UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”
During Butler’s tenure in the Army of the James he aggressively secured permission to raise new black regiments, and at the same time traded white units to other armies in return for black soldiers.
The war experience of Charles Francis Adams Jr., can best be understood within the larger gravitational pull of the black military into Butler’s charge.
When Adams finally quit the war in the spring of ‘65, his regiment, which had been consolidated into a massive black army, would be absorbed into George Cole’s cavalry brigade.
Like Cole, Adams was cut from Free Soil and Republican cloth.
He was raised with a gut hatred for the moral and economic system of slavery.
Before the war, Adams and his father toured with William Henry Seward across the West on his presidential campaign trail.
When Seward bowed out of the race, the Adams’s backed Lincoln who when elected, rewarded Adams’s father with an appointment as ambassador to Britain.1
While Cole left behind few written documents, Adams provides a rich trove of personal correspondence, memoirs, and selectively preserved diary entries.
Between the age of fifteen and twenty-five, Adams, like his ancestors, religiously kept a diary.
From his days in Latin school up until the fall of ’62 when he boarded a steamer headed for the battlefields of Virginia, he spilled his mind into nearly twelve volumes.
Around the time he embarked, news broke about the battle of Cedar Mountain and the death of one of his closest friends, Stephen Perkins (one of the few men about whom Charles openly admitted feeling inferior).2
It is unclear why, but before stepping to shore, Adams made his final entry, not to confide to his diary again for twenty-six years.
Some time after the war, Charles wrapped and packaged these volumes with directions that they should be destroyed in the event of his death.
As told in his autobiography, some three decades after sealing the volumes — crestfallen, humiliated by recent financial failures, the more-mature Adams “exhumed” his journals.
Perusing his own record he found “the revelation of myself to myself was truly shocking.”
Up until this time Charles “had indulged in the pleasing delusion that it was in [him]…to do, or be, something rather noticeable.”
Blushing and groaning over its immaturity, ineptitude, and conceit, Adams trudged through each “dreadful” volume.
Then, as he finished them, one by one, he laid them into the fire.
In the orange glow, he stood over the hearth “until the last leaf was ashes.”3
He had finally seen himself squarely in the looking glass.
“I felt that no human being who, between fifteen and twenty-five, so pictured himself from day to day could, by any possibility, develop into anything really considerable.”
As an old man, Adams reflected upon these disturbing glimpses into his own soul.
His dairy lent razor sharp detail to his many limitations.
“I was by no means what I in youth supposed myself to be.”
After thanking fortune that he somehow got through the rest of life without “making a conspicuous ass” off himself, Adams still could not put his shortcomings to rest.
He had been born with such promise.
“I might have been anything, had being it only been in me.”4
1 Charles Francis Adams, The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 51-71.
2 ibid., 29, 144
3 Adams did cull together some portions from his diaries that he deemed worthy of preservation. He uses these snippets throughout his autobiography. We have no way of knowing if the quotations that he pulled from his diary are unaltered. Subsequent use of his preserved quotations, therefore, reflect only what Adams chose not to destroy and are dependable only so far as Adams did not substantively alter them.
4 ibid., 27-8, 110-111, 144
TO BE CONTINUED ...
GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Having destroyed the record of his formative years, strangely — or perhaps not — Adams would later dedicate nearly three quarters of his autobiography to recreating roughly the same years.
The rest of the autobiography dashes through his postwar years as a railroad reformer, land speculator, president of the Union Pacific, and president of two prestigious historical associations.
Because he had his hands in the railroads and speculation, was a prolific historian regularly grafting positivism into his interpretations, and produced several strident articles about American imperialism and race relations (all of them laced with Darwinism) historians have looked to Adams as a way to peer into the Gilded Age and early twentieth century.
But to Adams everything after the Civil War was more of the same; the crashes of failure that haunted him in his later life were mere echoes of his experiences before and during the war.
Throughout his autobiography Adams pushes the reader to look closely at his earlier years; he laced his narrative with Wordsworth’s maxim “the child is the father of the man.”
If Adams came to reflect the boom and bust, clang and huff of the Gilded Age, he learned its cadences in his troubled adolescence, and most especially in the cavalcades of war.5
For Adams, the war brought into high relief a new kind of manliness that gave increasing importance to the athletic body, and aggressive individualism.
Examining Adams’s youth and role in a violent, physical war can help us appreciate the ways that white men of various stripes, throughout the north, incorporated new models of manliness into their war experiences.
His entire life Adams felt like the unannointed child in a remarkable line of American prophets.
His great-grandfather was the nation’s second president; his grandfather the sixth.
His father, twice elected to congress, was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to serve as ambassador to Great Britain during the crisis of confederate rebellion.
Adams came to consciousness as his dad and grandfather fashioned the final chapters of the family’s mammoth political legacy.
The accomplishments of his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, perhaps more than others, haunted Charles, not just the magnitude of his grandfather’s political stations, but the ways he talked about the acquisition of such power.
John Quincy Adams (like his father and son) regularly decried political ambition, though all three wrestled with their own mounting desires for the immortality of fame.
Instead, they believed, men should cultivate their virtues, and in the process qualify themselves for the unsought reward.
The Adams family, in other words, insisted that high office was properly obtained, not by aspiration, but as a moral reward.6
Rank and station should be the natural, if undesired, fruits of the ordered soul.
Even as a schoolboy Charles sensed how the ancestral “light was reflected” on him.
“I was the grandson of John Quincy Adams; and not quite as other boys."
"This I felt.”7
5 Here I follow Charles’s suggestion to his brother Henry that the art of biography requires that the historian “let a man tell his own story and reflect his own character in his own words.” Adams quoted in Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), vii. Of course this does not mean a facile regurgitation of Adams’s perception of himself and his life, but it is interesting how much Adams uses the first third of his life to flesh out all that would follow.
6 Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 46-7.
7 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 17. Charles would come to realize that his own father felt similarly about being the son of John Quincy Adams. In his biography of his father, Charles Jr., claimed that his father did not feel he had been accepted by his own merits until after he was fifty. See: Charles Francis Adams, Charles Francis Adams (Boston: New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), 28-9.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Having destroyed the record of his formative years, strangely — or perhaps not — Adams would later dedicate nearly three quarters of his autobiography to recreating roughly the same years.
The rest of the autobiography dashes through his postwar years as a railroad reformer, land speculator, president of the Union Pacific, and president of two prestigious historical associations.
Because he had his hands in the railroads and speculation, was a prolific historian regularly grafting positivism into his interpretations, and produced several strident articles about American imperialism and race relations (all of them laced with Darwinism) historians have looked to Adams as a way to peer into the Gilded Age and early twentieth century.
But to Adams everything after the Civil War was more of the same; the crashes of failure that haunted him in his later life were mere echoes of his experiences before and during the war.
Throughout his autobiography Adams pushes the reader to look closely at his earlier years; he laced his narrative with Wordsworth’s maxim “the child is the father of the man.”
If Adams came to reflect the boom and bust, clang and huff of the Gilded Age, he learned its cadences in his troubled adolescence, and most especially in the cavalcades of war.5
For Adams, the war brought into high relief a new kind of manliness that gave increasing importance to the athletic body, and aggressive individualism.
Examining Adams’s youth and role in a violent, physical war can help us appreciate the ways that white men of various stripes, throughout the north, incorporated new models of manliness into their war experiences.
His entire life Adams felt like the unannointed child in a remarkable line of American prophets.
His great-grandfather was the nation’s second president; his grandfather the sixth.
His father, twice elected to congress, was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to serve as ambassador to Great Britain during the crisis of confederate rebellion.
Adams came to consciousness as his dad and grandfather fashioned the final chapters of the family’s mammoth political legacy.
The accomplishments of his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, perhaps more than others, haunted Charles, not just the magnitude of his grandfather’s political stations, but the ways he talked about the acquisition of such power.
John Quincy Adams (like his father and son) regularly decried political ambition, though all three wrestled with their own mounting desires for the immortality of fame.
Instead, they believed, men should cultivate their virtues, and in the process qualify themselves for the unsought reward.
The Adams family, in other words, insisted that high office was properly obtained, not by aspiration, but as a moral reward.6
Rank and station should be the natural, if undesired, fruits of the ordered soul.
Even as a schoolboy Charles sensed how the ancestral “light was reflected” on him.
“I was the grandson of John Quincy Adams; and not quite as other boys."
