Despite settling in at Harvard, Henry remained an active combatant on the political reform front. His “Session” essay, as well as those on finance and government corruption, may have irritated congressmen and singed a spoilsman or two, but they changed nothing. As editor of the North American Review, however, he possessed the means to carry on a more concentrated effort in upscale muckraking. He wrote confidently to Gaskell in the late autumn of 1870, “Retirement from Washington has by no means thrown me out of politics. On the contrary, as editor I am deeper in them than ever, and my party is growing so rapidly that I look forward to the day when we shall be in power again as not far distant.” By “my party,” he meant the self-styled liberal wing of the GOP. In this late nineteenth-century sense, “liberal” did not connote sympathy for minorities, immigrants, or organized labor. When applied to Grant’s critics within the Republican Party, rather, it meant rooting out the special interests, seeing the nation steered by the “Best Men” (themselves, naturally), and more generally elevating the character of American politics. Remarkably Adams, seldom one to erect air castles, believed rule by robber baron to be in his sights. “Two or three years,” he innocently unfurled the family banner, “ought to do it.”1
This fleeting Liberal Republican movement to which Henry offered his assistance began in 1870 under the leadership of Carl Schurz. A German-born American who came to the United States shortly after the failed European revolutions of 1848 (a series of republican revolts against monarchies), Schurz settled in Wisconsin, joined the antislavery movement, and gained a reputation among Republicans as an important spokesman for German Americans. Rewarded for his exhaustive canvassing in the 1860 presidential campaign, he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain. Stopping in London on his way to Madrid, Schurz met Charles Francis Adams and his son Henry. His European tenure ended not long after. Having convinced Lincoln to make him a brigadier general of Union volunteers, he saw action at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga before accompanying Sherman’s army on its destructive march into the Carolinas. With the war’s end, Schurz briefly edited the Detroit Press before uprooting to Missouri, where, in 1868, he won election to the U.S. Senate.
The success of Missouri’s “insurgent” Republicans over the state’s regular Republicans led to the development of a national, if somewhat unruly, reform movement within the party. Its mouthpieces included Henry’s North American Review as well as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Horace White’s Chicago Tribune, and Murat Halstead’s Cincinnati Commercial. Really a loose collection of concerns and interests, Liberal Republicanism found common ground in its disdain for Grantism, which it associated with political corruption and the overextension of federal power in the states. Schurz and his supporters sought to end Reconstruction, amnesty disenfranchised former Confederates, promote free trade as a way to attack the trusts, and advance the cause of civil service reform. Most had joined the Republican Party in the 1850s in opposition to slavery’s expansion, and now, with slavery ended, inclined toward a more traditional limited government orientation. Along with the vast Reconstruction apparatus, Johnson’s near impeachment convinced them that traditional constitutional norms were directly endangered. Henry actively courted Schurz from Boston, inviting the senator on at least two occasions to write for the North American Review. “I would like to support your course, and make known to the eastern people the true nature of the contest you are engaged in,” he explained. “I want the public to know, if possible, how far you and your party represent principles which are of national interest; how far free-trade and reform are involved in the result; and what influences have been at work to counteract success.… I would be glad to extend the range of your influences so far as is in my power.”2
In January 1872 Missouri’s Liberal Republicans issued a call for a national convention to meet in Cincinnati on the first of May. Some of their number hoped this gathering of the disaffected might prompt regular Republicans to refuse to run Grant in the fall election; others wanted to form a third faction or, perhaps, lay the foundation for a partnership with the Democratic Party. Massachusetts’s Liberal Republicans arrived in Cincinnati determined to go the third-party route and to engineer the nomination of Charles Francis Adams. The Governor’s appeal beyond the Bay State, however, proved thin. In the postwar decades national elections generally went to Civil War veterans, and Charles Francis’s wartime diplomatic service in England, though important, stood outside this trend.3
Regionally the Governor could point to little popularity outside of New England. Southerners, particularly those with long memories, saw all Adamses as defenders of federal power, while westerners were turned off by his aristocratic mien. Even his appeal in the East extended only so far. Marcus Morton, who served as chief justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, indelicately described Adams as “the greatest Iceberg in the Northern hemisphere,” and one Liberal Republican complained that the Governor “represent[ed] too much the anti-popular element—the sneering and sniffling element.”4 The large concentration of Boston’s Irish voters, moreover, distrusted Charles Francis’s Anglophilia (suggested by his long London residency), while his former colleague Charles Sumner would almost certainly offer no support. And perhaps most important, the presumptive nominee shared his father’s and grandfather’s now dated hesitation for actively pursuing public office. He would accept, but not grasp.
