Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolayand the War for Lincoln's Image
by Joshua Zeitz. Copyright © 2014, The Viking
Press.
John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln's two private secretaries,
spent the evening of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, at the White House, drinking
whiskey and talking with the president's 21-year-old son, Robert, an officer
attached to General Ulysses S. Grant's staff. Shortly before 11 p.m., Tad
Lincoln burst through the front door of the mansion, crying "They've
killed Papa dead!" Hay and Robert rushed by carriage to Tenth Street,
where the mortally wounded president had been transferred to the Petersen
House, a boardinghouse across from Ford's Theatre. Upon their arrival, a doctor
informed them that the president would not survive his wounds.
With John Hay at his side, Robert Todd Lincoln walked into
the room where his father lay stretched out on a narrow bed. Unconscious from
the moment of his shooting, the president "breathed with slow and regular
respiration throughout the night," Hay later recalled. Family friends and
government officials filed in and out of the chamber. "As the dawn came and
the lamplight grew pale," Hay recalled, the president's "pulse began
to fail." Hay and Robert were at the president's side when he passed.
The next day, 33-year-old John Nicolay, who served as the
president's other private secretary, was aboard a Navy warship, returning from
a brief excursion to Cuba, where he had traveled to take the ocean air. As his
party entered Chesapeake Bay, Nicolay reported, they "took a pilot on
board [and] heard from him the first news of the terrible loss the country had
suffered ... . It was so unexpected, so sudden and so horrible even to think
of, much less to realize that we couldn't believe it, and therefore remained in
hope that it would prove one of the thousand groundless exaggerations which the
war has brought forth during the past four years. Alas, when we reached Point
Lookout at daylight this morning, the mournful reports of the minute guns that
were being fired, and the flags at half-mast left us no ground for further
hope."
It is little wonder that historians consult Hay's and
Nicolay's writing frequently-their letters and journals provide eyewitness
accounts of their White House years. But their major life's work after the
Civil War is a largely forgotten story.
"The boys," as the president affectionately called
them, became Lincoln's official biographers. Enjoying exclusive access to his
papers-which the Lincoln family closed to the public until 1947 (the 21st
anniversary of the death of Robert Todd Lincoln)- they undertook a 25-year
mission to create a definitive and enduring historical image of their slain
leader. The culmination of these efforts-their exhaustive, ten-volume
biography, serialized between 1886 and 1890-constituted one of the most
successful exercises in revisionism in American history. Writing against the rising
currents of Southern apologia, Hay and Nicolay pioneered the
"Northern" interpretation of the Civil War- a standard against which
every other historian and polemicist had to stake out a position.
Hay and Nicolay helped invent the Lincoln we know today- the
sage father figure; the military genius; the greatest American orator; the
brilliant political tactician; the master of a fractious cabinet who forged a
"team of rivals" out of erstwhile challengers for the throne; the
Lincoln Memorial Lincoln.
That Abraham Lincoln was all of these things, in some
measure, there can be no doubt. But it is easy to forget how widely underrated
Lincoln the president and Lincoln the man were at the time of his death and how
successful Hay and Nicolay were in elevating his place in the nation's
collective historical memory.
While Lincoln prided himself on his deep connection to
"the people," he never succeeded in translating his immense
popularity with the Northern public into similar regard among the nation's political
and intellectual elites. The profound emotional bond that he shared with Union
soldiers and their families, and his stunning electoral success in two
presidential elections, never fully inspired an equivalent level of esteem by
the influential men who governed the country and guarded its official history.
To many of these men, he remained in death what he was in life: the
rail-splitter and country lawyer-good, decent and ill-fitted to the immense
responsibilities that befell him.
Leading into the 1864 election cycle, many prominent in
Lincoln's own party agreed with Iowa senator James Grimes that the
administration “has been a disgrace from the very beginning to every one who
had anything to do with bringing it into power.” Charles Sumner, a radical
antislavery leader, fumed that the nation needed “a president with brains; one
who can make a plan and carry it out.”
From across the political spectrum, influential writers and
politicians blamed Lincoln for four years of military stalemate and setbacks
and for a series of political blunders that cost his party dearly in the 1862
midterm elections. John Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, spoke for many
Republicans when he explained his support of Lincoln’s re-election. The
president, he said, was “essentially lacking a close-knit family, and Nicolay,
orphaned at 14 after his parents emigrated from Bavaria in 1838, forged a close
friendship that endured over a half century. Fortune placed them in the right
place (Springfield, Illinois) at the right time (1860) and offered them a
front-row seat to one of the most tumultuous political and military upheavals
in American history.
