All this knowledge would not
have affected either the Minister or his son in 1862. The sum of
the individuals would still have seemed, to the young man, one
individual -- a single will or intention -- bent on breaking up
the Union "as a diminution of a dangerous power." The Minister
would still have found his interest in thinking Russell friendly
and Palmerston hostile. The individual would still have been
identical with the mass. The problem would have been the same;
the answer equally obscure. Every student would, like the private
secretary, answer for himself alone.
CHAPTER XI
THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS (1863)
MINISTER ADAMS troubled himself little about what he did not
see of an enemy. His son, a nervous animal, made life a terror by
seeing too much. Minister Adams played his hand as it came, and
seldom credited his opponents with greater intelligence than his
own. Earl Russell suited him; perhaps a certain personal sympathy
united them; and indeed Henry Adams never saw Russell without
being amused by his droll likeness to John Quincy Adams. Apart
from this shadowy personal relation, no doubt the Minister was
diplomatically right; he had nothing to lose and everything to
gain by making a friend of the Foreign Secretary, and whether
Russell were true or false mattered less, because, in either
case, the American Legation could act only as though he were
false.
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