Henry’s complicated marriage is never mentioned in the Education. That incomplete memoir moves from its author’s impressionable boyhood to his meandering search for a vocation before abruptly and without explanation jumping a generation to a busy chapter titled simply “Twenty Years After.” Despite this casual obliteration of the decades 1872–92, certain of its fragments and friendships invariably make their way into the narrative. Hay and King are warmly remembered, while the hapless politicos whom Henry—and Clover—espied from Lafayette Square are summarily dismissed. New players are also introduced, including Elizabeth Cameron and her husband, the Pennsylvania senator J. Donald Cameron. “Lizzie’s” importance to Henry has long interested both scholars and readers, and yet it is her husband who receives more attention in the Education. A product of Pennsylvania’s powerful Republican political machine, he interested Adams as a symbol of the country’s “precipitous” political culture. Long contact with Senator Cameron, he wrote, “led to an intimacy which had the singular effect of educating [Adams] in knowledge of the very class of American politician who had done most to block his intended path in life.”1
Despite their differing attitudes on party politics, Henry and Cameron shared one important bond: the burden of familial expectation. Cameron’s father, Simon, dominated his son. After making a fortune in railroads and banking, the senior Cameron entered politics, became a senator, and served briefly as secretary of war in Lincoln’s cabinet before resigning amid allegations of corruption. The House subsequently censured his handling of War Department purchases, though the pragmatic Lincoln, recognizing Pennsylvania’s importance, sent him to head the U.S. ministry in Moscow. Henry, in London at the time, wrote to Charles that he hoped the “whited sepulchre,” as he contemptuously called Simon, would “vanish into the steppes of Russia and wander there for eternity”: “He is of all my countrymen, one of the class that I most conspicuously and sincerely despise and detest.”2
If Simon Cameron is even dimly remembered today it is for the cynical quip “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.” Having “bought” Pennsylvania’s legislature, he returned to the Senate in 1867 and served ten years before passing the seat on to his son; critics derided the pliant state chamber as the “Cameron Transfer Company.” The younger Cameron, a bushy walrus mustache drooping from his invisible upper lip, was forty-three at the time, having previously taken, under his father’s efforts, the presidencies of a Pennsylvania bank and railroad. By this time, his eighteen-year marriage to Mary McCormick, mother to their six children, had ended with her death in 1874; four years later he married Lizzie, then only twenty. Cameron gave the distinct impression of treading water in the Senate, lacking completely his father’s brute ambition and appetite for political infighting; his career seemed a thing wholly designed by Simon. One observer insisted that he suffered from a “queer self-distrust,” while Emily Briggs, the Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, caustically remarked of the Cameron dynasty’s prominent drop-off, “The iron crown which Don Cameron inherited from his old Highland father seemed too heavy for his tender temples and weaker brain. He looks pale and extremely nervous.”3
Cameron’s inheritance of the kind of high placement that Henry sought for himself may have played a part in the latter’s low regard for the senator. True, “the Don” (as Adams and others sometimes preferred) was a social bore and an alcoholic and spent much of his time talking politics and playing cards, but Henry knew many well-placed second prizes who merit no mention in the Education. It is “the Cameron type,” however, more than a mere “Don” that is to be anatomized, for this particular Homo politicus, Henry swore, had “shipwrecked his career.” And no better example of Cameronism existed, he presumed, than Pennsylvania. “The true Pennsylvanian,” he nodded, was “as narrow as the kirk [the Church of Scotland]; as shy of other people’s narrowness as a Yankee; as self-limited as a Puritan farmer. To him, none but Pennsylvanians were white.” Conventional and conforming, the Pennsylvanian measured progress materially and rarely questioned the rights of the rising industrial gentry to do as it pleased. Where the dour Bostonian could be prickly, the earnest Pennsylvanian proved pliant. And this made him, Henry cracked, “the strongest American in America.” For “as an ally he was worth all the rest.… If one wanted work done in Congress, one did wisely to avoid asking a New Englander to do it. A Pennsylvanian not only could do it, but did it willingly, practically and intelligently.”4
The Adamses showed a social interest in the Don only because of their interest in his attractive wife. At five-feet-eight Lizzie Cameron looked down on most women and not a few men; strikingly slender at the waist, she had curly brunette hair, high cheekbones, and penetrating eyes. “On the whole,” one of Henry’s nieces later wrote, “[Mrs. Cameron was] the most socially competent woman that I had ever met. With perfect self-confidence she could tackle any situation and appear to enjoy it. She was perhaps not strictly beautiful, but she was such a mass of style and had such complete self-assurance that she always gave the appearance of beauty and she gave everyone a good time when she set out to please.” Well-informed and unafraid to share her opinions, “Mrs. Don” could be a bit waspy, though men found her confident nature irresistible. “With perfection of grace and manner,” a friend recalled, “she seemed to me a picture of accomplished seductiveness, of which her able and ambitious mind was in no way unconscious.” Her marriage to Cameron provoked the press into calling their union a match of “Beauty and the Beast.”5
