In January 1912, having just completed a revised edition of the Chartres, Henry, a month shy of seventy-four and in increasingly frail health, informed Elizabeth Cameron that he could now die. “At last I’ve finished!” he opened on a mock-triumphant note. “My final proof-sheets are sent off; my final occupation is ended; since Monday I wake up every morning with the happy thought that I’ve nothing more to do in the world, and that it doesn’t matter now whether I go blind or deaf or senile, or have aphasia in public, or forget my name.” Age, he well understood, was attacking him from all sides. For perhaps three or four years he had experienced memory and vision loss, worried about his nervous system, and occasionally found it difficult to form words. The distressing memory of the Governor’s slide into dementia frankly scared him. “Between ourselves,” he had written to Cameron in the fall of 1908, “I am quite aware that I am done for already. Any fati[g]ue or digestive derangement upsets my head at once, and some fine day I shall wander off and get lost, like my father.”1
Instead the months and years continued to pass without significant change in his health. Brooks, used to Henry’s hypochondria, mildly scolded his brother for screening an iron constitution behind a raft of complaints: “Seriously the trouble with you is that you are so uniformly well and active that you do not know what it is to be hurt.… You can write longer, remember better, and read double the number of hours that I can.” But time invariably caught up with Henry. In February 1912 he confided to one correspondent of plans for another Paris summer, excited particularly at the idea of cruising aboard the new British passenger liner Titanic on its maiden return voyage. Its tragic sinking in the early-morning hours of April 15 with appalling loss of life distressed him deeply. “The foundering of the Titanic is serious, and strikes at confidence in our mechanical success,” he wrote Cameron. “Bessy Lodge and Margaretta [Cameron MacVeagh] dined here last night and drove me insane by repeating the stories of the wreck.… Very little more, and we should all be as hysterical as the newspapers.” On the 21st he complained of his “poor old memory,” and three days later, dining alone at his Washington residence, he suffered a stroke.2
Henry’s manservant William Gray, having heard a thud, found Adams on the floor calling for assistance—“I can’t get up, you will have to help me”—and he and the female cook carried Adams to his upstairs bedroom. There was no telephone at 1603 H Street, so Gray rushed next door to the Hay residence and called for a physician. Henry woke up the next morning with limited use of his right hand, but other than feeling lethargic, he appeared to be in good shape. His brother Charles soon arrived on the scene and took charge. Anticipating a home convalescence for Henry, he ordered a telephone installed. Several days went by with no apparent change in the patient’s condition, but on the evening of May 2 Henry’s health dramatically declined. He became incoherent and two days later was described as “vague.” On the 8th he expressed a wish to write to his mother (dead nearly twenty-three years), though he also maintained that she went down on the Titanic. On the 10th Henry Cabot Lodge reported that Adams “had another bad night; was very violent and striving to get out of the window. They were obliged to… give him a sedative.”3
Biographer Ernest Samuels speculated that Henry, with a rational mind, sought to end his life, fearing a descent into “mindless senility.” But this presumes that Adams had control over his faculties at a time when, as the report of May 8 indicates, he may not. We know with more certainty that Henry’s personal physician, Dr. Harry Crecy Yarrow, believed his patient’s prospects for a full recovery dim. “I see very little hope for the future,” he wrote the London-situated Elizabeth Cameron on the 25th. “He may recover in part his… mental faculties, but I believe they will never be the same as before.”4 Nine days later, on June 3, Charles sent a similarly bleak note to her:
He seems quite indifferent to visitors.… I think it not improbable he may recover so far as that he can be wheeled through an open window on to a balcony, or even perhaps, carried on to the grass and sit in the shade under a tree. That, however, he will recover so far as to be capable of consecutive thought or continued articulate utterance and judgment I hardly think probable. Dr. Worcester, in whose experience and judgment I have the utmost confidence, holds out little hope of either.5
Dr. Alfred Worcester maintained a general practice outside of Boston. Many years later Worcester drafted a self-serving twenty-two-page memoir, “Reminiscences of a Country Doctor,” describing the situation, as he remembered it, at Adams’s house:
