In the latter months of 1883 Henry and Clover grew concerned with their living arrangements at the Corcoran house. Just to the east of their rented property lay a large empty lot on the corner of H and 16th streets recently sold by Corcoran to Frederick Paine, a young Washington real estate promoter rumored to be interested in putting up a multistory apartment house. Such a dreary (and noisy) prospect, Clover complained, made the Adamses feel “very uneasy about our future life.”1 It was a life that Henry in particular enjoyed. Peopled with friends—the Camerons and the George Bancrofts—as well as the occasional scoundrel (Adams’s bête noire, James G. Blaine), it offered the stimulating variety of social life that he could find nowhere else in America. Proximity to the State Department’s treasures, moreover, aided greatly his literary labors, as did the “suggestiveness” of his neighborhood, the city’s most exclusive. In Lafayette Square one could, following the example of every president since James Madison, attend St. John’s Episcopal Church, stroll by homes once occupied by the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay and South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, and see an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson (another bête noire). Here, the antique world of the early republic liked to share its secrets.
Unable to quash Paine’s apartment scheme on his own, Adams promptly enlisted John Hay as a financial guardian angel. Having inherited a fortune from his recently deceased father-in-law, Hay possessed the dollars to buy Paine out. Henry proposed that the two Hearts join forces and build houses on adjoining lots. Adams would be, monetarily speaking, the junior partner, though with the Hays currently living in Clara’s native Cleveland on Euclid Avenue’s “Millionaires Row,” Henry negotiated directly with Paine throughout the autumn. Paine’s investment had come to $64,000 and Adams agreed to offer a full refund of his outlay, plus interest on the amount for a year, plus an additional $5,000—in all $73,500 (approximately $2 million in current dollars). After briefly holding out for $77,000, Paine accepted. Of this sum, Henry contributed $25,000, which entitled him to “a lot with a 44-foot front on H Street and extending 131 feet back to an alley that led into 16th Street.”2 He set aside an extra $30,000 (inherited from Grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks’s estate) to build the new home. Combined, his $55,000 investment comes to about $1.5 million in contemporary dollars.
Though reliant upon Hay’s largesse to buy Paine out, Henry possessed considerable resources of his own. His several inheritances were supplemented by a number of investments that he believed brought in, about this time, a 10 percent rate of return. His common stocks portfolio included subscriptions in Calumet and Hecla, a major Michigan mining company that was at one time the leading copper producer in the world. In the nineteenth century it paid out some $72 million in shareholder dividends, something north of $1 billion in current dollars. Adams benefited from the acumen of two financial agents, Ward Thoron in Washington and his brother-in-law Edward Hooper, treasurer of Harvard College, who kept an eye on his assets in Boston. Figures are sketchy, though it’s estimated that by the mid-1880s Henry’s income may have exceeded $40,000 a year, much of which he tended to reinvest.3
The “junior” aspect of his partnership with Hay pleased Henry. He wrote to Gaskell of the purchase, “John Hay and I have bought a swell piece of land which looks across a little square.… Hay is the capitalist, and takes the corner.” When the structures were completed some two years later they could be said to resemble the “uneven” situations of their owners. Hay’s more elaborate home—as though he divined his future place in presidential cabinets—included a Syrian arched entrance, turrets, and gables. A showpiece, it served Hay well; his social life and public career mixed seamlessly, and building near the White House brought him to the doorstep of power. Henry’s smaller house, by contrast, complemented the larger building. It sheltered the historian, the thinker upon whose council and wisdom Hay might conveniently consult. Their mutual purchase, employment of the same architect, and strong friendship implied such an association. In this sense, the homes might have typified for Henry the kind of vicarious relationship with politics that he had come to accept. No longer a Young Turk, he had all but given up his vagrant dreams of leading a coalition of reformers. He may have continued to hold out some attenuated hope, however, that his name and talents might yet yield access to president neighbors through informal counsel. Perhaps that had been part of Washington’s appeal all along?4
The differences in size and adornment of the Adams and Hay homes might speak further to Henry’s break from old New England. His family was still identified architecturally with the primitive colonial Georgian-style box acquired by John and Abigail in 1787. He and Clover sought an entirely dissimilar design, creating a tasteful home of discriminating comfort embellished by a Neo-Romanesque façade. In the 1940s historian Harold Dean Cater offered a glimpse of the home by collecting the reflections of several visitors. They recalled an interior accented by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English paintings and various objects of Japanese arts—the handpicked treasures of Henry’s global travels. “The furniture was English, low and comfortable,” Cater wrote. “On the walls were Turners, De Wints, Constables, Blakes, and many other choice paintings.” The main room featured a fireplace with cases on either side containing “jades, porcelains, and bronzes, several Kwannons and one statue of the Oriental god of happiness. Oriental design could be seen on screens, cushions, and a few lacquer pieces.”5
