charles Sumner could hardly be called light and hand he was willing to be amused and smiled grandly from time to time while Mr. Adams who talked relatively little was always a good listener and laughed over a witticism till he choked by way of educating and amusing the children Mr. Adams read much aloud in political literature especially when it was satirical like the speeches of Horace Mann and the epistles of Hosea Biglow with great delight to the youth so he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson the boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he found readable but these were commonly 18th century historians in the want of positive instincts he drifted into the mental indolence of history so too he read shelves of 18th century poetry but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through he declined Pope and Gray called for no mental effort they were easy reading but the boy was 30 years old before his education reached Wordsworth this is the story of an education and the person or persons who were in it are supposed to have values only as educators or educated the surroundings concern it only so far as they affect education Sumner, Dana, Palfrey had values of their own like Hume, Pope and Wordsworth which anyone may study in their works here all appear only as influences on the mind of a boy very nearly the average of most boys in physical and mental stature the influence was wholly political and literary his father made no effort to force his mind but left him free play and this was perhaps best only in one way his father rendered him a great service by trying to teach him French and giving him some idea of a French accent otherwise the family was rather an atmosphere than an influence the boy had a large and overpowering set of brothers and sisters who were modes or replicas of the same type getting the same education struggling with the same problems and solving the question they were involved much in the same way they knew no more than he what they wanted or what to do for it but all were conscious that they would like to control power in some form and that the same thing could be said of an ant or an elephant their form was tied to politics or literature they amounted to one individual with half a dozen sides or facets their temperaments reacted on each other and made each child more like the other this was also education but in the type the Boston or New England type was well enough known what no one knew was whether the individual who thought himself a representative of this type was fit to deal with life as far as outward bearing went such a family of turbulent children given free reign by their parents or indifferent to check should have come to more or less grief certainly no one was strong enough to control them least of all their mother, the queen bee of the hive on whom nine tenths of the burden fell on whose strength they all depended but whose children were much too self-willed and self-confident to take guidance from her or from anyone else unless in the direction they fancied father and mother were about equally helpless almost every large family in those days produced at least one black sheep and if this generation of Adamses escaped it was as much a matter of surprise to them as to their neighbors by some happy chance they grew up to be decent citizens but Henry Adams as a brand escaped from the burning and walked back with astonishment at their luck the fact seemed to prove that they were born like birds with a certain innate balance home influences alone never saved the New England boy from ruin though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him and the influences outside of home were negative if school helped it was only by reaction the dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain the passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself yet the day school of that time was respectable and the boy had nothing to complain of in fact he never complained he hated it because he was hurted with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him his memory was slow and the effort painful for him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power was to prove himself wanting not only in memory but flagrantly in mind he thought his mind a good enough machine if it were given time to act but it acted wrong if hurried school masters never gave time in any and all its forms the boy detested school and the prejudice became deeper with years he always reckoned his school days from ten to sixteen years old as time thrown away perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional but his existence was exceptional between 1850 and 1900 nearly everyone's existence was exceptional for success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared the facile use of only four tools mathematics French German and Spanish with these he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry and feel at home in any society Latin and Greek he could with the help of the modern languages learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school these four tools were necessary to his success in life but he never controlled any one of them thus at the outset he was condemned to failure more or less complete in the life awaiting him but not more so than his companions indeed had his father kept the boy at home and given him half an hour's direction every day he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them of course school taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school most school experience was bad boy associations at fifteen were worse than none Boston at that time offered few healthy resources for boys or men the bar room and billiard room were more familiar than parents knew as a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to dancing school they played a rudimentary game of baseball football and hockey they would sail a boat still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow legs or a stray wild duck one or two may have learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood of Concord none could ride across country or knew what shooting with dogs meant sport as a pursuit was unknown boat racing came after eighteen-fifty for horse racing only the trotting course existed of all pleasures winter slaying was still the gayest and most popular from none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world books remained as in the eighteenth century the source of life and as they came out Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson Macaulay, Carlisle and the rest they were devoured but as far as happiness went the happiest hours of the boys education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of congressional documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy reading Quentin Darwood Ivanhoe and the talisman