By 1856, Nicolay, the editor of an Illinois antislavery
newspaper, had become active in Republican party politics. Appointed an aide to
the Illinois secretary of state that year, he was a well-known figure in the
statehouse. Hay returned to Illinois in 1859 after graduation from Brown
University and was studying law, having joined his uncle Milton Hay’s
Springfield practice, housed in the same building as Lincoln’s law offices.
Lincoln took on Nicolay as his secretary in June 1860, in
the midst of the presidential campaign. During the heady post-election
interlude in Springfield, Nicolay, installed in the governor’s office, controlled
access to Lincoln and labored alone, answering in the quality of leadership,”
but now that he had been renominated, “correction is impossible ...
Massachusetts will vote for the Union Cause at all events and will support Mr.
Lincoln so long as he remains the candidate.” Years later, Hay remarked that
had Lincoln "died in the days of doubt and gloom which preceded his
reelection,” rather than in the final weeks of the war, as the Union moved to
secure its great victory, he would almost certainly have been remembered
differently, despite his great acts and deeds.
John Hay and John George Nicolay were prairie boys who met
in 1851 as gifted, inquiring students in a rural Illinois school. Hay, a
physician’s son and one of six children born into between 50 and 100 letters a
day.
When the mail and visitors became unmanageable, Hay began
assisting his friend on an informal basis. By the end of December, Lincoln
offered Nicolay the post of presidential secretary, at a princely sum of $2,500
per year—almost three times what he earned as campaign secretary. Not long
after, Nicolay suggested that Hay be appointed assistant secretary. “We can’t
take all Illinois down with us to Washington,” Lincoln replied. When Milton
offered to pay his nephew’s salary for six months, the president-elect
relented. “Well, let Hay come,” he agreed.
As Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay
became closer to the president than anyone outside his immediate family. Still
in their 20s, they lived and worked on the second floor of the White House,
performing the functions of a modern-day chief of staff, press secretary,
political director and presidential body man. Above all, they guarded the “last
door which opens into the awful presence” of the commander in chief, in the words
of Noah Brooks, a journalist and one of many Washington insiders who coveted
their jobs, resented their influence and thought them a little too big for
their britches (“a fault for which it seems to me either Nature or our tailors
are to blame,” Hay once quipped).
From the instant of Lincoln’s death, the debate over his
role in history ignited. John Hay, who was present at Petersen House (pictured
leaning against table, right) understood the obligation to Lincoln’s legacy as
early as 1863. “I believe,” Hay wrote, “he will fill a bigger place in history
than even he dreams himself.”
In demeanor and temperament, they could not have been more
different. Short-tempered and dyspeptic, Nicolay cut a brooding figure to those
seeking the president’s time or favor. William Stoddard, formerly an Illinois
journalist and then an assistant secretary under their supervision, later
remarked that Nicolay was “decidedly German in his manner of telling men what
he thought of them ... People who do not like him—because they cannot use him,
perhaps—say he is sour and crusty, and it is a grand good thing, then, that he
is."
Hay cultivated a softer image. He was, in the words of his
contemporaries, a “comely young man with peach- blossom face,” “very witty
boyish in his manner, yet deep enough—bubbling over with some brilliant
speech.” An instant fixture in Washington social circles, fast friend of Robert
Todd Lincoln’s and favorite among Republican congressmen who haunted the White
House halls, he projected a youthful dash that balanced out Nicolay’s more grim
bearing.
Hay and Nicolay were party to the president’s greatest
official acts and most private moments. They were in the room when he signed
the Emancipation Proclamation, and by his side at Gettysburg, when he first
spoke to the nation of a “new birth of freedom.” When he could not sleep—which,
as the war progressed, was often—Lincoln walked down the corridor to their
quarters and passed the time reciting Shakespeare or mulling over the day’s
political and military developments. When his son Willie died in 1862, the
first person to whom Lincoln turned was John Nicolay.
Though the White House was under military guard—later, as
the war progressed, plainclothes detectives mingled among household staff for
added security—the public, including hordes of patronage seekers, was at
liberty to enter the mansion during regular business hours. Visiting hours
“began at ten o’clock in the morning,” Hay explained, “but in reality the
anterooms and halls were full before that hour—people anxious to get the first
axe ground.”
