Charles Francis must have wondered what the London appointment meant for his future. Reelected to a secure House seat just a few months earlier, he might conceivably have remained in Congress, served its Republican majority with distinction, and risen in its ranks. The diplomatic post, however, also suggested a perfectly respectable path to higher office. No fewer than five American ministers to the Court of St. James’s, including two Adamses, had subsequently captured the presidency. The Governor’s fortunes, in any case, were much on Henry’s mind. His correspondence with Charles, now in the army and quartered on Castle Island in Boston Harbor, indicates a shared scrutiny of their father’s prospects, a natural curiosity considering that the older man’s reputation and connections might well determine their own.
On the very May day the Adamses arrived in London, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of neutrality “between the… contending parties” that cautiously recognized the belligerent rights of “certain States styling themselves the Confederate States of America.” Henry and his father probably learned of the Queen’s actions the following day as they breakfasted and perused the city’s newspapers from their rooms at Maurigy’s Hotel.1 Combined with the Confederate’s bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, in early April and the Second French Empire’s ensuing issuance of its own neutrality declaration in June, Charles Francis’s role quickly narrowed to a single supreme aim: preventing England from extending recognition to the Confederate nation. If that happened he might be instructed by the Lincoln government to break diplomatic relations with London, a move likely to lead to hostilities. In short, the outcome of the war between rival republican armies in North America depended not merely upon soldiers and generals but on the adroitness with which Charles Francis, suddenly the country’s most vital diplomat, serving in its most crucial diplomatic post, conducted his affairs.
In working to prevent Britain from recognizing the Confederate government, the Governor sought to keep both an old and a new threat to the United States from making common cause. This proved immensely difficult during the first year and a half of the war as the cautious Palmerston ministry in London inched toward intervention. The sympathy often expressed by Britain’s governing classes for the southern slaveholding oligarchy indicated, to both Charles Francis and Henry, its fundamental and long-standing contempt for representative government. In some ways it must have struck both men as a revisitation of earlier Anglo-American conflicts—the Revolution of 1776 and the War of 1812—in which the emerging strength of New World democracy threatened the staying power of Old World aristocracy. Henry’s enmity easily fixated on Britain, with its unsinkable navy and its bullying colonial system, as a familiar, traditional foe. “Young Adams,” he wrote years later, “neither hated nor wanted to kill his friends the rebels, while he wanted nothing so much as to wipe England off the earth.”2
Henry’s resentment may perhaps be further understood as a shadowy extension of his embarrassed inability to ease his way into polite English society. How many times had he arrived at late evening balls in his best dress only to be indifferently announced, dully received, and duly cut adrift into the greater pell-mell, to linger conversationless for a few humiliating hours until slipping away unnoticed? Exasperated, he described these occasions as “beastly repulsive” and “solemn stupid crushes.” He thought them mere “matters of necessity” among London’s elite, simply “one of the duties of life” and thus lacking “the gaiety of our balls” in America. Neither did he appreciate having to shell out “upwards of $200.00”—some $5,500 in current dollars—for a sober Court suit. Accustomed at home to the privileges of a sparkling pedigree, Henry discovered in his new environment that his name counted for very little. “London society is so vast,” he complained to Charles, “that the oldest habitués know only their own sets, and never trouble themselves even to look at anyone else.”3 Something of a practiced snob, Henry realized in London what real snobs were and felt unusually common in its immense, intricate, and capricious hierarchy.
His discontent with English society almost certainly had something additionally to do with his awkward invisibility before its women. As in Germany, he seemed unable to enter into light, playful, flirtatious situations—a limitation suggested in the way he habitually intellectualized problems and analyzed personalities. He inclined to dissect first and indulge afterward. “From the educational point of view,” he later wrote of this period, the women of London “could give nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they became very interesting—very charming,—to the man of fifty. The young American was not worth the young Englishwoman’s notice, and never received it.”4
Henry’s mood in London only darkened after learning that a Union Army under Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell suffered a humiliating defeat in late July at the Battle of Bull Run in Fairfax County, Virginia. The largest and costliest contest in American history to this time—the engagement featured some thirty-six thousand poorly trained and in some instances badly led troops—demonstrated the Confederacy’s ability to sustain an army in the field and to protect its government. Suddenly it seemed possible, perhaps even likely, that hostilities might last for months if not years. “If this happens again,” Henry wrote shortly after the battle, “farewell to our country for many a day.”5
Unsure of his still vaguely defined role as the Governor’s private secretary and eager—so he supposed—to enter the fight, Henry implored Charles to secure him a commission. “I am the youngest and the most independent of all others,” he wrote his brother, “and I claim the right to go as younger son if on no other grounds.” But Henry’s moods waxed hot and cold during this anxious period, and just a month later he asked Charles to ignore his earlier note. Now he thought it entirely likely that the Lincoln government, with evidence that the British consul at Charleston had quietly conducted negotiations with the Confederacy, might threaten to make war on Britain, and that possibility amplified the importance of the American minister’s position. The pace at the Court soon picked up and along with it Henry’s spirits. “I am,” he then beamed to his brother, “absolutely necessary here.”6
While working closely with the Governor, Henry assumed a growing role in the American legation, and this caused no little irritation on the part of Benjamin Moran, a career official stationed at the embassy since 1853. Eighteen years Henry’s senior, Moran thought the young man little more than a well-petted arriviste. In February 1863 several English cities sent addresses to the American delegation supporting Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had declared the freedom of “all persons held as slaves” within rebellious states, excepting those areas already under northern control. Believing that the embassy’s old hands should have acknowledged the communiqués, Moran fumed when they were given to Henry. “It is quite evident that Mr. Adams has determined to push his son to the front whenever he can,” he informed his journal, “and this is the first open move. The boy has no business to do these things and Mr. Adams knows it.” Moran goes on in the diary to detail with some unfiltered acerbity Henry’s constant “meddling” into the delegation’s affairs, calling him “pompous” and “assuming” and insisting that if “there is much discontent [in the embassy]… it all comes from [the minister] having his son here.”7
Not above belittling Henry’s evident social aspirations, Moran gaily noted his adversary’s embarrassment when uninvited to a London city ball in honor of the Prince of Wales. He described Henry as something of a sneering tourist who had misread the cordial hospitality extended to him by the city’s elite and, having let his petty irritation show, now found himself understandably dropped. No doubt Moran had an axe to grind, and yet a perusal of Henry’s correspondence at this time gives every indication that he struggled with competing impulses, finding himself both attracted to and wary of English aristocratic life. “The tone of people here is insufferable to me,” he wrote Charles in early 1862. “I lose my temper, or get sulky, and as for pleasure, don’t know what it is. How is one to make friends when friends are only ball-room acquaintances. Such friends bore me.”8
But this rich, sprawling, and complex environment more favorably produced a thousand bright amenities that soon drew, after a fitful and uneven start, Henry’s interest. Dining and concerts—a table at the Star and Garter, a convivial few hours at the Argyll Rooms—offered special opportunities to congregate among the city’s elect and to measure one’s progress. Adams shared crowded conversations with Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, met the narrative painter Edward Matthew Ward, and ran into the occasional exiled revolutionary—the French socialist Louis Blanc, for one. Reflecting on a particularly joyful spring 1863 gathering, he wrote Charles, “All were people of a stamp, you know; as different from the sky-blue, skim-milk of the ball-rooms, as good old burgundy is from syrup-lemonade. I had a royal evening; a feast of remarkable choiceness, for the meats were very excellent good, the wines were rare and plentiful, and the company was of earth’s choicest.”9
Such associations Adams embraced fully, freely, and perhaps a little naïvely. He enthused over a several-day stay at Cambridge (“It is astonishing what good fellows these gowned individuals may be, and how well they do live”), joined the small St. James’s Club (“I have at last become a Club man”), and more generally took to a routine of sociable pleasures. He accompanied his sister Mary to Ascot “and did the races,” made the acquaintance of numerous “stray Americans and stately English,” and attended any number of balls, fêtes, and house parties. Vacations were opportunities for travel, and Henry, typically with his mother and junior siblings in tow, “did,” over a number of seasons, Scotland, Paris, Rome, and Baden-Baden. The first he disagreeably declared “too uniform in its repulsive bareness”; the last, an ancient spa town in southwestern Germany, he called “morally… delicious. The females one sees, are enough to make one’s hair stand out in all directions.”10
At its best, London’s throbbing multiplicity gave Adams an attractive alternative to Boston, to lawyering, and to pragmatic America’s suspicion of artistic aptitude and literary ambition. The city positively moved. Its insatiable appetite for urbanization absorbed neighboring boroughs, including Bromley and Sutton, Harrow and Havering; its railways spread about the countryside, and in 1863, during Henry’s second London year, the first lines of its Underground—using gas-lit wooden carriages to convey passengers by steam locomotives—opened. With some three million residents, London more than trebled the number of New Yorkers.
Amid all of this eclectic energy Adams’s friendship with Charles Milnes Gaskell, a highly educated gentleman and Liberal Party politician, proved perhaps most instructive, most satisfying. Four years Henry’s junior, Gaskell had read classics at Cambridge, moved easily among lettered circles, and, as one source notes, “took his place in the British liberal establishment with an ease and assurance that contrasted with the chanciness of American careers.”11 Adams appears to have instantly appreciated Gaskell—whom he met in 1863 at a breakfast given by Sir Henry Holland, formerly physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria—and the two began a warm friendship spanning a half-century. Their reunions sometimes transpired at Wenlock Abbey, a restored late fifteenth-century prior’s house now the Gaskell family’s Shropshire seat in the West Midlands. Henry reported to Charles of his first impressionable visit to the place:
Such a curious edifice I never saw.… I dined in a room where the Abbot or the Prior used to feast his guests; a hall on whose timber roof, and great oak rafters, the wood fire threw a red shadow forty feet above our heads. I slept in a room whose walls were all stone, three feet thick, with barred, square Gothic windows and diamond panes; and at my head a small oak door opened upon a winding staircase in the wall, long since closed up at the bottom, and whose purpose is lost.12
Recalling his entrée into the charming social world inhabited by “Carlo” (as he came to call Gaskell), Adams later described this period as “a golden time for me,” one that “altered my whole life.”13
More than one-third of Henry’s Harvard class fought in the Civil War, and there were sober moments in London when a guilty conscience gnawed upon the safely placed private secretary. In the early summer of 1863, with Grant’s frustrated army stalled during a long siege at the gates of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Lee’s Confederates marching north into Pennsylvania, Henry lamented to Charles, “I am becoming more and more uneasy and discontented. It hardly seems consistent with self-respect in a man to turn his back upon all his friends and all his ambitions, during such a crisis as this, only for the sake of conducting his mother and sister to the opera.”14 But Henry’s idle musings of military duty, let alone glory, were emotions of the moment. Despite the random pang of self-reproach, he had fallen in love with London, enjoyed its outstanding energy, and would have a difficult time readjusting to the comparatively unpolished American arena, let alone stumbling about the muggy Virginia wilderness in an ill-fitting blue flannel sack coat hoping very much not to be shot. He acknowledged all of this to Charles in a string of mocking exclamations:
Though I grumble at my position here and want to go home, [I] feel at times that I don’t know what I say, in making my complaints. I want to go into the army! to become a second lieutenant in an infantry regiment somewhere in the deserts of the South! I who for two years have lived a life of intellectual excitement, in the midst of the most concentrated society of the world, and who have become so accustomed to it that I should wither into nothing without it! Why, the thing’s absurd! Even to retire to a provincial life in Boston would be an experiment that I dread to look forward to! But for me to go into the army is ridiculous!15
No doubt Charles agreed with his brother’s self-important self-assessment. Introverted, intellectual, and indoor-minded, Henry seemed well suited to the patient parlor game of diplomatic service. It strains the imagination to place him in Charles’s position during these critical years, that of a cavalry officer commanding men and barking out orders. Even so, one might make a case that Henry’s London years, for all of their “concentrated society” appeal, did the young man at least some small harm. He took, that is, perhaps too easily to British airs, snobberies, and social graces. The strong inborn sense of Boston-based superiority already in his possession only ossified during this period, hardening into a pronounced and not altogether attractive facet of his personality.
Perhaps this is the reason why Charles, making his first tour of London in 1864 while on military leave, worried for Henry’s future. The day after the brothers strolled about St. Paul’s Cathedral and enjoyed “the excellent stout” at the Mitre Tavern, Charles, writing to a family friend in Boston, described Henry, whom he had not seen for three years, as “a very aged man. He is more changed than any of the rest of the family.… [He] philosophizes, and seeks the society of the profound and had better return to America as soon as my father can spare him.”16 Only in his late twenties, Henry had grown prematurely bald, his beard already graying, and Charles noted each change of face and feature. He seemed even more struck by his younger brother’s fascination with the better sort, perhaps concerned that London had proven after all a corrupting influence, an emphatic temptation to simple Quincy’s polite pieties.