and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears on the whole he learned most then end of chapter two chapter three of the education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Washington eighteen-fifty to eighteen-fifty-four except for politics Mount Vernon Street had the merit of leaving the boy-mind supple free to turn with the world and if one learned next to nothing the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned the surface was ready to take any form that education should cut into it though Boston with singular foresight rejected the old designs what sort of education was stamped elsewhere a Bostonian had no idea but he escaped the evils of other standards by having no standard at all and what was true of school was true of society Boston offered none that could help outside everyone now smiles at the bad taste of Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe the society of the forties but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack water between a tide past and a tide to come Boston belonged to neither and hardly even to America neither aristocratic nor industrial nor social Boston girls and boys were not nearly as unformed as English boys and girls but had less means of acquiring form as they grew older women counted for little as models every boy from the age of seven fell in love at frequent intervals with some girl always more or less the same little girl who had nothing to teach him or he to teach her except rather familiar and provincial manners until they married and bore children the idea of attaching oneself to a married woman or of polishing one's manners to suit the standards of women of thirty could hardly have entered the mind of a young Bostonian and would have scandalized his parents from women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing else he might not even catch the idea that women had more to give the garden of Eden was hardly more primitive to balance this virtue the Puritan city had always hidden a darker side Blaggard Boston was only too educational and to most boys much the more interesting a successful Blaggard must enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation and Henry Adams had neither but no boy escaped some contact with vice of a very low form Blaggardism came constantly under boys eyes and had the charm of force and freedom and superiority to culture and efficiency one might fear it but no one honestly despised it now and then it asserted itself as education more roughly than school ever did one of the commonest boy games of winter inherited directly from the 18th century was a game of war on Boston Common in old days the two hostile forces were called NorthEnders and SouthEnders in 1850 the NorthEnders still survived as a legend but in practice it was a battle of the Latin School against all comers and the Latin School for Snowball included all the boys of the WestEnd whenever on a half holiday the weather was soft enough to soften the snow the common was apt to be the scene of a fight which began in daylight with the Latin School in force rushing their opponents down to Tremont Street and which generally ended at dark by the Latin School dwindling in numbers and disappearing as the Latin School grew weak the ruffs and young blaggards grew strong as long as snowballs were the only weapon no one was much hurt but a stone may be put in a snowball and in the dark a stick or a slung-shot in the hands of a boy is as effective as a knife one afternoon the fight had been long and exhausting the boy Henry, following as his habit was his bigger brother Charles had taken part in the battle and had felt his courage much depressed by seeing one of his trustiest leaders Henry Higginson Bully Higg, his school name struck by a stone over the eye and let off the field bleeding in rather a ghastly manner as night came on the Latin School was steadily forced back to the Beacon Street Mall where they could retreat no further without disbanding and by that time only a small band was left headed by two heroes Savage and Marvin a dark mass of figures could be seen below making ready for the last rush and rumours said that a swarm of black guards from the slums led by a grisly terror called Conky Daniels with a club and a hideous reputation were going to put an end to the Beacon Street Cowards forever Henry wanted to run away with the others but his brother was too big to run away so they stood still and waited immolation the dark mass set up a shout and rushed forward the Beacon Street boys turned and fled up the steps except Savage and Marvin and the few champions who would not run the terrible Conky Daniels swaggered up stopped a moment with his bodyguard to swear a few oaths at Marvin and then swept on and chased the flyers leaving the few boys untouched who stood their ground the obvious moral taught that black guards were not so black as they were painted but the boy Henry had passed through as much terror as though he were Tyren or Henri IV and ten or twelve years afterward when these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland he wondered whether their education on Boston Common had taught Savage and Marvin how to die if violence were a part of complete education Boston was not incomplete the idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery leaders as well as to their followers most of them suffered from it mobs were always possible it never happened to be actually concerned in a mob but he, like every other boy was sure to be on hand whenever a mob was expected and whenever he heard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak he looked for trouble Wendell Phillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth Theodore Parker in his pulpit was not much safer worst of all the execution of the fugitive slave law in Boston the site of Court Square packed with bayonets and his own friends obliged to line the streets under arms of state militia in order to return a negro to slavery wrought frenzy in the brain of a 15-year-old 18th century boy from Quincy who wanted to miss no reasonable chance of mischief one lived in the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the T-Tax and the Boston Massacre within Boston a boy was first in 18th century politician and afterwards only a possibility beyond Boston the first step led only further into politics after February 1848 but one slight tie remained of all those that since 1776 had connected Quincy with the outer world the madam stayed in Washington after her husband's death and in her turn was struck by paralysis and bedridden from time to time her son Charles whose affection and sympathy for his mother in her many tribulations was always pronounced went on to see her and in May 1850 he took with him his 12-year-old son the journey was meant as education and as education it served the purpose of fixing in memory the stage of a boy's