On a sweltering July evening in 1868, Henry Adams entered New York Harbor aboard the Cunard steamer China from London. His altered appearance, conspicuously aged (“I am… very—very bald”), hinted at a broader attitude of adjustment.1 Returning to the Old House in Quincy, he encountered a “colonial” setting suddenly juxtaposed against the metropolitan backdrop of his seven years overseas. Back home at last, the native discovered a country much challenged, much changed. Formerly obscure towns, hamlets, and crossroads, including Shiloh and Antietam, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, were now enshrined in national memory; the country’s conception of freedom had suddenly, radically enlarged with slavery’s violent end; and the Old South’s once powerful political voice no longer boomed through congressional corridors. Despite all that had passed, however, a post-Appomattox peace proved elusive. Fresh issues, rather, regarding the educational, economic, and civil rights of the former slaves now took center stage. In a word, the southern states were undergoing Reconstruction, the long and incomplete effort to forge a new era of emancipation and industrialization under Republican rule.
Political moderates during the secessionist winter of 1860–61, the Adamses showed a similar restraint in advocating an easy reconciliation with the former Confederates. John Quincy, Henry’s eldest brother and the occupant of a lower house seat in the Massachusetts legislature, conspicuously broke with the country’s congressional radicals in the postwar period. For this apostasy the U.S. Senate rejected his pending appointment to the Boston Customs House in 1867. Arrogant and aggrieved, he switched party allegiances, becoming a Democrat—the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and much of the old planter elite. Over the next five years the Massachusetts Democratic Party conferred its gubernatorial nomination upon John Quincy five times (terms lasted only twelve months), and each year he went down to a predictable defeat. Possibly sensing a way to “respectfully” evade the kind of difficult political life endemic among his ancestry, “John,” writes one historian, “wanted to lose.” Like other Adamses—proud, certain, and sometimes sanctimonious—he seemed reconciled, even determined, so his daughter Abigail later remembered, to break from majority opinion. “He was a lone wolf,” she wrote, and switching to the Democratic Party, “however ill-advised, was very characteristic of his independent spirit.”2
John’s electoral struggles only underlined for Henry the House of Adams’s chronic decline. The senior John Quincy had captured the presidency, his son occupied a more modest congressional seat, and now his namesake grandson failed repeatedly to win even a state race. These political reversals exemplified both the rise of popular politics in the republic and the wisdom—or rationalization—in Henry’s insistence that as a third son and a Brooks, he need not master the dubious arts of glad-handing, stump speaking, or wire pulling. What, after all, was the point? Voters seemed disinclined, so he concluded, to recognize and reward talent, blindly ratifying the cynical strategies of party bosses to elevate party hacks. He thought it a far more attractive prospect to shape policy than to play politics. If unelectable, he still wished to have a say, and if Reconstruction failed to win his sympathy, other national issues, including the need for civil service reform—stressing proficiency over patronage when appointing government employees—most emphatically did.
Creating an “independent” civil sector class, Henry reasoned, promised to undermine partisanship’s noxious power. Who could disagree that expertise, rather than blind loyalty to a faction, should decide who served and where? He seemed less aware of the obvious self-interest in recommending the maintenance of a meritocracy, for he, the beneficiary of Adams privilege, Brooks wealth, and a Harvard education, might expect to do reasonably well on any exam that any government office or agency happened to pass his way. Thus, by outpointing his peers, he might yet see a way to resurrect the Adams family’s fortunes. If the family no longer commanded a national, or even, as John Quincy repeatedly demonstrated, a state constituency, perhaps it could avoid the electorate altogether as part of a unique American Mandarin class, above politics, above democracy.