After rising at dawn and eating a sparse breakfast of one
egg, toast and black coffee, the president read the morning dispatches from his
generals, reviewed paperwork with his secretaries and conferred with members of
his cabinet. Breaking at noon for a solitary lunch—“a biscuit, a glass of milk
in the winter, some fruit or grapes in the summer”—he returned to his office
and received visitors until 5 or 6 in the evening. Most days, Lincoln worked
until 11 p.m.; during critical battles, he stayed up until the early daylight
hours, reviewing telegraphic dispatches from the War Department. Unlike modern
presidents, Lincoln never took a vacation. He worked seven days each week, 52
weeks of the year, and generally left Washington only to visit the field or, on
one occasion, to dedicate a battleground cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
For the secretaries, too, the work was punishing. When their
boss was in the office, often 14 hours each day, they remained on call. “The boys”
soon came to know him intimately. He often took carriage rides with them, and
when the first lady was out of town or indisposed, they accompanied him to the
theater. In good humor, the secretaries referred to Lincoln privately as “the
Tycoon” and “the Ancient,” though they always addressed him directly as “Mr.
President.” Charles G. Halpine, an Irish-born writer who came to know Hay
during the war, later judged that “Lincoln loved him as a son.”
Nicolay’s rapport with Lincoln was more formal but they were
still close. Nicolay decided which visitors would enjoy a presidential audience
and which dispatches would fall under Lincoln’s gaze. In many cases, Nicolay
issued orders and responses without consulting the president, whose policies
and priorities he came instinctively to understand and anticipate. Even his
detractors did not second-guess his standing.
In the weeks following Lincoln’s burial in Springfield,
Nicolay and Hay returned to Washington, where they spent several weeks
arranging the presidential papers for shipment to Illinois. The archives would
be overseen by Lincoln’s son, Robert, now devoted to a growing law practice in
Chicago. Lincoln’s official correspondence comprised more than 18,000
documents, sprawled across roughly 42,000 individual pieces of paper.
Most items were letters and telegrams written to the
president, but dispersed among dozens of boxes were copies of thousands of
Lincoln’s outgoing letters and telegrams, memoranda, Congressional reports and
speeches.
During the next, half-dozen years, the Lincoln papers
remained sealed behind closed doors. When William Herndon, Lincoln’s
Springfield law partner, who was planning his own Lincoln biography, asked
Robert for access, Robert insisted that he had “not any letters which could be
of any interest whatever to you or anyone.”
The first substantive attempt at memorializing Lincoln fell
to George Bancroft, the unofficial dean of the American historical enterprise,
whom Congress invited to deliver a tribute in early 1866. A Democrat who had
served in James Polk’s cabinet, Bancroft was an unusual choice to eulogize the
first Republican president. The two men were not well acquainted. Bancroft cast
a critical eye on Lincoln’s abilities. Speaking from the well of the House for
more than two and a half hours, the gray haired relic offered little background
beyond a stock biographical sketch of the 16th president, though he managed to
issue a cool, outwardly polite rebuke of Lincoln’s administrative skills and
intellectual capacity for high office. John Hay later fumed that “Bancroft’s
address was a disgraceful exhibition of ignorance and prejudice.” The former
secretary was particularly offended that Bancroft seemed fundamentally to
underestimate Lincoln’s native genius. It was an error Hay had seen committed
time and again during the war, by better-educated but lesser men who remained
stubbornly ignorant of the president’s inner reserve of intelligence and
strength.
William Herndon likely shared Hay’s contempt for George
Bancroft, though for reasons of his own. Lincoln’s friend and law partner of 16
years, Herndon was an abolitionist and temperance man, though also an alcoholic
who relapsed repeatedly. Yet for all his faults, Herndon understood Lincoln
intimately and frowned upon the popular impulse to apotheosize the man whom he
had known in the flesh and blood.
No biographer was more guilty of this historical mischief
than Josiah Holland, the deeply pious editor of the Springfield Republican in
Massachusetts, who paid Herndon a visit in May 1865. In the 1866 Holland’s Life
of Abraham Lincoln, the author introduced the president as a Bible-quoting
evangelical whose hatred of slavery flowed from an eschatological belief that
“the day of wrath was at hand.” The book reinvented Lincoln from whole cloth,
but the reading public eagerly bought up 100,000 copies, making it an overnight
best seller.
