PRESIDENT GRANT (1869)

  THE first effect of this leap into the unknown was a fit of low
spirits new to the young man's education; due in part to the
overpowering beauty and sweetness of the Maryland autumn, almost
unendurable for its strain on one who had toned his life down to the
November grays and browns of northern Europe. Life could not go on so
beautiful and so sad. Luckily, no one else felt it or knew it. He bore
it as well as he could, and when he picked himself up, winter had come,
and he was settled in bachelor's quarters, as modest as those of a
clerk in the Departments, far out on G Street, towards Georgetown,
where an old Finn named Dohna, who had come out with the Russian
Minister Stoeckel long before, had bought or built a new house.
Congress had met. Two or three months remained to the old
administration, but all interest centred in the new one. The town began
to swarm with office-seekers, among whom a young writer was lost. He
drifted among them, unnoticed, glad to learn his work under cover of
the confusion. He never aspired to become a regular reporter; he knew
he should fail in trying a career so ambitious and energetic; but he
picked up friends on the press--Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, Henry
Watterson, Sam Bowles--all reformers, and all mixed and jumbled
together in a tidal wave of expectation, waiting for General Grant to
give orders. No one seemed to know much about it. Even Senators had
nothing to say. One could only make notes and study finance.

  In waiting, he amused himself as he could. In the amusements of
Washington, education had no part, but the simplicity of the amusements
proved the simplicity of everything else, ambitions, interests,
thoughts, and knowledge. Proverbially Washington was a poor place for
education, and of course young diplomats avoided or disliked it, but,
as a rule, diplomats disliked every place except Paris, and the world
contained only one Paris. They abused London more violently than
Washington; they praised no post under the sun; and they were merely
describing three-fourths of their stations when they complained that
there were no theatres, no restaurants, no monde, no demi-monde, no
drives, no splendor, and, as Mme. de Struve used to say, no grandezza.
This was all true; Washington was a mere political camp, as transient
and temporary as a camp-meeting for religious revival, but the
diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for
there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was
in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After
watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London
society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington. He had ten
years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the
easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple,
good-natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington spring.
Society went on excellently well without houses, or carriages, or
jewels, or toilettes, or pavements, or shops, or grandezza of any sort;
and the market was excellent as well as cheap. One could not stay there
a month without loving the shabby town. Even the Washington girl, who
was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had
singular charm, and used it. According to Mr. Adams the father, this
charm dated back as far as Monroe's administration, to his personal
knowledge.

  Therefore, behind all the processes of political or financial
or newspaper training, the social side of Washington was to be taken
for granted as three-fourths of existence. Its details matter nothing.
Life ceased to be strenuous, and the victim thanked God for it.
Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
Adams was not alone. Senator Sumner had as private secretary a young
man named Moorfield Storey, who became a dangerous example of
frivolity. The new Attorney-General, E. R. Hoar, brought with him from
Concord a son, Sam Hoar, whose example rivalled that of Storey. Another
impenitent was named Dewey, a young naval officer. Adams came far down
in the list. He wished he had been higher. He could have spared a world
of superannuated history, science, or politics, to have reversed better
in waltzing.

  He had no adequate notion how little he knew, especially of
women, and Washington offered no standard of comparison. All were
profoundly ignorant together, and as indifferent as children to
education. No one needed knowledge. Washington was happier without
style. Certainly Adams was happier without it; happier than he had ever
been before; happier than any one in the harsh world of strenuousness
could dream of. This must be taken as background for such little
education as he gained; but the life belonged to the eighteenth
century, and in no way concerned education for the twentieth.

  In such an atmosphere, one made no great pretence of hard work.
If the world wants hard work, the world must pay for it; and, if it
will not pay, it has no fault to find with the worker. Thus far, no one
had made a suggestion of pay for any work that Adams had done or could
do; if he worked at all, it was for social consideration, and social
pleasure was his pay. For this he was willing to go on working, as an
artist goes on painting when no one buys his pictures. Artists have
done it from the beginning of time, and will do it after time has
expired, since they cannot help themselves, and they find their return
in the pride of their social superiority as they feel it. Society
commonly abets them and encourages their attitude of contempt. The
society of Washington was too simple and Southern as yet, to feel
anarchistic longings, and it never read or saw what artists produced
elsewhere, but it good-naturedly abetted them when it had the chance,
and respected itself the more for the frailty. Adams found even the
Government at his service, and every one willing to answer his
questions. He worked, after a fashion; not very hard, but as much as
the Government would have required of him for nine hundred dollars a
year; and his work defied frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing
than the world ever got from reading him, for his work was not amusing,
nor was he. One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and
this was the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months
to an article on the finances of the United States, just then a subject
greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it, he sent it to
London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous editor of the Edinburgh
Review. Reeve probably thought it good; at all events, he said so; and
he printed it in April. Of course it was reprinted in America, but in
England such articles were still anonymous, and the author remained
unknown.

  The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a place on
the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow of Lord
Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank seemed
colossal--the highest in the literary world--as it had been only
five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed since then, but
the position still flattered vanity, though it brought no other
flattery or reward except the regular thirty pounds of pay--fifty
dollars a month, measured in time and labor.