Just why Lizzie married her Don remains elusive. She came from the powerful Sherman family in Ohio that traced its lineage back several generations to colonial Connecticut. Her father, Charles Taylor Sherman, was a prominent Cleveland judge, but her uncles, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Treasury Secretary John Sherman, commanded national attention. Scholars agree that family fiat sent Lizzie to Washington in 1878 to live with her uncle John in order that she might be separated from an unsuitable suitor, one Joseph Russell, a young New York lawyer rumored to like his liquor a little too much. There is, however, some disagreement regarding why—and indeed if—she chose to marry Cameron. John Hay’s latest biographer, John Taliaferro, contends that Lizzie made a calculated decision to become a senator’s wife. Cameron’s children (the oldest Lizzie’s age) would not be under her care, and the senator’s busy political affairs would presumably allow his wife time to cultivate her own interests and friendships. Should a contest of wills arise, Taliaferro ventures, Lizzie seemed confident that she could keep Cameron at bay; informing her mother of their engagement, she gaily wrote of the senator as though he were a poodle: “He is very nice about it all and keeps away from me except when I tell him he can come.”6
The marriage’s financial angle, however, is also worth considering. Arline Boucher Tehan conjectures that Cameron may have come to the aid of Lizzie’s debt-burdened father and, with more certainty, notes that the Don signed a prenuptial agreement “by which the senator turned over to her the income from $160,000 worth of securities”—about $4 million in current dollars. The couple’s wedding gifts, including an abundance of plates, figurines, and tea servers gilded in gold, silver, and bronze, were rumored to total some $100,000.7
Other biographers argue that Lizzie had little freedom in the affair. Natalie Dykstra believes that “the Sherman brothers stepped in to arrange” the marriage, while Patricia O’Toole, author of The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, goes even further. She writes that Lizzie, “bowing to the pressure of family members eager for a match with a powerful senator… finally agreed to marry Don Cameron. On her wedding day she begged that the ceremony be called off, but the Shermans held firm.… Lizzie and Don passed their wedding night aboard a luxury railroad car; years later she confided to a friend that his clumsy insistence had left her feeling like the victim of a rape.” Whatever the circumstances leading up to her nuptials, Lizzie’s marriage was clearly unhappy. She and Cameron, so different in interests, outlook, and age, never grew close; they often traveled and lived apart during their fraught forty-year union, which ended with the Don’s 1918 death. Julia Stoddard Parsons, a young socialite who gained some intimacy with the Shermans and served as a bridesmaid at Lizzie’s wedding, seemed to have put the relationship in perspective when, shortly after Lizzie announced her engagement, she wrote in her diary, “I never saw Elisabeth look prettier, Mr. Cameron beamed. My Lady keeps him in order, but, an I mistake not, there is a canny Scotch will of his own hidden somewhere about this young-elderly lover, so have a care Elisabeth!”8
Lizzie became acquainted with the Adamses at a reception given by Clara Hay in January 1881. Shortly after that introduction she and her slightly older companion Emily Beale, the daughter of Gen. Edward F. Beale, a friend of Grant’s who collected various appointments under several presidents, paid a call at the Adamses second H Street residence. A few months earlier, Henry and Clover had moved into another Corcoran property, assuming a six-year lease on a six-bedroom residence fronting Lafayette Square. The $200 a month rent (a little more than $5,000 in current dollars) included a stable with upstairs servants’ quarters. The Camerons lived just a short walk away, on Madison Place along the Square’s eastern border.9
Clover liked Lizzie, though she was quick to size up the younger woman’s inexperience, writing, “[Mrs. Cameron] asked if she might come to tea and declined to wait till I called first. She is very young, pretty, and, I fear, bored, and her middle-aged Senator fighting a boss fight in Harrisburg; so she came on Friday, wailed about Harrisburg, and was quite frank in her remarks about men and things. Poor ‘Don’ will think she’s fallen among thieves when he comes back.”10
For Henry at least, attending to the Camerons meant proximity to Lizzie. In correspondence with Hay he often struck a note of domestic light comedy when relating the couple’s interactions, though such remarks, as Hay surely knew, were meant to conceal heavier emotions. In a January 1883 letter Adams fell upon a sobriquet that would, much to his regret, too precisely characterize his relationship with the senator’s wife: “Don is behaving himself again this winter and entertains. We were asked to a charming dinner there the other evening, and I am now tame cat around the house. Don and I stroll around with our arms around each other’s necks. I should prefer to accompany Mrs Don in that attitude.” More typically he made sport of Cameron’s social inadequacies (“I… cannot saddle my friends with Don”) and Harrisburg chauvinisms, which allowed him to linger over his “pity” for Lizzie. In discussing his feelings with Hay, he liked to play the role of sympathetic friend: “I adore her, and respect the way she has kept herself out of scandal and mud, and done her duty by the lump of clay she promised to love and respect.” When the Camerons embarked for England in the summer of 1883 Henry urged Gaskell to make Lizzie’s acquaintance but fairly apologized for her husband: “not my ideal companion for a cottage.” Leaving little to Gaskell’s imagination, he wrote, referring specifically to the Don and his young wife’s rocky May-December romance, “As a rule, husbands and wives go best in single harness.”11
Adams’s connection to Lizzie never moved beyond “correct”; he remained throughout their nearly four-decade friendship a perpetual tame cat. It was the only role in which he could openly socialize with the Camerons, respect his wife (in life and in memory), and protect his name. A proper Victorian, Henry’s impressive capacity for self-control contained both public and private dimensions. He lampooned in his correspondence, essays, and books those corporate and political figures that resorted to lies, corruption, and other sharp practices. It was his special pride to have “failed” for being too honest. In exile, he adopted the proud man’s defense of self-denial, seeing renunciation as a sign of character and strength. But this questionable attitude contributed to a sense of isolation and despair when his high standards inevitably stiffened into a superior attitude. Forgoing became a habit. That he long remained a part of Lizzie’s world, to the extent of making a meal upon his own heart, should come as no surprise—it revealed, rather, a certain and not always enviable consistency of character.