Ultimately, Herndon—although he delivered a series of
lectures on Lincoln’s life—was unable to complete a biography, particularly
once he became sidetracked by stories he collected regarding Lincoln’s doomed
courtship of Ann Rutledge. The New Salem, Illinois, innkeeper’s daughter
contracted typhoid and died at age 22 in 1835; rumor had it that she and
Lincoln had been engaged. Herndon’s subtext was impossible to mistake: Lincoln
had loved only one woman (Ann Rutledge) and his grief for her was so profound
that he never loved another woman, including his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.
Mary, of course, was enraged. “This is the return for all my
husband’s kindness to this miserable man!” she fumed. Robert was equally
incensed, but also concerned. “Mr. Wm. H. Herndon is making an ass of himself,”
he told David Davis, the executor of his father’s estate, and pleaded with him
to intercede. Because Herndon “speaks with a certain amount of authority from
having known my father for so long,” his stories, Robert believed, could do
great injury to the family’s reputation. (Years later, as late as 1917, Robert
still bristled at any suggestion that his father had been a simple, rough-hewn
relic of the frontier, a characterization advanced aggressively by Herndon.)
Fortunately for the Lincoln family, Herndon lacked the necessary discipline to
sit down and write a proper book.
Unfortunately for the family, by 1867, Herndon, in
increasingly dire financial straits, sold copies of his extensive collection of
Lincoln materials—interview transcripts, court records, testimonial letters and
newspaper clippings—to Ward Hill Lamon, a bluff, gregarious lawyer whom Lincoln
had befriended on the circuit in the 1850s. Lamon went to Washington with
Lincoln, served as U.S. marshal for the city during the war and later established
a law practice in Washington, D.C. with Jeremiah Black, a prominent Democrat
who had served in President Buchanan’s cabinet.
Realizing that he lacked a way with words, Lamon joined
forces with his partner’s son, Chauncey Black, who undertook the task of
ghostwriting Lamon’s history of Lincoln. The Black family held the Republican
Party and its martyr in low esteem. “He certainly does not compare well with
the refined and highly cultivated gentlemen (fifteen in number) who preceded
him in the executive chair,” the elder Black scoffed. “He also lacked that
lofty scorn of fraud and knavery which is inseparable from true greatness. He
was not bad himself but he tolerated the evil committed by others when it did
not suit him to resist it.”
On the eve of the book’s publication in 1872, Davis, who had
learned of its contents, all but locked Lamon in a room and compelled him to
excise an entire chapter representing Lincoln as a bumbling, inept president who
inadvertently pushed the nation to war. Black was incensed by the eleventh-hour
omission, but what remained in print proved sufficiently explosive.
Incorporating Herndon’s material, Black and Lamon, in The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, were the first to publish alleged details of Lincoln’s troubled
marriage to Mary Todd, the depth of the future president’s putative atheism and
a charge—long thereafter disputed, and much later discredited—of Lincoln’s
illegitimate patrimony. Hay beseeched a mutual friend, “Can’t you stop him? ...
For the grave of the dead and the crime of the living prevent it if possible.
Its effect will be most disastrous.” Robert, too, was furious. “It is
absolutely horrible to think of such men as Herndon and Lamon being considered
in the light that they claim.”
Herndon, for his part, countered that he was helping the
world to appreciate the complex of hurdles that Lincoln overcame, including
bastardy, poverty and obscurity. Unsurprisingly, tire Lincoln family took
exception to Herndon’s declarations of friendship. Robert also came gradually
to understand that to tell the story his way, he would need help.
Hay and Nicolay had begun planning a biography of Lincoln as
eaiiy as midway through their White House tenure. The president’s death upended
whatever initial scheme they had in mind. Over the next five years, the
secretaries turned their attention to other endeavors. Nicolay took pleasure in
travel and family life with his wife and daughter before settling in the
nation’s capital, while Hay kept busy as a newspaper editor and poet, for the
most part in New York City, and devoted time to his courtship of Clara Stone, a
daughter of wealthy Cleveland industrialist Amasa Stone.
By 1872, however, Hay was “convinced that we ought to be at
work on our ‘Lincoln.’ I don’t think the time for publication has come, but the
time for preparation is slipping away.”
That same year, Charles Francis Adams—a scion of the famous
Massachusetts family (and father of Henry Adams) who had served in the Lincoln administration
as minister to Great Britain—delivered a memorial address on William Seward
that portrayed him as the glue that kept the government together in perilous
times. “I must affirm, without hesitation,” he avowed, “that in the history of
our government, down to this hour, no experiment so rash has ever been made as
that of elevating to the head of affairs a man with so little previous
preparation for the task as Mr. Lincoln.” Only by good grace and luck did
Lincoln possess the wisdom to appoint as his first minister Seward, the “master
mind” of the government and savior of the Union. The speech enraged Lincoln’s
stalwart defenders, first among them Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy in
Lincoln’s cabinet, who issued a stinging rebuke.