"This I felt.”7
5 Here I follow Charles’s suggestion to his brother Henry that the art of biography requires that the historian “let a man tell his own story and reflect his own character in his own words.” Adams quoted in Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), vii. Of course this does not mean a facile regurgitation of Adams’s perception of himself and his life, but it is interesting how much Adams uses the first third of his life to flesh out all that would follow.
6 Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 46-7.
7 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 17. Charles would come to realize that his own father felt similarly about being the son of John Quincy Adams. In his biography of his father, Charles Jr., claimed that his father did not feel he had been accepted by his own merits until after he was fifty. See: Charles Francis Adams, Charles Francis Adams (Boston: New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), 28-9.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
According to Adams his youth and education were “a skillfully arranged series of mistakes.”
“It was just the sort of bringing up I ought not to have had.”
He would always feel that Boston bred a sort of parochialism into its inhabitants, and Quincy, though much preferred by young Charles, still had not shed its colonial skins.8
His parents failed to provide the tools he would need to become a man of gravity.
Charles Sr., “hereditarily warped,” never taught his sons to appreciate raw nature, to ramble, to bloody their lips in athletic games; Charles complained years after the fact that his Harvard education had cut him off from modern life.
He never came up to the scratch.
Stultified by Harvard’s “Scale of Merit” (the dominant pedagogical system at Harvard in the 1850s where points were awarded for class recitation) he graduated at the bottom half of his class.9
In the years between his graduation and his entrance into the war, Charles groped for purpose.
He yearned to set out on his own, but found it difficult to cut the ties of dependence to his father, “the governor.”
Charles had already begun to deflect the oppressive parental urgings to marry.
His father believed that a young man should “get to work as soon as he could scrabble through college, begin to make a living, marry, and become…‘a useful member of society.’”10
Yet, at the age of twenty-four Charles still lived on the fourth floor of his family home.
He monthly siphoned off an allowance from his father’s funds (in the form of an advance on Charles’s inheritance).
And to their father’s chagrin Charles and his older brother John had taken to staying out until the small hours among Boston’s “party-going, dancing set,” after which Charles, at least one time, had to ring his father out of bed to be let in the home.11
After graduation, Adams, as he often put it, could never find his true “aptitude.”
Even though he had not attended law school, and perhaps looking to pacify his parents, he followed his father and older brother John “almost as a matter of course” into practicing law.
Through his father’s connections he secured himself a sort of apprenticeship in the distinguished law office of R. Henry Dana and Francis E. Parker.
Just how Adams passed the bar he could never tell — though he had his suspicions.
His family had intimate contact with that of Judge Bigelow, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth.
Apparently tired of some twenty months of aimless study, Adams prematurely sought out
Bigelow.
All too quickly Adams found himself anguishing over a set of legal questions about which he “knew absolutely nothing.”
Days later, Bigelow asked Adams to come to the court room to be sworn in.
“I was no more fit to be admitted than a child,” Charles would confess in his latter years.12
Never taking to the profession, Adams festered.
He immediately left the office of Dana and Francis, tried to set up office with his brother John, and later relocated into a “gloomy, dirty den” in his father’s building.
“Still, my father was satisfied,” Adams would admit, implying some resentment.
In the spring of 1859, Charles bragged to his brother Henry, “I am becoming a Croesus.”13
With the help of his father, Charles had his hand in plans to develop a granite front building on Washington Street — with stores, offices and a large hall.
Soon though Charles complained that he had become little more than a “real estate agent.”
Then in early 1860 Charles’s family relocated to Washington DC, where Charles Sr. began his second term in the House of Representatives.
Charles remained in Boston to wait on clients and manage his father’s real estate.
He detested the endless haggling with tenants and employees.
“For this work,” he wrote, “it is possible God may have made me, but if he did, I would almost rather that in my infancy he had taken me to himself.”14
8 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 107-8
9 Years later Charles would compare the diary he kept while attending Harvard with his father’s similar record — realizing that “I then was not half the man he was at the same age.” Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 10-12; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 4-5.
10 ibid., 19.
11 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 15-18; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 39
12 ibid., 38-43
13 Croesus was the last king (560-546 B.C.) of Lydia, known for expanding his kingdom to the Halys on the east and the Taurus on the south.
14 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 18
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
According to Adams his youth and education were “a skillfully arranged series of mistakes.”
“It was just the sort of bringing up I ought not to have had.”
He would always feel that Boston bred a sort of parochialism into its inhabitants, and Quincy, though much preferred by young Charles, still had not shed its colonial skins.8
His parents failed to provide the tools he would need to become a man of gravity.
Charles Sr., “hereditarily warped,” never taught his sons to appreciate raw nature, to ramble, to bloody their lips in athletic games; Charles complained years after the fact that his Harvard education had cut him off from modern life.
He never came up to the scratch.
Stultified by Harvard’s “Scale of Merit” (the dominant pedagogical system at Harvard in the 1850s where points were awarded for class recitation) he graduated at the bottom half of his class.9
In the years between his graduation and his entrance into the war, Charles groped for purpose.
He yearned to set out on his own, but found it difficult to cut the ties of dependence to his father, “the governor.”
Charles had already begun to deflect the oppressive parental urgings to marry.
His father believed that a young man should “get to work as soon as he could scrabble through college, begin to make a living, marry, and become…‘a useful member of society.’”10
Yet, at the age of twenty-four Charles still lived on the fourth floor of his family home.
He monthly siphoned off an allowance from his father’s funds (in the form of an advance on Charles’s inheritance).
And to their father’s chagrin Charles and his older brother John had taken to staying out until the small hours among Boston’s “party-going, dancing set,” after which Charles, at least one time, had to ring his father out of bed to be let in the home.11
After graduation, Adams, as he often put it, could never find his true “aptitude.”
Even though he had not attended law school, and perhaps looking to pacify his parents, he followed his father and older brother John “almost as a matter of course” into practicing law.
Through his father’s connections he secured himself a sort of apprenticeship in the distinguished law office of R. Henry Dana and Francis E. Parker.
Just how Adams passed the bar he could never tell — though he had his suspicions.
His family had intimate contact with that of Judge Bigelow, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth.
Apparently tired of some twenty months of aimless study, Adams prematurely sought out
Bigelow.
All too quickly Adams found himself anguishing over a set of legal questions about which he “knew absolutely nothing.”
Days later, Bigelow asked Adams to come to the court room to be sworn in.
“I was no more fit to be admitted than a child,” Charles would confess in his latter years.12
Never taking to the profession, Adams festered.
He immediately left the office of Dana and Francis, tried to set up office with his brother John, and later relocated into a “gloomy, dirty den” in his father’s building.
“Still, my father was satisfied,” Adams would admit, implying some resentment.
In the spring of 1859, Charles bragged to his brother Henry, “I am becoming a Croesus.”13
With the help of his father, Charles had his hand in plans to develop a granite front building on Washington Street — with stores, offices and a large hall.
Soon though Charles complained that he had become little more than a “real estate agent.”
Then in early 1860 Charles’s family relocated to Washington DC, where Charles Sr. began his second term in the House of Representatives.
Charles remained in Boston to wait on clients and manage his father’s real estate.
He detested the endless haggling with tenants and employees.
“For this work,” he wrote, “it is possible God may have made me, but if he did, I would almost rather that in my infancy he had taken me to himself.”14
8 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 107-8
9 Years later Charles would compare the diary he kept while attending Harvard with his father’s similar record — realizing that “I then was not half the man he was at the same age.” Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 10-12; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 4-5.
10 ibid., 19.
11 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 15-18; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 39
12 ibid., 38-43
13 Croesus was the last king (560-546 B.C.) of Lydia, known for expanding his kingdom to the Halys on the east and the Taurus on the south.
14 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 18
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Such was Adams’s world when the nation’s mounting regional crisis came to a head in the winter and spring of 1861.
After confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and “minute men” soldiers like Robert Dollard or Benjamin Butler had already marched from Boston’s streets, Adams reasoned in his diary “war is no plaything, and, God knows, I have no wish to trifle with it."
"I, therefore, shall not volunteer, or expose myself to unnecessary service.”
But he could not put the question to rest.
Though he served in the Massachusetts militia, and had experienced garrison duty at Fort Independence (at Boston Harbor), Adams spent months anguishing over his flickering desire to join the volunteer army.
After observing a ragtag throng of soldiers march through the streets of Boston and off to war Adams felt “a rising in the throat,” and with wet eyes came to feel “little of the soldier.”
This convinced him to enlist.
Almost.
Within days, if not hours, his burning conviction smoldered into excuses as the pageantry and “elements of the heroic” faded from his brain.