  The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert Cecil had
invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of politics which he
called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and the name--he thought he
had been enough in Lord Robert's house, in days of his struggle with
adversity, to excuse the theft--and began what he meant for a permanent
series of annual political reviews which he hoped to make, in time, a
political authority. With his sources of information, and his social
intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would
command attention. He had the field to himself, and he meant to give
himself a free hand, as he went on. Whether the newspapers liked it or
not, they would have to reckon with him; for such a power, once
established, was more effective than all the speeches in Congress or
reports to the President that could be crammed into the Government
presses.

  The first of these "Sessions" appeared in April, but it could
not be condensed into a single article, and had to be supplemented in
October by another which bore the title of "Civil Service Reform," and
was really a part of the same review. A good deal of authentic history
slipped into these papers. Whether any one except his press associates
ever read them, he never knew and never greatly cared. The difference
is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five
hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five
hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. The fateful year 1870
was near at hand, which was to mark the close of the literary epoch,
when quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration;
volumes to pages. The outburst was brilliant. Bret Harte led, and
Robert Louis Stevenson followed. Guy de Maupassant and Rudyard Kipling
brought up the rear, and dazzled the world. As usual, Adams found
himself fifty years behind his time, but a number of belated wanderers
kept him company, and they produced on each other the effect or
illusion of a public opinion. They straggled apart, at longer and
longer intervals, through the procession, but they were still within
hearing distance of each other. The drift was still superficially
conservative. Just as the Church spoke with apparent authority, or the
quarterlies laid down an apparent law, and no one could surely say
where the real authority, or the real law, lay. Science did not know.
Truths a priori held their own against truths surely relative.
According to Lowell, Right was forever on the scaffold, Wrong was
forever on the Throne; and most people still thought they believed it.
Adams was not the only relic of the eighteenth century, and he could
still depend on a certain number of listeners--mostly respectable, and
some rich.

  Want of audience did not trouble him; he was well enough off in
that respect, and would have succeeded in all his calculations if this
had been his only hazard. Where he broke down was at a point where he
always suffered wreck and where nine adventurers out of ten make their
errors. One may be more or less certain of organized forces; one can
never be certain of men. He belonged to the eighteenth century, and the
eighteenth century upset all his plans. For the moment, America was
more eighteenth century than himself; it reverted to the stone age.

  As education--of a certain sort--the story had probably a
certain value, though he could never see it. One seldom can see much
education in the buck of a broncho; even less in the kick of a mule.
The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal's way.
This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in
politics since 1860.

  At least four-fifths of the American people--Adams among the
rest--had united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency,
and probably had been more or less affected in their choice by the
parallel they felt between Grant and Washington. Nothing could be more
obvious. Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the
soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he
pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million
or a million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even
Washington, who was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller,
had known how to organize a government, and had found Jeffersons and
Hamiltons to organize his departments. The task of bringing the
Government back to regular practices, and of restoring moral and
mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was
ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the
confusion, especially in the old slave States and in the currency, was
considerable, but, the general disposition was good, and every one had
echoed that famous phrase: "Let us have peace."

  Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic
adventures, but even at twice his age he could not see that this
reliance on Grant was unreasonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one
would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never
expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public
spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower
House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed,
one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and
tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke
out: "You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog!
You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!" Adams knew far too
little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he
thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average
Congressman of 1869--he saw little or nothing of later ones--but he
knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: "If a
Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?" This innocent question, put
in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a
week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief.
The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but
faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole
Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent
reason. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be
burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them;
even Grant, who rarely sparkled in epigram, became witty on their
account; but their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter.
They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield and Blaine, and
even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome task of
a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

  Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope
that any President chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians
would raise the character of government; and by instinct if not by
reason, all the world united on Grant. The Senate understood what the
world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle with Grant more
serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were alive with
eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The
newspaper-man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his
person feels best satisfied in its double instincts when writing in one
sense and thinking in another. All newspaper-men, whatever they wrote,
felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated with the stream. He was
eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or later
inevitable. He meant to support the Executive in attacking the Senate
and taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did
he much care how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect
the revolution in 1870 than to wait till 1920.

  With this thought in his mind, he went to the Capitol to hear
the names announced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of
Grant's Cabinet. To the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness
of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his
intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed
of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements not much
weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him
blush, while Grant's nominations had the singular effect of making the
hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made
another total misconception of life--another inconceivable false start.
Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he had missed his motive narrowly, and his
intention had been more than sound, for the Senators made no secret of
saying with senatorial frankness that Grant's nominations betrayed his
intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier
might be a baby politician.

  Adams left the Capitol, much in the same misty mental condition
that he recalled as marking his railway journey to London on May 13,
1861; he felt in himself what Gladstone bewailed so sadly, "the
incapacity of viewing things all round." He knew, without absolutely
saying it, that Grant had cut short the life which Adams had laid out
for himself in the future. After such a miscarriage, no thought of
effectual reform could revive for at least one generation, and he had
no fancy for ineffectual politics. What course could he sail next? He
had tried so many, and society had barred them all! For the moment, he
saw no hope but in following the stream on which he had launched
himself. The new Cabinet, as individuals, were not hostile.
Subsequently Grant made changes in the list which were mostly welcome
to a Bostonian--or should have been--although fatal to Adams. The name
of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism
and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as
Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke;
Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch,
and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one
resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as
Secretary of the Interior, suggested help and comfort; while that of
Judge Hoar, as Attorney-General, promised friendship. On the whole, the
personal outlook, merely for literary purposes, seemed fairly cheerful,
and the political outlook, though hazy, still depended on Grant
himself. No one doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform;
that his aim had been to place his administration above politics; and
until he should actually drive his supporters away, one might hope to
support him. One's little lantern must therefore be turned on Grant.
One seemed to know him so well, and really knew so little.

