Back on American soil for the first time in two years, Adams returned to a nation in flux. Much, including the emergence of Free Soil Republicanism and Lincoln’s election, had redefined the political landscape. But Henry had little time to take it all in. He briefly read law in Boston before migrating to Washington as the Governor’s private congressional secretary. All of this transpired over a single dramatic winter in which, shocked at the prospect of a Republican administration, seven Deep South states left the Union. With an unprecedented crisis at hand, these proved to be anxious months for the House of Adams, whose gilded reputation rested on past deeds. As congressional discussions over the country’s future heated up, Charles Francis, now representing Massachusetts’s 3rd District, spoke not simply for his constituents but for his family and, looking especially down the line at Henry and his brothers, its uncertain prospects as well.
The Adamses’ dwindling political status took on a particular resonance during this contentious winter, when Henry and his brother Charles crossed the Potomac one late February day to dine at Arlington House, the plantation home of (an absent) Robert E. Lee and Henry’s Harvard classmate Rooney. Charles later remembered thinking the general’s third daughter, Eleanor, “extremely attractive,” though more significant is the symbolism of these two distinguished antebellum families, gathering on a “dull, murky day,” each approaching the precipice of its own particular oblivion.1 As Henry so attentively noted in the Education, the shifting cultural, economic, and political energies that undermined the nation’s old ruling elite were already at work. This breaking of bread among declining ducal clans gave the day an altogether secular Last Supper dynamic.
The Adams family’s encroaching obsolescence might be equally measured in the Governor’s vain efforts to lead the moderate wing of the Republican Party. If eager to bar slavery from the nation’s western territories, he nevertheless annoyed more radical Republicans like Charles Sumner by proposing conciliation with the South. Putting the Union above all, he worked ceaselessly during the secessionist debates to avert the rise of a southern Confederacy. To Sumner, however, there could be no more compromises. Lincoln had fairly won the White House, carrying eighteen states and capturing nearly 60 percent of the electoral vote. Better to see the slave drivers leave, Sumner believed, than to prop up their long-standing power over the American political system. “If the secession can be restrained to the ‘Cotton States,’ ” he wrote an English friend shortly after the election, “I shall be willing to let them go.”2
Rejecting radical Republicanism, the Governor regarded William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state–designate and a fellow moderate, as the party’s most distinguished statesman. “Alone of all others,” he maintained, “[Seward] had most marked himself as a disciple of the school in which I had been bred myself.”3 Both presumed that most southerners were unsympathetic to secession and given time would make their voices heard. Both believed the border states’ responses were key. Without Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and particularly Virginia, they reasoned, there could be no Confederate nation.
In December 1860 a House committee made up of a single representative from each state was charged with finding a solution to the tangle of issues dividing the sections. Charles Francis, one of the body’s thirty-three members, promptly joined other moderates in proposing a series of concessions to the South. These included admitting the New Mexico Territory into the Union as a slave state, ratifying a constitutional amendment to protect slavery in those states where it currently existed, and vigorously enforcing the country’s controversial fugitive slave laws—which, as noted earlier, bound the citizens of free states to participate in the capture and return of runaways. Considering that the party’s appeal in the North depended on its Free Soil promise to exclude slavery from the territories, the Governor appeared to be asking his fellow Republicans to repudiate their recent victory, indeed their identity. Believing that a series of accommodations would, as he put it, show “sympathy with the hesitating and timid but honest citizens of the slave states,” Charles Francis badly misread both the South and his own party.4
But young Henry, full of family pride, thought just the opposite, supposing his father to be, in this darkening hour, the country’s one essential man—if only he could learn to perform like a politician. “Papa has got to make himself indispensable,” he wrote his mother, Abigail, “not only in the wild-beast pen [of politics], but out of it too.… He doesn’t like the bother and fuss of entertaining and managing people who can’t be reasoned with, and he won’t take the trouble to acquire strength and influence that won’t fall into his mouth.” Now, as the republic teetered on the verge of collapse, Henry believed the Governor’s moment had suddenly arrived. “He’s a growing man,” he confidently wrote his brother Charles in early January, “and will soon have a national fame and power inferior to no one unless it be Seward.”5