Seeking national influence Henry, now thirty and having outgrown the provincial city of his youth, prepared to exit Boston. In vibrant Britain, he had made friends among the country’s aristocratic liberals, discovered Tocqueville’s and Mill’s stimulating criticisms of representative government, and demonstrated a budding talent for historical research. A nebulous New England situation, by contrast, struck him as perfectly impossible. “Boston seemed to offer no market for educated labor,” he later remembered. “A peculiar and perplexing amalgam Boston always was, and although it had changed much in ten years, it was not less perplexing. One no longer dined at two o’clock; one could no longer skate on Back Bay; one heard talk of Bostonians worth five millions or more as something not incredible. Yet the place seemed still simple, and less restless-minded than ever before.”3 Only one American city excited Henry, and that was Washington. His enthusiasm for the capital, awoken in childhood and abetted by family folklore, remained firmly in place. If no London, it did offer certain offsetting urbanities, including a front-row seat to national affairs and the promise of a more cosmopolitan social order than Boston’s incestuous nest of bankers, lawyers, and professors. It included, finally, the added and certainly much appreciated virtue of harboring none of his kin. In a city that many Americans associated with one Adams or another, Henry would be on his own.
The not unrelated questions of occupation and ennui that prompted his Boston withdrawal had been building. Having given up on two deeply rooted paternal professions—law and international relations—he seemed at something of a loss to reconcile with his future. “Anyone who had held, during the four most difficult years of American diplomacy, a position at the centre of action,” he once explained his refusal to consider a career in the State Department, “could not beg a post of Secretary at Vienna or Madrid in order to bore himself doing nothing until the next President should do him the honor to turn him out.”4 No doubt Henry’s financial independence, family connections, and quick intellect offered several possible paths, though the decision to become a writer and critic seems in retrospect inevitable. His Italian letters, Secession Winter articles, and London dispatches all pointed to something more autonomous and privately ambitious than a cozy but constraining sinecure in Boston—or in Bolivia.
By late September, less than three months after returning to America, Henry’s plans to relocate to the capital were secure. On the 25th he wrote to Gaskell, “I am still here [in Quincy], waiting till the first frosts shall have made Washington habitable.” Seventeen days later, he departed. Stopping off in New York he met William Evarts, recently appointed U.S. attorney general and, like Henry, the progeny of an old patriot. For a few weeks in the early summer of 1776 Evarts’s grandfather, the Connecticut statesman Roger Sherman, had served with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert R. Livingston on the Committee of Five assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence. Making a more modest kind of history, Evarts was Andrew Johnson’s chief counsel during the recent (March–May) impeachment trial in which the president survived, by a single vote, charges of obstructing the War Department’s attempts to carry out various Reconstruction programs in the southern states. Henry thought him “a great man” for “saving the President.”5
In Washington, Adams stayed briefly at Evarts’s home, during which time the attorney general took his guest to meet Johnson, “who,” Henry wrote Gaskell, “was grave, and cordial, and gave me a little lecture on Constitutional law.” Adams also rekindled an old family friendship during his early days in the capital by visiting William Seward, now in his final months heading the State Department. Anticipating that the autumn elections would usher in a new generation of Republican power brokers, men shaped by the realities of war and Reconstruction, Henry recognized the cessation of his father’s political influence and, more broadly, whatever attenuated White House connections his people still possessed. “This whole cabinet goes out on the 4th of March,” he told Gaskell, “and in the next one I shall probably be without a friend.”6
Bidding Evarts adieu, Henry moved on to the house of his aunt Mary Catherine Hellen Adams. This constituted but a brief stay, a question of propriety rather than budgetary convenience. In November, having made arrangements to contribute to the Nation and the New York Post, Henry informed the London barrister Ralph Palmer of his “full determination to make Washington [his] home,” while disclosing to Gaskell both pride in his escape—“The great step is taken”—and the hope that after a decade of drifting, he had encamped at last: “Here I am, settled for years, and perhaps for life.”7 And so, given an interlude or two, he was. Over most of the next half-century, until his death in 1918, Adams enjoyed the social energy and proximity to power offered in the growing American seat of government. If not London, it nevertheless attracted a richer and more eclectic range of minds, opinions, and politics than Boston’s inevitable inbreeding permitted. It might further be the case that in coming to the capital city he wished to resume an indelible family fiefdom. Washington retained for Henry both the magic of his first visit and the inviting idea that if Adamses could no longer capture elections, they might yet find a path to appointed success in a city built, in some small sense, upon their talents. In going south, he unquestionably advertised himself as an available man, open to assuming his share.