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Henry’s assessment of his father’s social limitations was harsh but accurate. At fifty-three, Charles Francis Adams was a curious figure of a man; he managed to convey the impression of being not quite formed, that there were still untapped reserves of potential, while simultaneously appearing old and disillusioned with the world. Being the son and grandson of American presidents2.8 had paradoxically both defined him and robbed him of ambition. He sought neither power nor attention. Small by American standards, he cultivated a professorial appearance, accentuated by a receding hairline that ended in fluffy wisps just above his ears. His face was kind, but it seemed more like a mask than a canvas for displaying emotion. It was as if at a young age Adams had entered internal exile and found the place congenial.

Adams’s unsettled early life had no doubt impressed upon him a sense of being different from others. In 1814, after six years in Russia, his father became the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, having helped negotiate peace with England. But for eight-year-old Charles it meant being transplanted from cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to a small country house in the village of Ealing, several miles west of London, which his father preferred to living in the city. It also meant leaving a friendly nation to go to one that had been, until a few months earlier, America’s enemy.

It was the Adams legacy, however, rather than any particular childhood event, that cast the longest shadow over Charles’s life. His father constantly invoked the family name as both praise and chastisement. If one of his children performed well, he was simply doing what was expected of an Adams; if he failed, the shame would follow him into the afterlife.35 The treatment crushed Charles’s elder brother, but in Charles it created a morbid sense of duty. When the family returned to Boston, Charles followed a well-trodden path, entering law, then politics, the occupations of an Adams, and taking up the family crusade to see slavery abolished.

Charles Francis Adams loathed the noisy, public side of politics. He admired Sumner and Seward precisely because they possessed the drive and bravado he lacked. He could never emulate Seward’s theatrical embrace of working-class voters, and public speaking made him miserable. He also lacked Sumner’s charisma and conversational ease. Adams was no more likely to frequent Willard’s than was Lord Lyons. His greatest pleasures were the quiet concentration of historical research and the inner satisfaction of rock collecting. John Quincy Adams, who had become president at the age of fifty-eight—beating his own father by four years—would not have been impressed to learn that at fifty-one his son had only just managed to reach the House of Representatives.36

The price Adams paid for this determination to remain above, or at least away from, the fray was his failure to be considered for a place on any of the prestigious committees in Congress. Indeed, he was so reticent that the winter of 1860 passed without his having made his maiden speech. He did not even attempt to cultivate Lord Lyons, despite a family history that gave him a far greater claim to the minister’s notice than Sumner, who stopped by the legation at every opportunity.

Lyons appreciated Sumner’s visits. The senator happily shared with him the sort of insider political gossip that diplomats are required to know but find it hardest to obtain. Although Lyons was one of the only Washington figures whose standing had not been affected by the widening social chasm between the North and South, he was still as friendless as the day he arrived in the city. Ironically, his inability to make social inroads made it easier for President Buchanan to confide in him. On April 5, 1860, Lyons bumped into Buchanan while taking his constitutional around Lafayette Square. The president looked harassed and careworn. He felt helpless, he told Lyons, against the forces that were driving the country apart. The only area in which he still