Adams

“ To Henry Adams. Bad-Nauheim, June 17, 1910.
Dear Henry Adams,—I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. ”

“ A SON OF LIBERTY There was no loftier genius nor purer Patriot during the struggle for Independence, than John Adams.
He was born at Braintree—now a part of Quincy—Massachusetts. He was descended from Henry Adams who came to America during the reign of Charles the First. On his mother’s side, he was descended from John Alden, the Pilgrim Father who came over in the Mayflower. Thus, from both sides of his house, John Adams inherited staunch, fearless, English blood and love of Independence. ”

“ Critics who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and he never saw quite so much of it as in the winter of 1860-61. Every one knows the story; every one draws what conclusion suits his temper, and the conclusion matters now less than though it concerned the merits of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; but in 1861 the conclusion made the sharpest lesson of life; it was condensed and concentrated education. ”

“ Adams was the happy medium through which it was communicated to the Continental Congress, thereby placing at the head of the American armies just such a man as the crisis required—prudent, dignified, bold, sagacious, patient, persevering, and universally esteemed by the patriots, and admired even by the most violent adherents of the crown. ”

“ Here is inscribed upon the tablet of truth the blessings derived from a government like our own in its principles—faithfully adhered to by every true patriot but trampled under foot by the demagogues of the present day and the aristocracy of all time.
Among all the great men of our country, no one has exhibited a more clear and minute conception of human nature and human government, than John Adams. ”

“ Adams was a plain man; low in stature, not graceful in his movements, and was sometimes abrupt and repulsive. His manners were rather austere and unbending in public, but in the social circle, with his relatives and friends, he was familiar, pleasing and entertaining. He was not partial to ceremonious etiquette, and was averse to pedantry. Plain strong common sense he practised and admired. He spoke his sentiments freely, and could never have been transformed into a technical politican, even had he enjoyed the magic advantages of modern schools. ”

“ He learned something—a piece of practical education worth the effort,—by watching Sumner’s behavior. He could see that many thoughts—mostly unpleasant—were passing through his mind, since he made no inquiry about any of Adams’s family, or allusion to any of his friends or his residence abroad. He talked only of the present. To him, Adams in Washington should have seemed more or less of a critic, perhaps a spy, certainly an intriguer or adventurer, like scores of others; a politician without party; a writer without principles; an office-seeker certain to beg for support. ”

“ It was the triumph of Henry Adams’s detachment that no escalator could move him forward anywhere because he was not bound anywhere in particular. Such a man, of course, could speak of his life as perpetually educational. ”

“ Doctor Franklin glances across where the austere Mr. Adams is stiffly posing, with a final thought of impressing the sparkling Duchess de Chartres.
“Rather he is a big man,” replies the philosopher. “Like some houses, his foundations cover a deal of ground; but then he is only one story high. If you could raise Mr. Adams another story, he would be a great man.”
The good doctor goes over, and becomes polite to Mrs. Adams; for the enlightenment of that lady of reserve and dignity, he expands on France and the French character. ”

“ Adams asked and obtained leave of Congress to visit his family, mounted his horse, and rode joyfully home to Braintree. We can well imagine the rejoicings that greeted his return; but they were short-lived. He had barely reached home when word came that he was appointed ambassador to France, and that the frigate Boston was being prepared to carry him thither as soon as possible.
Here was a thunderbolt indeed! Weary and worn after four years of incessant labor, John Adams had longed almost passionately for the joys and comforts of home life and family affection. ”

“ HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS THIRD AND LAST DEVIL
In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams’s ship of dreams was left high and dry in the salt marsh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether Henry Adams knew it or not, he knew enough to act as though he did. He reached Quincy once more, ready for the new start. His brother Charles had determined to strike for the railroads; Henry was to strike for the press; and they hoped to play into each other's hands. They had great need, for they found no one else to play with. After discovering the worthlessness of a so-called education, they had still to discover the worthlessness of so-called social connection. No young man had a larger acquaintance and relationship than Henry Adams, yet he knew no one who could help him. ”

“ Adams, of which his admirers bitterly or sorrowfully complain, and which renders him an impracticable member of a party, arises from the same honest simplicity which crowns his virtues, mingled with a faulty taste and an imperfect temper. His hastiness of assertion has sometimes placed him in predicaments so undignified as almost to be a set-off against the honours he wins by pertinacious and bold adherence to a principle which he considers sound. ”