In fact, the Governor’s conservative response to the secession crisis spoke of an inability to recognize that the questions of race, regionalism, and states’ rights had grown beyond the control of Congress. He hoped to revisit the old politics practiced in the compromises of 1820 and 1850, as though that sectional status quo still existed. Rather, the determination of southerners to see slavery expand and the refusal of an increasing number of northerners to allow that to happen argued otherwise. Confronted with circumstances they could neither direct nor even fully fathom, the moderates fell into paralysis. Charles Francis later and somewhat lazily blamed the bitter outcome of that winter on an inconvenient calendar: “Our only course in the defenceless position in which we found ourselves was to gain time.” His son Charles, a proud veteran of the war that could not be negotiated away, however, took a different, harder, and more personal line. “My father,” he wrote some years after the Governor’s death, “favored the abandonment of [Fort] Sumter. His horror of civil war was such that I find myself at a loss to fix the point at which he would have made a stand. I am not at all sure he would not have concluded that a peaceable separation was best.”6
If Henry doubted the Governor’s course in Congress, he kept it to himself. It was Sumner, once a dear family friend, now a radical, who epitomized to Adams all that had gone wrong on the Republican side. He subsequently conjectured, and some scholars have followed suit, that the senator’s unwillingness to compromise with the South resulted from the brutal caning he had suffered several years earlier: “his nervous system never quite recovered its tone.” But Henry’s reproach of Sumner more distinctly suggested his own failure to grasp the ethical struggle over slavery. He knew the institution to be wrong, hoped for its eventual extinction, and yet, along with many others, to be sure, drew back from abolitionism’s moral severity and the heightened emotional pitch frequently attending its arguments. One might say that to Henry slavery was a distant sin, while Sumner had formerly been a very real friend. “Not one rebel defection—not even Robert E. Lee’s—cost young Adams a personal pang,” he later wrote, “but Sumner’s struck home.”7
Sumner’s “defection,” however, only accentuated the fact that some few years earlier the Adamses’ political support had shifted to Seward. Like many Republicans, Henry had hoped to see the New York senator elected president in 1860, believing him capable of reaching a binding agreement with the South short of war. Successful leadership on Seward’s part promised further to validate the moderates’ course—and Charles Francis stood second only to Seward, his son supposed, as the exemplar of that school. “If the Governor weathers this storm,” Henry wrote Charles, “he has a good chance of living in the White House some day… [and] the house of Adams may get [its] lease of life renewed.”8 This roseate speculation failed to reckon, however, with several crucial factors: the emergence of Lincoln, the rising political importance of the Middle West (whose favorite sons captured the presidency in every campaign from 1860 to 1880), and the unwillingness of the white Lower South to remain in a Union dominated politically by Republicans.
Fresh off his Italian letters and eager to advance the moderate cause, Henry proposed to write on Congress’s doings during these critical months. Accordingly, family friend and Boston Advertiser publisher Charles Hale agreed to print the opinions of this unusually well-connected if otherwise untried “Washington correspondent.” As the Governor’s private secretary, privy to confidential information, Henry requested anonymity, so the articles were innocent of even the “H.B.A.” byline appended to his Mediterranean dispatches. Thinking about his journalistic role and possibly of other and more consequential roles to come, Henry decided that despite certain benefits in passing as a Brooks or a Johnson, he wished perhaps more than these to be an Adams—he wanted, that is, to count. “I fairly confess that I want to have a record of this winter on file,” he wrote Charles in December. “I… would like to think that a century or two hence when everything else about us is forgotten, my letters might still be read and quoted as a memorial of manners and habits at the time of the great secession of 1860.”9 He then proceeded, between early December and early March, to produce twenty-one epistles for the Advertiser.