I found Henry Adams cooped in a crib-cot with slat sides, from which he said he wanted to get out. There were several doctors there, one of them a permanent resident, and as many nurses. They said their patient had had a shock several weeks previously, that he was deranged, partially paralized and difficult to manage. I found little in his condition to warrant either their objections to his removal or the generous amount of soporific drugs which the records showed he was having. As we were going down stairs for our consultation the colored butler whispered to me “They are all living here on terrapin and drinking up his champagne.” Perhaps it was this revelation that stiffened my insistence that it would be perfectly safe to move the patient North. When the disagreement of the doctors was reported to his brothers they accepted my advice in spite of the Washingtonians.6
Along with a physician and two nurses, Henry boarded a private rail car (arranged by Henry Cabot Lodge) and headed toward Boston. From there, on June 16, the small convalescent party arrived in Lincoln, where Henry stayed at Birnam Woods, close to Charles’s home. Making a marvelous recovery, he walked the grounds (including strolls to nearby Walden Pond), lifted light weights, took open-air drives, and endured massages. He reported to his friend Cecil Spring Rice with a flash of the old acid, “[They] have proceeded to rub me, and pound me, and make me generally exceedingly uncomfortable, with the idea that I was going to be quite well again.”7
On June 26 Elizabeth Cameron, under the cover of returning to America to attend the marriage of Colgate Hoyt, her widowed brother-in-law, arrived in Lincoln. Her attention, and that of several nieces and a host of ancient Quincy and Boston connections, seemed to lighten Henry’s outlook. Though Charles reported that his brother’s tongue remained sharp throughout the summer, Henry’s correspondence suggested, at least on occasion, a mellower mood. In a late August communication to Gaskell, he fairly basked in his surprising situation:
I’ve really passed quite a happy summer,—rather better than in a rainy Paris, for the weather has been good. Nothing has happened. A few very old friends have been with me. Mrs Cameron is in America. My niece Louly Hooper has stuck to me. My niece Elsie Adams… has not deserted me. Various Lodges, Endicott’s, &c, have lighted near my perch. My brother Charles comes here every day to growl about politics and the nature of newspapers.8
Having resumed his correspondence in June, Henry dispensed with dictation in August. His health steadily returning, he predictably turned his eye toward the coming presidential canvas, a perfect smash-up for the Republicans as Theodore Roosevelt, eager after a fitful four-year retirement to reclaim the White House but unable to wrest the GOP’s nomination from his former protégé William Howard Taft, formed the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party, a vote-splitting insurgency that ensured the November victory of New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson. Adams thought it a beautiful disaster. He wrote to Anna Cabot Lodge while in Lincoln:
Do not be alarmed about the election. Whatever way it goes it is sure to go against us, so we might as well look on it with perfectly philosophical eyes.… I am somewhat more puzzled to know what satisfaction Theodore gets out of it, or will be likely to get out of it, and I have only one hope in regard to him, and that is that he will be firm on the point not to spend any of his own or of Edith’s money on it. It is bad enough to ruin oneself and one’s party too, without absolutely throwing away one’s fortune.9
His attitude, in any event, seemed to have made a rather complete recovery.
That fall Henry arranged to return to Washington, though he would now need a permanent secretary-companion to care for him. On the recommendation of Mabel Hooper La Farge and Louisa Hooper Ward, he invited their friend Aileen Tone to join his household. Tone, then living in New York, was thirty-four, unmarried, a Roman Catholic, and an adept musician; her connection to the Hoopers only strengthened her appeal to Adams. Flashing the old blend of charm and exaggeration that he typically reserved for Elizabeth Cameron and any number of nieces, he courted the tall, attractive Tone like an avid suitor: “Truly come, and bring me life in some form, for I perish.”10 In need of a situation to support herself, Tone agreed to become an H Street niece-nurse in residence. On the last day of October, slightly more than six months after his stroke, Henry left Lincoln and returned to Washington. There, on November 7, he wrote to Charles thanking him for his many kindnesses and care. He also reported that he was at peace, expected to live but a few months longer, and wished only to finish the “game” strong:
I have no illusions. I accepted my notice to quit in full consciousness of its bearing, and, between ourselves, with a breath of relief. My return here, and the changes ahead, smooth the way. My general decline in vigor and endurance notifies me that a few months at most are all I have or want. But I’ve got to go on as though I could see ahead, and everyone will have to lend themselves to the game. It will not be easy, but I will be as docile as I can.11