  By chance it happened that Adam Badeau took the lower suite of
rooms at Dohna's, and, as it was convenient to have one table, the two
men dined together and became intimate. Badeau was exceedingly social,
though not in appearance imposing. He was stout; his face was red, and
his habits were regularly irregular; but he was very intelligent, a
good newspaper-man, and an excellent military historian. His life of
Grant was no ordinary book. Unlike most newspaper-men, he was a
friendly critic of Grant, as suited an officer who had been on the
General's staff. As a rule, the newspaper correspondents in Washington
were unfriendly, and the lobby sceptical. From that side one heard
tales that made one's hair stand on end, and the old West Point army
officers were no more flattering. All described him as vicious, narrow,
dull, and vindictive. Badeau, who had come to Washington for a
consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey
for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He
talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for
analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do.
Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his
patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive
about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins
understood the General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent
energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in
repose. He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why
Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For
stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would
systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but
by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would
announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the
discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the
energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his
character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a
mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.

  In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not,
like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant's power of suggestion to act on the
General's mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his
portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to
add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen
since Napoleon. Badeau's analysis was rather delicate; infinitely
superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.

  Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced
him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen
Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the
most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of study
among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely. Adams had
no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied
him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus
far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or
unintellectual type--Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a
trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for
nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual,
archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam,
according to legend, was such a man.

  In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with
differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the
greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil
to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy;
jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance;
always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest
stimulant--the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature,
energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of
scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them
than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect
at once.

  Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw
only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow;
only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand
near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits.
Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he
resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to
commonplaces when at a loss for expression: "Let us have peace!" or,
"The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it"; or a score of such
reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness;
but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously
remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a
fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have
taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of
simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual
commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite
distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was
not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted
and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first
principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for
ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset
evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years
after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be
called--and should actually and truly be--the highest product of the
most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as
commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant,
was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

  Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was
worth the pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he
was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was
archaic and should have lived in a cave and worn skins. Darwinists
ought to conclude that America was reverting to the stone age, but the
theory of reversion was more absurd than that of evolution. Grant's
administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait of the
past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American. Not
an official in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who
died in September, suggested an American idea.

  Yet this administration, which upset Adams's whole life, was
not unfriendly; it was made up largely of friends. Secretary Fish was
almost kind; he kept the tradition of New York social values; he was
human and took no pleasure in giving pain. Adams felt no prejudice
whatever in his favor, and he had nothing in mind or person to attract
regard; his social gifts were not remarkable; he was not in the least
magnetic; he was far from young; but he won confidence from the start
and remained a friend to the finish. As far as concerned Mr. Fish, one
felt rather happily suited, and one was still better off in the
Interior Department with J. D. Cox. Indeed, if Cox had been in the
Treasury and Boutwell in the Interior, one would have been quite
satisfied as far as personal relations went, while, in the
Attorney-General's Office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible
ideal, both personal and political.

  The difficulty was not the want of friends, and had the whole
government been filled with them, it would have helped little without
the President and the Treasury. Grant avowed from the start a policy of
drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles. At thirty, one
has no interest in becoming a barnacle, but even in that character
Henry Adams would have been ill-seen. His friends were reformers,
critics, doubtful in party allegiance, and he was himself an object of
suspicion. Grant had no objects, wanted no help, wished for no
champions. The Executive asked only to be let alone. This was his
meaning when he said: "Let us have peace!"

  No one wanted to go into opposition. As for Adams, all his
hopes of success in life turned on his finding an administration to
support. He knew well enough the rules of self-interest. He was for
sale. He wanted to be bought. His price was excessively cheap, for he
did not even ask an office, and had his eye, not on the Government, but
on New York. All he wanted was something to support; something that
would let itself be supported. Luck went dead against him. For once, he
was fifty years in advance of his time.

Initially optimistic about Grant's first term in office, Henry soon becomes disillusioned. Because of Grant's success during the Civil War, Henry assumes that the new President will at least be an effective administrator, as George Washington was, and have the wisdom to select top men for his Cabinet. The Cabinet announcements are disappointing to Henry because they indicate political inertia rather than reform. Adams prefers limited control for the federal government, a laissez-faire policy; but he does hope that Grant will restore power to the Constitution and get rid of "greenback" currency, which is not supported by gold. A visit to the White House is discouraging. Henry sees only a diminishing future for himself in Washington. As a writer, however, he has some success. The British Edinburgh Review publishes his "American Finance, 1865-1869" in April, editor Henry Reeve praising it with such enthusiasm that Henry includes the evaluation in a letter to his brother Charles. The North American Review carries two of his articles on the political situation in Washington; the Nation runs two on inside information, such as "A Peep into Cabinet Windows," in December.

