A grandson and great-grandson of presidents, Henry Adams had a proprietary interest in the White House. His great-grandmother Abigail Adams had hung the family wash to dry in the unfinished East Room, and his grandmother Louise Catherine Adams had entertained Lafayette there in 1825, to mention only two family associations. Henry Adams himself made his first visit at the age of 12 in 1850 to the sleepy Southern village of Washington. Taken by his father, Charles Francis Adams, to call on President Zachary Taylor, he passed the president's horse, "Old Whitey," grazing in a paddock outside the White House. Adams recalled (in the Education of Henry Adams) that he had "felt no sense of strangeness" in meeting the president.

"He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every respectable family." Subsequently, in 1860, he came to Washington as private secretary to his father, who had been reelected to Congress. These were the tense months before the Civil War. Then, after spending the war years in London, again as secretary to his father, who was minister to Great Britain, Henry Adams returned to Washington in 1868 as a lobbyist and journalist working for "large internal reforms" of the government. One of his slashing articles earned him the epithet "begonia" from an irate senator, and he achieved the reputation, as reported in the national press, of being "one of the three best dancers in the capital." In 1870, partly as a result of family pressure— they did not quite approve of the Bohemianism of his life in Washington—Adams left to become assistant professor of