A still more illuminating description of the house comes from Henry’s niece Abigail, who first visited the four-story residence in 1895, the year she turned sixteen. “One entered a low hall,” she recalled:
Above were the living rooms—a big one in the front looking out on Lafayette Square.… Also on the front of the house was Uncle Henry’s study. In the rear was the dining room which overlooked a pleasant tree-shaded yard enclosed by a stable at the back. Two admirable colored servants ran the house—William the butler and Maggie the maid. There were others concealed downstairs, including a cook who could make a particularly hearty gumbo soup.… Uncle Henry’s study was furnished with a huge mahogany table which took up most of the room. At this desk he could be found every morning drinking his coffee and ponderously making notes.… The living room opened out of his study and was larger and more formal.… It held two low curved sofas and some equally low leather armchairs, all chosen for his convenience, while a few chairs of more standard size catered to the comfort of his taller friends.… There were shoulder-high bookcases around his living room hung with pieces of Chinese brocade, and above were some of his collection of pictures which were scattered everywhere all over the house.6
Had Abigail inventoried her uncle’s bookshelves, she would have noted several gems, including rare editions of a 1502 Dante illustrated by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius and, compliments of Gaskell, a 1762 copy of Jean de La Fontaine’s anthology of racy stories and novellas, Contes et nouvelles en vers.7
Henry and Hay contracted Henry Hobson Richardson to build their H Street homes. Presumably the overture came from the Adamses, who knew the architect and admired his work in the Romanesque Revival style. Born on a Louisiana plantation in St. James Parish, Richardson, a great-grandson to the English natural philosopher Joseph Priestly, attended Harvard with Henry and Edward Hooper. His most acclaimed work, Boston’s Trinity Church, was erected while the Adamses lived on Marlborough Street and could observe its progress. Richardson resided nearby, maintaining his home and offices in a Brookline house that he had rented since 1874 from Clover’s father. A handful of the Adamses’ intimates, including the Ephraim Gurneys—Henry’s former Harvard colleague and Clover’s sister Ellen—and Henry’s college friend Nicholas Anderson, lived in Richardson-built houses.
Expressive, impulsive, and the radiating center of all he surveyed, Richardson left a strong and affable impression. Clover wrote to her father of seeing him at a party: “He can say truly ‘I am my own music,’ for he carries off any dinner more or less gaily.” The sculptor artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens once said of Richardson, “It would require a Rabelais to do justice to his unusual power and character.” Hiding a handsome face behind a dark (and for the period) de rigueur full beard, he “wore a brilliant yellow waistcoat, had an enormous girth, and a halt in his speech, which made the words that followed come out like a series of explosions.” Unknown to his admirers, Richardson suffered from Bright’s disease, which causes swelling; the illness combined with a strong appetite for alcohol ballooned his weight to nearly 350 pounds and contributed to his death at the age of forty-seven in April 1886, just four months after the H Street homes became habitable.8
Perhaps Richardson intended his vivacity to put others at ease during the unavoidably delicate financial negotiations between builder and buyer. Known to put architectural temptations before his clients (the price of the Anderson house notoriously skyrocketed from start to finish), Richardson plied his patrons with attractive options. Clover looked down upon such easily influenced house hunters, dismissing Anderson as simply “not educated as to what is ultimate.” Hoping to head off an escalating budget and punning on his architect’s amplitude, Henry once described Richardson as “an ogre. He devours men crude, and shows the effects of inevitable indigestion in his size!”9
Aiming for the “ultimate,” Richardson, who had promised to complete the Hearts’ homes by the early summer of 1885, ran over by several months. The flat, heavy-looking façade, deep balcony, and large above-street-level windows that distinguished the Adamses’ redbrick residence gave it a stern and unfriendly appearance. The art and architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler (1843–1914) once observed, “Richardson’s dwelling houses were not defensible except in a military sense.”10 In the case of Henry’s property, this martial evocation suggests something more than simply external appearance. For its owner carried with him a number of secrets as an anonymous novelist, as a member of a self-chosen circle of Hearts, and as a spouse increasingly anxious about his wife’s delicate health. The exclusivity and privacy that defined Henry’s new house defined the man as well.