Then, in his popular account of the war years, The American
Conflict, the ever-erratic newspaper editor Horace Greeley portrayed Lincoln as
a bungling leader who squandered multiple opportunities to end the war early,
either on the battlefield or through negotiation. Lincoln acolytes might have
rolled their eyes, but he sold books, so his opinion mattered.
Shortly after Seward’s death, Nicolay wrote once more to
Robert, urging him to allow for the “collection and arrangement of the
materials which John and I will need in writing the history we propose. We must
of necessity begin with your father’s papers.” Robert agreed to grant access in
April 1874.
That summer, several dozen boxes made their way from
Illinois to Washington, D.C., where Nicolay, who had been appointed marshal to
the Supreme Court in 1872, deposited them in his office. There, in the marble
confines of the Capitol building, they would be safe from fire, water damage or
theft.
Hay and Nicolay were especially troubled by the historical
amnesia that was quickly taking hold over the reunited states. In popular
literature and journalism, the war was being recast as a brothers’ squabble
over abstract political principles like federalism and states’ rights, rather
than as a moral struggle between slavery and freedom. Magazines and newspapers
commonly took to celebrating the military valor of both Confederate and Union
soldiers, as though bravery, rather than morality, were the chief quality to be
commemorated.
The authors pointedly emphasized the salient moral and
political issues that had divided the nation before, and in many respects
after, the war. The conflict had been caused by “an uprising of the national
conscience against a secular wrong” that could never be blotted out by the
romance of reunion.
By 1875, the secretaries were fully immersed in research and
slowly coming to appreciate the mammoth task for which they had volunteered.
The biography would consume them for the next 15 years. During that time, both
men held other jobs: Nicolay remained at the Supreme Court until 1887, while
Hay worked for his father- in-law and served briefly as assistant secretary of
state under Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes. Their labors were
frequently interrupted by their own illnesses or those of their wives and children.
Editors begged them for an advance peek at the work. Publishers courted them.
For the time being, they held their suitors at bay. “We [are] in no hurry to
make arrangements,” Hay told one hopeful.
Though Nicolay and Hay made little effort to mask their
bias, they did set out to write a history grounded in evidence. In the early
days of the project, Nicolay spent several months interviewing dozens of
individuals who had known Lincoln in Illinois and Washington. The transcripts
of these discussions informed their work, but they came to cast a skeptical eye
on memories recorded years or decades after the fact. If a fact or an anecdote
could not be confirmed by the written record, they usually discounted it
entirely. Luckily, what they could not find in Lincoln’s vast manuscript
collection they often located in their personal archives.
On rare occasions they relied on personal recollection of
events to bring the biography to life—for instance, Nicolay’s vivid description
of the moment that Lincoln was nominated at Chicago. They scoured newspapers
for speech transcripts. They collected vast quantities of government documents,
both Union and Confederate,related to the war. They swapped materials with the
War Department, which retained copies of Lincoln’s in-going and out-going
telegrams. They asked the children of long-departed Civil War notables to look
through their attics for important documents, and they purchased materials from
manuscript and book dealers. “I am getting together quite a little lot of books,”
Nicolay reported as early as 1876.
The oversize first-floor study in Nicolay’s Capitol Hill row
house came to accommodate one of the largest private collections of Civil War
documentation and secondary scholarship in the country. Later, when Hay lived
in Washington, between 1879 and 1881 as assistant secretary of state, and again
from 1885 onward, he and Nicolay would walk between each other’s homes to swap
materials and chapter drafts.
“The two would never divulge how the actual writing was
divided between them,” Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later explained. “They seemed
to take a mischievous delight in keeping it a secret, saying they were
co-authors, and that was all the public need know.” In some cases they
alternated chapters. In other cases, each might assume responsibility for an
entire volume. Hay and Nicolay had been so long acquainted that they were able
to develop a common prose style with little effort.
By 1885, Hay and Nicolay had written some 500,000 words and
were scarcely halfway through the Civil War. Hay grew increasingly concerned by
the scope of the undertaking. What was needed was an incentive to bring the
project to a close. Roswell Smith and Richard Gilder, publisher and editor,
respectively, of the Century magazine, provided that motivation. “We want your
life of Lincoln,” Smith told Hay. “We must have it. If you say so, I shall give
you all the profit. We will take it, and work it for nothing... It is probably
the most important literary venture of the time.”