As an educational experience, the first Grant administration is a disappointment; as career advancement for Henry, he feels it is even worse. A reform journalist, Henry has high hopes for Grant's leadership. He is disappointed almost immediately. Grant's popularity is based on his achievements as a military leader in the Civil War; considering this, Henry expects the new executive to be at least an able administrator. "Grant represented order," the narrator says; but young Henry hopes for intellectual vitality and strengthening of the Constitution as well. These hopes are dashed with the first Cabinet announcements, which include choices that support the status quo. An example is the unimaginative George S. Boutwell for Secretary of the Treasury. In an area in which Henry has some expertise, he had hoped for the selection of David A. Wells, a man he considers brilliant and sympathetic to Henry's position. Henry still supports the gold standard and also seeks lower tariffs to broaden America's economy; by March, Henry has pretty well given up. As he says to a friend, there is virtually no hope for change. A visit to the White House is not encouraging. He finds Grant to be an "unintellectual . . . pre-intellectual" type, a man in whom only energy counts, a force of nature who may respond well to a fight but is all action and no thought. Henry is sure that Grant is not being ironic when he states, "Venice would be a fine city if it were drained." More important, Grant doesn't seem to care to be bothered with the problems of the government. When accepting the nomination for the Presidency on May 29, 1868, Grant had famously stated, "Let us have Peace." Henry now takes this to mean that the President simply wants to be left alone! Instead of changing bad laws, Grant maintains that they should be enforced so the people will be outraged and change the laws themselves. Rather than taking the lead, Grants seems to prefer to do nothing. His is a policy of drift; and drift, Adams avers, attracts only barnacles. In an intentionally silly interpretation of Darwin, Adams now wonders how Grant could have evolved from Washington. Henry's writing is more rewarding. After spending the better part of three months on his financial piece for the Edinburgh Review, he is pleased that it is well received. The down side is that such articles are still printed anonymously in England so the essay, which is reprinted in American journals, is not widely attributed to the author. Henry is equally pleased with his work in the North American Review, advocating civil service reform, among other changes. Henry argues against patronage in the civil service; he wants to see an elite corps of career professionals. Henry's reputation as a writer is on the rise. Still, he is concerned about his career as a reformer in the stagnant political atmosphere of the Grant administration. Glossary demimonde  the class of women who have lost social standing due to sexual promiscuity; prostitutes. abject of the lowest degree; miserable; wretched. abet to incite, sanction, or help, especially in wrongdoing. a priori  from cause to effect; from a generalization to particular instances. lugubrious sad or mournful, especially in an exaggerated or ridiculous way.


FREE FIGHT (1869-1870)

  THE old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal, but the
young New Englander was sometimes human. Judge Hoar brought his son Sam
to Washington, and Sam Hoar loved largely and well. He taught Adams the
charm of Washington spring. Education for education, none ever compared
with the delight of this. The Potomac and its tributaries squandered
beauty. Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains. Here and there a
negro log cabin alone disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the
azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of
struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the
landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The
brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the
running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the
deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No
European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace
and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too
much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could not leave it,
but loitered on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer
village about La Fayette Square, as one whose rights of inheritance
could not be questioned. Few Americans were so poor as to question them.

  In spite of the fatal deception--or undeception--about
Grant's political character, Adams's first winter in Washington had so
much amused him that he had not a thought of change. He loved it too
much to question its value. What did he know about its value, or what
did any one know? His father knew more about it than any one else in
Boston, and he was amused to find that his father, whose recollections
went back to 1820, betrayed for Washington much the same sentimental
weakness, and described the society about President Monroe much as his
son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effect on
young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his
brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in
Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it.

  Henry was in a savage humor on the subject of Boston. He saw
Boutwells at every counter. He found a personal grief in every tree.
Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, Clarence King used to amuse him by
mourning over the narrow escape that nature had made in attaining
perfection. Except for two mistakes, the earth would have been a
success. One of these errors was the inclination of the ecliptic; the
other was the differentiation of the sexes, and the saddest thought
about the last was that it should have been so modern. Adams, in his
splenetic temper, held that both these unnecessary evils had wreaked
their worst on Boston. The climate made eternal war on society, and sex
was a species of crime. The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond
recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees. Of course he was in
the wrong. The thinness was in himself, not in Boston; but this is a
story of education, and Adams was struggling to shape himself to his
time. Boston was trying to do the same thing. Everywhere, except in
Washington, Americans were toiling for the same object. Every one
complained of surroundings, except where, as at Washington, there were
no surroundings to complain of. Boston kept its head better than its
neighbors did, and very little time was needed to prove it, even to
Adams's confusion.

  Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over,
and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant's character
showed themselves. They were startling--astounding--terrifying. The
mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to
corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up--at least so
far as to make it intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change
at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner gold without
interference from the Government. He took a number of precautions,
which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also
testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have
satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal
lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that no
such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead that he had
taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances which did satisfy
him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.

  This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the
White House or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him.
To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to
hire their services at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was
Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly,
with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had
ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They
risked something; no one could say what; but the people about the Erie
office were not regarded as lambs.

  The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most efficient
District Attorney, with all his official tools to work with. Charles
took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold Conspiracy; and
they went to New York to work it up. The surface was in full view. They
had no trouble in Wall Street, and they paid their respects in person
to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace; but the New York side
of the story helped Henry little. He needed to penetrate the political
mystery, and for this purpose he had to wait for Congress to meet. At
first he feared that Congress would suppress the scandal, but the
Congressional Investigation was ordered and took place. He soon knew
all that was to be known; the material for his essay was furnished by
the Government.

  Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or
historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and
as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any
mystery existed. All Adams's great friends--Fish, Cox, Hoar, Evarts,
Sumner, and their surroundings--were precisely the persons most
mystified. They knew less than Adams did; they sought information, and
frankly admitted that their relations with the White House and the
Treasury were not confidential. No one volunteered advice. No one
offered suggestion. One got no light, even from the press, although
press agents expressed in private the most damning convictions with
their usual cynical frankness. The Congressional Committee took a
quantity of evidence which it dared not probe, and refused to analyze.
Although the fault lay somewhere on the Administration, and could lie
nowhere else, the trail always faded and died out at the point where
any member of the Administration became visible. Every one dreaded to
press inquiry. Adams himself feared finding out too much. He found out
too much already, when he saw in evidence that Jay Gould had actually
succeeded in stretching his net over Grant's closest surroundings, and
that Boutwell's incompetence was the bottom of Gould's calculation.
With the conventional air of assumed confidence, every one in public
assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the
situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had
not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the
ways of Wall Street were dark and double. All this was wildly exciting
to Adams. That Grant should have fallen, within six months, into such a
morass--or should have let Boutwell drop him into it--rendered the
outlook for the next four years--probably eight--possibly
twelve--mysterious, or frankly opaque, to a young man who had hitched
his wagon, as Emerson told him, to the star of reform. The country
might outlive it, but not he. The worst scandals of the eighteenth
century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched
executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and
people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool
of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man,
fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an
honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new
Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping
the stables of American society clear of the endless corruption which
his second Washington was quite certain to breed.

  By vigorously shutting one's eyes, as though one were an
Assistant Secretary, a writer for the press might ignore the Erie
scandal, and still help his friends or allies in the Government who
were doing their best to give it an air of decency; but a few weeks
showed that the Erie scandal was a mere incident, a rather vulgar Wall
Street trap, into which, according to one's point of view Grant had
been drawn by Jay Gould, or Jay Gould had been misled by Grant. One
could hardly doubt that both of them were astonished and disgusted by
the result; but neither Jay Gould nor any other astute American
mind--still less the complex Jew--could ever have accustomed itself to
the incredible and inexplicable lapses of Grant's intelligence; and
perhaps, on the whole, Gould was the less mischievous victim, if
victims they both were. The same laxity that led Gould into a trap
which might easily have become the penitentiary, led the United States
Senate, the Executive departments and the Judiciary into confusion,
cross-purposes, and ill-temper that would have been scandalous in a
boarding-school of girls. For satirists or comedians, the study was
rich and endless, and they exploited its corners with happy results,
but a young man fresh from the rustic simplicity of London noticed with
horror that the grossest satires on the American Senator and politician
never failed to excite the laughter and applause of every audience.
Rich and poor joined in throwing contempt on their own representatives.
Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own failure.
Nothing remained for a young man without position or power except to
laugh too.

  Yet the spectacle was no laughing matter to him, whatever it
might be to the public. Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford
to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot
be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead;
but a young man has only one chance, and brief time to seize it. Any
one in power above him can extinguish the chance. He is horribly at the
mercy of fools and cowards. One dull administration can rapidly drive
out every active subordinate. At Washington, in 1869-70, every
intelligent man about the Government prepared to go. The people would
have liked to go too, for they stood helpless before the chaos; some
laughed and some raved; all were disgusted; but they had to content
themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on
their railroads and foundries. They were strong enough to carry even
their politics. Only the helpless remained stranded in Washington.

  The shrewdest statesman of all was Mr. Boutwell, who showed how
he understood the situation by turning out of the Treasury every one
who could interfere with his repose, and then locking himself up in it,
alone. What he did there, no one knew. His colleagues asked him in
vain. Not a word could they get from him, either in the Cabinet or out
of it, of suggestion or information on matters even of vital interest.
The Treasury as an active influence ceased to exist. Mr. Boutwell
waited with confidence for society to drag his department out of the
mire, as it was sure to do if he waited long enough.

  Warned by his friends in the Cabinet as well as in the Treasury
that Mr. Boutwell meant to invite no support, and cared to receive
none, Adams had only the State and Interior Departments left to serve.
He wanted no better than to serve them. Opposition was his horror; pure
waste of energy; a union with Northern Democrats and Southern rebels
who never had much in common with any Adams, and had never shown any
warm interest about them except to drive them from public life. If Mr.
Boutwell turned him out of the Treasury with the indifference or
contempt that made even a beetle helpless, Mr. Fish opened the State
Department freely, and seemed to talk with as much openness as any
newspaper-man could ask. At all events, Adams could cling to this last
plank of salvation, and make himself perhaps the recognized champion of
Mr. Fish in the New York press. He never once thought of his disaster
between Seward and Sumner in 1861. Such an accident could not occur
again. Fish and Sumner were inseparable, and their policy was sure to
be safe enough for support. No mosquito could be so unlucky as to be
caught a second time between a Secretary and a Senator who were both
his friends.

