The Early Adams

BOTH SIDES OF THE OCEAN: A BIOGRAPHY OF HENRY ADAMS; HIS FIRST LIFE, 1838-1862 by Edward Chalfant '42 Archon Books, 1982. 475 pp. $32.50

Henry Adams (1838—1918) was the great-grandson of the second president of the United States, the grandson of the sixth, and the son of a career statesman and politician. He was shocked as a 10-year- old boy by the remark of an Irish gardener which caused him to consider for the first time the novel idea that he might never be president. His ambition by age 16 was to travel, to move to Washington, and to become a writer and a politician that is, to write his way into politics. Although he never entered politics officially, he did become an historian, an educator, an incomparable writer about the forces of his age, and he eventually built a house in Washington across from the White House, whose first occupants had been his great grandparents, John and Abigail Adams.

In his greatest work, The Education ofHenry Adams, privately printed when Adams was 68, he estimated that his education in the broadest terms had been a failure. His familial and intellectual inheritance had been at once an incentive and a handicap which made it necessary and all but impossible to accelerate his education from his 18th-century orientation to comprehend the forces that were shaping the world towards the 20th century. But what Adams defined as failure, R. P. Blackmur defines as an act of scrupulous intellectual courage. It was Adams's recurrent, awareness of ignorance that Blackmur saw as the mark of all true education. What is more, the failure that Adams assigned to his education was not a confession of defeat as much as it was a strategic self-effacement that released the full power of his irony as a form of intellectual energy.

In writing his 1948 three-volume biography of Adams, Ernest Samuels had been alert to Adams's ambition, even as a young man. But in the book under review here, the first volume of a projected trilogy, Chalfant shows much more thoroughly than Samuels just how successful young Henry Adams was in wielding political influence from behind the scenes, first in Washington and then in London, at the outset of the Civil War. Given Adams's success by age 24, we can begin to see, through Chalfant's investigation, how strategic Adams's self-effacement in later life was.

Only two years out of Harvard, the 22- year-old Adams went to Washington to serve as private secretary to his father, who had been recently elected to Congress. Under a secret agreement with the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, Adams served as an anonymous Washington correspondent, posing as a veteran Republican well acquainted with Washington politics. He reported on Secession politics and, like his brother Charles, promoted his father in the press.

This brief stint in politics behind the scenes, an occupation that was, he confessed, "a continual intoxication," was a rehearsal for more influential political maneuvering. In 1861, again as private secretary for his father, who went to London as ambassador to Great Britain, Adams contracted secretly to be anonymous correspondent for the New York Times. Privy to communications involving his father and Secretary of State Seward, Prime Minister Palmerston, and Foreign Secretary Russell, Adams acted as, to use his own later words, "a volunteer manipulator."

Chalfant devotes half his book to these two London years in Adams's life, partly because of the importance of newly available evidence in collections of the Adams papers. As Chalfant's close reading shows, not only did Adams's 35 reports help shape Union attitudes towards the British when England was poised to align with the South, but his reports on the Trent affair actually influenced policy decisions in the Lincoln cabinet. Unknown even to his father, Adams was exercising this influence at a time when his father defined his own ineffectual role as "quietly waiting the development of events over which I have no control, and in which I had no participation." In time his anonymity as secret correspondent was threatened, and he had to curtail his reports. Adams then wrote to his brother Charles about the "curious sensation of discovering himself to be a humbug" a self-congratulatory joke in light of the behavior which Chalfant brings so sharply into focus.

Not only does Chalfant steadily marshal evidence of young Adams's political influence as a writer; he begins to illuminate the ramifications of the third son's ambitions within the highly ambitious Adams family. Only coincidentally, Chalfant surmises, was Henry not named "George Washington Adams" after a dead uncle, though it was an identity Chalfant believes he entertained. When he dropped his middle name, "Brooks," from his mother's side of the family, at age 32, Adams remade his name to be identical with that of the original sire who had migrated from England. As Denis Brogan remarks in his 1961 introduction to TheEducation of Henry Adams, since no legitimate male line descended from Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin, the Adams line might be said to be the greatest American family. In remaking his name, Henry Adams, in effect, took on identity as the first American Adams.

As Chalfant explains in the preface to this first volume, the rationale for a trilogy is the idea that Henry Adams completed three lives in his 80 years one by age 24, another by 54, and a third before his death. These lives "reveal themselves as coming, not one after another, like the acts of a play, but one above another, like the tiers of arches in a Roman aqueduct." While Samuel's first volume, covering Adams's life up to age 39, is more comprehensive, Chalfant's offers a more incisive treatment of young Adams's life, especially his political behavior. His future volumes promise to develop the psychological patterns which he suggests in the first. Students of Henry Adams will find Chalfant's research and lucid analysis indispensable.

Thornton Jordan teaches American literature at Columbus College, a part of the University of Georgia.