In early May, though, after his militia battalion was ordered to do garrison duty at Fort Independence, Adams became convinced that he “loathed” his profession and needed change.
Even more compelling, he came to believe that the war could actually remake him.
While meeting with his friends at the Parker House after his battalion was relieved in late May, Adams glimpsed a strange form in a mirror.
His chums had urged him to survey the physical metamorphosis in the looking glass.
What Adams saw “amazed” him: “I had in every respect the aspect of a prize-fighter,” he wrote in his diary.
“My face was brown and tanned, my hair was cut close to my head, my loose coat and blue shirt gave me a brawny reckless bearing, and I had thought I had never looked so rollicking and strong…in all my life.”15
At this time, “Muscular Christianity” was making significant inroads into American male culture, especially in aristocratic circles in New England.16
Young men like Charles borrowed from British counterparts, rethinking what it meant to be manly and assigning morality to brawniness.17
Both Charles and Henry were familiar with Thomas Hughes’ recently published book Tom Brown’s Schooldays — the literary cornerstone for the burgeoning movement.18
For Charles, the glimpse of himself as a sun-weathered pugilist seduced him into imagining how war might convert his scrawny figure into a “brawny reckless” specimen.
Charles felt (and would continue so until death) that his genteel upbringing did not prepare him for the increasingly rough-and-tumble world of male politics, business and competition.
He resented his father for not allowing him to attend boarding school where he would have been “compelled to rough it” with his male peers.
Always a bit bookish, Charles was “not by nature daring…having a positive inaptitude for games and athletic exercises.”19
Roughening up through combat would, in effect, allow Charles to break free from the hold of his soft-handed father.
But Charles Sr. looked to keep his children in tow, and alive.
To his diary Charles Sr. confessed, “no man who dips his hands in this blood will remember it with satisfaction."
"And I confess my aversion to see any of my blood either a victor or a victim in this fratricidal strife.”
“With the coldness of temperament natural to him,” Charles later recalled, my father, “did not believe in any one taking a hand in actual fight.”20
Notwithstanding his longing to assume a new form of manliness, Charles could never bring himself to flout the counsels of his parents.
Just after graduating from Harvard, after reading a letter where Henry tried to elicit praise for their mother, Charles quashed the sentimentalism, responding that she was little more than a weak woman eclipsed by her own children.
“I am now too old,” he added, “and too independent to be ruled.”21
But Charles greatly exaggerated his liberation.
Despite his epiphany in the Parker House mirror, where he saw how military life transformed him in ways that his father and Harvard could not, the conflicted twenty-five-year-old soon convinced himself to toe the line drawn by his parents.
When Lincoln appointed his father to England’s Court of Saint James, Charles Sr. asked his son to remain in the Boston and Quincy area to ensure “proper conduct” of family affairs.22
15 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 118. It is interesting that Adams preserved this passage from his diaries, among a handful of others, and chose to include it in his “autobiographical sketch.”
16 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Ward Beecher -- all contemporaries of Adams — are often mentioned in conjunction with American Muscular Christianity.
17 Muscular Christianity can best be defined as a loose movement that attempted to assign moral meaning to physicality and muscularity. Drawing from works like Rousseau’s Emile, Thomas Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, and Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and taking root in evangelical pews, places like Oberlin College, and among immigrants, particularly Germans, Muscular Christianity preceded the boom in American sport culture in the 1870s. See: Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, Vol. 2 (Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 244.; John A. Lucas, "A Prelude to the Rise of Sport: Ante-Bellum America, 1850-1860," Quest 11, no. Winter (1968), 50-57.; Frederick D. Shults, "Oberlin College: Molder of Four Great Men," Quest 11, no. Winter (1968), 71-75.; William E. Winn, "Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of 'Muscular Christianity'," Church History 29 (1960), 64-73.
18 Indeed Henry made a point to meet with Thomas Hughes while the former was in London during the Civil War. See: Henry Adams to C.F. Adams Jr, London, September 14, 1861, Worthington Chauncey Ford and others, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), 45-46.
19 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams"
20 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 256; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams"
21 Adams quoted in Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 5
22 This though his older brother John attended to family affairs. See: Paul C. Nagel, "Reconstruction, Adams Style," Journal of Southern History 52, no. 1 (1986), 3.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Such was Adams’s world when the nation’s mounting regional crisis came to a head in the winter and spring of 1861.
After confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and “minute men” soldiers like Robert Dollard or Benjamin Butler had already marched from Boston’s streets, Adams reasoned in his diary “war is no plaything, and, God knows, I have no wish to trifle with it."
"I, therefore, shall not volunteer, or expose myself to unnecessary service.”
But he could not put the question to rest.
Though he served in the Massachusetts militia, and had experienced garrison duty at Fort Independence (at Boston Harbor), Adams spent months anguishing over his flickering desire to join the volunteer army.
After observing a ragtag throng of soldiers march through the streets of Boston and off to war Adams felt “a rising in the throat,” and with wet eyes came to feel “little of the soldier.”
This convinced him to enlist.
Almost.
Within days, if not hours, his burning conviction smoldered into excuses as the pageantry and “elements of the heroic” faded from his brain.
In early May, though, after his militia battalion was ordered to do garrison duty at Fort Independence, Adams became convinced that he “loathed” his profession and needed change.
Even more compelling, he came to believe that the war could actually remake him.
While meeting with his friends at the Parker House after his battalion was relieved in late May, Adams glimpsed a strange form in a mirror.
His chums had urged him to survey the physical metamorphosis in the looking glass.
What Adams saw “amazed” him: “I had in every respect the aspect of a prize-fighter,” he wrote in his diary.
“My face was brown and tanned, my hair was cut close to my head, my loose coat and blue shirt gave me a brawny reckless bearing, and I had thought I had never looked so rollicking and strong…in all my life.”15
At this time, “Muscular Christianity” was making significant inroads into American male culture, especially in aristocratic circles in New England.16
Young men like Charles borrowed from British counterparts, rethinking what it meant to be manly and assigning morality to brawniness.17
Both Charles and Henry were familiar with Thomas Hughes’ recently published book Tom Brown’s Schooldays — the literary cornerstone for the burgeoning movement.18
For Charles, the glimpse of himself as a sun-weathered pugilist seduced him into imagining how war might convert his scrawny figure into a “brawny reckless” specimen.
Charles felt (and would continue so until death) that his genteel upbringing did not prepare him for the increasingly rough-and-tumble world of male politics, business and competition.
He resented his father for not allowing him to attend boarding school where he would have been “compelled to rough it” with his male peers.
Always a bit bookish, Charles was “not by nature daring…having a positive inaptitude for games and athletic exercises.”19
Roughening up through combat would, in effect, allow Charles to break free from the hold of his soft-handed father.
But Charles Sr. looked to keep his children in tow, and alive.
To his diary Charles Sr. confessed, “no man who dips his hands in this blood will remember it with satisfaction."
"And I confess my aversion to see any of my blood either a victor or a victim in this fratricidal strife.”
“With the coldness of temperament natural to him,” Charles later recalled, my father, “did not believe in any one taking a hand in actual fight.”20
Notwithstanding his longing to assume a new form of manliness, Charles could never bring himself to flout the counsels of his parents.
Just after graduating from Harvard, after reading a letter where Henry tried to elicit praise for their mother, Charles quashed the sentimentalism, responding that she was little more than a weak woman eclipsed by her own children.
“I am now too old,” he added, “and too independent to be ruled.”21
But Charles greatly exaggerated his liberation.
Despite his epiphany in the Parker House mirror, where he saw how military life transformed him in ways that his father and Harvard could not, the conflicted twenty-five-year-old soon convinced himself to toe the line drawn by his parents.
When Lincoln appointed his father to England’s Court of Saint James, Charles Sr. asked his son to remain in the Boston and Quincy area to ensure “proper conduct” of family affairs.22
15 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 118. It is interesting that Adams preserved this passage from his diaries, among a handful of others, and chose to include it in his “autobiographical sketch.”
16 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Ward Beecher -- all contemporaries of Adams — are often mentioned in conjunction with American Muscular Christianity.
17 Muscular Christianity can best be defined as a loose movement that attempted to assign moral meaning to physicality and muscularity. Drawing from works like Rousseau’s Emile, Thomas Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, and Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and taking root in evangelical pews, places like Oberlin College, and among immigrants, particularly Germans, Muscular Christianity preceded the boom in American sport culture in the 1870s. See: Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, Vol. 2 (Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 244.; John A. Lucas, "A Prelude to the Rise of Sport: Ante-Bellum America, 1850-1860," Quest 11, no. Winter (1968), 50-57.; Frederick D. Shults, "Oberlin College: Molder of Four Great Men," Quest 11, no. Winter (1968), 71-75.; William E. Winn, "Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of 'Muscular Christianity'," Church History 29 (1960), 64-73.