  This dream of security lasted hardly longer than that of 1861.
Adams saw Sumner take possession of the Department, and he approved; he
saw Sumner seize the British mission for Motley, and he was delighted;
but when he renewed his relations with Sumner in the winter of 1869-70,
he began slowly to grasp the idea that Sumner had a foreign policy of
his own which he proposed also to force on the Department. This was not
all. Secretary Fish seemed to have vanished. Besides the Department of
State over which he nominally presided in the Infant Asylum on
Fourteenth Street, there had risen a Department of Foreign Relations
over which Senator Sumner ruled with a high hand at the Capitol; and,
finally, one clearly made out a third Foreign Office in the War
Department, with President Grant himself for chief, pressing a policy
of extension in the West Indies which no Northeastern man ever
approved. For his life, Adams could not learn where to place himself
among all these forces. Officially he would have followed the
responsible Secretary of State, but he could not find the Secretary.
Fish seemed to be friendly towards Sumner, and docile towards Grant,
but he asserted as yet no policy of his own. As for Grant's policy,
Adams never had a chance to know fully what it was, but, as far as he
did know, he was ready to give it ardent support. The difficulty came
only when he heard Sumner's views, which, as he had reason to know,
were always commands, to be disregarded only by traitors.

  Little by little, Sumner unfolded his foreign policy, and Adams
gasped with fresh astonishment at every new article of the creed. To
his profound regret he heard Sumner begin by imposing his veto on all
extension within the tropics; which cost the island of St. Thomas to
the United States, besides the Bay of Samana as an alternative, and
ruined Grant's policy. Then he listened with incredulous stupor while
Sumner unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible
American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession
of Canada to the United States.

  Adams did not then know--in fact, he never knew, or could
find any one to tell him--what was going on behind the doors of the
White House. He doubted whether Mr. Fish or Bancroft Davis knew much
more than he. The game of cross-purposes was as impenetrable in Foreign
Affairs as in the Gold Conspiracy. President Grant let every one go on,
but whom he supported, Adams could not be expected to divine. One point
alone seemed clear to a man--no longer so very young--who had lately
come from a seven years' residence in London. He thought he knew as
much as any one in Washington about England, and he listened with the
more perplexity to Mr. Sumner's talk, because it opened the gravest
doubts of Sumner's sanity. If war was his object, and Canada were worth
it, Sumner's scheme showed genius, and Adams was ready to treat it
seriously; but if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a
voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled. On the point of
fact, Adams was as peremptory as Sumner on the point of policy, but he
could only wonder whether Mr. Fish would dare say it. When at last Mr.
Fish did say it, a year later, Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance.
Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad
as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and
Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel
with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as
far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a
man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner,
whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican
Party, if separated from his Committee of Foreign Relations. As a party
manager he had not the weight of half-a-dozen men whose very names were
unknown to him.

  Between these great forces, where was the Administration and
how was one to support it? One must first find it, and even then it was
not easily caught. Grant's simplicity was more disconcerting than the
complexity of a Talleyrand. Mr. Fish afterwards told Adams, with the
rather grim humor he sometimes indulged in, that Grant took a dislike
to Motley because he parted his hair in the middle. Adams repeated the
story to Godkin, who made much play with it in the Nation, till it was
denied. Adams saw no reason why it should be denied. Grant had as good
a right to dislike the hair as the head, if the hair seemed to him a
part of it. Very shrewd men have formed very sound judgments on less
material than hair--on clothes, for example, according to Mr. Carlyle,
or on a pen, according to Cardinal de Retz--and nine men in ten could
hardly give as good a reason as hair for their likes or dislikes. In
truth, Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in
common; and for the same reason he disliked Sumner. For the same reason
he would be sure to dislike Adams if Adams gave him a chance. Even Fish
could not be quite sure of Grant, except for the powerful effect which
wealth had, or appeared to have, on Grant's imagination.

  The quarrel that lowered over the State Department did not
break in storm till July, 1870, after Adams had vanished, but another
quarrel, almost as fatal to Adams as that between Fish and Sumner,
worried him even more. Of all members of the Cabinet, the one whom he
had most personal interest in cultivating was Attorney General Hoar.
The Legal Tender decision, which had been the first stumbling-block to
Adams at Washington, grew in interest till it threatened to become
something more serious than a block; it fell on one's head like a
plaster ceiling, and could not be escaped. The impending battle between
Fish and Sumner was nothing like so serious as the outbreak between
Hoar and Chief Justice Chase. Adams had come to Washington hoping to
support the Executive in a policy of breaking down the Senate, but he
never dreamed that he would be required to help in breaking down the
Supreme Court. Although, step by step, he had been driven, like the
rest of the world, to admit that American society had outgrown most of
its institutions, he still clung to the Supreme Court, much as a
churchman clings to his bishops, because they are his only symbol of
unity; his last rag of Right. Between the Executive and the
Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they were at the mercy of
Power. They had created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power,
and it was little enough protection at best. Adams wanted to save the
independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not
conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.

  Frank Walker shared this feeling, and, by way of helping the
Court, he had promised Adams for the North American Review an article
on the history of the Legal Tender Act, founded on a volume just then
published by Spaulding, the putative father of the legal-tender clause
in 1861. Secretary Jacob D. Cox, who alone sympathized with reform,
saved from Boutwell's decree of banishment such reformers as he could
find place for, and he saved Walker for a time by giving him the Census
of 1870. Walker was obliged to abandon his article for the North
American in order to devote himself to the Census. He gave Adams his
notes, and Adams completed the article.

