Late in the summer of 1854, sixteen-year-old Henry made the short pilgrimage across the Charles River and began taking classes at Harvard. Much like Quincy and the presidency, he recognized the College as something of a family fiat, all a part of being a male Adams. He was the fourth generation (and one of four brothers) to attend the school; his grandfather Adams had offered lectures as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (1806–9) and sat on its Board of Overseers—as would the Governor and his son Charles. The Governor’s eldest son, John Quincy II, served for a time on the Harvard Corporation, the smaller of the school’s two superintending committees. Bending to family preference, not to say pressure, Henry himself returned to his alma mater in the 1870s to teach medieval and American history. “All went there,” he later smiled with a deflating sarcasm, “because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.… Any other education would have required a serious effort.”1
Henry, in fact, gave his studies more than a passing glance, although, in the fuller sense that he meant, Harvard loomed as a tiresomely orthodox institution, a sheltered place for privileged sons to congregate with other privileged sons. The school’s student body counted 340 undergraduates with an additional 365 in the divinity, law, scientific, and medical schools; its faculty consisted of thirty-nine professors, and its several libraries held fewer than 100,000 volumes; the young scholars, dressed in obligatory black coats, accepted a curriculum largely imposed on them by the administration and faculty. Total expenses for an academic year—room and board, instruction, and textbooks—came to $249, about $6,900 in current dollars.2
The school ranked its students on a complicated merit system, and Henry seemed willing to play the game before boredom and perhaps some resentment set in. He received no deductions for conduct his first year, but soon the penalties began to pile up—70 as a sophomore, an additional 94 points as a junior, and a contemptuous 608 his senior year. Clearly he had little respect for Harvard’s method of apportioning distinction.3 He deliberately courted, rather, a number of small transgressions, including smoking in the College yard, cutting classes, and missing prayers. After absenting himself from one devotional service too many, the school sent Charles Francis a formal letter to acquaint him of his son’s sins.
Combined, the penalties helped to bring Henry’s final class rank down to a middling 44th out of 89 graduates. Even without these demerits, however, his chances of scholastic recognition were early and perhaps fatally compromised by a freshman-year illness (possibly mononucleosis) that caused him to miss a month of classes, thus dropping his first-term standing to 70th. Diligent work the following semester elevated him to 43rd. He inched up to 34th sophomore year and peaked at 21st as a junior. At that point, with but a year to go and no chance of cracking the top tier, he appears to have simply invited penalties. He rejected, in other words, a College model that policed private behavior, held out small rewards for congenial conduct, and treated undergraduates more like schoolboys than young men. In many respects, the institution existed less for the students than the students existed for the institution. Still socially informed by its proud colonial past, Harvard made few concessions to its clientele, who were fenced in a cramped quadrangle containing a few plain buildings. A ringing bell called students twice a day to morning and evening prayers, where, when seated, they were enjoined to refrain from fidgeting, whispering, and otherwise demonstrating a less than monastic reverence. One could conceivably cultivate an intellectual life apart from the school, though the merit system discouraged gestures in this direction. Henry’s collegiate friend Nicholas Longworth Anderson, the son of two distinguished Ohio families, complained to his mother, “Rank at college is determined not by a uniform elegance of recitation or by a knowledge of the subjects in hand, but by a conformity to the college rules.”4
Henry’s classroom performance varied by subject. He did well in languages (French, Latin, and Greek), labored unevenly in the sciences (taking higher marks in botany and astronomy than in physics and chemistry), and excelled in composition and elocution—the necessary skill set of pre–Civil War statesmen. Ironically, considering his later success as an interpreter of the American past, he proved at this time a diffident student of history. Disinclined to the lecture and recitation mode and perhaps unwilling to exert himself for something less than top place, there is evidence that he purposefully underperformed. His peers considered him intellectually formidable, and the College’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa made him an honorary member; one student, upon receiving an army commission, asked Henry to draft his letter of acceptance. Beyond a small circle of intimates, he more generally mixed well with his colleagues, who were possibly intrigued by his casual flouting of school rules. Apart from the academic routine, Adams contributed essays and book reviews to the student-run Harvard Magazine, made occasional forays into neighboring Boston for much needed dining alternatives, and was initiated into the Hasty Pudding Club, Harvard’s preeminent student organization (and the country’s oldest theatrical society). In its company he acquired the improbable moniker “Alligator” and appeared in several productions, including John Morton Madison’s one-act farce, Lend Me Five Shillings, and The Poor Gentleman, a happy-ending five-act comedy by the British dramatist George Colman the Younger.5
