The call of multiple missions—to aid the Governor, to commence a career, and to save war-torn America—gave form to Henry’s English existence. As an Adams he naturally sought the knight’s armor of a sufficiently sharpened pen. Invited by New York Times editor Henry Jarvis Raymond to serve as the paper’s London correspondent, he tirelessly sent more than thirty dispatches across the Atlantic between June 1861 and January 1862. Because of his sensitive position as the private secretary–cum-son of the American minister, Henry concealed his dangerous authorship. The essays, emphasizing political and diplomatic affairs, typically carried generic titles—“American Topics in England,” “American Questions in England,” and “Matters at London”—that belied the strained nature of U.S.-British relations. Collectively they somewhat wishfully argued that liberal Britain, having emancipated its immense West Indies empire a generation earlier (1833), must now support free labor in the United States. But as the first year of the war closed with southern armies as yet unsubdued, Henry grew increasingly disappointed in England’s willingness to entertain the prospect of planter independence. “Neutrality in a struggle like this,” he wrote in one provocative dispatch, “is a disgrace.”1
Adams’s seven-month run as a Times contributor ended abruptly after his name appeared in the byline of an independent piece—“A Visit to Manchester: Extracts from a Private Diary”—published in the December 16, 1861, Boston Daily Courier. Encouraged by Charles to “look into the cotton supply question… and try to persuade the English that our [Yankee] blockade [against southern shipping] is their interest,” he had traveled north to Manchester, interviewing the city’s textile barons but seeking more generally to register the working classes’ support for the Union cause. In the article, however, a jejune Henry, only twenty-three, indulged in a rather gratuitous swipe at London, the glittering oasis so often indifferent to his existence. “It is still the fashion” in Manchester, he wrote, “for the hosts to see that their guests enjoy themselves,” while in London “the guests shift for themselves, and a stranger had better depart at once so soon as he has looked at the family pictures.”2 He supposed this invidious comparison to be anonymous, but the Courier’s editor, oblivious to the delicacies involved, artlessly blew his cover. London’s journalists promptly filed their knives.
Most notably, a London Times editorial made sport of Henry, suggesting that the workings of a truly cosmopolitan society were as yet beyond his untutored acuity. Perhaps, the writer purred, if young Adams but “persevere[d] in frequenting soirees and admiring ‘family pictures’ ” he might someday come to appreciate “the gay world of our metropolis.” Outfoxed, Henry complained to Charles, “The Courier in putting my name to my ‘Diary’ has completely used me up. To my immense astonishment and dismay I found myself this morning sarsed through a whole column of the Times, and am laughed at by all England.”3 One wonders, however, if the “sarsed” diarist might have privately relished the attention—noticed at last, important enough to briefly be the object of a London editorialist’s sarcasm.
For good measure, a few Americans piled on as well. Moran, his critic at the legation, delighted in the public drubbing: “We have had a little fun at his expense, and I have told him that it is not every boy… who can in 6 mos. residence here extort a leader from The Times.” More than a momentary humiliation, Henry feared that some inveterate scanner of English newspapers, sensitive to language, might connect the author of the Manchester essay to the New York Times dispatches. Such a revelation would, he feared, compromise Charles Francis’s London labors while forcing an awkward père et fils encounter—the Governor having known nothing of his son’s moonlighting. “I have wholly changed my system,” a reformed Henry anxiously assured his brother, “and having given up all direct communication with the public, am engaged in stretching my private correspondence as far as possible.”4 No more dispatches left London.
While writing for the Times, Henry’s thoughts frequently turned to the question of emancipation in America. “I am an abolitionist,” he imprecisely wrote Charles in October 1861, making no distinction between gradualists (his position) and immediatists (the position of Sumner and other radicals). “We must wait,” he radiated a patrician smugness, “till the whole country has time to make the same advance that we have made within the last six months.” Wildly overestimating the efficacy of Union military forces operating in the Chesapeake, he thought a “dispersed or captured… main southern army” in Virginia quite likely quite soon. But what then?—what to do with Virginia’s slaves? He feared “a new explosion” between the sections if the “extreme abolitionists,” as he called them, insisted on black freedom. “Emancipation,” he told one correspondent, “cannot be instantaneous.”5
In place of immediatism, Henry thought that the Lincoln government would do well, following military victory, to “found free colonies in the south,” thus emulating the Port Royal Experiment in which thousands of former slaves worked the captured Sea Islands cotton plantations off the South Carolina coast. He envisioned a great colonizing wave of Yankee power and purpose somehow erasing the racial caste past. “The old soldiers with their grants of land, their families, their schools, churches and Northern energy,” he wrote Charles in early 1862, would surely make “common cause with the negroes in gradually sapping the strength of the slave-holders.” He believed that “year after year” the impact of “new industry and free institutions” linking “the Atlantic, the Gulf, the Mississippi and the Tennessee” promised to make slavery but a bitter memory: “and the old crime shall be expiated and the whole social system of the South reconstructed.”6 Never did he imagine—from a plush London lodging—the desperate years of battlefield campaigning to come or the brutal Jim Crowism that proved impervious to the grand plans of “Northern energy.”
