Part 5 (1/2)
As far as a young ton was fitted for his duties; or rather, no duties in March were fitted for the duties in April The few people who thought they knew so
Education was matter of life and death, but all the education in the world would have helped nothing Only one man in Adae and experience to be an adviser and friend This was Senator Suan; there it ended
Going over the experience again, long after all the great actors were dead, he struggled to see where he had blundered In the effort to make acquaintances, he lost friends, but he would have liked much to knohether he could have helped it He had necessarily followed Seward and his father; he took for granted that his business was obedience, discipline, and silence; he supposed the party to require it, and that the crisis overruled all personal doubts He was thunderstruck to learn that Senator Suarded Mr Ada the principles of his life, and broke off relations with his family
Many a shock was Henry Ada life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that per about the point in discussion; he was even willing to adencies he co; he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened a chas as life lasted, he found hiranted, as a political instinct, with out waiting further experiranted that arsenic poisoned--the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost
On his own score, he never aded a ith Mr Sumner on the subject, then or afterwards, but his education--for good or bad--made an enormous stride One has to deal with all sorts of unexpectedat hundreds of Southern gentleularly honest, but who seeed in the plainest breach of faith and the blackest secret conspiracy, yet they did not disturb his education History told of little else; and not one rebel defection--not even Robert E Lee's--cost young Ada; but Sumner's struck home
This, then, was the result of the new attempt at education, down to March 4, 1861; this was all; and frankly, it seeton in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between torlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing Washi+ngton was a dismal school Even before the traitors had flown, the vultures descended on it in swarround, and tore the carrion of political patronage into fragobbets of fat and lean, on the very steps of the White House Not a man there knehat his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public Lincoln, Seward, Sueducation; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement Henry was a helpless victim, and, like all the rest, he could only wait for he knew not what, to send him he knew not where
With the close of the session, his own functions ended Ceasing to be private secretary he knew not what else to do but return with his father and mother to Boston in the middle of March, and, with childlike docility, sit down at a desk in the law-office of Horace Gray in Court Street, to begin again: ”My Lords and Gentle to discuss politics with the future Justice
There, in ordinary times, he would have re, like all the rest, disastrously failed
CHAPTER VIII
DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adaland Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf
As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before: Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Coed its shadowy existence for a week The law, altogether, as path of education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving ain a new life without education at all They asked few questions, but if they had asked ot no answers No one could help Looking back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could only shake one's white beard in silent horror Mr Adaht himself entitled to the services of one of his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared froain without a word
He could offer no protest Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters He was at least no public official, like the thousands of ienerals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President
He was not a vulture of carrion--patronage He knew that his father's appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendshi+p; he did not then know that Senator Sued for thinking it unfit; but he could have supplied proofs enough had Su that, in his opinion, Mr Adams had chosen a private secretary far ht well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of possible candidates, except Mr Sumner himself; and no one kneell as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr Adams's proofs of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than Senator Sun Relations Coive hierous risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except perhaps Mr Sumner, knew more The President and Secretary of State knew least of all As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as Charley Wilson, who had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the Minister
The assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard worker, but socially useless Mr Adams made no effort to find efficient help; perhaps he knew no naton, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of strength in his son
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he knew not where to turn Su him letters of introduction, but if Su paths No one, at thateither paths or people The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into service On April 13 the stor men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves of war Adaiments fors and h, with the air of business they wore frons or sounds of exciteo down the harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before being throith a hundred thousand et educated in a fury of fire Few things were for the moment so trivial in i down to the wretched old Cunard steaain for Liverpool This tione to the fountain once too often; it was fairly broken; and the young ot to meet a hostile world without defence--or arnorant was the world of its huland, May 1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in a rowboat Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone Had Secretary Seward and Senator Suiven to Mr Adams the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal fae, the private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra burden of manyfor master only his father who never fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of Ahteenth century Minister Adarandfather had sailed froate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had hardly a parallel for success He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John Adaht it natural that the Government should send him out as an adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even notice that he left not a friend behind him No doubt he could depend on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the Chairn Relations Minister Adams had no friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he asked none
He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and grandfather had done before him, without a murmur This was a lofty view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys, and when, in ti man realized what had happened, he felt it as a betrayal He ht hied his father to be less fit than hi as the chaitimacy and order
Her representatives should kno to play their role; they should wear the costume; but, in the itimacy or order was the private secretary, whose stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of Great Britain
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to e of his masters If they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook theht on his body By way of teaching him quickly, they sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same shi+p Secretary Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M Clay in the diplomatic service, but Mr Seward's education profited less than the private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though possibly so man, not in Government pay, could be asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Govern those ere in it At horurumble or not; no one listened
Above all, the private secretary could not gruly little, but that e as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected hi--is never effaced He had to begin it at once He was already an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went instantly up to London: a fa into an arena of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius Palhed his peculiar Pal as Tiberius, he would have seen only evident reseed the ceremony
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his son What he or Mr Seward or Mr Suht is the affair of history and their errors concern historians The errors of a private secretary concerned no one but hiht on May 12 that he was going to a friendly Government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had been their steadiest profession For a hundred years the chief effort of his faland into intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America His father was about to make a new effort, and this ti The slave States had been the chief apparent obstacle to good understanding As for the private secretary hilish He could not conceive the idea of a hostile England He supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere in the British Islands
On May 13, he nized the belligerency of the Confederacy This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany He had to learn--the sooner the better--that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England--literally no one--doubted that Jefferson Davis had lad of it, though not often saying so Theyto Mr
Gladstone, ”desired the severance as a diue” The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the rebel eerency before the arrival of Mr Adams in order to fix the position of the British Governnition of independence would then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion