Brotherly inspiration and perhaps a bit of brotherly rivalry resulted in Henry’s first published commentary, a series of Italian letters touching upon his travels, hasty impressions of the Peninsula’s politics, and callow reflections of the Risorgimento. The letter’s origins can be traced to a number of winter 1860 Boston Advertiser articles by Charles attacking Congress’s spoils system. Writing under the prim pseudonym “Pemberton,” he praised a small group of House Republicans, including the Governor, for contesting their party’s politics-as-usual choice, one Mr. Defrees, for House printer. The nominee, the reformers claimed, bought the recommendation “on a promise of future campaign funds.” After a number of inconclusive ballots, the tainted candidate retired from the field and a presumably more reputable Mr. Ford from Ohio claimed the position. Charles predictably touted his father’s efforts in the Advertiser as nobly disinterested and above politics, precisely the kind of leadership needed by a nation suddenly on the edge of separation.1
Slavery, the principal source of this sectional discord, was long subject to a series of settlements and compromises now coming undone. In 1857 a Supreme Court comprising mainly southerners controversially affirmed the rights of slaveholders to take their chattel into the western territories. Two years later, in something of a violent counterstroke, nearly two dozen abolitionists led by John Brown captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in a bid to initiate an armed revolt among slaves. The assault began on October 16, 1859; two days later marines under the command of Robert E. Lee killed or captured several of the raiders, and on December 2 Brown, convicted of treason, murder, and inciting slaves to rebellion, was taken to a scaffold surrounded by soldiers and hanged in Charles Town, Virginia.2 On that very day, an in-transit Governor neared the nation’s capital, on his way to taking his place in the U.S. Congress.
His family, surrounded in Quincy by sundry memories and memorials of their kin’s service to community and country, wondered if some intricate destiny now called upon the Governor. Henry seemed to believe so. Across the Atlantic, he declared Charles’s articles “a great success,” thinking they augured well for their father’s rising political profile. Currently the occupant of a mere congressional seat, the Governor, only in his early fifties, appeared to be coming into his own. Perhaps now, in the uncertain electoral climate of 1860, might he find his way back to the White House? And might the Adamses, after a generation of slaveholder ascendency and Jacksonian Democracy, matter once more? “We must all feel the importance of this start,” Henry wrote to his mother shortly after learning of the “Pemberton” letters. “It’s the first declaration of the colors we sail under.… We young ones don’t count much now, but it may at least please papa to know that those who are nearest and dearest to him, go heart and soul after him on this path.”3
Ready to take leave of Dresden and stimulated by Charles’s example, Henry proposed now to see his own work in print. Moving south, he planned to pass through Vienna, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Palermo, and Sorrento, eager to record his impressions of people, places, and politics. He carefully, somewhat shyly, and a bit self-consciously spelled out to Charles what he hoped to do:
As you know, I propose to leave Dresden on the 1st of April for Italy. It has occurred to me that this trip may perhaps furnish material for a pleasant series of letters, not written to be published but publishable in case they were worth it.… Now, you will understand, I do not propose to write with the wish to publish at all hazards; on the contrary I mean to write private letters to you, as an exercise for myself, and it would be of all things my last wish to force myself into newspapers with a failure for my first attempt. On the other hand if you like the letters and think it would be in my interest to print them, I’m all ready.4
Charles liked the letters.
Traveling through a succession of Italian states convulsed by revolution, Henry forwarded to his brother nine communications that were, with some slight editing, published in the Boston Courier between April 30 and July 13. The pieces included touristy reflections on art, architecture, and cuisine, mingled with weightier if understandably uneven observations on the Italian drive for unification. These were historic weeks in which the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi led a small corps of volunteers (the famous Expedition of the Thousand) from Genoa to the port of Marsala on the westernmost point of Sicily; its improbable victories culminated in the taking of Palermo, the island’s largest city, and in the subsequent collapse of the Bourbon-ruled two Sicilies. The creation of the Kingdom of Italy came as a result the following year. For a brief time, the little Courier could claim some journalistic distinction in having an American observer reporting firsthand on the birth pangs of a new nation.