Beyond the practical implications of emancipation, another and seemingly more distant southern question captured Henry’s attention while in London: the problematic narratives of John Smith (1580–1631). Soldier, explorer, and colonial governor, Smith, as every ten-year-old knew, helped establish Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. More than simply conducting an exercise in textual analysis, Adams took aim in his research at one of the South’s original icons. To reduce Smith’s reputation might vicariously diminish the status of all “cavaliers” who claimed him as a patriarch of sorts. The idea came to Henry after the Boston historian John Gorham Palfrey raised doubts about Smith’s famous account of his rescue in 1608 by Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, a leader of the Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians. Presumably the young princess threw herself between Smith, his head pressed down upon a stone, and a warrior about to club him to death in a ritual ceremony. Impressed, her father spared the lucky Englishman’s life. After a few hours of research at the British Museum in October 1861, Henry began preparing a paper designed to demolish Smith’s credibility—“the ancient liar,” he called him. “I hardly know whether I ought not to be ashamed of myself for devoting myself to a literary toy like this, in these times,” he wrote Palfrey, “when I ought to be helping or trying to help the great cause.” But as a self-ascribed “social failure” unable to fire off any more dispatches to New York, he had time on his hands. “So perhaps the thing is excusable, especially as it is in some sort a flank, or rather a rear attack, on the Virginia aristocracy, who will be utterly graveled by it if it is successful.”7
Henry sent a copy of the completed essay, “Captaine John Smith,” to Palfrey in early 1863; due to authorial second thoughts it remained unpublished until, under Palfrey’s prodding, appearing four years later in the North American Review. The piece, propagandistic in temper and intent, opens with a predictably deflating contrast: Smith is dismissed as a poor composite of the piratical line, a Sir Walter Raleigh redux “on a much lower level.” Adams then launches into a comparison of Smith’s memoir, A True Relation by Captain John Smith (1608), with his later study, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). It is in the second manuscript that Smith included the dramatic Pocahontas story, and its absence in the first history led Henry to reject it outright as a tall tale. His antisouthernisms come through in various pointed remarks—“Smith’s character was always a matter of doubt,” “his career in Virginia terminated disastrously”—and in a derisory observation: “Families of the highest claim to merit trace their descent from the Emperor’s daughter that saved the life of Captain John Smith.” Presumably the members of these high-tidewater clans could connect their blood to the celebrated young Indian sovereign and her English husband, John Rolfe. Of course in attacking Smith’s character and questioning Pocahontas’s posterity, Henry more broadly undermined the founding article of southern history—the story of the noble “savages,” the beautiful princess, and the brave Elizabethan adventurer—as a mere creation myth. Pocahontas’s 1616 “visit to England,” he insisted, “made her the most conspicuous figure in Virginia, and romantic incidents in her life were likely to be created, if they did not already exist, by the exercise of the popular imagination.”8
Though Adams took an occasional slap at southern sensibilities while in London, he devoted far more of his time and energy to the study and criticism of America’s representative form of government. In this endeavor his primary tutors included the slightly built French gentleman-scholar Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), best remembered today for authoring the influential treatise Democracy in America, and the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), whom he once called “about the ablest man in England.” Writing to Charles in the spring of 1863, Henry described these theorists as “the two high priests of our faith.” He agreed with their shared conviction that democratic societies require a small elite—primarily of the best educated—to add distinction, expertise, and tone. In Tocquevillian terms, the “best government is not that in which all have share, but that which is directed by the class of the highest principle and intellectual ambition.”9 No doubt Henry imagined himself a future elect in this select club. Something of a backward-looking faith, it harkened to the deferential politics once the bread and butter of the early American republic, when men like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson could count on being recognized and rewarded as the “better sort.” The rise of a more inclusive democratic sprit, beginning in the 1810s with a rising suffrage in the new western states and running through the populistic age of Jackson, pointed to a shifting direction in statecraft that never sat well with Henry.