Henry, just two years out of Harvard but already eager to engage in public affairs at the highest level, predictably used Hale’s paper to both clarify and amplify the moderate position in Congress—sometimes without much regard for reality. He claimed in one commentary that a southern confederacy under the “moral opposition… of the whole world” promised to implode “before a year was over.” This wild guess of global opprobrium might be dismissed as mere inexperience, though on occasion Adams crossed over into outright fiction. He disingenuously assured his Boston audience, for example, that “the republicans in Congress [were] said to be unanimous” on a policy of “kindness and forbearance to the South, short of a sacrifice of principle.” Certainly this view misrepresented the vital Sumner strain of Republicanism, now deeply involved in shaping party policy. Henry, in fact, promised readers that no fundamental differences separated Seward and Sumner. “So long as the republicans remain united, temperate, and forbearing in tone and manner,” one December editorial argued, “it is thought that there is no real danger for the country.” In other words, if the Republican Party did not split, then neither would the Union. Adopting an equally fantastic attitude, one late January column declared, “The tide is certainly turning… the disunionists are checked and wavering, and it would not take much to turn the scale against them.”10 Actually, five states had already seceded from the Union, with Louisiana and Texas to follow within a few days.
If Henry’s two years abroad offered valuable insight into European conditions, they did nothing to improve his understanding of America’s rapid race to separation. His fealty to the moderate approach staked out by Charles Francis, moreover, dimmed the darkened lens through which he imperfectly read both Sumner and the secessionists. As a historical document, Henry’s contributions to the Advertiser tell us more about moderate Republicanism’s confusion in an increasingly radical period than they do about the intentions, motivations, and maneuvers of the major players who set the terms of debate; among this small circle, Lincoln undoubtedly mattered most.
Accustomed to elite rule in the republic, a snobbish Charles Francis took one look at the new president and his plain wife, Mary Todd, and ran to his diary. “Neither of them,” he wrote, “is at home in this sphere of civilization.” Nominated in March to serve as U.S. minister to the United Kingdom, the Governor, back in New England, returned to Washington to acknowledge his benefactor. Some years later Charles Francis Jr., privy to his father’s private remembrances, recorded the strained interview between the Boston Brahmin and the prairie politician. His account stressed Lincoln’s supposedly awkward and ungainly carriage before the poised Governor, whose education, experience, and patrimony, the younger Charles suggested, deserved a better reception then they received:
Presently a door opened, and a tall, large-featured, shabbily dressed man, of uncouth appearance, slouched into the room. His much-kneed, ill-fitting trousers, coarse stockings, and worn slippers at once caught the eye. He seemed generally ill at ease,—in manner, constrained and shy. The secretary [Seward] introduced the minister [Charles Francis] to the President, and the appointee of the last proceeded to make the usual conventional remarks, expressive of obligation, and his hope that the confidence implied in the appointment he had received might not prove to have been misplaced. They had all by this time taken chairs; and the tall man listened in silent abstraction. When Mr. Adams had finished,—and he did not take long,—the tall man remarked in an indifferent, careless way that the appointment in question had not been his, but was due to the secretary of state, and that it was to “Governor Seward” rather than to himself that Mr. Adams should express any sense of obligation he might feel; then, stretching out his legs before him, he said, with an air of great relief as he swung his long arms to his head:—“Well, governor, I’ve this morning decided that Chicago post-office appointment.” Mr. Adams and the nation’s foreign policy were dismissed together!11
Appropriating the family view, Henry thought Lincoln clumsy, rustic, and decidedly too western. The Harvard in him scorned what he called the “stump oratory” and crabbed education that he associated with Ohio Valley politicians. Seeing Lincoln only once, at the Inaugural Ball, he scored the sixteenth president as anxious, overmatched, and lacking in “apparent force,” nervously clasping at his “white kid gloves.” The future of the republic seemed to Henry a very uncertain thing that evening. By the end of the war, however, he had come to appreciate Lincoln as a vigorous and resolute leader—an attitude subsequently embellished by his deep friendship with John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary and biographer. “Had young Adams been told that his life was to hang on the correctness of his estimate of the new President,” Henry later admitted, “he would have lost.”12
A few weeks after Lincoln’s inaugural, Charles Francis, duly confirmed by the Senate, boarded the Niagara at East Boston and along with Abigail and their three youngest children, Henry, sixteen-year-old Mary, and twelve-year-old Brooks, steamed to England. The increasingly indispensable Henry retained his role as private secretary. Like his ancestors who had served their country in an age rocked by revolutions, the fortunes of war and diplomacy now moved him far from home. Not long returned from his European travels, he again crossed the Atlantic, and would not cross again for seven long years.