Settling in downtown Washington, Henry and Clover leased a large house on H Street belonging to William Corcoran, a banker, philanthropist, and founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The structure, formerly occupied by Clover’s recently deceased congressman uncle Sam Hooper, sat conveniently near Lafayette Square. “Possessed of large wealth,” Hooper, so one eulogy stated, “attracted to his house and to his society men among the ablest and the best which our country furnishes.”1 The building’s new occupants aimed to be equally hospitable. With a combined unearned annual income of $25,000, some $585,000 in current dollars, the Adamses were in a position to make their Washington homes—two successor residences followed the H Street experiment—exemplars of good taste. Numerous overseas trips yielded an impressive assortment of paintings and porcelains, bronzes and tapestries, along with a lesser collection of bibelots and bric-à-brac. Stylish and sophisticated, their Washington addresses offered an agreeable contrast to the congressional debates droning on a few blocks to the east. Taken in full, the Adamses had perhaps all they could reasonably want in these early capital years—all, that is, excepting a child.
If the move to Washington signified a host of breakings and beginnings, it also likely softened whatever strains came from the Adamses’ growing awareness that they would never be parents. They were now five years into their marriage and, as the captives of distinguished New England genealogies, almost certainly cornered on the baby front by unspoken pressures and empty wishes. As if to draw unwanted attention to their childless situation, Henry’s and Clover’s brothers were, thanks to their fecund wives, fathers to fifteen children. Boston may have accordingly held difficult, even painful associations for the couple. Washington, on the other hand, moved to a different and decidedly less maternal beat. Its boardinghouses welcomed bachelor politicians and lobbyists, a small army of men whose invisible broods typically resided far beyond the capital’s shadow. Society proved to be fluid and in its own way ephemeral; salons, gatherings, and parties filled the spaces that otherwise—and in much of America—might be occupied by the daily rituals of family life.2
It remains a mystery as to why Henry and Clover could not conceive. One possible clue is the appearance of a gynecological study in the couple’s library, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery with special reference to the management of sterile conditions, written by J. Marion Sims, M.D., and published in 1873.3 Though what particular ailment this may have pointed to, if any, is unclear. We do know that children were on Henry’s mind during this time. In February 1876 he reflected upon the death of an acquaintance’s great-uncle and the commensurate news of a birth within his own circle. “I wish—wish—wish—well, I wish various things,” he wrote to one correspondent, “but among others that the mystery of Birth and the Grave were either less important to us, or more encouraging.”4 The following year he congratulated Gaskell, soon to be a father, in a labored letter advertising his presumed indifference to children:
I am glad you are going to have a family and I hope it will be at least as large as either of your sister’s’, for I find from experience that daily life becomes commonplace anyway, and perhaps its commonplatitude is less offensive among many daily commonplaces than among few. I have myself never cared enough about children to be unhappy either at having or not having them, and if it were not that half the world will never leave the other half at peace, I should never think about the subject.5
Determined to keep “half the world” away, the Adamses knew with whom to extend their social connections and when to close ranks. Henry acknowledged as much when he wrote to Gaskell just weeks into their new situation, “I have only room to add that we are quite well, very busy, and very happy. One consequence of having no children is that husband and wife become very dependent on each other and live very much together. This is our case.”6
If Washington’s cosmopolitanism diverted an unflattering focus on family life, the city more directly elevated Henry and Clover’s status. In Boston they remained among any number of Adamses, Hoopers, Sturgises, Bigelows, and Cabots—and new “names” tied to fresh fortunes in banking, insurance, and industry were now pressing upon the old. But in the still green capital city, with a healthy private income, Henry and Clover could, as the latter put it, “strut around as if we were millionaires.” A mutual friend, Henry James, recognized this facet of their marriage when he informed the British diplomat Sir John Clark, “[The Adamses] don’t pretend to conceal… their preference of America to Europe, and they rather rub it into me, as they think it a wholesome discipline for my demoralized spirit. One excellent reason for their liking Washington better than London is that they are, vulgarly speaking, ‘someone’ here, and that they are nothing in your complicated kingdom.”7
As if to demonstrate the veracity of James’s statement, Adams wrote Gaskell in late 1878 of the special social amenities available to him and Clover in the American capital:
You see, in London I can’t drop in of an evening to the palace to chat with the Queen.… Here society is primitive as the golden age. We run in at all hours to see everybody. I have a desk in our Foreign Office for my exclusive study, and unlimited access to all papers. We make informal evening calls on the President, the Cabinet and the Diplomates. Ten days ago I went uninvited to Yoshida’s, the Japanese Minister’s, and played whist with him and his Japanese wife till midnight.8