Soon they had a contract. Century offered unprecedented
terms: $50,000 for serial rights, as well as royalties on sales of the full
ten-volume set, to be issued following the magazine run.
The long-awaited serialization began in late 1886.
Almost from the start, the work proved controversial.
By virtue of their exhaustive treatment of Lincoln’s
political career, Nicolay and Hay seared into the national awareness episodes
largely unknown to the public, and themes and arguments that would influence
Lincoln scholars and Civil War historians for generations.
Among its many famous contributions to the nation’s shared
historical consciousness were revelations that William Seward drafted the
closing lines of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, which the president-elect
then fashioned into a work of literary genius. Nicolay and Hay were the first
to report George McClellan’s vainglorious assurance that he could “do it all”
when Lincoln gave him command of the Union Army. They were the first to write
of Lincoln’s great distress early in the war, when Washington, D.C. was cut off
from the North and the president, keeping anxious vigil for fresh troops,
wondered, “Why don’t they come!” The biographers offered unprecedented insight
into Lincoln’s decision-making on emancipation and the enlistment of black
soldiers and an insider’s view of his interaction with the Union’s high
command.
Above all, Nicolay and Hay created a master narrative that
continues to command serious scrutiny more than a century after its
introduction. Populating his cabinet with former opponents for the Republican
presidential nomination, Lincoln demonstrated his discernment and magnanimity
in choosing men whom he “did not know... He recognized them as governors,
senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier
lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt
to be due to themselves.” Presaging the popular argument that Lincoln forged a
“team of rivals,” Nicolay and Hay insisted that the strong personalities and
talents who constituted his inner circle did not always appreciate “the
stronger will and ... more delicate tact [that] inspired and guided them all.”
Hay’s love for Lincoln shines through in his imagining of
the future president’s solitary childhood. Describing Lincoln’s boyhood habit
of reading and rereading Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, the Bible and Parson
Weems’ biography of George Washington, he drew a moving portrait of a young boy
sitting “by the fire at night,” covering his “wooden shovel with essays and
arithmetical exercises, which he would shave off and begin again. It is
touching to think of this great-spirited child, battling year after year
against his evil star, wasting ingenuity upon devices and makeshifts, his high
intelligence starving for want of the simple appliances of education that are
now afforded gratis to the poorest and most indifferent.” Hay presented the
future president as a hero in the wilderness, doing solitary battle against the
privations of his upbringing.
Nicolay and Hay gave a prominent place to the elephant in
the room: slavery. Few white Americans were interested in discussing the
question by 1885. Hay, in his discussion of sectional politics that formed the
backdrop of Lincoln’s political rise, stated matter- of-factly that “it is now
universally understood, if not conceded, that the Rebellion of 1861 was begun
for the sole purpose of defending and preserving to the seceding States the
institution of African slavery and making them the nucleus of a great slave
empire.” Rejecting the increasingly widespread argument that the Civil War was
about a great many things, but not slavery, Hay reduced the conflict to “that
persistent struggle of the centuries between despotism and individual freedom;
between arbitrary wrong, consecrated by tradition and law, and the unfolding
recognition of private rights.”
Breaking his own rule against believing the memories of old
men long after the fact, Hay gave credence to the claim of John Hanks,
Lincoln’s cousin, who recalled a journey that he and Lincoln had taken. Hired
to escort a barge of goods down the Mississippi River in 1831, Hanks claimed
that it was there that Lincoln first saw “negroes chained, maltreated, whipped,
and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent,
looked bad. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he first
formed Ins opinion of slavery.” As an antebellum politician, Lincoln—though not
an abolitionist or a radical—had boldly affirmed that black Americans were
fellow men and women. After four years of war, his own thinking evolved even
further. The secretaries followed his moral and intellectual lead. They also
understood that his legacy would forever be linked with his emancipation
agenda. In this regard, they were writing for posterity. As young presidential
aides, Nicolay and Hay often missed the significance of events that they’d
witnessed and in which they’d participated. They were actors in “stirring
times,” Nicolay observed in the first weeks of the war, though “I hardly
realize that they are so, even as I write them.” In November 1863, the secretaries
drank their way through a 24-hour trip to Gettysburg, in part because it was
their job to work the swing-state reporters and politicians on hand for the
dedication of the cemetery, but also because they were young men who enjoyed a
good time. In hindsight, they appreciated the gravitas of the moment.