18 Indeed Henry made a point to meet with Thomas Hughes while the former was in London during the Civil War. See: Henry Adams to C.F. Adams Jr, London, September 14, 1861, Worthington Chauncey Ford and others, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), 45-46.
19 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams"
20 Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 256; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams"
21 Adams quoted in Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 5
22 This though his older brother John attended to family affairs. See: Paul C. Nagel, "Reconstruction, Adams Style," Journal of Southern History 52, no. 1 (1986), 3.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Yet the young man had grown increasingly convinced that the war promised his best chances.
And soon enough he began chafing at his profession and the “empty escort duty” required by the militia; he hungered for “some outside stimulus.”
His incompetence in law was undeniable.23
Even more, things had changed between him and his older brother John — Charles’s erstwhile partner in late night exploits.
John had recently taken a wife, and Charles suddenly found himself in his parent’s home sharing quarters with two newlyweds.
In the summer of 1861, Charles could only half-heartedly assert his freedom to his father: “I am twenty-six years old and of course have the right to do as I choose; but I acknowledge, as I have done all along, that great regard is due in this matter to you and your feelings, and now, as heretofore, I shall not go without your consent; but I think you ought to give that consent….”24
He claimed that the family property would be better off in the hands of a competent business man.
But, if indeed Charles’s services were “necessary,” he would “give up the idea still.”
Then, finally, in the closing passages of the same letter, Charles tried to make his father see how little would become of the Adams’s legacy if the fourth generation did not adjust to winds of the day.
The war promised a way for Charles, at least, to stop the slide:
For years our family has talked of slavery and of the South and been most prominent in the contest of words, and now that it has come to blows, does it become us to stand aloof from the conflict? It is not as if I were an only son, though, many such have gone; but your family is large and it seems to me almost disgraceful that in after years we should have it to say that of them all not one at this day stood in arms for that government with which our family history is so closely connected. I see all around going, but I sit in my office and read the papers….I see great events going on, and a heroic spirit everywhere flashing out, and you ask me for no sufficient cause to stifle my own and, when sitting here at home, I am convinced of my failure as a lawyer, to quietly sink into a real estate agent. I hope you will let me go, for if you should, and I return, it will make a man of me.25
In July, still awaiting his father’s approbation, Charles heard newsboys below his office window hollering about Union troops fleeing at Bull Run; pushed inches closer to defying his father, Adams again reasoned through what he would later call, “the whole gamut of self-deception.”
He felt he should enlist, but…
I do so because I am carried away by the enthusiasm of those around me, or in the desire of a new and exciting life, with a chance of military distinction…but these possible advantages, though they weigh heavily enough with me, will not justify my leaving the manifest duties which ought to keep me here. My father has entrusted me with the care of the bulk of his property so difficult to manage as it now is…and these considerations of real duty must outweigh the possible advantages to result from novelty, excitement and activity. Yes! This chance is gone by, and I feel that I shall not take part in the war.
This back-and-forth soliloquy would soon come to a head.
Other voices — ones that had already prevailed in the heads of thousands of young men throughout the Boston area — would eventually draw Adams away from his commodious (yet in his view increasingly emasculating) life and into war.
Interestingly, not until Adams visited his chums in the Massachusetts Twentieth, and bid them farewell, did he truly resolve to join.
His well-positioned friends made up a large portion of the regimental officers, and after witnessing them march to join the Army of the Potomac (upon which so much of the national gaze was directed), Adams felt the pull.
“I tried to feel satisfied with Quincy and myself."
"I might have commanded the right line of that regiment; and, instead, I am scolding tenants, auditing bills, discussing repairs, rendering accounts, and so — doing my duty! — Psh!”
23 John Quincy Adams, Jr., had a similar distaste of law and struggle with confidence during his coming-of-age. See: Robert Abraham East, John Quincy Adams; the Critical Years: 1785-1794 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962), 90-91.
24 C. F. Adams Jr., to C.F. Adams, Boston, June 10, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume 1, p. 9
25 C. F. Adams Jr., to C.F. Adams, Boston, June 10, 1861, ibid., 9-11
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Yet the young man had grown increasingly convinced that the war promised his best chances.
And soon enough he began chafing at his profession and the “empty escort duty” required by the militia; he hungered for “some outside stimulus.”
His incompetence in law was undeniable.23
Even more, things had changed between him and his older brother John — Charles’s erstwhile partner in late night exploits.
John had recently taken a wife, and Charles suddenly found himself in his parent’s home sharing quarters with two newlyweds.
In the summer of 1861, Charles could only half-heartedly assert his freedom to his father: “I am twenty-six years old and of course have the right to do as I choose; but I acknowledge, as I have done all along, that great regard is due in this matter to you and your feelings, and now, as heretofore, I shall not go without your consent; but I think you ought to give that consent….”24
He claimed that the family property would be better off in the hands of a competent business man.
But, if indeed Charles’s services were “necessary,” he would “give up the idea still.”
Then, finally, in the closing passages of the same letter, Charles tried to make his father see how little would become of the Adams’s legacy if the fourth generation did not adjust to winds of the day.
The war promised a way for Charles, at least, to stop the slide:
For years our family has talked of slavery and of the South and been most prominent in the contest of words, and now that it has come to blows, does it become us to stand aloof from the conflict? It is not as if I were an only son, though, many such have gone; but your family is large and it seems to me almost disgraceful that in after years we should have it to say that of them all not one at this day stood in arms for that government with which our family history is so closely connected. I see all around going, but I sit in my office and read the papers….I see great events going on, and a heroic spirit everywhere flashing out, and you ask me for no sufficient cause to stifle my own and, when sitting here at home, I am convinced of my failure as a lawyer, to quietly sink into a real estate agent. I hope you will let me go, for if you should, and I return, it will make a man of me.25
In July, still awaiting his father’s approbation, Charles heard newsboys below his office window hollering about Union troops fleeing at Bull Run; pushed inches closer to defying his father, Adams again reasoned through what he would later call, “the whole gamut of self-deception.”
He felt he should enlist, but…
I do so because I am carried away by the enthusiasm of those around me, or in the desire of a new and exciting life, with a chance of military distinction…but these possible advantages, though they weigh heavily enough with me, will not justify my leaving the manifest duties which ought to keep me here. My father has entrusted me with the care of the bulk of his property so difficult to manage as it now is…and these considerations of real duty must outweigh the possible advantages to result from novelty, excitement and activity. Yes! This chance is gone by, and I feel that I shall not take part in the war.
This back-and-forth soliloquy would soon come to a head.
Other voices — ones that had already prevailed in the heads of thousands of young men throughout the Boston area — would eventually draw Adams away from his commodious (yet in his view increasingly emasculating) life and into war.
Interestingly, not until Adams visited his chums in the Massachusetts Twentieth, and bid them farewell, did he truly resolve to join.
His well-positioned friends made up a large portion of the regimental officers, and after witnessing them march to join the Army of the Potomac (upon which so much of the national gaze was directed), Adams felt the pull.
“I tried to feel satisfied with Quincy and myself."
"I might have commanded the right line of that regiment; and, instead, I am scolding tenants, auditing bills, discussing repairs, rendering accounts, and so — doing my duty! — Psh!”
23 John Quincy Adams, Jr., had a similar distaste of law and struggle with confidence during his coming-of-age. See: Robert Abraham East, John Quincy Adams; the Critical Years: 1785-1794 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962), 90-91.
24 C. F. Adams Jr., to C.F. Adams, Boston, June 10, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume 1, p. 9
25 C. F. Adams Jr., to C.F. Adams, Boston, June 10, 1861, ibid., 9-11
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Jealous of his friends, angry at the stultifying effects of duty, witnessing the ways in which the national war drew from intimate webs, and how it transformed a pack of cronies into a celebrated fighting machine, Adams finally began to snuff out the voices in his head.
In late September Charles Sr. finally approved of his son’s personal call to duty.
Charles stewed over his plans for another month, and then, in late October, accepted a commission in the First Massachusetts Cavalry.26
Yet, as if still trying to shake guilt, he continued to justify his chosen path to his family.
His legal practice had brought in virtually no income over the summer.
“I have completely failed in my profession,” Charles vented, “and I long to cut myself clear of it.”
