Henry’s journey to the capital overlapped an extended period of literary labor in which he assisted the Governor on a major editing project, The Works of John Adams. Running upon completion (1856) to ten fat volumes, this collection of unearthed essays, letters, and state papers required many hours of careful pruning and proofreading. Just entering his early teens, Henry gave his eyes to the enterprise. The finished product, one that fell somewhere between historical documentation and filial piety, carried multiple meanings for its junior partner. Importantly, it suggested to Henry how biography could be communicated over a large canvas filled with narrative drama and color; his crowded history of the early republic, drafted a generation later and packed with masterful portraits of Jefferson and Jackson, Madison and Monroe, picks up, in a manner, where The Works leaves off. The apprenticeship further anticipated another and vital father-son partnership: Henry’s appointment as Charles Francis’s private secretary in London, where the latter served as America’s minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. And finally, combing through the House of Adams’s seemingly endless archives offered Henry an intensive tutorial on the origins and “making” of his famous family. If, as he insisted in the Education, his historical perspective ran somewhat archaically to the colonial, The Works, a fife-and-drum hymn to the past, could only have nurtured that sentimental panorama.
Working closely in the Adams files with his father gave Henry an intensive line-by-line primer in the oft-disillusioning art of cross-generational comparison. He later confessed that Charles Francis’s “mind was not bold like his grandfather’s or restless like his father’s, or imaginative or oratorical,” though he did praise the Governor’s stolid intellect for exhibiting “singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery of form”—before adding the inevitable Calvinistic caveat, “Within its range it was a model.” In short, Henry esteemed the Governor’s stable temperament even as he recognized it as something of a lesser virtue. And maybe this too—the bias toward balance—could be counted among Louisa Catherine’s largely unrecognized legacies, giving to her son the soupçon of Maryland blood that helped him to withstand the passions, anxieties, and expectations that afflicted other Adams men. Charles Francis’s uncle Charles Adams suffered from alcoholism and died at thirty; his two name-weighted brothers—George Washington Adams and John Adams II—died, respectively, at the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-one, having both struggled with drinking. Like Henry, Charles Francis was a lucky third son and thus not so obviously saddled with excessive expectations. Writing to his brother Charles some years after their father’s death, Henry described the Governor in European rather than American terms, introducing yet again Louisa Catherine’s influence: “His instinctive sense of form, combined with keenness of mind, were French rather than English. His simplicity was like the purity of crystal, without flash or color. His figure, as a public man, is classic,—call it Greek, if you please.”1
If Henry admired his father’s comparatively quiet constitution, he found such placidity in organized Christianity, another family formality, disappointing. He would look back with some puzzlement on the small role that religion had played in his life. Despite their formidable reputations, the great theologians, divines, and ministers who once commanded such prime cultural space in colonial New England, men such as Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan who supported the Salem witch trials, and Jonathan Edwards, a charismatic revivalist preacher central to shaping the First Great Awakening that helped create a common evangelical identity in American Protestantism, meant surprisingly little to him. Heroes were at home or in the statehouse; they resided not in the pulpit. Though Henry respected his father’s poised temperament as a shield to certain inevitable family pressures, he thought less of that asset when practiced by Boston’s influential Unitarian Church, which had rejected such ancient articles of faith as the Trinity, original sin, and biblical infallibility. He believed its prevailing “mental calm,” modeled by a rational-minded Harvard-trained clergy, too distant, too analytical, and too self-satisfied. These learned men, he protested, “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. Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realised the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.”2
Henry and his siblings found little inspiration in such a stillborn theology. In youth they dutifully read their Bibles, marched off to church twice each Sunday, and outwardly followed the rituals of worship. And yet, he remembered, “neither to [him] nor to [his] brothers or sisters was religion real.… The religious instinct had vanished.”3 His brother Charles, late in life, wrote a rather caustic account of the generational disconnect behind that disappearance:
The recollection of those Sundays haunts me now. We always had a late breakfast—every one did; and we dined early—roast beef always for dinner; and I got a dislike for roast beef which lasted almost to manhood, because I thus had to eat it every Sunday at 1.30, after a breakfast at 9. Then came the Sunday hair-combing and dressing. After which, Bible reading, four chapters, each of us four verses in rotation. Then a Sunday lesson, committing some verses from the Bible or a religious poem to memory.… Then came the going to Church.… Twice a day, rain or shine, summer and winter. In town [Boston] we went to that dreary old Congregational barn in Chauncy Street—the gathering place of the First Church—where my uncle, Dr. Frothingham, held forth.4
Despite moving away from orthodox Christian belief, however, Henry retained throughout his life a searching attitude toward various cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic expressions of religious experience. Buddhism and medieval Catholicism, in particular, opened fresh avenues for making comparisons and contrasts with the modern West that found their way into his published work. Boston’s liberal Protestantism, on the other hand, never made such a vigorous impression, and neither did the “eccentric off-shoots” (as he called them) of Transcendentalism and Universalism, or the neighboring experimental communities—most famously Brook Farm (1841–47), satirized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance, and Fruitlands (1843), a seven-month flop conducted by Bronson Alcott, father of Little Women’s author, Louisa May Alcott—that popped up and then promptly disappeared during his childhood. This utopic side of the New England conscience left Henry cold. Even with the old Calvinism no longer an encompassing cultural force, he felt intellectually at home with its skeptical view of humanity, a perspective that led him to suggest, with all due respect, that Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author, philosopher, and celebrated Concord sage, “was naïf.”5 And as a harmless “eccentric,” Emerson, no less than Boston’s more conventional clerisy, failed to impress Henry as a compelling public figure. None among them would do as a hero, none could capture the boy’s emotions, and none was Charles Sumner.