The slain president’s critics were legion, including
historian George Bancroft; Senator James Grimes; newspaper editor Horace
Greeley; statesman Charles Francis Adams; William Herndon, Lincoln's law
partner.
The pair acknowledged the growing consensus around the
magnitude of the Gettysburg Address when they devoted a stand-alone chapter, 13
pages, to the speech. They reproduced the entire address, along with a photo
facsimile of the original manuscript in Lincoln’s hand.
In securing Lincoln’s historical legacy, Hay believed it was
imperative that the biography diminish the reputation of George McClellan, the
former Union general, Democratic presidential candidate and thorn in Lincoln’s
side during the war.
Hay portrayed McClellan as an inept general given to
“delusions” and “hallucinations of overwhelming forces opposed to him,” a man
who “rarely estimated the force immediately op-posed to him at less than double
its actual strength.” Hay disclosed for the first time McClellan’s discourteous
refusal to meet with Lincoln, when the president called at his house in late
1861, and zeroed in mercilessly on the general’s botched effort at the Battle
of Antietam, where, thanks to a Union private’s discovery of Lee’s battle
plans, he "knew not only of the division of his enemy’s army in half, but
he knew where his trains, his rear-guard, his cavalry, were to march and to
halt, and where the detached commands were to join the main body.” McClellan
failed to act on this intelligence, Hay disclosed, and “every minute which he
thus let slip away was paid for in the blood of Union soldiers the next day.”
McClellan’s “deplorable shortcomings” were a constant source of agony, as was
his “mutinous insolence” in routinely denigrating the president behind his
back.
Nicolay and Hay scrupulously avoided distortions. Yet their
bias was evident not only in what they wrote but what they omitted. The
secretaries were fully cognizant of Mary Todd Lincoln’s misappropriation of the
official household expense account. They also witnessed the distress that her actions visited upon the
president. The subject appears nowhere in their work.
As for the president’s liberal suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus—protection against indefinite confinement without benefit of
legal proceeding—they dismissed critics. “The greatest care was taken by the
President to restrain the officers acting under his authority from any abuse of
this tremendous power,” they wrote. In retrospect, even historians who believe
that Lincoln had little choice but to jail certain vituperous Northern
opponents of the war would disagree with the secretaries’ overly generous
assessment.
The Lincoln whom Hay and Nicolay introduced to the reading
public was a deft operator. He exerted control “daily and hourly” over “the
vast machinery of command and coordination in Cabinet, Congress, army, navy,
and the hosts of national politics.” When the military high command failed to
deliver victory, the president schooled himself in the art of battle, and “it
is safe to say that no general in the army studied his maps and scanned his
telegrams with half the industry—and, it may be added, with half the
intelligence—which Mr. Lincoln gave to his.” Unlike many of his generals, the
president displayed a “larger comprehension of popular forces” and understood
that “a free people ... can stand reverses and disappointments; they are
capable of making great exertions and great sacrifices. The one thing that they
cannot endure is inaction on the part of their rulers.” He was, in the eyes of
his secretaries, the most skilled executive ever to have lived in the White
House.
Hay was certain that he and Nicolay had placed “the truth
before the country.” ‘Tear after year of study,” he wrote to Robert Lincoln,
“has shown me more clearly than ever how infinitely greater your father was
than anybody about him, greater than ever we imagined while he lived. There is
nothing to explain or apologize for from beginning to end. He is the one
unapproachably great figure of a great epoch.”
Reviews of the massive Nicolay-Hay work-in its final form,
Abraham Lincoln: A History was ten volumes and 1.2 million words—were mixed.
Some reviewers were baffled by its scope. Even a friendly newspaper remarked
that “no one will suspect the writers of being lukewarm Republicans.”
William Dean Howells, the dean of American literature who,
as a young man, had written Lincoln’s campaign biography in 1860, called it
“not only... the most important work yet accomplished in American history” but
also “one of the noblest achievements of literary art.” By far, the critic
whose opinion held the greatest sway with the authors was Robert Lincoln, and
he was “much pleased ... with the results of your long work,” he told Hay. “It
is what I hoped it would be.” “Many people speak to me & confirm my own
opinion of it as a work in everyway excellent—not only sustaining but elevating
my father’s place in History,” he assured his friend of three decades. “I shall
never cease to be glad that the places you & Nicolay held near him & in
his confidence were filled by you & not by others.”