“The Army,” he continued, “must cover my defeat.”27
Poised to join his regiment, Charles, in one of his final letters from the home front, openly relished this new manhood, boasting that he would soon “rough it and fight it out with the rest, sleep fifteen in a tent with stable-boys, groom horses, feed like a hog and never wash….”
He would soon send off missives boasting of his having become like an ox, sleeping in mire, and living off whiskey and tobacco to chase away malarial fever.
After Charles’s first Thanksgiving in uniform he rebuked his older brother John for having chosen a life of ease.
“I hope you yesterday remembered us at home in your cups,” Charles wrote, after painting a bleak holiday of “mud and mire and rain.”
Then, in response to criticisms that the army was not accomplishing enough Charles laid into his brother, “I may be wrong and hope I am."
"But Lord!"
"How it vexes and amuses me to think how easy it is, after a full dinner, to sip your wine in the gas light, and look severely into a fine fire across the table, and criticize and find fault with us poor devils, at that very time preparing to lie down before our fires, mud to the middle, wet through, after a fine meal of hard bread and water….”28
Later, in the winter of 1863 Charles would defend himself against Henry’s suggestion that Charles’s life in the army might not be so “profitable.”
“I feel within myself that I am more of a man…and I see in the behavior of those around me and in the faces of my friends, that I am a better fellow.”
Then Charles addressed his hiatus from the life of letters.
“You may say that my mind is lying fallow all this time."
"Perhaps, but after all the body has other functions than to carry round the head, and few years’ quiet will hardly injure a mind warped, as I sometimes suspect mine was, in time past by the too constant and close inspection of print.”
Though he never would have believed it before the war, Charles felt at home sleeping in the wet fields.
Again, tying this transformation to escaping his father’s control, Charles continued:
After being a regular, quiet, respectable stay-at-home body in my youth, lo! at twenty-seven I have discovered that I never knew myself and that nature meant me for a Bohemian — a vagabond. I am growing and developing here daily, but in such strange directions. Let not my father try to tempt me back into my office and the routine of business, which now seems to sit like a terrible incubus on my past. No! he must make up his mind to that29
26 C.F. Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, September 20, 1861, ibid.
27 C.F. Adams, Jr., to C.F. Adams, Quincy, November 26, 1861, ibid., 73
28 C. F. Adams, Jr., to brother, John Quincy Adams, Potomac Bridge, Virginia, November 28, 1862, ibid., 197-98
29 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Potomac River, Va., January 23, 1863, ibid., 237-42
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Jealous of his friends, angry at the stultifying effects of duty, witnessing the ways in which the national war drew from intimate webs, and how it transformed a pack of cronies into a celebrated fighting machine, Adams finally began to snuff out the voices in his head.
In late September Charles Sr. finally approved of his son’s personal call to duty.
Charles stewed over his plans for another month, and then, in late October, accepted a commission in the First Massachusetts Cavalry.26
Yet, as if still trying to shake guilt, he continued to justify his chosen path to his family.
His legal practice had brought in virtually no income over the summer.
“I have completely failed in my profession,” Charles vented, “and I long to cut myself clear of it.”
“The Army,” he continued, “must cover my defeat.”27
Poised to join his regiment, Charles, in one of his final letters from the home front, openly relished this new manhood, boasting that he would soon “rough it and fight it out with the rest, sleep fifteen in a tent with stable-boys, groom horses, feed like a hog and never wash….”
He would soon send off missives boasting of his having become like an ox, sleeping in mire, and living off whiskey and tobacco to chase away malarial fever.
After Charles’s first Thanksgiving in uniform he rebuked his older brother John for having chosen a life of ease.
“I hope you yesterday remembered us at home in your cups,” Charles wrote, after painting a bleak holiday of “mud and mire and rain.”
Then, in response to criticisms that the army was not accomplishing enough Charles laid into his brother, “I may be wrong and hope I am."
"But Lord!"
"How it vexes and amuses me to think how easy it is, after a full dinner, to sip your wine in the gas light, and look severely into a fine fire across the table, and criticize and find fault with us poor devils, at that very time preparing to lie down before our fires, mud to the middle, wet through, after a fine meal of hard bread and water….”28
Later, in the winter of 1863 Charles would defend himself against Henry’s suggestion that Charles’s life in the army might not be so “profitable.”
“I feel within myself that I am more of a man…and I see in the behavior of those around me and in the faces of my friends, that I am a better fellow.”
Then Charles addressed his hiatus from the life of letters.
“You may say that my mind is lying fallow all this time."
"Perhaps, but after all the body has other functions than to carry round the head, and few years’ quiet will hardly injure a mind warped, as I sometimes suspect mine was, in time past by the too constant and close inspection of print.”
Though he never would have believed it before the war, Charles felt at home sleeping in the wet fields.
Again, tying this transformation to escaping his father’s control, Charles continued:
After being a regular, quiet, respectable stay-at-home body in my youth, lo! at twenty-seven I have discovered that I never knew myself and that nature meant me for a Bohemian — a vagabond. I am growing and developing here daily, but in such strange directions. Let not my father try to tempt me back into my office and the routine of business, which now seems to sit like a terrible incubus on my past. No! he must make up his mind to that29
26 C.F. Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, September 20, 1861, ibid.
27 C.F. Adams, Jr., to C.F. Adams, Quincy, November 26, 1861, ibid., 73
28 C. F. Adams, Jr., to brother, John Quincy Adams, Potomac Bridge, Virginia, November 28, 1862, ibid., 197-98
29 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Potomac River, Va., January 23, 1863, ibid., 237-42
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
He certainly knew that his unvarnished descriptions of army life would cause his family to wince, and perhaps respond in kind.
In a letter that must have felt like a slight dig, Henry from his cushioned parlor in London, decried the regrettable stories about soldiers succumbing to dirt, whiskey, and the vulgar spirit of “getting ahead.”30
But this was the world that Charles embraced by pawning off the one inhabited by his father.
Feeling no aptitude for walking the (narrowing) path opened to him by birth, Charles thrust himself into the dark theatre of war — a place that disproportionately awarded muscularity, grit, and force over the life of the mind.
Early on Charles revealed other traits that more significantly parted from the course of his forefathers.
Come April, while occupying an old slave plantation in Port Royal, South Carolina, Charles bragged that he commandeered a local “gang of niggers.”
“I had ten slaves and drove by example.”
With horse tied to a tree, pistols and coat thrown to the ground, “I, in heavy boots and spurs and my shirt sleeves, handled a spade by the side of my sable brethren….”
“You would n’t have known me,” jested Charles.31
His family most certainly wondered how well they did know their son and brother.
Letters flowed from the fields of Virginia to London, revealing young Adams’s attempt to remake his fortunes in the roily world of violence and promotion.
But when Charles began sending extended, often vitriolic commentaries on the capabilities and prospects of black soldiers, the Adams kinsfolk — cut from abolitionist and anti-slavery cloth — found one among them was no longer with them — so far as sensibilities about African Americans went.
Later in the war, with Adams-like concision, Henry articulated these personal sea changes brought on by the war.
Responding to Charles’s promotion and reflecting on how both of them had come to learn in different ways that “promotion is not progress,” Henry wrote, “If we manage to get back to Quincy, we shall find that this scattering of our family has left curious marks on us.”32
For Charles, at least, these “marks” would never quite wash clean.33
After trading his fountain pen for a saber, and forsaking his staid life as a lawyer and an agent for his father, Charles’s three-anda-half-year service would give him new eyes, and imprint itself on his succumbing body.
In the spring of 1864 Charles confided to Henry his truest ambitions and fears.
In two months, Charles noted, he would turn twenty-eight, his father’s age when little Charles was born to him.
He no longer had the luxury, as Henry did, to travel the world and mull over possibilities for the future.
“My plans are altered little if any; it is only my way of coming at them.”
Charles claimed that his true calling was that of literature and politics; “I would be a philosophical statesmen if I could, and a literary politician if I must.”
Charles just needed to find a way to “command attention” and secure a position of his own, a sort of stepping off point.
He had already squandered one chance through his inglorious stint as a lawyer; “I must look for another.”
“Why should not the army serve my turn — if I hang to it?” asked Charles.
“Here is my support, leisure for reflection and promotion — two years would make me a Colonel almost surely and my very faculty with the pen will give me reputation as such, besides my chance of distinction as a soldier.”34
These are the kinds of ambitions that would later cause Charles to condemn his diaries to the fireplace.
And though he descended from men who constructed their manhood through politics and erudition, Charles understood how manhood, politics and warfare cross-fertilized with one another in the antebellum mind.
