Prior to his free silver turn, while meandering about the South Seas, Henry had reveled in the histories, pedigrees, and social customs of other cultures. But for the now fifty-something sojourner, such arduous travels were a thing of the past. Closer vistas, however, beckoned. Encouraged by his fellow Heart Clarence King, Adams had canvassed Cuba in 1888 while on a brief break from writing the History. Accompanied by his secretary and sometime housemate Theodore Dwight, he joyfully soaked in the picaresque, counting himself among the island’s ruling class—“we… Spaniards”—and moved from diversion to diversion. Occupying a front-row seat for an afternoon bullfight, he seemed more taken by the “ladies in… soul-moving costumes” of red dresses and white mantillas than on the bull-baiting, which, he admitted, “I was too unwell to watch long.” Later, he attended a masquerade carnival—“I had much amusement watching the costumes and people”—and enjoyed three successive evenings of opera. Returning to H Street with trinkets and a cache of cigars, he found the excursion on the whole highly agreeable. “Havana,” he wrote Hay, “is just my affair.”1
Struck by the convenience of a tropical entrepôt just off the American coast, Adams returned to Cuba in 1893 with William Hallett Phillips, a young State Department lawyer, and with King in 1894, and again the following year with Chandler Hale, son of a U.S. senator from Maine. Never one to let paradise just be paradise, Henry romanticized Cuba as a rebuke to the relentless course of modernization clamping down on the West. With the Cuban independence movement—a long-building nationalist uprising against Spanish rule beginning in the late 1860s—gaining momentum, he sympathetically opened his Washington home to its revolutionaries, thus offering support to yet another island Eden endangered.
Of his several Cuban tours, Henry seemed most content when collaborating with King. His correspondence during this period is unusually light, expansive, and playful. “I love the tropics,” he confessed to Gaskell, “and feel really at ease nowhere else.” He began his winter journey in January by staying at the Camerons’ Coffin Point plantation on St. Helena Island in South Carolina, roughly equidistant to Charleston and Savannah. He explained his southerly removal to one correspondent as a necessary response to the recent economic Panic and its ruinous aftermath on those near to him: “The collapse has been, and still is, very sad to me. Among my friends and family, the strain has told terribly.… My brothers and their contemporaries are old men. I am myself more than ever at odds with my time.”2 Once committed to the quaint, “sound” money certainties that had informed the Governor, Adams felt himself cast out into a brave new economic world, cut adrift on a turbulent sea of speculation.
From Coffin Point, Henry traveled to Tampa, where he met King. Recently discharged from Bloomingdale Asylum following his own crash crisis, King sought to refurbish his finances by conducting a geological survey in the West Indies. For Henry, the temperate Gulf Coast proved an unexpectedly welcome diversion from “history,” “economics,” and “politics.” Sensitive to the change in color, he complimented Florida’s “lovely blue skies” and took pleasure in the constant cooling motion of the tropical sea breeze.3
By early February Adams and King were in Cuba. An evening pattern soon developed, King catting about while Adams attended to his letters. Considering that his principal correspondent was Elizabeth Cameron, however, one might say that, in his own cerebral and celibate way, he too courted while abroad. After a brief stay in “noisy, dirty, and fascinating” Havana the two adventurers rented a fine residence just outside of Santiago de Cuba (population forty thousand) on the island’s southeastern shore and once Spain’s colonial capital. While there, lounging, so he said, “in an ideal country-house in an ideal valley,” Henry sketched, painted watercolors of the landscape, and practiced his Spanish. “You would appreciate me at last,” he wrote Cameron, “if you could hear me hablar.” The sun-splashed setting and smooth rhythm of unbroken balmy days—“The climate is divine”—invited ease, and he went weeks without picking up either an American or a Cuban newspaper.4 He occasionally joked of buying a coffee plantation.
A pleasantly surprised King reported to Hay that time in Cuba had marvelously lifted Henry’s spirits. “He was simply delightful, genial and tropical in his warmth,” King wrote. “If he could only live in a capital in Cuba, I think the world-hate would perspire out of him and he might take hold of life and even of letters again.”5
From Cuba, Adams and King went to Nassau, though Henry ordained it a “bore” and the Bahamas left little positive impress on him. Presumably out of disapproval he described the Bahamians, darker-skinned than the Cubans, as “a peculiar type” among whose female population King predictably “managed to amuse himself.” On issues such as skin color and sensuality, however, Henry liked to have it both ways. While he primly shied from some of the franker exhibitions of sexuality he encountered in his various tropical travels, preferring to be an observer (and recorder) rather than a participant, he nevertheless liked to imagine that these “uncomplicated” civilizations were in their own ways superior to the overcivilized, industrialized, gold-bug-driven economies of London and New York. He embraced Cuba, in other words, as he had once embraced Quincy. “Society here, as well as in Europe, is shaking,” he wrote to Gaskell soon after returning from the West Indies. “I prefer my Cuba, which is frankly subsiding into savagery. At least the problems there are simple.”6
Siding with the world’s Cubas and Quincys, Henry adopted in 1894 the ironic honorific “conservative Christian anarchist.” Rejecting the rising scientific-mechanical world, he assumed the role of dissenter and held up various examples of island innocence as the sane man’s antidote to the rush and crush of so many Chicagos. The alias suggests both a looking back and a bold (if only rhetorical) resistance to the main lines of contemporary industrial development. Increasingly he sought to honor past traditions in his written work while assailing the energy, vulgarity, and avarice that so brutally pushed, so he swore, commercial civilization forward.
