"Treason (1860 - 1861)", Chapter VII of *The Education of Henry Adams*

During the last phase years of South Carolina's increasing hysterical frenzy about the North, the Republicans, Lincoln et al., Henry Adams was at Harvard. After graduation he departed to Europe via the justification of studying Civil Law in Berlin -- though he baldly declares he knew no more what Civil Law was then than he does now (the now of writing The Education), nor why Germany was a place to study it. Neither did he study it, or anything else, other than some German. As far as the growing sectional crisis back home, he says little, other than he spent time with Charles Sumner when the Senator passed through Germany at a late period of his recovery after his severe beating (1856) at the hands of Preston Brooks in the Senate.


In the last part of this European period Adams fell in love with both Italy and France, though for different reasons. When he returned home, with a heavy heart he started reading law with a prestigious firm in Boston, a city for which Adams had no more affection at this time than earlier. However, within weeks, in November, 1860, his father, Charles (one of the founders of the Free Soil party), took him off to D.C. His father's call was to lobby the Southern senators to keep Virginia in the Union through, and hopefully after, Lincoln's inauguration; Henry was his father's private secretary. Thus he spent a great deal of time in the company of such figures as Governor Seward, who, like Sumner, was an old family friend.

This is how Henry Adams describes this time:

[ " ... Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind -- fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination, -- haunted by suspicion, by idée fixes, by violent morbid excitement, but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil to flame. They showed the young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.

This might be a commonplace of 1900 but in 1860 it was a paradox. The southern statesmen were regarded as standards of statesmanship, and such standards barred education. Charles Sumner's chief offense was his insistence on southern ignorance, and he stood a living proof of it ....


None learned a useful lesson from the Confederate school except to keep away from it. Thus, at one sweep, the whole field of instruction south of the Potomac was shut off; it was overshadowed by the cotton-planters, from whom one could learning nothing but bad temper, bad manners, poker and treason." ]

My goodness, doesn't this look familiar?

Soon after the war was declared, Lincoln sent Charles Adams to England as head of the mission to ensure Britain didn't recognize the CSA as a nation. Again, the young Henry went with his father as his private secretary -- a long family tradition going back to Henry's great-great-grandfather, John Adams, and John Quincy, his grandfather.

Thus Henry Adams, like Henry James, never came close to sniffing a battlefield. It's pointless, but one wonders how things might have progressed with Henry Adams if he'd been in the Union army. We do know that Henry James forever felt a certain shame and guilt, an inferiority, that he did not.

ETA: I've been reading deeply in Adams these last weeks, from his fiction, to his histories, the Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and The Education. Though there is ample display of unconscious, aristocratic ignorance and arrogance, so far nothing that smacks of anti-semitism. Maybe these sentiments were expressed in the private circulation of the manuscripts before publication, and taken out of the published versions?