thought in 1850 he could not remember taking special interest in the railroad journey or in New York with railways and cities he was familiar enough his first impression was the novelty of crossing New York Bay and finding an English railway carriage on the Camden and Amboy Railroad this was a new world a suggestion of corruption in the simple habits of American life a step to exclusiveness never approached in Boston but it was amusing the boy rather liked it at Trenton the train set him on board a steamer which took him to Philadelphia where he smelt other varieties of town life then again by boat to Chester and by train to Harvard to Grace by boat to Baltimore and thence by rail to Washington this was the journey he remembered the actual journey may have been quite different but the actual journey has no interest for education the memory was all that mattered and what struck him most to remain fresh in his mind all his lifetime was the sudden change that came over the world on entering a slave state he took education politically the mere raggedness of outline could not have seemed wholly new for even Boston had its ragged edges and the town of Quincy was far from being a vision of neatness or good repair in truth he had never seen a finished landscape but Maryland was raggedness of a new kind the railway about the size and character of a modern tram rambled through unfenced fields and woods or through village streets among a haphazard variety of pigs cows and negro babies who might all have used the cabins for pens and styes had the southern pig required styes but who never showed a sign of care it was the boy's impression of what slavery caused and for him was all it taught coming down in the early morning from his bedroom in his grandmother's house still called the Adams building in F Street and venturing outside into the air reeking with the thick odor of the catalpa trees he found himself on an earth road or village street with wheel tracks meandering from the colonnade of the treasury hard by to the white marble columns and fronts of the post office which faced each other in the distance like white greek temples and the abandoned gravel pits of a deserted syrian city here and there low wooden houses were scattered along the streets as in other southern villages but he was chiefly attracted by an unfinished square marble shaft half a mile below and he walked down to inspect it before breakfast his aunt dryly remarked that at this rate he would soon get through all the sites but guess, having lived always in Washington how little the sites of Washington had to do with its interest the boy could not have told her he was nowhere near an understanding of himself the more he was educated the less he understood slavery struck him in the face it was a nightmare a horror, a crime the sum of all wickedness contact made it only more repulsive he wanted to escape like the negroes to free soil slave states were dirty, unkempt poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious he had not a thought but repulsion for it and yet the picture had another side the may sunshine and shadow had something to do with it the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more the sense of atmosphere almost new had perhaps as much again and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier the impression was not simple but the boy liked it distinctly it remained on his mind as an attraction almost obscuring Quincy itself the want of barriers of pavements, of forms the looseness, the laziness the indolent southern drawl the pigs in the streets the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas the freedom, openness, swagger of nature and man most boys would have felt it in the same way but with him the feeling caught on to an inheritance the softness of his gentle old grandmother as she lay in bed and chatted with him did not come from Boston his aunt was anything rather than Bostonian he did not wholly come from Boston himself though Washington belonged to another world and the two worlds could not live together he was not sure that he enjoyed the Boston world most even at twelve years old he could see his own nature no more clearly than he would at twelve hundred if by accident he should happen to live so long his father took him to the capital and on the floor of the senate which then, and long afterwards until the era of tourists was freely open to visitors the old senate chamber resembled a pleasant political club standing behind the vice president's chair which is now the chief justices the boy was presented to some of the men whose names were great in their day and as familiar to him as his own Clay and Webster and Calhoun were there still but with them a free soil candidate for the vice presidency had little to do what struck boys most was their type senators were a species they all wore an air as they wore a blue dress coat or brass buttons they were all Roman the type of senator in eighteen fifty was rather charming at its best and the senate when in good temper was an agreeable body numbering only some sixty members and affecting the heirs of courtesy its vice was not so much a vice of manners or temper as of attitude the statesmen of all periods was apt to be pompous but even pomposity was less offensive than familiarity on the platform as in the pulpit and southern pomposity when not arrogant was genial and sympathetic in its simple-mindedness quite a different thing from the Websterian or Conglinian pomposity of the north the boy felt at ease there more at home than he ever had felt in Boston State House though his acquaintance with the codfish and the House of Representatives went back beyond distinct recollection senators spoke kindly to him and seemed to feel so for they had known his family socially and in spite of slavery even J. Q. Adams in his later years to stand in the way of rivals had few personal enemies decidedly the Senate pro-slavery though it were seemed a friendly world this first step in national politics was a little like the walk before breakfast an easy, careless, genial and large stride into a fresh and amusing world where nothing was finished but where even the weeds grew rank the second step was like the first that it led to the White House he was taken to see President Taylor outside in a paddock in front, old Whitey the President's Charger was grazing as they entered and inside the President was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock too the President was friendly and the boy felt no sense of strangeness that he could ever recall in fact what strangeness should he feel the families were intimate so intimate that their friendliness generations, civil war and all sorts of rupture President Taylor owed his election to Martin Van Buren and the Free Soil Party to him the Adamses might still be of use as for the White House all the boy's family