  He had not toiled in vain over the Bank of England Restriction.
He knew enough about Legal Tender to leave it alone. If the banks and
bankers wanted fiat money, fiat money was good enough for a
newspaper-man; and if they changed about and wanted "intrinsic" value,
gold and silver came equally welcome to a writer who was paid half the
wages of an ordinary mechanic. He had no notion of attacking or
defending Legal Tender; his object was to defend the Chief Justice and
the Court. Walker argued that, whatever might afterwards have been the
necessity for legal tender, there was no necessity for it at the time
the Act was passed. With the help of the Chief Justice's recollections,
Adams completed the article, which appeared in the April number of the
North American. Its ferocity was Walker's, for Adams never cared to
abandon the knife for the hatchet, but Walker reeked of the army and
the Springfield Republican, and his energy ran away with Adams's
restraint. The unfortunate Spaulding complained loudly of this
treatment, not without justice, but the article itself had serious
historical value, for Walker demolished every shred of Spaulding's
contention that legal tender was necessary at the time; and the Chief
Justice told his part of the story with conviction. The Chief Justice
seemed to be pleased. The Attorney General, pleased or not, made no
sign. The article had enough historical interest to induce Adams to
reprint it in a volume of Essays twenty years afterwards; but its
historical value was not its point in education. The point was that, in
spite of the best intentions, the plainest self-interest, and the
strongest wish to escape further trouble, the article threw Adams into
opposition. Judge Hoar, like Boutwell, was implacable.

  Hoar went on to demolish the Chief Justice; while Henry Adams
went on, drifting further and further from the Administration. He did
this in common with all the world, including Hoar himself. Scarcely a
newspaper in the country kept discipline. The New York Tribune was one
of the most criminal. Dissolution of ties in every direction marked the
dissolution of temper, and the Senate Chamber became again a scene of
irritated egotism that passed ridicule. Senators quarrelled with each
other, and no one objected, but they picked quarrels also with the
Executive and threw every Department into confusion. Among others they
quarrelled with Hoar, and drove him from office.

  That Sumner and Hoar, the two New Englanders in great position
who happened to be the two persons most necessary for his success at
Washington, should be the first victims of Grant's lax rule, must have
had some meaning for Adams's education, if Adams could only have
understood what it was. He studied, but failed. Sympathy with him was
not their weakness. Directly, in the form of help, he knew he could
hope as little from them as from Boutwell. So far from inviting
attachment they, like other New Englanders, blushed to own a friend.
Not one of the whole delegation would ever, of his own accord, try to
help Adams or any other young man who did not beg for it, although they
would always accept whatever services they had not to pay for. The
lesson of education was not there. The selfishness of politics was the
earliest of all political education, and Adams had nothing to learn
from its study; but the situation struck him as curious--so curious
that he devoted years to reflecting upon it. His four most powerful
friends had matched themselves, two and two, and were fighting in pairs
to a finish; Sumner-Fish; Chase-Hoar; with foreign affairs and the
judiciary as prizes! What value had the fight in education?

  Adams was puzzled, and was not the only puzzled bystander. The
stage-type of statesman was amusing, whether as Roscoe Conkling or
Colonel Mulberry Sellers, but what was his value? The statesmen of the
old type, whether Sumners or Conklings or Hoars or Lamars, were
personally as honest as human nature could produce. They trod with
lofty contempt on other people's jobs, especially when there was good
in them. Yet the public thought that Sumner and Conkling cost the
country a hundred times more than all the jobs they ever trod on; just
as Lamar and the old Southern statesmen, who were also honest in
money-matters, cost the country a civil war. This painful moral doubt
worried Adams less than it worried his friends and the public, but it
affected the whole field of politics for twenty years. The newspapers
discussed little else than the alleged moral laxity of Grant, Garfield,
and Blaine. If the press were taken seriously, politics turned on jobs,
and some of Adams's best friends, like Godkin, ruined their influence
by their insistence on points of morals. Society hesitated, wavered,
oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the
weak, and deferentially following the strong. In spite of all such
criticism, the public nominated Grant, Garfield, and Blaine for the
Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for the
question; until young men were forced to see that either some new
standard must be created, or none could be upheld. The moral law had
expired--like the Constitution.

  Grant's administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,
but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare,
were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it
wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who
could work it; but it found neither. Adams had tried his own little
hands on it, and had failed. His friends had been driven out of
Washington or had taken to fisticuffs. He himself sat down and stared
helplessly into the future.

  The result was a review of the Session for the July North
American into which he crammed and condensed everything he thought he
had observed and all he had been told. He thought it good history then,
and he thought it better twenty years afterwards; he thought it even
good enough to reprint. As it happened, in the process of his devious
education, this "Session" of 1869-70 proved to be his last study in
current politics, and his last dying testament as a humble member of
the press. As such, he stood by it. He could have said no more, had he
gone on reviewing every session in the rest of the century. The
political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970.
The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century
fabric of a priori, or moral, principles. Politicians had tacitly given
it up. Grant's administration marked the avowal. Nine-tenths of men's
political energies must henceforth be wasted on expedients to piece
out--to patch--or, in vulgar language, to tinker--the political machine
as often as it broke down. Such a system, or want of system, might last
centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as
a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world--the
clumsiest--the most inefficient.

  Here again was an education, but what it was worth he could not
guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most
triumphant results of politics--to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even
Mr. Sumner--he could not honestly say that such an education, even when
it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything.
There were men, as yet standing on lower levels--clever and amusing men
like Garfield and Blaine--who took no little pleasure in making fun of
the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself
which the North American Review would not have admitted. One asked
doubtfully what was likely to become of these men in their turn. What
kind of political ambition was to result from this destructive
political education?