Hefty and expensive, Abraham Lincoln: A History sold only
7,000 copies, but for every person who bought the collection, 50 others read
extensive excerpts in its serial run. More important than sales was the book’s
intellectual reach. For at least half a century, the Nicolay-Hay volumes formed
the basis of all major scholarship on Lincoln.
Nicolay continued to labor in Lincoln’s shadow. He
contributed articles on matters of Lincoln lore and legend. He condensed the
ten volumes of his effort with Hay, creating an abridged history that achieved
strong sales. That his life had become an extension of Lincoln’s did not seem
to trouble Nicolay. He had not grown as rich as Hay (though he surely
understood that Hay married, rather than earned, his money). He was by no means
as famous. He never held high office or seemed even to aspire to it.
Hay, approaching 60, finally achieved the political heights
that many of his friends had expected of him. In spring 1898, President William
McKinley forced the increasingly senile John Sherman out of the State
Department and later that year tapped Hay to replace him as secretary of state.
Over the next six and a half years, until his death, Hay played an instrumental
role in expanding America’s strategic position over two oceans and two
hemispheres.
Days after William McKinley, struck down by an assailant’s
bullet, expired on September 14, 1901, Hay rode by carriage from his home on
Lafayette Square to Capitol Hill, where his oldest friend, John Nicolay, lay
dying. Hay wore black crepe on his arm, a sign of mourning for the president.
Helen greeted him in the hall and explained that her father did not have long
to five. She asked that Hay not tell him of the president’s assassination, for
fear that the news would agitate him. “I must take this off before I go up to
him,” Hay said as he removed his armband. “I had to tell him that my father
would not see it—that he was already more in the other world than in this,”
Helen later wrote. “He mounted the stairs slowly. I stayed below. He came down
more slowly still, his face stricken with grief. He never saw his old friend
again.” Shortly following Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1905, Hay took a
leave of absence from the State Department and traveled to Europe with Clara,
where he hoped that doctors might help cure him of mounting heart trouble. The
sojourn seemed to have had a restorative effect. Yet by the time John and Clara
boarded the RMS Baltic for the journey home, the old troubles seemed to afflict
him once again. After conferring with the president in Washington, Hay left
with Clara for the Fells, his New Hampshire country house, where he died in the
early hours of July 1,1905.
On July 25,1947, some 30 scholars and scions of the Civil
War era gathered in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress for a gala
dinner. Poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg was there—so were historians
James G. Randall and Paul Angle, the leading expert on Lincoln’s Springfield
years. Ulysses S. Grant III was pleased to attend; Helen Nicolay, now 81, was
compelled by poor health to send her regrets. “Not since that morning in the
Petersen House have so many men who loved Lincoln been gathered in one room,” remarked
one of the attendees.
Shortly before midnight, the party took leave of the banquet
and walked across the street to the library annex. There they waited for the
clock to strike 12, signaling the 21st anniversary of Robert Todd Lincoln’s
death—the date that the Lincoln family had designated to make the president’s
papers available. Among the crowd of 200 onlookers, newspaper cameramen lit the
room with then* flashbulbs, while CBS Radio News interviewed several
dignitaries.
At the appointed hour, the library staff unlocked the
vaulted doors that had guarded the Lincoln collection, and the scholars rushed
the card catalog. Elated, Randall felt as though he were “living with Lincoln,
handling the very papers he handled, sharing his deep concern over events and
issues, noting his patience when complaints poured in, hearing a Lincolnian
laugh.” Many of the Lincoln papers were written in Nico- lay’s or Hay’s hand
and signed by the president. Most had passed through their fingers at least
twice—during the war, when they were young men, and decades later, when they
were old.
Soon after release of the manuscript collection, Roy P.
Basler, the 41-year-old secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, entered
into an agreement with the Library of Congress to edit The Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln. Basler was among a handful of individuals, then and since, who
could claim to have read almost every extant scrap Lincoln ever wrote, from the
mundane to the truly profound (with the exception of the late president’s legal
papers). In 1974, speaking as “one of the few people yet alive who once read
Nicolay and Hay complete,” he judged their work “indispensable” and predicted
that it “will not be superseded.” Theirs was “not merely a biography of a
public man but a history of the nation in his time.” The secretaries, he
concluded, made “use of the stuff of history” in a way that few of their
successors could claim.
Review by Joshua Zeitz, Smithsonian, February 2014.