had lived there and barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign had been more or less at home there ever since it was built the boy half thought he owned it and took for granted that he should someday live in it he felt no sensation whatever a president was a matter of course in every respectable family he had two in his own three if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham who was the oldest and first in distinction revolutionary patriots or perhaps a colonial governor might be worth talking about but anyone could be president and some very shady characters were likely to be presidents, senators congressmen and such things were swarming in every street everyone thought alike but they had ancestors or not no sort of glory hedged presidents as such and in the whole country one could hardly have met with an admission of respect for any office or name unless it were George Washington that was to all appearance sincerely respected people made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon and made even an effort to build Washington a monument the effort had failed but one still went to Mount Vernon although it was no easy trip Mr. Adams took the boy there in a carriage and pair over a road that gave him a complete Virginia education for use ten years afterwards to the New England mind roads, schools, clothes and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system bad roads meant bad morals the moral of this Virginia road was clear and the boy fully learned it slavery was wicked and slavery was the cause of this road's darkness which amounted to social crime and yet at the end of the road and product of the crime stood Mount Vernon and George Washington luckily boys accept contradictions as readily as their elders do or this boy might have been prematurely wise he had only to repeat what he was told that George Washington stood alone otherwise this third step in his Washington education would have been his last on that line the problem progress was not soluble whatever the optimists and orators might say or for that matter whatever they might think George Washington could not be reached on Boston lines George Washington was a primary or if Virginians liked it better an ultimate relation like the pole star and amid the endless restless motion of every other visible point in space he alone remained steady in the mind of Henry Adams to the end other points shifted their bearings John Adams, Jefferson Madison, Franklin even John Marshall took varied lights and assumed new relations but Mount Vernon always remained where it was with no practicable road to reach it and yet when he got there Mount Vernon was only Quincy in a southern setting no doubt it was much more charming but it was the same 18th century the same old furniture the same old patriot the boy took to it instinctively the broad Potomac and the coons and the trees the bandanas and the box hedges the bedrooms upstairs and the porch outside even Martha Washington herself in memory were as natural as the tides and the May sunshine he had only enlarged his horizons a little but he never thought to ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that deduced George Washington all wickedness in practice such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man but any attempt to deal with them seriously as education is fatal luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was singularly free from Kant he may have had views of his own but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact that George Washington stood alone life was not yet complicated every problem had a solution even the Negro the boy went back to Boston more political than ever and his politics were no longer so modern as the 18th century but took a strong tone of the 17th slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism the boy thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors the slave power took the place of Stuart Kings and Roman popes education could go no further in that course and ran off into emotion but as the boy gradually found his surroundings change and felt himself no longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe but a sort of herring fry in a shoal of moving fish he began to learn the first and easier lessons of practical politics thus far he had seen nothing but 18th century statesmanship America and he began at the same time to become aware of a new force under the innocent surface of party machinery even at that early moment a rather slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might meet some personal difficulties in trying to reconcile 16th century principles and 18th century statesmanship with late 19th century party organization the first vague sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle came in 1851 the free soil conclave in Mount Vernon Street belonged, as already said to the statesman class and like Daniel Webster had nothing to do with machinery Websters or sewers depended on others for machinery work and money on Peter Harvey's and Thurlow Weeds who spent their lives in it took most of the abuse and asked no reward almost without knowing it the subordinates wanted their employers and created a machine which no one but themselves could run in 1850 things had not quite reached that point the men who ran the small free soil machine were still modest though they became famous enough in their own right Henry Wilson John B. Alley Anson Burlingame and the other managers negotiated a bargain with the Massachusetts Democrats giving the state to the Democrats and a seat in the senate to the free soilers with this bargain Mr. Adams and his statesman friends would have nothing to do for such a coalition was in their eyes much like jockeys selling a race they did not care to take office as pay for votes sold to pro-slavery Democrats theirs was a correct not to say noble position but as a matter of fact they took the benefit of the sale for the coalition chose Charles Sumner as its candidate for the senate while George S. Bootwell was made governor for the Democrats this was the boys first lesson in practical politics and a sharp one not that he troubled himself with moral doubts but that he learned the nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too good to take part but not too good to take profit Charles Sumner happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods but between his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction and for him there was none he entered into no kazooistry on the matter his friend was right because his friend and the boy shared the glory the question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted yet everyone saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must be learned and understood once for all the boy might ignore as a mere historical puzzle the question how to deduce George