Grant Adams

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. ”

“ Youth is sensitive; often it is supersensitive, and Grant Adams saw or thought he saw in the little byplay of Tom Van Dorn the caste prod of society jabbing labor back into its place.
“Tom,” said the bride as they watched Grant Adams unhitch the horse by the lumber yard, “why did you force that money on Grant─he would have much preferred to have your hand when he said good-by.”
“He’s not my kind of folks, Laura,” replied Van Dorn. “I know you like him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If he is not released, a mob will take Grant as they took that poor fool last night and–” She stopped, turned toward them a perturbed and fear-wrinkled face. Then she said quickly: “I don’t know that I owe Grant Adams anything but–you children do–” She did not complete her sentence, but burst out: “I don’t care for Tom Van Dorn’s court, his grand folderol and mummery of the law. He’s going to send a man to death to-night because his masters demand it. And we must stop it–you and Lila and I, Kenyon.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ God does not plant the organizing spirit in the world for one group; it is the common heritage of the time. So the sinister power of organized capital loomed before Market Street with its terrible threat of extinction for the town if the town displeased organized capital; so also rose in the town a dread feeling of uneasiness that labor also had power. The personification of that power was Grant Adams. And when the young man in exquisite gray twill had become only a memory, Tom Van Dorn squarely faced Grant Adams. Market Street was behind the Judge. The Valley was back of Grant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had reached cross-roads of education which all led astray. What he could gain at Harvard College he did not know, but in any case it was nothing he wanted. What he lost at Washington he could partly see, but in any case it was not fortune. Grant's administration wrecked men by thousands, but profited few. Perhaps Mr. Fish was the solitary exception. One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870 to 1895, and find little but damaged reputation. ”

“ What answer he made to Van Dorn does not matter. Grant Adams could not recall it when he had finished. But ever as he spoke through his being throbbed the electrical beat of the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.” And he was exultant in the consciousness that in the struggle of “life and death,” life would surely win. So he stood and spoke with a tongue of flame.
“If you have given all–and you have, we also have given all. But our all is more vitally our all–than yours; for 408it is our bodies, our food and clothing; our comfortable homes; our children’s education, our wives’ strength ”

“ He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organised 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 organise a government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organise 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 ”

“ The American thought of himself as a restless, pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors. Perhaps this idea of the national character might be correct for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ The day after Amos Adams and Tom Van Dorn had met in the Serenity of Books and Wallpaper at Brotherton’s, Grant was in the Tribune office. “Grant,” the father was getting down from his high stool to dump his type on the galley; “Grant, I had a tiff with Tom Van Dorn yesterday. Lord, Lord,” cried the old man, as he bent over, straightening some type that his nervous hand had knocked down. “I wonder, Grant”–the father rose and put his hand on his back, as he stood looking into his son’s face–“I wonder if all that we feel, all that we believe, all that we strive and live for–is a dream? ”

“ Adams that when an English sympathizer with the South lauded the bravery of the Southern Army, Mr. Adams replied: "Yes, they are brave men; they are my country- men."
The Southern Army was composed of brave men and its officers were qualified by training and experience to command any army and to contest for supremacy on any field.
My readers should not assume that I have avoided a discussion of the characteristics of General Grant in his personality and as a civil magistrate.
The voice of those who in 1872 denied his ability and questioned his integrity is no longer heard ”

“ I’d rather be old Amos Adams the spook chaser–than Dan Sands with his million. I’ve been happier, Jim, with the memory of my Mary than he with his five wives. I’d rather be on the point of the drill of life and mangled there, than to have my soul rot in greed.”
The Doctor puffed on his pipe. “Well, Amos,” he returned quietly, “I suppose if a man wants to get all messed up as one of the points of the drill of life, as you call it–it’s easy enough to find a place for the sacrifice. I admire Grant ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Elaine for the Presidency, and voted for them afterwards, not seeming to care for their morals; until young men were forced to see that either some new moral standard must be created, or none could be upheld. ”

“ Law me, Mary Adams, I sh’d think you’d want Grant to stay with George Brotherton there in the cigar stand, instead of carpentering. Such elegant people he can meet there, and such refined influences since Mr. Brotherton’s put in books and newspapers, and he could work in the printing office and deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago dailies for Mr. Brotherton, and do so much better than he can carpentering. I tell John, if we can just keep our boy among nice people until he’s twenty-five, he’ll stay with ’em. ”

“ Dissatisfied Republicans now began to speak freely of him as a candidate for the presidency against Gen. Grant. Numbers of the most distinguished Republicans in the senate and elsewhere combined in the formation of the Liberal Republican party, and called a convention at Cincinnati to nominate a national ticket. Eastern Republicans, outside of New York at least, generally expected Charles Francis Adams to be the nominee, and he had the united support of the whole revenue reform and free-trade section. But Mr. Greeley soon proved stronger than any other with western and southern delegates. ”

“ And then,” he concluded sadly, “at the end is the greatest temptation of all–the temptation that comes with power to get power for the sake of power.”
The next morning Amos Adams and Grant went in to Market Street to sell their home. Grant seemed a stranger to that busy mart of trade: the week of his absence had taken him so far from it. His eyes were caught by two tall figures, a man and a woman, walking and talking as they crossed the street–the man in a heavy, long, brown ulster, the woman in a flaring red, outer garment. He recognized them as Margaret Fenn and Thomas Van Dorn. ”

“ The subject of this narrative was a great-grandson of Henry Adams, who emigrated from England about 1640, with a family of eight sons, being one of the earliest settlers in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, where he had a grant of a small tract of forty acres of land. The father of John Adams, a deacon of the church, was a farmer by occupation, to which was added the business of shoemaking. He was a man of limited means, however, was enabled by hard pinching to give his son a fairly good education. ”

“ He often said that he was the only artist in New York whose career had begun and would end under the same roof.
You would have taken uncle and nephew for a pair of brothers, one silvery and one golden. Evening dress and the bright decorations emphasized the resemblance. Both men were tall, [201] slender, clean-shaven. Steven Grant carried his sixty years lightly, as artists often do, while Gerald at thirty sometimes showed a seriousness in accord with his honors rather than with his years. His forehead was already higher than his uncle’s ”