Such episodes and activities drew from Adams a strong sense of camaraderie with several classmates, a bond captured well in his sentimental response, as an upperclassman, to leaving Holworthy Hall. After lovingly enumerating the dormitory’s deficiencies as “the coldest, dirtiest, and gloomiest [quarters] in Cambridge,” he wrote with feeling of how its frugal rooms held certain and special instances of unexpected friendships: “To me it will always be haunted by my companions who have been there, by the books that I have read there, and by a laughing group of bright, fresh faces, that have rendered it sunny in my eyes forever.”6
Though Henry pertly disparaged Harvard in the Education as intellectually archaic, the school did offer certain amenities not to be found elsewhere in America. The English novelist and Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray, former longtime Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton (who, with his brother Jesse, had years earlier nearly killed Andrew Jackson in a Nashville gunfight), and educational pioneer Horace Mann were a few of the notable lecturers brought to Cambridge during Henry’s undergraduate years. The school’s faculty, if uneven, did include several prominent dons, some of whom, like the Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz and the versatile New England poet James Russell Lowell (replacing the nation’s most famous bard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, at the beginning of Henry’s sophomore year), made lasting impressions. Henry later remembered Agassiz’s course on the glacial period and paleontology as “the only teaching that appealed to [my] imagination.”7
Harvard’s ability to draw students from across the country further earned Adams’s appreciation. Nowhere else, outside of perhaps a military academy, was he likely to strike up a friendship with someone like William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee, the ducal second son of then Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee. Many years after graduating, Henry supposed that a shared antipathy to the quickly approaching modern age—dominated by machines and accountants, bankers and bottom lines—made the two classmates temperamentally suited. He called himself “little more fit than the Virginians to deal with a future America which showed no fancy for the past. Already northern society betrayed a preference for economists over diplomats [Adamses] or soldiers [Lees],—one might even call it a jealousy,—against which two eighteenth-century types had little chance to live, and which they had in common to fear.”8 In Lee, Adams recognized a fellow aristocrat similarly burdened by the ghosts of history-laden ancestors. Lee’s paternal grandfather, Maj. Gen. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, had fought effectively in the southern theater of the American Revolution before serving as Georgia’s ninth governor; his maternal grandfather, George Washington Parke Custis, was the step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington. Though an enemy of slavery, Henry nevertheless identified with the slaveholder as a powder-wigged fixture of the past, part of a southern system that, like black bondage, trembled on the edge of extinction.
In his later years, Adams came to see Harvard as performing a kind of intellectual evasion. Anchored in orthodoxy, the College seemed disinclined to grapple with fresh discoveries in the social and hard sciences. Its emphasis on student attendance at religious services and a classics-heavy curriculum harkened back to its Puritan roots, but the next half-century unleashed upon the world—even the neatly trimmed Harvard Yard—Marxism, Fordism (the emergence of mass production in the automobile industry as elsewhere), and evolutionary theory. To be fair, Henry arrived in Cambridge at the tail end of an older scholastic tradition, before men such as Marx and Darwin had published their most influential works. Thus, when he later complained of “not… remember[ing] to have heard the name of Karl Marx mentioned [at Harvard], or the title of Capital,” he was aiming for effect rather than accuracy.9 The first volume of Capital, as he knew, did not appear until 1867; in any case Henry’s copy, held at the Massachusetts Historical Society, has a number of uncut pages, indicating that they remained unread.