Henry’s earliest memories of Sumner were in the family’s Mount Vernon Street home, where the spirited discussions that led to the evolution of Whigs into Conscience Whigs and Conscience Whigs into Free Soilers ensued. At the age of ten or so Henry was given a desk in the large upstairs library to improve upon his Latin grammar. There, winter after winter, he toiled away at his studies, growing increasingly aware of the antislavery politics being practiced on the other side of the room. Though he admired each of his father’s several associates (the historian John Gorham Palfrey “was to a boy often the most agreeable”; the lawyer-memoirist Richard Henry Dana “was… without dogmatism or self-assertion”), only Sumner held his attention. Here was a man, even more so than the measured Charles Francis, whom he clearly wished to emulate. Sumner’s “superiority,” he later wrote, came across as brilliantly 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.… 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.”6
Three years Charles Francis’s junior, Sumner had made his mark in Massachusetts as a lawyer, a lecturer, and, following America’s controversial annexation of Texas in 1845, a savage critic of slavery. A popular, gregarious figure who, at a towering six feet four inches, could look down upon lesser mortals, he had traveled in England and the Continent—still a rare thing—rolling up one social success after another. His attendance at Queen Victoria’s Westminster Abbey coronation, intimacy with the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and tales of Oxford friendships and Cambridge acquaintances only enhanced his reputation in status-conscious Boston. To the young Henry, Sumner had made the right friends and the right enemies; he was the Bay State’s brilliant rising sun to the aging Webster’s sinking star. When the latter left the Senate in July 1850, Sumner, a Free Soiler, claimed his seat. After several months of partisan wrangling, the legislature sent him to the upper chamber by a single vote on the twenty-sixth ballot in a tense session attended by an elated Henry. “He ran home as hard as he could,” Adams later wrote of himself in the Education, “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.”7
In time, however, Henry came rather uneasily to equate Sumner with that other and more distant idol: the great Washington. If the latter had compromised his reputation by holding slaves, the former had played politics, only a slightly lesser sin in Henry’s estimation. True, Sumner never overtly courted the opposition, the Massachusetts Democratic Party, but he had accepted a precious gift from its hand. With both a Senate seat and the gubernatorial chair open, the Free Soilers proved to be the balance of power in a state assembly dominated by Democrats and Whigs. Accordingly, they negotiated the Senate for Sumner in exchange for supporting the Democrat George S. Boutwell for governor. “Boy as he was,” Henry recounted, “he knew enough to know that something was wrong.” In fact, his disillusionment with Sumner had only just begun.8
A fierce moralist by nature, Sumner’s rhetorical assault on the South drew the hatred of a cane-wielding South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks who, eager to avenge the “honor” of his section, attacked him in the Senate Chamber on a spring day in 1856. Following a three-year convalescence (some below the Mason-Dixon Line accused him of “shamming”; the current view is that he may have suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder), Sumner returned and, in such baiting addresses as “The Barbarism of Slavery,” fired upon the South with renewed vigor. By this point he had moved far beyond the moderate position on the slave question still held by Charles Francis. The Governor’s reverence for the republic ensured his opposition to radical abolitionism, invariably souring his relations with Sumner. Siding with family, Henry could love the senator only as a fallen angel who had failed to put union first.