Evenings were crowded with entertaining, and though some of the anointed included “our eminent Boston constituents,” as Henry put it, he seemed inclined to certain southern sympathies. He bragged to one correspondent that a “not unusual” H Street dinner included Mississippi senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II (“the most genial and sympathetic of all Senators”) and former Confederate general Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor and brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis.9
Henry and Clover’s mornings, by contrast, were reserved for horseback riding about the capital and its environs. They typically departed—aboard the prosaically named Prince and Daisy—at about nine and returned for an eleven-thirty breakfast. The nearby Rock Creek Park, just a couple of miles north of the city, proved to be a favorite destination. “The riding is excellent hereabouts,” Henry observed to Gaskell, though conceding the terrain’s unfitness for fox hunting: “We are not so swell.”10
The Adamses settled into a tight circle of friends who called themselves the Five of Hearts. Its roster included the pungent, dark-eyed, and smartly attired future secretary of state John Hay; his stout and pious wife, Clara (daughter of the Cleveland railroad tycoon Amasa Stone); and Clarence King, a prominent geologist and mountaineer known for a lively, playful manner. For Henry these were maturing acquaintances; he had first met Hay in Washington during the secessionist winter and King a few years later while hiking in Estes Park, Colorado. A conspicuous intimacy characterized the clique, who advertised their affection with heart-embossed stationery, a heart-shaped tea set, and enameled Five of Hearts pins ordered from Tiffany. Their closeness, however, remains a matter of question. Clara came aboard as a spousal appendage, while Clover’s depression seemed a thing outside the group’s gay orbit. Most striking, King led a secret life in which he passed (as “James Todd”) for an African American and fathered five children with his common-law wife, Ada Copeland, thought to be a former slave.11
Just what united the Five of Hearts is a matter of speculation, though clearly a common snobbery put them at ease. Condescending toward the lower classes, they spoke as a group believing itself in possession of all the history, all the fine prizes their nation might bestow, and yet they were also restive in their recognition that this patrician proprietorship appeared to be nearing its end. As twin testimonials of class anxiety, Henry’s 1880 novel Democracy admonished popular political power, while Hay’s 1883 novel The Bread-Winners: A Social Study attacked organized labor; both books were published anonymously.
Though Henry and Hay were the most intellectually compatible and politically interested of the Hearts, Adams saw in King a romantic figure to whom he remained long devoted. Naturalist, author, and collector of fine arts, the geologist enjoyed an easy and extensive range of seemingly incompatible references that eluded the hyperintellectual Henry. While still in his twenties King wrote the classic Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), a work that Adams enthusiastically praised in the North American Review. Calling its ruggedly handsome author “a kind of young hero of the American type,” he valorized the Newport-born and Yale-educated rock hunter whose climbing expeditions suggested yet another episode in the centuries-long struggle pitting Puritan resolve against the “wild” North American continent. Comfortable on a mountain or in a museum, King represented a certain masculine ideal that would always elude Adams. Intrepid, brave, gallant, humorous, and above all unaffected, he was a “natural,” a child of the open American scene in a way that Henry could never be. Without a trace of jealousy Adams wrote of his friend, “Whatever prize he wanted lay ready for him,—scientific, social, literary, political,—and he knew how to take them in turn.”12
With a change in presidential administrations both King, first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Hay, assistant secretary of state, resigned their positions and left Washington in 1881. The Adamses kept in contact with their fellow Hearts, though King, increasingly engaged in risky mining ventures, moved stealthily around the country, allowing him the necessary freedom to keep secret his several relationships with nonwhite women. Henry remained closer to Hay, and their correspondence attests to a connection that only deepened over the years; theirs proved to be the strongest bond of the five, forming, in a sense, a separate clique.
Clover’s salon operated efficiently, with a perpetual afternoon tea often prefacing a convivial dinner party. The Adamses, Henry James favorably observed, “have a very pretty little life.”13 Such sociable days would have been empty for Henry Adams, however, without a more vocational engagement. Still an Adams, still the offspring of letter collectors, diary keepers, and memoirists, he began during this period, having just turned forty, to justify his relocation to Washington by becoming the writer and historian he never was in Boston. In just five years (1879–84) he produced two “contemporary” novels and two biographies, all the while working steadily on a prolonged portrait of the Jeffersonian era. Moving easily between reportage and reflection, the projects announced their author’s intention to write of democracy from within, to absorb the capital city’s vast store of parties, archives, and rumors. Stimulated by the presence of power, Henry went to work.