He more accurately indicted Harvard for seeking to inculcate its students with the liberal Protestant virtues—“moderation, balance, judgment, restraint”—that mirrored the character of the Cambridge Unitarian clergy.10 This did nothing to prepare Henry and his peers for either the coming carnage of the Civil War or the age of industry and empire that followed. As a culture-shaping institution, Harvard seemed to play a part in a grand conspiracy to defend the idea of a New England conscience hardened in its quasi-Puritan convictions and indisposed to change. Had Henry taken his education, say, in the 1720s, it would likely have lasted him a lifetime, but to graduate as he did in 1858, on the cusp of a radical new age in science and economics, immigration and warfare, raised serious doubts about the very foundations of his training.
In this profoundly influential period (say, 1860–1905), x-rays, radioactivity, and electrons were discovered, and Einstein advanced the theory of special relativity; much of the Western world industrialized, which inspired a new era of imperialism evinced in the so-called scramble for Africa and incursions into Asia. A series of conflicts—the American Civil War, wars of German unification, and the Sino-Japanese War—demonstrated the efficacy of “modern” economies and technologies. Some twenty million immigrants, mainly from southern and eastern European countries, arrived in the United States during the last twenty years of Adams’s life. No doubt he too severely condemned his college in the Education for failing to, in effect, predict the future. And yet, as a probing commentary on the insularity of scholastic institutions, the critique is worth considering.
Adams’s single conspicuous triumph at Harvard came late, when his peers chose him to deliver their Class Day oration, a ceremonial occasion approximately a month before graduation. “This,” he subsequently recalled, “was political as well as literary success, and precisely the sort of eighteenth-century combination that fascinated an eighteenth-century boy.”11 The recognition from his colleagues conformed to a traditional (and distinctly Adams-like) assumption of honor; presumably no horse-trading or special pleading from the penalty-mired candidate marred his elevation. His selection seemed an assurance that the “eighteenth-century” continuities would continue, and from the Quincy perspective that may have been a bigger prize than the oration itself.
A bit before noon, following an ice-cream repast, on a blazing late June day, an audience of faculty and families, students and guests packed into Cambridge’s First Parish Church. “Here all hot—yes roasted, and dripping with perspiration,” one of them wrote, “as we listened to the oration by Henry Adams and the poem by [George W.] Noble—both were good.” Considering the convivial occasion, the address struck a decidedly critical note. Posing as a Puritan, Adams, decked out in de rigueur black gown and looking solemn and grave, attacked the age’s—or at least Boston’s—materialistic bent. And in doing so he vented too against the Unitarian mindset that, so he pressed, had done its best to dilute all wonder, mystery, and experimentation from the human experience. “Man has reduced the universe to a machine,” he complained, and thus failed to recognize “that there are secrets of nature which have puzzled chemist and philosopher even in these days of science, and which still wait for a solution.”12 Conceding nothing to his captive audience, a happy gathering of the secure and the satisfied, he attacked the lazy intellectual assumptions of the New England way:
Some of us still persist in believing that there are prizes to be sought for in life which will not disgust in the event of success.… There are some who believe that this long education of ours, the best that the land can give, was not meant to be thrown away and forgotten; that this nation of ours furnishes the grandest theatre in the world for the exercise of that refinement of mind and those high principles which it is a disgrace to us if we have not acquired.13
In effect, Henry subjected his audience to a sermon, one that raised the uncertain specter of a spiritual breakdown afflicting civilization. It proved to be an anticipatory statement, a minor jeremiad that he would rehearse and repeat over the course of his life in a number of literary genres.
More immediately, however, a newly commenced Adams was barely looking beyond the day and faced the nagging postgraduation problem of identifying a suitable profession; he simply saw no clear path. “Ultimately it is most probable that I shall study and practice law,” he wrote in the class Life-Book, “but where and to what extent is as yet undecided.”14 He wished, in other words, for the rare gift of time before a decisive series of hushed parental conversations and maneuvers quietly cornered him into slipping on an occupational harness. “Law,” like “Harvard,” was reflexive, and he said “law” only because, for the time being, in his last, late collegiate spring, it offered the path of least resistance. More genuinely, if secretly, he had begun to formulate other plans and rather than saunter off to a local attorney’s office to bow before the altar of apprenticeship, he broke in a decidedly different direction. The favorite son, desperate for independence, managed to make his way to Germany.