Washington from the sum of all wickedness he had himself helped to deduce Charles Sumner from the sum of political corruption on that line too education could go no further Tammany Hall stood at the end of the vista Mr. Alley one of the strictest of moralists held that his object in making the bargain was to convert the Democratic party to anti-slavery principles and that he did it Henry Adams could rise to no such moral elevation he was only a boy and his object in supporting the coalition was that of making his friend a senator it was as personal as though he had helped to make his friend a millionaire he could never find a way of escaping immoral conclusions except by admitting that he and his father and Sumner were wrong and this he was never willing to do for the consequences of this admission were worse than those of the other thus before he was fifteen years old he had managed to get himself into a state of moral confusion from which he never escaped as a politician he was already corrupt and he could never see how any practical politician could be less corrupt than himself apology as he understood himself was Kant or cowardice at the time he never even dreamed that he needed to apologize though the press shouted at him from every corner and though the Mount Vernon Street conclave agreed with the press yet he could not plead ignorance and even in the heat of the conflict he never cared to defend the coalition boy as he was he knew enough to know that something was wrong but his only interest was the election day after day the general court balloted and the boy haunted the gallery following the roll call and wondered what Caleb Cushing meant by calling Mr. Sumner a one-eyed abolitionist truly the difference in meaning with the phrase one-idead abolitionist which was Mr. Cushing's actual expression is not very great but neither the one nor the other seemed to describe Mr. Sumner to the boy who could never have made the error of classing Garrison and Sumner together or mistaking Caleb Cushing's relation to either Temper ran high at that moment while Sumner every day missed his election by only one or two votes at last April 24th, 1851 standing among the silent crowd in the gallery Henry heard the vote announced which gave Sumner the needed number slipping under the arms of the bystanders he ran home as hard as he could and burst into the dining room where Mr. Sumner was seated at table with the family he enjoyed the glory of telling Sumner that he was elected it was probably the proudest moment in the life of either the next day when the boy went to school he noticed numbers of boys and men in the streets wearing black crepe on their arm he knew few free soil boys in Boston his acquaintances were what he called pro-slavery so he thought proper to tie a bit of white silk ribbon around his own arm by way of showing that his friend Mr. Sumner was not wholly alone this little piece of bravado passed unnoticed no one even cuffed his ears but in later life he was a little puzzled to decide which symbol was the more correct no one then dreamed of four years war but everyone dreamed of succession the symbol for either might well be matter of doubt this triumph of the Mount Vernon street conclave capped the political climax the boy, like a million other American boys, was a politician and what was worse fit as yet to be nothing else he should have been, like his grandfather a protégé of George Washington a statesman designated by destiny with nothing to do but look directly ahead follow orders and march on the contrary he was not even a Bostonian he felt himself shut out of Boston as though he were an exile he never thought of himself as a Bostonian he never looked about him in Boston as boys commonly do wherever they are to select the street they like best the house they want to live in the profession they mean to practice always he felt himself somewhere else perhaps in Washington with its social ease perhaps in Europe and he watched with vague unrest from the Quincy Hills with Bernard steamers stretching in a long line to the horizon and disappearing every other Saturday or whatever the day might be as though the steamers were offering to take him away which was precisely what they were doing had these ideas been unreasonable influences enough were at hand to correct them but the point of the whole story when Henry Adams came to look back on it seemed to be that the ideas were more than reasonable they were the logical, necessary result of conditions old as history and fixed as fate invariable sequence in man's experience the only idea which would have been quite unreasonable scarcely entered his mind this was the thought of going westward and growing up with the country that he was not in the least fitted for going west made no objection whatever since he was much better fitted than most of the persons that went the convincing reason for staying in the east was that he had there every advantage over the west he could not go wrong the west must inevitably pay an enormous tribute to Boston and New York one's position in the east was the best in the world for every purpose that could offer an object for going westward if ever in history men had been able to calculate on a certainty for a lifetime in advance the citizens of the great eastern seaports could do it in 1850 when their railway systems were already laid out neither to a politician nor to a businessman nor to any of the learned professions did the west promise any certain advantage while it offered uncertainties in plenty at any other moment in human history this education including its political and literary bias would have been not only good but quite the best society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased not ill pleased with himself he had all he wanted he saw no reason for thinking that anyone else had more he finished with school not very brilliantly but without finding fault with the sum of his knowledge probably he knew more than his father or his grandfather or his great grandfather had known at sixteen years old only on looking back fifty years later at his own figure in 1854 and pondering on the needs of the twentieth century he wondered whether on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904 or to that of the year one he found himself unable to give a sure answer the calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth century thought but the story will show his reasons for thinking that in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy in history, literature, art in the concepts of all science except perhaps mathematics the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year one than to the year 1900 the education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed speaking as an American of 1900 he had as yet no education at all he knew not even where or how to begin End of Chapter 3