Like Tocqueville and Mill, Adams understood the emergence of large-scale democracies as an inevitable historical outcome. Accordingly, he read the American Civil War as positive proof that representative government’s triumph over a pecking order of planters demonstrated the resilience and self-correcting nature of a people’s republic. Under proper guidance, he presumed, America might yet fulfill the promise of its Revolution. But this would necessitate the cultivation of a learned, disciplined, and disinterested civil service class that stood outside the ugly scrum of sectionalism, moneymaking, and partisanship. Henry put his finger on the problem when he wrote Charles, “What we want, my dear boy, is a school. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country. A national school of our own generation.” Existing cultural and educational institutions had failed to cultivate such an elite. Harvard proved too parochial, Washington too political, and New York too commercial. Henry sensed the impossibility of his plea when he acknowledged to Charles that such a school was precisely “what America has no power to create.”10
Much influenced by the tenor of what he took to be London’s aristocratic public-spiritedness, Henry drafted an article lamenting the lack of such patrician resolve in his native land. Titled “Men and Things in Washington” and published in the November 1869 Nation, it conveyed his disappointment that the American capital city remained, nearly seventy years into its existence, a sleepy, provincial, and altogether dull center of arts, letters, and society. One could find no satisfactory salons or clubs, no distinguished symphonies or theaters; the talk remained tenaciously political, and those who might conceivably raise the cultural conversation lingered about, dispersed and fragmented. Reaching desperately for a solution, Henry called for a kind of social congress, what he termed a “cosmopolitan club.”11 Left to itself, this lofty body of legislators and lawyers, diplomats and editors might quietly convene, screened from the public’s prying eyes, and discreetly decide on what must be decided. Bankers, Irish bosses, and prairie politicians were welcome to wait outside. The article betrayed Adams’s infatuation with the London civil-electoral elite while offering an indication that, like his aging mother, he too sometimes indulged in the luxury of a well-petted woe.
While Henry mused a little abstractly in the 1860s on the perils of representative government, the clock of history refused to stop. Grant’s victories in Virginia, the assassination of Lincoln, and the collapse of the Confederacy remade America, though Adams experienced all of this only vicariously in the pages of The Times. He missed as well the rise of a new Trans-Mississippi West. The decade saw three new states, including Nevada and Nebraska, enter the Union, the Alaska Purchase, and the emergence of Jesse James into a folk legend. In a Philadelphia factory, John B. Stetson began to make a fortune producing “Cowboy” hats; and in Wyoming women were granted the right to vote.
Even old Washington, so familiar to the Adams family, underwent a great change during the war years. Though still burdened by dirt roads and insufficient sanitation, the capital ceased to be a sleepy southern village. Its population, despite the exodus of many Confederate-minded, increased considerably in the 1860s, from 75,000 to over 130,000. “Washington is perfectly thronged with strangers,” one recently transplanted Iowan noted during the war. “Every nook and corner is occupied with officers and their families, and with lookers-on at this swiftly moving Panorama of life.”12 The completion of the U.S. Capitol Building’s iconic cast-iron dome in 1866, establishment of Howard University (conceived as a theological seminary for African Americans) the following year, and founding of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1869 suggested an evolving attitude in the nation’s relationship to race and education, art and architecture. Such improvements, Adams may have appreciated, though they hardly offered hope for a “cosmopolitan club.”
Henry’s decided commitment to the declining patrician order is fully evident in a solicitous December 1869 letter to George Adams, his six-year-old nephew. In this playful communication, Henry promised to connect his young charge to the old Washington scene: “One of these days, when you are twelve or fourteen years old, and your mamma lets you travel… I will take you up to the Capitol where all the Senators and Judges are sitting in great rooms; and you shall call on the President and ask him how he likes it, and you shall go down to Mount Vernon and see where the great General Washington lived; and you shall know all the great people who are going to live when the time comes.”13 One hears clearly in this sentimental overture the echo of Henry’s own boyhood journey to Washington in 1850. In that lost antebellum world he had met President Taylor, observed the “great people” entering and exiting the “great rooms,” and soaked in an atmosphere thick with national and family history. But this type of personalized politics, one with all the fragrant redolence of a Quincy summer, no longer held court. It was an illusion that Adams gave up with great reluctance—and mourned long thereafter.