Henry’s initial letter to Charles, dated April 5 and published on the 30th, detailed its author’s last and altogether enjoyable evening in Dresden. What stands out is Henry’s obvious infatuation with the colorful pageantry of high Court culture. While assuming the skeptical tone of the seasoned traveler, he more clearly took pleasure that night in performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; the city’s Royal Orchestra (founded in the 1540s and conducted that evening by Carl August Krebs) partnered with a chorus, Henry estimated, of some three hundred. In the royal box sat King John of Saxony and his handsome wife, Amalie Auguste, Princess of Bavaria and Queen of Saxony. Henry’s admiring, though not uncritical, interest in monarchical privilege marked several of his Courier communications that spring—a curious absorption for a supposedly rock-ribbed New England republican.5
The aristocrat pitch of the first letter, written from Vienna, is further evident in Henry’s stumbling understanding of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its apparent success melding peoples of differing nationalities (Germans, Magyars, Poles, etc.), languages (Hungarian, Croatian, Czech, etc.), and religions (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, etc.) seemed to him argument enough to justify the Hapsburg Monarchy’s hold over such a vast territory. Only surface-sensitive to the many and intricate tensions that underlay the conservative regimes in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, he thought the empire likely to reform itself and doubted democracy’s capacity to do better. As he put it, “The Austrian government is a mass of faults and evils, but even republics are not always wholly pure. It is fairer and pleasanter to trust that under the long and steady pressure from within and without, the nation and the government may gradually be forced forward step by step without marking its course by more blood.”6 Henry’s “trust” in a benign process of central European liberalization turned out, of course, to be colossally misplaced. Continued ethnic tensions in the sharply divided Hapsburg Empire proved to be, with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in July 1914, the immediate catalyst for the First World War, the collapse of several empires, and the spilling of far “more blood” than any late nineteenth-century American could have imagined.
Adams’s second letter, also carrying a Vienna dateline, reviewed his travels to Trieste and Austrian-occupied Venice. In the interest of capturing local color for his Anglo Boston readership (and perhaps exercising his untried hand at humor), he chastised the small navy of noisome gondoliers who “quarreled” over customers “as badly as Irish hackmen.” Visiting the obligatory Venetian retreats, Henry trooped about stately palazzos and crumbling churches, took in Titians and cool evening crypts. And like a good countinghouse Puritan, he marveled a little dubiously at the city’s apparent lack of economic initiative, which he identified in its leisurely pace. “The idea that I got,” he informed Courier readers, “was that every man in Venice keeps a shop, and every one of them loses money by it. And this must be tolerably near the truth.… All hard at work doing nothing… all lazy as they well can be.” Despite holding such an unabashedly Beacon Hill opinion on the unsure virtues of “doing nothing,” Henry took rather easily to the relaxed environment, spending his days sitting in the warm Adriatic sun, sipping chocolate, smoking cigarettes, and listening to regimental bands while watching the inevitable beggars shuffle along the charming Riva degli Schiavoni quay.7
From Venice, Adams passed through Padua, Ferrara, and Bologna en route to Florence, where he moved once more in the privileged company of kings and counts. Enjoying the horse races on a track just outside the city, he saw the arrival of royals in a bright show of carriages and heard the rhythmic clapping of hands accompanied by shouts of “Evviva Vittorio Emmanuele!” when King Victor Emman-uel II appeared dressed in a shooting jacket and looking, so Henry told Charles, “like a very vulgar and coarse fancy-man.” The following day, while attending the opera, Adams caught site of the Count of Cavour, “the greatest man in Europe,” he boasted, and certainly one of the unification movement’s acclaimed statesmen. He stared in respect “through [his] glass for five minutes steadily.”8 These leading figures of the Risorgimento impressed Henry as modern statesmen who personified the kind of first-family ruling regime he wished for his own country.
While in Florence, Henry visited his sister Louisa (Loo) and her husband, Charles Kuhn, then in the midst of a prolonged grand tour of the Continent. Having taken easily to European manners, customs, and certain social freedoms, Loo loved Italy, lived in the handsome Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, and, as a privileged Victorian, surrounded herself with a staff of smartly attired servants. “I am thought very French,” she bragged at this time of the Anglo Florentine community’s response to her fine Paris-made apparel. “She was not meant for America,” Henry once said of his sister. “She ought to have been an English aristocrat.” Though Loo, too, had grown up in the Adams hothouse, her sex guaranteed a different set of experiences than her brothers’. Despite a lively intelligence, she would not go to Harvard, would not train for a profession, and would never write for the Boston papers. She found herself, rather, maneuvered into something of an idler’s existence, spending money, decorating apartments, and ordering about the help. That Henry recognized the fundamental unfairness of his sister’s inert condition is evident in his anxious comment to their mother, “To me hers seems a life thrown away. That is, she has no object to it.”9
Calling on Loo for a week in April, Henry commented favorably to their mother on the couple’s convivial Florentine routine: “They’ve charming rooms, and seem to have acquaintances in abundance.” Perhaps reflecting on his own desire for flight, he defended his sister’s choice to live abroad: “I have no doubt she is and always will be happier here than anywhere else, not because it’s gay or because it’s amusing, but because one is free and one’s own master.” In his later years, Henry remembered this brief Italian interlude as having enlarged his view of women. An ocean from home, he realized Loo for the first time as an adult and reveled in her presence. “She was the first young woman he was ever intimate with,” he wrote in the Education. She was “quick, sensitive, wilful, or full of will, energetic, sympathetic and intelligent enough to supply a score of men with ideas,—and he was delighted to give her the reins;—to let her drive him where she would. It was his first experiment in giving the reins to a woman, and he was so much pleased with the results that he never wanted to take them back.”10
Reluctantly parting with Loo, Henry moved on to Rome, where he wrote his fifth Courier letter. It was now mid-May and the ancient city’s eloquence heightened before the deepening colors of a delicious spring. Succumbing willingly to its many charms, Henry remembered his fortnight in Rome as “the happiest fourteen days known ever to have existed.” His interest in the Gothic world, most apparent in the last decades of his life, appears to have first stirred during this magical season. “The lights and shadows were still mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive,” he later wrote. “No sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought and feeling.” Strolling about the city he encountered a splendid medley of unearthed ruins and decaying churches so agreeably different from the scrubbed spirituality of Puritan New England. Here he felt at ease, able for a few days to drop the Adams pretense and sun himself in a weightless anonymity. “One’s emotions in Rome,” he observed, with a mixture of peace and relief, “were one’s private affair.”11
Rome held one further virtue for Henry: it coaxed him to read Edward Gibbon’s sublime History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (six volumes, 1776–89). A visit to the Eternal City in October 1764 inspired Gibbon to take on the tome. At first he contemplated writing a history of Rome, later shifting his perspective to the empire. Henry carried with him a popular Murray’s Handbook that contained a selection from Gibbon’s autobiography, Memoirs of My Life, in which the Englishman recounted (after a bit of doctoring for dramatic effect) his sudden decision to write the History. The moment arrived, he recalled, “in the close of the evening, as [he] sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan Friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, on the ruins of the Capital.” Henry absorbed these affecting words amid Rome’s arresting backdrop and wrote to Charles of their power: “I read Gibbon. Striking, very. Do you know, after long argument and reflexion, I feel much as if perhaps some day I too might come to anchor like that. Our house needs a historian in this generation and I feel strongly tempted by the quiet and sunny prospect, while my ambition for political life dwindles as I get older. This came up once before in our discussion. What do you think? Law and literature.”12
Leaving Rome, Adams continued south to Naples, where he improbably met Garibaldi. An audience with Pennsylvania Whig Joseph Ripley Chandler, the American minister to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, won Henry a seat on the USS Iroquois, an American sloop-of-war embarking for Palermo to protect the lives and property of U.S. citizens. “He was kindly treated,” Adams candidly wrote of himself, “not for his merit but for his name.”13 Given the nominal task of delivering dispatches to the Iroquois’s commander, James Shedden Palmer, Henry accompanied the ship and its crew to Palermo, where, presumably “for his name,” he managed to finagle an interview with the great Garibaldi himself. In the eighth Courier letter, he evenly assessed the man:
The party was five in all, officers and civilians, and the visit was informal; indeed Garibaldi seems to discourage all formality and though he has just now all the power of an Emperor, he will not even adopt the state of a General.… He rose as we came in, and came forward shaking hands with each of the party as we were introduced. He had his plain red shirt on, precisely like a fireman, and no mark of authority. His manner is… very kind and off-hand, without being vulgar or demagogic. He talked with each of us and talked perfectly naturally; no stump oratory and no sham.14
But what did Garibaldi, speaking in French with a few words of broken English dropped in, actually say? What striking observations on war and revolution did he have to share? According to Henry the conversation never lifted beyond the pedestrian: “As for what he said, it was of no particular interest to anyone, at least as far as it was said to me.”15 In another respect, however, the evening proved for Henry unforgettable. Wandering through Palermo’s mess of barricades and broken streets, shouting crowds and celebratory cannon fire, he witnessed a revolution as something more than a textbook recitation blandly devoted to an antique Boston and peopled by an antique ancestor.
That May, while Henry ambled about Italy, Republicans gathered in Chicago and awarded their party’s presidential nomination to the Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The Adamses, having supported New York’s Senator William Henry Seward, a protégé, as a young Whig, of John Quincy Adams, were greatly disappointed. The Governor and his sons looked upon Lincoln as a novice from nowhere, too “small” to tackle the immense task ahead. “In ’56,” Henry reported to Courier readers with thick sarcasm, “we had the satisfaction of rejecting our Garibaldi [John C. Frémont, opposed to slavery’s extension, lost that year’s presidential election to James Buchanan], and now in ’60 we have done still better; we have deserted our Cavour [Seward].”16
On this snappish note did Henry’s Italian letters come to an end. Leaving the Peninsula he returned north, spending much of the summer in Paris. “It’s a great life,” he glowed to “dearest mamma” of his daily round of restaurants and theater, “varied, exciting and elevating.”17 From Paris, he made his way to the coast and from the coast finally back to Quincy. In a few weeks there would be a presidential election and shortly after that a growing momentum among several of the southern states to leave the Union. Moving about Italy, Henry had watched a nation being built; in America he witnessed one coming undone. What his future held that autumn of 1860 he could not divine. Even as a third son his days and choices were not yet his own.