Neither would he be within four thousand miles of Cincinnati that spring. The Governor had been called to Geneva, where he led the American delegation before an international arbitration commission designed to settle claims for damages inflicted on Union shipping during the war by British-built Confederate commerce raiders. When asked if he might offer assurances of his views before the Cincinnati convention, the old diplomat demurred. In the absence of clear signals his sons were reduced to making coy assurances on their own. Some two months before the convention met, former Ohio governor Jacob Cox wrote to one correspondent that Henry had vaguely “inferred” to him that the Governor “was cordially with us.”5
The three-day convention proved to be a curiously disharmonious affair for a group of insurgents supposedly united by the goal of toppling Grant. But a common enemy is all they shared. The historian John Sproat has written, “One great weakness was the gathering’s heterogeneous composition: it was as motley a collection of politicians and reformers as ever tried to form a political party in the United States. Among the delegates were free traders and protectionists, conservative New England patricians and agrarian radicals… advocates of Negro rights and Southern Redeemers.” Enough of a consensus existed, however, for the hammering out of a party platform; it emphasized civil service reform to break up the old patronage politics, a return to “the constitutional limitations of power” that prevailed before the war, and a reversion to specie payments paired with the retirement of inflationary greenbacks. Next, the convention moved to nominate a presidential candidate. Despite his absence, Charles Francis surged ahead as the early front-runner, but following six ballots (four of which the Governor led) Greeley captured the prize. It proved to be a divisive choice in an already divided party.6
A former Whig, the fiercely independent Greeley had been a strong critic of Lincoln, opposed keeping federal troops in the South, and signed a bond in the spring of 1867 to help former Confederate president Jefferson Davis—locked up in Hampton, Virginia’s Fortress Monroe—make bail. Many northerners considered him a traitor. When the Democrats, still damningly associated with secession, met at Baltimore two months after the Liberal Republican convention and, determined not to split the anti-Grant vote, chose Greeley to lead their ticket, more than a few Yankees thought their suspicions confirmed. As the fall campaign shaped up, Henry backed away from the sinking Liberal Republican cause. Putting on a brave face, he defiantly insisted to Gaskell that the Governor, after all, had gotten lucky: “My father narrowly escaped being the next President, but has come out of the fight very sound and strong, while his successful rival is likely to be not only disgraced but beaten.”7
The beating arrived soon enough. Come November Greeley captured not quite 44 percent of the popular vote while carrying only three border states (Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) and three former Confederate states (Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia). It perhaps struck some Americans as morbidly fitting, then, when, following the election but prior to the meeting of the Electoral College, Greeley suddenly died on November 29. The passing of the man prefaced a passing phase in postwar reform politics. Liberal Republicanism’s view of the war as a tragedy and its belief that corporate power threatened the country’s independent yeoman heritage failed to convince a growing northern electorate that now dominated national politics. Instead, Grant’s “blood and iron” vision of a strong nation united by its railroads, commerce, and industry proved compelling; as an organizing principle it more or less ruled America’s political roost until the Great Depression.
Neither Henry nor his father was in America to witness regular Republicanism’s predictable triumph. They thus shared a peculiar connection with earlier Adamses who had also avoided the public after difficult political defeats. John Adams and John Quincy Adams, both trounced in reelection bids, were the first retiring presidents to abstain from their successor’s swearing-in ceremonies; a handful of others, including Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, inconveniently entangled in issues of impeachment, followed. Charles Francis left Geneva in late September following the successful conclusion of the arbitration discussions and toured Europe with his family for several weeks thereafter. He sailed for home on November 3; Grant won reelection on the 5th. Altogether different circumstances ensured Henry’s removal from the American scene. Much to his family’s surprise he had married earlier in the year and Election Day found him and his bride, Marian (Clover) Hooper, honeymooning in an “empty” Florence, far away from Greeley and Grantism.8 For the moment he had no room for politics, for Harvard, or even for other Adamses. The dutiful son had stolen a march, taken a wife, and slipped away.