30 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 22, 1862, ibid., 151-52
31 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Milne Plantation, Port Royal Island, Monday, April 6, 1862, ibid., 124-25
32 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, September 25, 1863, Worthington Chauncey Ford and others, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), Volume II, 87-88.; Henry’s experiences during the war were also life altering as he continually lapsed into self-loathing for not having enlisted in the Union army; He played with the idea of abandoning his position as his father’s secretary in London, and taking obtaining a commission; later he even toyed with the idea of heading up black troops, though Henry’s seemed much more sympathetic with emancipation and the arming of blacks.
33 For Henry too, though this is not within the scope of my paper, the war seemed to make deep impressions; he did not enlist, though he frequently expressed guilt for not having followed his older brother Charles into the ranks.
34 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Sunday, March 22, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 265-67
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
He certainly knew that his unvarnished descriptions of army life would cause his family to wince, and perhaps respond in kind.
In a letter that must have felt like a slight dig, Henry from his cushioned parlor in London, decried the regrettable stories about soldiers succumbing to dirt, whiskey, and the vulgar spirit of “getting ahead.”30
But this was the world that Charles embraced by pawning off the one inhabited by his father.
Feeling no aptitude for walking the (narrowing) path opened to him by birth, Charles thrust himself into the dark theatre of war — a place that disproportionately awarded muscularity, grit, and force over the life of the mind.
Early on Charles revealed other traits that more significantly parted from the course of his forefathers.
Come April, while occupying an old slave plantation in Port Royal, South Carolina, Charles bragged that he commandeered a local “gang of niggers.”
“I had ten slaves and drove by example.”
With horse tied to a tree, pistols and coat thrown to the ground, “I, in heavy boots and spurs and my shirt sleeves, handled a spade by the side of my sable brethren….”
“You would n’t have known me,” jested Charles.31
His family most certainly wondered how well they did know their son and brother.
Letters flowed from the fields of Virginia to London, revealing young Adams’s attempt to remake his fortunes in the roily world of violence and promotion.
But when Charles began sending extended, often vitriolic commentaries on the capabilities and prospects of black soldiers, the Adams kinsfolk — cut from abolitionist and anti-slavery cloth — found one among them was no longer with them — so far as sensibilities about African Americans went.
Later in the war, with Adams-like concision, Henry articulated these personal sea changes brought on by the war.
Responding to Charles’s promotion and reflecting on how both of them had come to learn in different ways that “promotion is not progress,” Henry wrote, “If we manage to get back to Quincy, we shall find that this scattering of our family has left curious marks on us.”32
For Charles, at least, these “marks” would never quite wash clean.33
After trading his fountain pen for a saber, and forsaking his staid life as a lawyer and an agent for his father, Charles’s three-anda-half-year service would give him new eyes, and imprint itself on his succumbing body.
In the spring of 1864 Charles confided to Henry his truest ambitions and fears.
In two months, Charles noted, he would turn twenty-eight, his father’s age when little Charles was born to him.
He no longer had the luxury, as Henry did, to travel the world and mull over possibilities for the future.
“My plans are altered little if any; it is only my way of coming at them.”
Charles claimed that his true calling was that of literature and politics; “I would be a philosophical statesmen if I could, and a literary politician if I must.”
Charles just needed to find a way to “command attention” and secure a position of his own, a sort of stepping off point.
He had already squandered one chance through his inglorious stint as a lawyer; “I must look for another.”
“Why should not the army serve my turn — if I hang to it?” asked Charles.
“Here is my support, leisure for reflection and promotion — two years would make me a Colonel almost surely and my very faculty with the pen will give me reputation as such, besides my chance of distinction as a soldier.”34
These are the kinds of ambitions that would later cause Charles to condemn his diaries to the fireplace.
And though he descended from men who constructed their manhood through politics and erudition, Charles understood how manhood, politics and warfare cross-fertilized with one another in the antebellum mind.
30 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 22, 1862, ibid., 151-52
31 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Milne Plantation, Port Royal Island, Monday, April 6, 1862, ibid., 124-25
32 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, September 25, 1863, Worthington Chauncey Ford and others, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), Volume II, 87-88.; Henry’s experiences during the war were also life altering as he continually lapsed into self-loathing for not having enlisted in the Union army; He played with the idea of abandoning his position as his father’s secretary in London, and taking obtaining a commission; later he even toyed with the idea of heading up black troops, though Henry’s seemed much more sympathetic with emancipation and the arming of blacks.
33 For Henry too, though this is not within the scope of my paper, the war seemed to make deep impressions; he did not enlist, though he frequently expressed guilt for not having followed his older brother Charles into the ranks.
34 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Sunday, March 22, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 265-67
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But between 1863 and the fall of 1864, Adams came to realize that the war would likely not serve as his stepping stool into statesmanship.
The way things had taken shape the military hardly promised to “cover his defeat.”
Not only had Charles fruitlessly tried to make a name for himself through the army, he also began to feel like he was at the mercy of external forces — some of them benevolent, others deadly, all of them seemingly arbitrary.
Some weeks after Gettysburg, when his division was engaged in “some futile movements” along the Rapidan, Charles’ regiment received orders to make themselves conspicuous to the enemy troops across the river.
In other words Charles and his comrades were “designedly exposed and made to maneuver in the open, as a target” for Confederate artillery.
As enemy batteries “practiced upon” Charles and his comrades, he came undone.
Hour upon hour they sat on their horses, playing the target for the sake of gathering information on the enemy’s whereabouts.
One shell whizzed directly toward Charles’ face, missing him by a few feet, hitting his comrade instead.
Momentarily overcome by the blinding flash and burning nostrils, he turned to see the unfortunate trooper who had just tumbled from his horse a “mere lifeless bundle of clothes and jangling accoutrements.”35
The randomness of destruction rattled him.
The following afternoon Charles lay demoralized in his tent — trying to pull his “shattered nervous system together.”
As he dwelt, not on the pride and pomp of war, but “its actualities and the vicissitudes” of exploding shells and such, Charles was suddenly rescued from his depression by the unexpected visit of his Harvard friend, then army officer, Theodore Lyman.
This visit, Charles claimed later, provided “fresh water” for someone sinking under the heat of the desert.
And months later, Lyman rescued Adams again.
This time Adams’s camp had been captured by the enemy who drove the Union soldiers off into the December cold without winter supplies.
Adams nearly froze during ensuing nights, sleeping without his blankets or overcoat, having only his summer blouse.
But he pulled a few wires and obtained permission to visit Army Headquarters where he sought out Lyman again, and through him secured (for himself, not his comrades) two heavy English blankets and a sleighing coat.36
35 When Charles recounted this story nearly thirty-five years later he likened the afternoon to the biblical story where the ancient prophet Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in order for the Israelites to defeat their enemy. This is striking, not just because it is coming from a man who claimed to have totally shed religious superstition and entered into a purely scientific phase, but also because it again attributes certain qualities and strengths to his confederate enemies that he believed no longer possible for modern Americans.
36 Lyman also probably pulled strings to secure Adams his promotion into the staff of the Army of the Potomac. See: Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 28; Charles Francis Adams, "December Meeting in 1897," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 1897-1899 (Second Series) XII (1897-99), 62-65.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But between 1863 and the fall of 1864, Adams came to realize that the war would likely not serve as his stepping stool into statesmanship.
The way things had taken shape the military hardly promised to “cover his defeat.”
Not only had Charles fruitlessly tried to make a name for himself through the army, he also began to feel like he was at the mercy of external forces — some of them benevolent, others deadly, all of them seemingly arbitrary.
Some weeks after Gettysburg, when his division was engaged in “some futile movements” along the Rapidan, Charles’ regiment received orders to make themselves conspicuous to the enemy troops across the river.
In other words Charles and his comrades were “designedly exposed and made to maneuver in the open, as a target” for Confederate artillery.
As enemy batteries “practiced upon” Charles and his comrades, he came undone.
Hour upon hour they sat on their horses, playing the target for the sake of gathering information on the enemy’s whereabouts.
One shell whizzed directly toward Charles’ face, missing him by a few feet, hitting his comrade instead.
Momentarily overcome by the blinding flash and burning nostrils, he turned to see the unfortunate trooper who had just tumbled from his horse a “mere lifeless bundle of clothes and jangling accoutrements.”35
The randomness of destruction rattled him.
The following afternoon Charles lay demoralized in his tent — trying to pull his “shattered nervous system together.”
As he dwelt, not on the pride and pomp of war, but “its actualities and the vicissitudes” of exploding shells and such, Charles was suddenly rescued from his depression by the unexpected visit of his Harvard friend, then army officer, Theodore Lyman.