  Yet the sum of political life was, or should have been, the
attainment of a working political system. Society needed to reach it.
If moral standards broke down, and machinery stopped working, new
morals and machinery of some sort had to be invented. An eternity of
Grants, or even of Garfields or of Conklings or of Jay Goulds, refused
to be conceived as possible. Practical Americans laughed, and went
their way. Society paid them to be practical. Whenever society cared to
pay Adams, he too would be practical, take his pay, and hold his
tongue; but meanwhile he was driven to associate with Democratic
Congressmen and educate them. He served David Wells as an active
assistant professor of revenue reform, and turned his rooms into a
college. The Administration drove him, and thousands of other young
men, into active enmity, not only to Grant, but to the system or want
of system, which took possession of the President. Every hope or
thought which had brought Adams to Washington proved to be absurd. No
one wanted him; no one wanted any of his friends in reform; the
blackmailer alone was the normal product of politics as of business.

  All this was excessively amusing. Adams never had been so busy,
so interested, so much in the thick of the crowd. He knew Congressmen
by scores and newspaper-men by the dozen. He wrote for his various
organs all sorts of attacks and defences. He enjoyed the life
enormously, and found himself as happy as Sam Ward or Sunset Cox; much
happier than his friends Fish or J. D. Cox, or Chief Justice Chase or
Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to
the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what
Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms
more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate.
Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree.
They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by
remarking what a purified charm was lent to the Capitol by the greatest
possible distance, as one caught glimpses of the dome over miles of
forest foliage. At such moments he pondered on the distant beauty of
St. Peter's and the steps of Ara Coeli.

  Yet he shortened his spring, for he needed to get back to
London for the season. He had finished his New York "Gold Conspiracy,"
which he meant for his friend Henry Reeve and the Edinburgh Review. It
was the best piece of work he had done, but this was not his reason for
publishing it in England. The Erie scandal had provoked a sort of
revolt among respectable New Yorkers, as well as among some who were
not so respectable; and the attack on Erie was beginning to promise
success. London was a sensitive spot for the Erie management, and it
was thought well to strike them there, where they were socially and
financially exposed. The tactics suited him in another way, for any
expression about America in an English review attracted ten times the
attention in America that the same article would attract in the North
American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in
full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest
ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since in any
case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of chase he was
becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.

Even in the dormant Grant administration, a young reformer soon has plenty to write about. On September 24, 1869, the price of gold crashes spectacularly, exposing a scheme involving financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk as well as President Grant's own brother-in-law. The Legal Tender Act is still an issue, and Adams is concerned that the Constitution has lost its effectiveness because of emergency measures taken by the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. While they oppose slavery, for example, the Adams men maintain that even the Emancipation Proclamation was actually unconstitutional.

Adams often writes in cryptic terms in the Education, dropping a name here or an issue there with the assumption that his reader is thoroughly versed in the history of the time. With his initial audience, a close circle of friends, that may have been the case; later readers may need a little explanation. The Gold Scandal of September 1869 allows Henry and his brother Charles to work as an investigative team. Jay Gould, president of the Erie Railroad and a capitalist known for his financial manipulations -- along with his associate, James Fisk -- attempts to corner the market in gold during the late summer of Grant's first year in office. The approach is to purchase as much American gold coin and bullion as possible in order to control the price. If successful, the scheme could then effect a monopoly, and the gold would sell at a much higher rate to those whose contracts require them to pay off debts in gold. This would especially impact foreign trade because other countries are reluctant to accept greenbacks. The two bring Grant's brother-in-law, a man named Corbin, into the deal with the expectation that this will dissuade Grant from intervention. On Black Friday, September 24, the price of a gold dollar  rises as high as $1.65 in paper money. At this point, Grant belatedly orders Secretary of Treasury Boutwell to place on sale $4,000,000 worth of government gold. The price of gold plummets, setting off a panic on Wall Street. Gould somehow knows of the Treasury sale in advance and sells his gold near the top price. Fisk, however, is not informed and is still buying as the price sinks. Although no one can prove that Grant or members of his Cabinet are directly involved in the scheme, Henry feels that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.  For Henry and Charles, the scandal is, as Henry says in the Education, "heaven-sent." Charles investigates corruption in the management of the railroads; Henry pursues the gold conspiracy and even gets an interview with James Fisk. James A. Garfield, who in 1881 will become the twentieth President of the United States , heads an investigation as chairman of the House Committee on Currency and Banking. He exchanges information with the Adams brothers. For Henry, the result is one of his most highly praised articles, "The New York Gold Conspiracy," in the Westminster Review . Although he is disappointed that more prestigious publishers refuse the piece, fearing charges of libel, he is delighted that the work is widely distributed in "pirated" versions. Charles's expose of the railroads is so effective that his life is threatened. He survives, unharmed, to father five children and die at the age of eighty in 1915. Henry is pleased with the reception of other articles, especially "The Legal Tender Act" in North American Review , which accuses Congress of "a piece of intolerably impudent political abuse." He argues again against greenbacks and reiterates his belief in laissez-faire economics, hoping that the Grant administration will return the government's position to a hands-off policy. In another installment of political assessments called "The Session," in the North American Review , he calls for Grant to restore the power of the Constitution and the federal government's system of checks and balances. All expectations to the contrary, it has been a productive and rewarding period for Henry. Glossary profligate immoral and shameless. ame damnee  stooge; a foil or underling. skein here, a sequence or series of events. peremptory barring further action; final. putative considered or deemed such; reputed. fiat an order issued by legal authority.