After returning from his long South Seas withdrawal, Henry largely confined his overseas sojourns for the next several years to England and the Continent. But late in the winter of 1898 he returned to Egypt for the first time since navigating the Nile on his honeymoon. He appeared to be chasing ghosts. Just a few weeks earlier he had written pointedly to Clover’s old friend Rebecca Dodge Rae, explaining his weary widower’s existence: “When one has eaten one’s dinner, one is bored at having to sit at the table. Do you know that I am sixty in six weeks, and that I was only fortyseven when I finished my dinner?” Shortly thereafter he told Elizabeth Cameron that his “old instinct of running away” had suddenly resurfaced. He felt unable to remain any longer in Washington, “still less… Boston.”1
Perhaps his impending birthday produced a pause, or maybe the posthumous life no longer struck the same symbolic chords, or possibly he needed to more definitively reconcile with Clover’s memory, to confront whatever long-held resentments remained from her depression and suicide, to finally, so to speak, walk away from the darkening dinner table. Egypt, the site of Clover’s initial “breakdown,” offered, even in the traveling company of the Hays, the opportunity for a kind of private communion. As a particularly delicate memory, it preceded the couple’s hopeful removal to Washington, the invention of the Five of Hearts, and the shared secret of Democracy’s authorship. In describing to Cameron his sudden need for Egypt, Adams noted somewhat vaguely and without elaboration that his desire for decamping ran “strong just now” and must be attended to “so that I can settle down to a new situation.”2
Not long after writing these words Henry experienced a powerful sense of recall while cruising on a steam dahabieh off Memphis. The emotional release he perhaps longed for had at last arrived. “I knew it would be a risky thing,” he later reported to Cameron, “but it came so suddenly that before I could catch myself, I was unconsciously wringing my hands and the tears rolled down in the old way.… A few hours wore off the nervous effect, and now I can stand anything, although of course there is hardly a moment when some memory of twentyfive years ago is not brought to mind. The Nile does not change.”3
Hardly had his stirred emotions settled when Adams, now docked at Aswan in the Upper Nile Valley, learned that the American battleship Maine had blown up in Havana Harbor on February 15. Half a world away, “hiding in a hole,” he suddenly redirected his energies toward the Cuban crisis and the growing possibility of a Spanish-American War endgame. Within two months Congress, claiming an external mine destroyed the Maine and eager to see Spain out of Cuba, pushed through a joint resolution calling for Cuban independence—and American military assistance if necessary. President William McKinley signed the measure on April 20, and America’s “splendid little war,” as Hay called the campaign, had begun. Utterly absorbed watching this unexpected conflict slowly take shape, Adams wrote to Cameron, “Step to step, [I] was dragged back to the life I fled.”4
That spring Henry remained on the move. In early May, while in Belgrade, he learned that the American Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey had destroyed Spain’s Pacific fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay—thus ending nearly four hundred years of that nation’s rule over the Philippines. “It is time to look ahead once more,” he wrote to a niece, “and to see where things are drifting.” By the middle of the month Adams had taken rooms at the Hotel Brighton in the heart of Paris. While there he played at heading the State Department, musing in correspondence that he hoped to see Spanish recognition of Cuban independence and some measure of self-government in Puerto Rico; the United States, he ventured, might do well to annex Hawaii and recall its forces from the Philippines in return for maintaining a harbor outfitted with a coaling station. With America’s victory in sight, he now feared that Spain’s defeat might destabilize half of Europe. Journeying on to London, he confided to Brooks, “In my eyes, Spain is too rotten to hold together, and I fear her total extinction. Western Europe is in a parlous state. If we do not take care, we shall drag the whole rotten fabric down on our heads. I want peace.”5
Shortly thereafter Adams joined the Hays and Camerons at Surrenden Dering, a grand ivy-covered Kent house constructed during the reign of Charles I and later rebuilt. “The country around Surrenden was lovely,” remembered one of their party, “and we were blessed all through the summer with the most divine weather in which to enjoy it.” Comfortably situated, the Americans followed the papers; with several of their acquaintances or the offspring thereof fighting in Cuba, they collectively felt, so Henry reported to Brooks, “anxious about the casualties.” These tensions, however, more generally gave way to sociable days of ambling and exploration. “Uncle Henry” dutifully conveyed his companions about the region, reciting for their consideration the history and human drama lying as quiet as crypts about the surrounding villages, farms, and fields. Adams, so a niece recalled of their busy itinerary, exhibited a remarkable “bird-dog instinct” for sniffing about “a number of old parish churches in the immediate neighborhood” as well as a couple of crumbling castles “sacred to the stormy memory of Anne Boleyn.”6
When not wandering around the countryside, Adams spent much of his time at Surrenden Dering in discussion with Hay, then serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Their conversations were interrupted in late August, however, when Hay returned to Washington, heeding McKinley’s invitation to serve as secretary of state. This, of course, left Hay’s ambassadorial post vacant. With a powerful friend heading the State Department and an unimpeachable pedigree, Henry had reason to hope that he might finally duplicate at least one of his celebrated antecedents’ achievements. Beyond the advantage of a venerable family tree, he could be said to have cultivated, as one of the country’s most distinguished historians, an appropriate profession for diplomatic work. George Bancroft (naval secretary in the Polk administration), Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Hay all wrote American history, and Adams’s acclaimed interpretation of the early republic, with its careful combing of the British and European archives, served as something of an advertisement for his ability to broadly conceptualize statecraft.