“ John Adams represented one element of our national character, and represented it nobly, with a singular force and greatness. He was an eminent Puritan statesman, and the Puritan ingredient has colored all our national life. We have got strength and persistency and some part of our steady moral purpose from it. But in the quick growth and exuberant expansion of the nation it has been only one element among many. The Puritan blood has mixed with many another strain. ”

“ Stubbornly fighting for freedom of speech and against the slaveholders, fierce and unwearied in old age, falling literally out of the midst of the conflict into his grave, Mr. Adams, during the closing years of his life, is one of the most striking figures of modern times. I beg the reader of this volume to put into its pages more warmth of praise than he will find therein, and so do a more correct justice to an honest statesman and a gallant friend of the oppressed. ”

“ With strong feeling and busy imagination, loving both to talk and write, Adams had been betrayed into many confidences and into free expressions of feeling, opinions, and even conjectures and suspicions—a weakness very unsuited to the character of a statesman, and one which Adams had during his life many times the occasion to rue. ”

“ Genius has to pay itself that unwilling self-respect.
Towards the middle of February, 1892, Adams found himself again in Washington. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead. Changes had taken place there; improvements had been made; with time—much time—the city might become habitable according to some fashionable standard; but all one’s friends had died or disappeared several times over, leaving one almost as strange as in Boston or London. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Henry Adams, who taught history for seven years at Harvard, and who built his intellectual dwelling-place upon its firm foundations, pronounced it to be "in essence incoherent and immoral." Nevertheless, all that we know of man's unending efforts to adjust and readjust himself to the world about him we learn from history, and the tale is an enlightening one. ”

“ The judgment of posterity will be, that he was a brave man, deep-sighted, conscientious, patriotic, and possessed of Integrity which nothing ever shook, but which stood firm as the granite of his Quincy Hills. While American Institutions continue, the People will honor brave, honest old John Adams, who never failed his country in her hour of need, and who, in his life of more than ninety years, though both passionate and ambitious, wronged no man nor any woman. ”

“ King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. ”

“ Adams was of middle size, well formed, with a countenance full of intelligence indicating firmness of purpose and energy of action. As a public man and private citizen he was highly esteemed and richly earned a place in the front rank of the American patriots. He placed a low value upon wealth—died poor but not the less esteemed for his poverty which was then no crime. He placed a high value upon common school education and properly estimated the higher branches of science. General intelligence among the great mass he considered the strongest bulwark to preserve our independence. ”

“ His practical sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership, and made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for work. With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England began to take heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the heavy-weights, came into action, and even the private secretary caught now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely to be as brutal as ever England had known. ”

“ It might be imagined that Charles Adams, having determined to reside in his native village, and remain, what his father and grandfather had been, a simple gentleman farmer, and that rather on a small than a large scale, was altogether without that feeling of ambition which stimulates exertion and elevates the mind. ”

“ Joseph Adams, being undeniably first in the classics and first in the drawing room, having been gravely commended in his class by his venerable president, and gayly flattered in the drawing room by the elegant Miss This and Miss That, was rather inclining to the opinion that he was an uncommonly fine fellow, and even had the assurance to think that, under present circumstances, he could please without making any great effort—a thing which, however true it were in point of fact, is obviously improper to be thought of by a young man. ”

“ Adams, if you consider his acquirements, is probably the best informed man in America, though his knowledge is somewhat rhapsodical, like his character. He has the most astonishing memory, and possesses great conversational powers. ”

“ It was, however, as a manager of men that Samuel Adams was greatest. Such a master of the methods by which a town-meeting may be swayed, the world has never seen. On the best of terms with the people, the shipyard men, the distillers, the sailors, as well as the merchants and ministers, he knew precisely what springs to touch. ”

“ Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.
At any other moment in human history, this education, including its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. ”

“ In his diary John Adams appeals to the calmer mind and juster judgment of the coming age—meaning that in which we live, and from which we look wistfully back to old John Adams's cocked hat and knee-breeches as the symbols of a nobler time. ”

“ Adams to believe that the state of my mind is what it really is; that he may think I view him as an obstacle in my way. I have no supernatural power to impress truth on the mind of another, nor he any to discover that the estimate which he may form, on a just view of the human mind as generally constituted, may not be just in its application to a special constitution. ”

“ Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was singularly free from cant. He may have had views of his own, but he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary fact that George Washington stood alone.
Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution, even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism. ”