And that civilization, he little doubted, stood poised to own the next century outright. Tramping about the Caribbean, Adams enjoyed his “ideal valley” just prior to the brief Spanish-American War (1898) in which the victorious United States ended up directing Cuba’s economic and political development. This involvement, which included occupying the country between 1906 and 1909, prefaced a number of other incursions over the next several years. During the final two decades of Adams’s life the United States, to take but a few instances, intervened in Columbia’s Panama province; landed marines in Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz. President William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy policy (1909–13)—a belief that American financial power could promote stability throughout the Western Hemisphere and East Asia—seemed premised on the kind of gold-bug principle that Adams loathed. As in his earlier South Pacific travels, he again found favor in a tropical peoples’ distance from Washington and London.
While in Santiago de Cuba, Henry became fascinated with the Cuban independence movement. King had made contact with a few rebel leaders during their stay, and Adams lived a little vicariously through his friend’s assignations. The uprising began decades earlier with the unsuccessful Ten Years’ War (1868–78) and was now reaching its final phase in what would come to be known as the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98). Henry took great interest in this revolt against the fading Spanish Empire, though in late 1895 his attention turned temporarily to another hemispheric concern: the Venezuelan boundary crisis. Briefly, a long-standing dispute existed between the United Kingdom and Venezuela over territory that Britain insisted belonged to British Guiana. President Grover Cleveland claimed for the United States an interest in the outcome and, rather than see the British define the boundary by dragooning a weaker nation, argued for arbitration. Britain dragged its feet but ultimately complied; in 1899 a Tribunal of Arbitration meeting in Paris decided that the bulk of the disputed territory belonged to British Guiana.
During the crisis Henry had been on the side of arbitration, meaning, despite the eventual outcome, that he favored the Venezuelan cause. In the summer of 1895 Secretary of State Richard Olney, citing the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which had warned Europe away from future political interference in the Americas, prepared a statement vigorously defending the U.S. position of hemispheric dominance; it was subsequently passed on to the British government. “The United States is practically sovereign on this continent,” Olney argued, “and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” Henry, with his detestation of Lombard Street’s money lords and a residual family animosity inherited from his Patriot forefathers, thoroughly enjoyed this twisting of the British lion’s tale. He wrote enthusiastically to Olney, “As a rule of delicacy and good taste, I never volunteer remarks of any sort, on public affairs, to public officials. I do not mean to do so now; but if the opinion of a class of private persons is in any degree worth having, and if mine is any clue to that of others, I pray you to be assured that your message of this day commands my strongest possible approval and support.”7 A few days later, his blood up, Henry facetiously wrote to a niece that he expected war between the United States and Great Britain.
In January Britain agreed to accept arbitration in principle, after which a pleased (and somewhat smug) Adams apprised his old friend Sir Robert Cunliffe, “We have never had the smallest intention of fighting you.… All we wanted was to wake you up in time to prevent trouble”—by which he meant turning England’s attention away from profit squeezing at the expense of other nations. This effort to connect the boundary dispute and the Panic of 1893 is labored at best and gives some sense of Henry’s hostility to British financial power as well as to his simmering anti-Semitism. “What with your Jew crusade for gold, and your hopeless subservience to the speculative interests of the city of London,” he lectured Cunliffe, “we were drifting very far apart.”8 For a few months in the winter of 1895–96 the Venezuelan situation concentrated Adams, and he celebrated Britain’s acceptance of arbitration. This meant that the Monroe Doctrine—conceived by Monroe’s secretary of state John Quincy Adams—had “won out” over the presumed wishes of the bankers and the gold-bugs; the great John Bull, though master of much of the world, could not do as he pleased in America’s backyard. With a satisfying victory on the home front, Henry eagerly took up the Cuba question.
The 1895 outbreak of rebellion on the island put Adams into motion. He encouraged his political friends to simultaneously aid the rebels while applying pressure on Spain to abandon Cuba. “My share in it,” he assured Brooks, “is wholly behind the scenes.”9 Lizzie’s husband, the Don, and her uncle John Sherman of Ohio sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and gravitated to Henry’s arguments. At their behest he drafted a committee report, subsequently informing the nonbinding Morgan-Cameron Resolution of April 1896, calling for America’s endorsement of Cuban independence. Adams further involved himself in the affair by welcoming into his home Gonzalo de Quesada and Horatio Rubens, two important Cuban rebels seeking American support.
Henry now counted Grover Cleveland among the major impediments to the independence movement. The president had signed a proclamation of neutrality in June and remained throughout the final twenty-one months of his tenure in office committed, despite considerable congressional pressure, to staying out of Cuba. Cleveland’s position, coupled with his earlier decision to repeal the Silver Purchase Act, disappointed Adams, who had voted for the president in 1892 as a protest to high-tariff Republicanism, which he regarded as the gold-bug party. “The Democrats,” he defended his ballot, “represented to [me] the last remnants of the eighteenth century.”10 Forgetting the plantocracy’s former influence on the old Jeffersonian coalition, Henry embraced the Democrats’ quaint agrarian vision, critical of both centralized banking and industrialization. Had he his way, the Cuban future would apparently have looked a lot like the American past.
In less assured moments, however, Adams thought the long-term prospects of Cuban independence doubtful. Certainly Spain’s withdrawal appeared imminent, but to what end? A “free” Cuba saddled with a large postcolonial debt merely meant a different kind of colonialism, and Henry could see the commercial needs of its people then becoming, as he evocatively put it, “only one more link in our servitude.”11 They would, in other words, be as dominated by dollars as any Kansas populist. Perhaps needing to place in perspective both the Panic and the Cuban debate, Adams, his mind fixated on the rapidly shifting geopolitical scene, returned to historical writing. These new offerings often abandoned the narrative approach favored in the History, featuring instead a more theoretical and openly pessimistic style. Their author, detesting the strong bond between industry and empire, seemed almost desperately eager in these acerbic exercises to discover the gilded path to Armageddon.