As usual, Henry qualified his ambitions even as he privately disclosed a desire that others might at last recognize his fitness for a major diplomatic role. “All my life I have lived in the closest possible personal relations with men in high office,” he wrote Gaskell. “Hay is the first one of them who has ever expressed a wish to have me for an associate in his responsibilities.” He claimed to have no serious designs on leading the American embassy in London, as, he said, “nothing short of a cataclysm” would induce the GOP’s power brokers to elevate an independent bereft of party backing. Still, he assured Gaskell that “poor Hay” would certainly need assistance, and “if he called on me, I should no doubt be obliged to do whatever he wished.”7
In such careful communications Henry offered evidence as to why he never found his footing in the American political system. He clearly longed to emulate his ancestors’ successes, though even these antiparty men had occasionally been aided by parties. His unwillingness to bow to ambition contains a certain attractiveness, and yet there were some around him who wished that he might have exerted at least some small effort to claim his share of prizes—as Hay, a giver of time, advice, and money to the party of Lincoln, had strained to claim his. Instead Adams seemed eager to deny the republic his talents, as he thought the republic had so often denied him. “If the country had put him on a pedestal,” Justice Holmes once said, “I think Henry Adams with his gifts could have rendered distinguished public service. He wanted it handed to him on a silver platter.”8
And so, for a moment, the ambassadorship appeared to be. In late September a Philadelphia dispatch to that effect made its way into both the London Times and the Paris Herald: “Mr. Henry Adams, of Massachusetts, son of Charles Francis Adams, and a friend of Mr. Hay, is reported to have been suggested for Ambassador in London. He is a prominent author and historian. His father, grandfather, and great-grand-father have all been on missions to London.” But the call never came. Instead Henry left London and returned to the United States in November. He subsequently wrote to Elizabeth Cameron that Hay had casually met him on the doorstep of his house. The two went inside, chatted for an hour about a number of matters, but conspicuously avoided “political” talk. “We did not,” he pointedly observed, “even mention the embassy.” He closed his note by adding that James McMillan, a Detroit industrialist and Michigan senator, would receive the London post. This news, he assured Cameron, came as a “vast relief.”9 The ambassadorship actually went to the distinguished New York lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate, a venerable GOP warhorse who had campaigned for every Republican presidential nominee since 1856. Confirmed by the Senate, Choate held the London post for six years (1899–1905), longer than any minister since Charles Francis Adams.
On the questions of war and empire Henry took conflicting positions. One can find in his correspondence many and sincere comments sharply critical of American expansion. In one communication, written during the debate over whether the United States should remain in the Philippines, he denounced the mounting pressure to pocket colonies, condemning “our present state of Washington. We are disgustingly fat, oily, greasy and contented.” In other moments, however, the emergence of American power made him proud. Thus, while he wished for nothing more from the Philippines than a coaling station, he had little patience for the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898–1920), which opposed annexation of the islands as a violation of the United States’ founding principles of self-government and nonintervention. The League’s eclectic membership included Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and William James. James furiously scolded his country’s Pacific push: “God Damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles.” How, he queried, could the United States, a nation born in a great anticolonial struggle, so casually “puke up its ancient soul… in five minutes without a wink of squeamishness.” The League also counted Charles Francis Adams Jr., among its numbers, and Henry privately dismissed his older brother as making “a fool of himself by talking… idiotically.” He thought younger brother Brooks’s realpolitik more sensible, observing, “The anti-imperialists are perfectly right in what they see and fear, but one can’t grow young again by merely refusing to walk.”10
Henry’s desire to punish Wall Street, however, strongly compromised his foreign policy realism. Taking note of the bankers’ aversion to ending Spanish rule in Cuba, he presumed that American and British financiers wanted to see the old colonial system survive for their own selfish ends. Accordingly, he moved into the opposing camp, joining the bulk of American public opinion—and the yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—in shouting for war. But Adams’s underlying ambivalence—wanting freedom for Cuba, a presence in the Philippines, and a protectorate in Puerto Rico—spoke of broader ambiguities. His family had made its good name contesting the world’s largest empire; what would history now make of his own generation’s actions overseas? Even for a master ironist, the question seemed fraught with peril.