This visit, Charles claimed later, provided “fresh water” for someone sinking under the heat of the desert.
And months later, Lyman rescued Adams again.
This time Adams’s camp had been captured by the enemy who drove the Union soldiers off into the December cold without winter supplies.
Adams nearly froze during ensuing nights, sleeping without his blankets or overcoat, having only his summer blouse.
But he pulled a few wires and obtained permission to visit Army Headquarters where he sought out Lyman again, and through him secured (for himself, not his comrades) two heavy English blankets and a sleighing coat.36
35 When Charles recounted this story nearly thirty-five years later he likened the afternoon to the biblical story where the ancient prophet Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in order for the Israelites to defeat their enemy. This is striking, not just because it is coming from a man who claimed to have totally shed religious superstition and entered into a purely scientific phase, but also because it again attributes certain qualities and strengths to his confederate enemies that he believed no longer possible for modern Americans.
36 Lyman also probably pulled strings to secure Adams his promotion into the staff of the Army of the Potomac. See: Kirkland, "Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835-1915, the Patrician at Bay", 28; Charles Francis Adams, "December Meeting in 1897," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 1897-1899 (Second Series) XII (1897-99), 62-65.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But if friends rescued Adams, he felt powerless to do the same.
He had recently learned how suffering and death randomly picked off his closest comrades.
Three weeks before Gettysburg he witnessed hell.
Hoping to ascertain the whereabouts and intentions of Lee’s army, General Hooker sent his cavalry forces toward Aldie, Virginia where they unexpectedly clashed with enemy forces guarding a critical mountain gap.
In the mayhem, confederate soldiers secured a stone wall, allowing them to pick off Adams’s regiment at will.
His company, in particular, suffered staggering losses.
Adams received orders to march into the teeth of the enemy, but soon realized he was leading his comrades to the grave.
He ordered them to dismount and take cover in a small patch of woods, which ultimately pinned them in the crossfire.
Out of the fifty-seven active soldiers in his company, Adams lost thirty-two.
“My poor men were just slaughtered and all we could do was to stand still and be shot down, while the other squadrons rallied behind us."
"The men fell right and left and the horses were shot through and through, and no man turned his back, but they only called on me to charge."
"I couldn’t charge, except across a ditch, up a hill and over two high stone walls, from behind which the enemy were slaying us….”
When Confederate soldiers rushed in to crush Adams’ stunned soldiers, and at the same time decimated the Union regiment protecting Adams’s flank, Charles mounted his horse and darted from the slaughter.
“Here I lost my missing men…."
"In twenty minutes and without fault on our part I lost thirty two as good men and horses as can be found in the cavalry corps."
"They seemed to pick out my best and truest men, my pets and favorites."
"How and why I escaped I can’t say, for my men fell all around me….”37
Even in this small clash that would soon be totally eclipsed by Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Adams found how little control he had over the results, and the cruel lack of correlation between survival and being “true” or “favored.”
Sleeping through Antietam
Adams continually found himself at the cusp of momentous battles but rarely in the
fray.
In both Antietam and Gettysburg — arguably the two most famous battles of the war, then and now — Charles came within inches of taking his place in history.
But, as he freely admitted in his final years, he did not take part in “the fierce agony of battle at its height”; instead he waited on the sidelines until he was lulled into “two exceedingly refreshing naps.”
He snoozed through Antietam, “that veritable charnel-house,” where he lay on a hillside staring into the “furious artillery duel” thundering above.
The deadening thumps slowly turned into lullabies.
The next summer, Charles again found himself dismounted with his comrades as they listened with anticipation for the impending clash at Gettysburg.
It was midday July 3 when cannonades suddenly broke the tension; it was the artillery fire that covered Pickett’s immortalized advance into Meade’s forces.
Just then, “lulled by the incessant roar of the cannon, while the fate of the army and the nation trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict,” Charles “dropped quietly asleep.”
He was merely a cog in the wheel (as Adams would come to view all officers not involved in central planning); Paralyzed by the rationalized and often inert sprawl of large-scale military operations, he waited for his chance.
But in Gettysburg, just as Antietam, “orders never came.”38
37 This quote comes from a penciled letter from Charles to his brother John back home in Massachusetts. Charles Frances Adams, Jr., to John Quincy Adams, Middleburg, Va., 10 A.M., Friday, June 19, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 37-37 A Confederate general, writing about the slaughter at Aldie Gap, claimed: “I do not hesitate to say that I have never seen as many Yankees killed in the same space of ground in any fight I have ever seen, or on any battlefield in Virginia that I have been over.” Confederate Colonel Munford quoted in: Benjamin W. Crowninshield, A History of the First Regiment of Massachusetts Cavalry Volunteers (Baltimore, MD: Butternut and Blue, 1995), 157.; Stephen Z. Starr, "The First Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, 1861-1865 - a Fresh Look," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 87 (1975), 102-04.; For more details about Aldie, see: Robert W. Frost and Nancy D. Frost, eds., Picket Pins and Sabers: The Civil War Letters of John Burden Weston (Ashland, Ky: Economy Printers, 1971).
38 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 150-51
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But if friends rescued Adams, he felt powerless to do the same.
He had recently learned how suffering and death randomly picked off his closest comrades.
Three weeks before Gettysburg he witnessed hell.
Hoping to ascertain the whereabouts and intentions of Lee’s army, General Hooker sent his cavalry forces toward Aldie, Virginia where they unexpectedly clashed with enemy forces guarding a critical mountain gap.
In the mayhem, confederate soldiers secured a stone wall, allowing them to pick off Adams’s regiment at will.
His company, in particular, suffered staggering losses.
Adams received orders to march into the teeth of the enemy, but soon realized he was leading his comrades to the grave.
He ordered them to dismount and take cover in a small patch of woods, which ultimately pinned them in the crossfire.
Out of the fifty-seven active soldiers in his company, Adams lost thirty-two.
“My poor men were just slaughtered and all we could do was to stand still and be shot down, while the other squadrons rallied behind us."
"The men fell right and left and the horses were shot through and through, and no man turned his back, but they only called on me to charge."
"I couldn’t charge, except across a ditch, up a hill and over two high stone walls, from behind which the enemy were slaying us….”
When Confederate soldiers rushed in to crush Adams’ stunned soldiers, and at the same time decimated the Union regiment protecting Adams’s flank, Charles mounted his horse and darted from the slaughter.
“Here I lost my missing men…."
"In twenty minutes and without fault on our part I lost thirty two as good men and horses as can be found in the cavalry corps."
"They seemed to pick out my best and truest men, my pets and favorites."
"How and why I escaped I can’t say, for my men fell all around me….”37
Even in this small clash that would soon be totally eclipsed by Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Adams found how little control he had over the results, and the cruel lack of correlation between survival and being “true” or “favored.”
Sleeping through Antietam
Adams continually found himself at the cusp of momentous battles but rarely in the
fray.
In both Antietam and Gettysburg — arguably the two most famous battles of the war, then and now — Charles came within inches of taking his place in history.
But, as he freely admitted in his final years, he did not take part in “the fierce agony of battle at its height”; instead he waited on the sidelines until he was lulled into “two exceedingly refreshing naps.”
He snoozed through Antietam, “that veritable charnel-house,” where he lay on a hillside staring into the “furious artillery duel” thundering above.
The deadening thumps slowly turned into lullabies.
The next summer, Charles again found himself dismounted with his comrades as they listened with anticipation for the impending clash at Gettysburg.
It was midday July 3 when cannonades suddenly broke the tension; it was the artillery fire that covered Pickett’s immortalized advance into Meade’s forces.
Just then, “lulled by the incessant roar of the cannon, while the fate of the army and the nation trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict,” Charles “dropped quietly asleep.”
He was merely a cog in the wheel (as Adams would come to view all officers not involved in central planning); Paralyzed by the rationalized and often inert sprawl of large-scale military operations, he waited for his chance.
But in Gettysburg, just as Antietam, “orders never came.”38
37 This quote comes from a penciled letter from Charles to his brother John back home in Massachusetts. Charles Frances Adams, Jr., to John Quincy Adams, Middleburg, Va., 10 A.M., Friday, June 19, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 37-37 A Confederate general, writing about the slaughter at Aldie Gap, claimed: “I do not hesitate to say that I have never seen as many Yankees killed in the same space of ground in any fight I have ever seen, or on any battlefield in Virginia that I have been over.” Confederate Colonel Munford quoted in: Benjamin W. Crowninshield, A History of the First Regiment of Massachusetts Cavalry Volunteers (Baltimore, MD: Butternut and Blue, 1995), 157.; Stephen Z. Starr, "The First Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, 1861-1865 - a Fresh Look," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 87 (1975), 102-04.; For more details about Aldie, see: Robert W. Frost and Nancy D. Frost, eds., Picket Pins and Sabers: The Civil War Letters of John Burden Weston (Ashland, Ky: Economy Printers, 1971).
