Trouble in Lafayette Square by Klein Gil;Kelly John;

Author:Klein, Gil;Kelly, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

For Adams, all of Washington society gathered around Lafayette Square, and beyond it, “the country began.”53 Adams’s pedigree is impeccable. He was the great-grandson of the Revolutionary leader and second president, John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president. His father, Charles Francis Adams, had run as a vice presidential candidate for the Free Soil Party—the precursor of the Republican Party—with Martin Van Buren in 1848. He served a term in Congress before Lincoln named him ambassador to Great Britain, and he is often credited with keeping the British from recognizing the Confederacy. Henry Adams was born in 1838, the fourth child in the family. Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, he attended Harvard, but he was at loose ends after graduating in 1858 and traveling in Europe and studying in Germany. He accepted his father’s offer to become his personal secretary in London during the Civil War. He secretly wrote articles for London newspapers, which taught him how much he loved writing and journalism. When his father returned to the United States in 1868, Henry decided on a career in journalism and went to Washington. Because of his name, doors opened for him all over town, and he lambasted the corruption in the Grant administration and in Congress. “To be abused by a senator is my highest ambition,” he quipped.54 Harvard offered Henry an assistant professorship, and he finally accepted it, although he also was editor of the Boston-based North American Review with a small but influential circulation.

In 1871, Henry was enticed west to spend a summer with a party conducting a geological survey for the federal government. He was enthralled with the wildness of the territory. But most of all, he enjoyed meeting Clarence King, the survey’s director. King was a man’s man who could stare down a bear. But he also enjoyed the good things in life, wearing well-tailored clothes, bringing accomplished artists to record his geological survey of the American border with Canada and making sure the food for his exploration party was of high quality. “On meeting Clarence King, Adams felt the same instant connection he had experienced when he shook hands with John Hay. Friendship with King ‘was never a matter of growth or doubt,’ Adams said. It was whole from the start.”55 King had met John Hay a couple of years earlier in New York, where they also had created an instant rapport. Hay had marveled at King’s humor, his grasp of art and literature and his “intelligent sympathy, which saw the good and the amusing in the most unpromising subjects.”56

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