38 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 150-51
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
The battle of Fredricksburg in the winter of 1862 had played out in similar ways.
Though Adams stayed awake, he found himself just on the outskirts of the conflict, reading the poetry of Browning by his campfire.39
Weeks after Fredricksburg, in the final days of 1862, Adams received orders to head up a small detachment along with another group of “carefully armed” men, and select horses.
Clearly, Charles thought, “something was on foot.”
While advancing to his unknown destination Adams learned from his Major that they were heading directly for Warrenton, Virginia where they would find and capture two unsuspecting companies of rebel cavalry.
Adams winked at his Major and then darted to the rear where he immediately swapped his mare for a “heavy old working brute.”
As Adams rode through the freezing rain he rejoiced: “for once I really believed we were going to do something and my spirits rose accordingly.”
But that especially dark night, after the moon had sunk below the timberline, Adams’s detachment lost their trail, losing the advance guard — forcing the column to retrace its steps back to the Junction.
Unable to make up for lost time, the union soldiers reached Warrenton well behind schedule.
Adams’s men followed close on the heels of the advance forces as they raced toward the town.
But as they drew close, Adams began to “smell a rat.”
In vain he waited for the first shots to be fired between the approaching union troopers and the surprised rebel forces.
The confederate cavalrymen, though, had long since departed.
Charles missed his chance, and with humiliation galloped through the town through flocks of curious civilians who looked upon the tardy soldiers like a traveling circus show.
Charles confided to his mother that the troopers felt like fools as they sloped back toward their camps.40
Making things worse Charles learned soon after returning that some two hours after his men fruitlessly searched and then abandoned the town, the elusive forces of Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee temporarily converged in the same streets.
Just a week later Charles found himself once again in the saddle trudging through marshes in the frost and moonlight.
This time Adams’s men had orders to find and destroy some confederate bridges.
Again, Charles’s column got lost in the dark.
He groped aimlessly until he heard the sound of axes hacking away at the bridge.
“This was,” Charles groaned in his letter to his mother, “the greatest humbug of all.”
The confederate “bridge” turned out to be nothing more than a “miserable little culvert about three yards long, on which some twenty destroyers were at work.”
“We had come with artillery and cavalry and infantry, through rain and snow and ice, without shelter or forage, all the way up here to cut up a miserable little culvert which ten men could rebuild in five hours.”
In “amused despair” Charles watched from his saddle as the men fumbled over themselves with fine-tuned incompetence.
After heading back to camp the party chanced upon a “real bridge”; it dawned upon all that they had just destroyed the wrong structure.
This time the men made quick work, but Adams, as he confessed to his mother, “felt like a fool."
"It was a small job and badly done; slight resistance would have turned us back and I haven’t as yet gotten over an old prejudice against going round destroying property which no one tries to protect.”41
Charles then suggested that the bridge fiasco would be manufactured into a “newspaper success — ‘dashing raid’ and all that….”
He had grown disgruntled with the ways in which paper reports braided the war in ways that pandered to the clamors and romantic visions of the home front.
Charles imagined himself as a pawn in a sweeping drama that was authored and largely altered through the collusion of incompetent generals (in this case Joe Hooker) and journalists hunting for headlines.
Adams estimated that the same mission could have been accomplished with half the men, and in half the time:
But no! that wouldn’t answer for political effect, and so the sledge is brought out to crush the fly, and infantry, artillery and cavalry are paraded out in the depth of winter to burn a bridge which no one used or means to use….The thing amounted to nothing, was very badly done after no end of blunders and mismanagement, and was and is intended solely for political effect and about as much bearing on the ends of the war as would be burning a Neponset Bridge or our barn at Quincy…42
39 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father and mother, single letter written in two parts, In the Woods, near Falmouth, Va. December 15, 1862 and Potomac Run, Va., December 21, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 207-14
40 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Potomac Run, Va., January 2, 1863, ibid., 225-28
41 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Potomac Run, Va., January 8, 1863, ibid., 229-31
42 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Potomac Run, Va., January 8, 1863, ibid., 232
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
The battle of Fredricksburg in the winter of 1862 had played out in similar ways.
Though Adams stayed awake, he found himself just on the outskirts of the conflict, reading the poetry of Browning by his campfire.39
Weeks after Fredricksburg, in the final days of 1862, Adams received orders to head up a small detachment along with another group of “carefully armed” men, and select horses.
Clearly, Charles thought, “something was on foot.”
While advancing to his unknown destination Adams learned from his Major that they were heading directly for Warrenton, Virginia where they would find and capture two unsuspecting companies of rebel cavalry.
Adams winked at his Major and then darted to the rear where he immediately swapped his mare for a “heavy old working brute.”
As Adams rode through the freezing rain he rejoiced: “for once I really believed we were going to do something and my spirits rose accordingly.”
But that especially dark night, after the moon had sunk below the timberline, Adams’s detachment lost their trail, losing the advance guard — forcing the column to retrace its steps back to the Junction.
Unable to make up for lost time, the union soldiers reached Warrenton well behind schedule.
Adams’s men followed close on the heels of the advance forces as they raced toward the town.
But as they drew close, Adams began to “smell a rat.”
In vain he waited for the first shots to be fired between the approaching union troopers and the surprised rebel forces.
The confederate cavalrymen, though, had long since departed.
Charles missed his chance, and with humiliation galloped through the town through flocks of curious civilians who looked upon the tardy soldiers like a traveling circus show.
Charles confided to his mother that the troopers felt like fools as they sloped back toward their camps.40
Making things worse Charles learned soon after returning that some two hours after his men fruitlessly searched and then abandoned the town, the elusive forces of Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee temporarily converged in the same streets.
Just a week later Charles found himself once again in the saddle trudging through marshes in the frost and moonlight.
This time Adams’s men had orders to find and destroy some confederate bridges.
Again, Charles’s column got lost in the dark.
He groped aimlessly until he heard the sound of axes hacking away at the bridge.
“This was,” Charles groaned in his letter to his mother, “the greatest humbug of all.”
The confederate “bridge” turned out to be nothing more than a “miserable little culvert about three yards long, on which some twenty destroyers were at work.”
“We had come with artillery and cavalry and infantry, through rain and snow and ice, without shelter or forage, all the way up here to cut up a miserable little culvert which ten men could rebuild in five hours.”
In “amused despair” Charles watched from his saddle as the men fumbled over themselves with fine-tuned incompetence.
After heading back to camp the party chanced upon a “real bridge”; it dawned upon all that they had just destroyed the wrong structure.
This time the men made quick work, but Adams, as he confessed to his mother, “felt like a fool."
"It was a small job and badly done; slight resistance would have turned us back and I haven’t as yet gotten over an old prejudice against going round destroying property which no one tries to protect.”41
Charles then suggested that the bridge fiasco would be manufactured into a “newspaper success — ‘dashing raid’ and all that….”
He had grown disgruntled with the ways in which paper reports braided the war in ways that pandered to the clamors and romantic visions of the home front.
Charles imagined himself as a pawn in a sweeping drama that was authored and largely altered through the collusion of incompetent generals (in this case Joe Hooker) and journalists hunting for headlines.
Adams estimated that the same mission could have been accomplished with half the men, and in half the time:
But no! that wouldn’t answer for political effect, and so the sledge is brought out to crush the fly, and infantry, artillery and cavalry are paraded out in the depth of winter to burn a bridge which no one used or means to use….The thing amounted to nothing, was very badly done after no end of blunders and mismanagement, and was and is intended solely for political effect and about as much bearing on the ends of the war as would be burning a Neponset Bridge or our barn at Quincy…42
39 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his father and mother, single letter written in two parts, In the Woods, near Falmouth, Va. December 15, 1862 and Potomac Run, Va., December 21, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 207-14
40 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Potomac Run, Va., January 2, 1863, ibid., 225-28
41 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Potomac Run, Va., January 8, 1863, ibid., 229-31
42 C.F. Adams, Jr., to his mother, Camp of 1st Mass. Cavalry, Potomac Run, Va., January 8, 1863, ibid., 232
TO BE CONTINUED ...