by Joshua Zeitz
Unbeknownst to Nicolay and Hay, the president-elect had already agreed to a plan that would spirit him secretly through Baltimore and into Washington. Acting on intelligence from multiple sources, Lincoln begrudgingly agreed to bypass a rumored assassination plot in Maryland by splitting off from his party and traveling overnight with an armed guard. Early that evening, the secretaries began to suspect that something was afoot. “[T]here is something up,” Nicolay told Norman Judd, who was among the very few who knew of the plan. “George,” Judd replied, “there is no necessity fore your Knowing & one man can keep a secret better than two.” The next morning, with Lincoln safely installed in the nation’s capital, the rest of the presidential entourage, including Mary Todd Lincoln, her three sons, and the two secretaries, completed their long journey to Washington.
For the nine days preceding his inauguration, the president-elect opted to use Willard’s Hotel as his temporary home and base of operations. Filling most of a city block on Fourteenth Street, between F Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Willard’s was a modern wonder, with 150 guest rooms, lecture and meeting halls, and a massive bar and dining room where hundreds of patrons gorged themselves daily on fish, oysters, venison, and good champagne. Nathaniel Hawthorne said that it was “much more justly called the center of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department,” and with the Lincolns now occupying the best suite in the house, the hotel struggled to keep up with the crush of visitors. Dignitaries were forced to double and triple up in rooms—and sometimes in beds—as overworked hotel staff moved hundreds of mattresses into the hallways to house the multitudes who converged on Washington for the inaugural festivities. Nicolay grumbled that “all of the party except Mr. & Mrs. Lincoln have but sorry accommodations” but offered as an aside that “next week we hope to be in the White House, where perhaps it may be better.”
Walking from the hotel to the Mall, Hay observed the steps on the east end of the Capitol, where carpenters had already constructed “a platform, in the midst of which a canopy is to be arranged, beneath which the President will stand while delivering his inaugural.” Several blocks away, by the old post office, workmen erected a temporary structure for the inaugural ball, “capable of accommodating six thousand people.” Back at Willard’s, he noted with bemusement that “the number of western politicians here is beginning to tell with fearful effect upon the market for alcoholic beverages.” Writing for the Providence Journal, he reported that “Mrs. Lincoln received nightly at her parlors at Willard’s. She has won all hearts by her frank, unaffected cordiality of manner.” The president’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, known popularly as the Prince of Rails for his famous, rail-splitting father, “has been extensively lionized, and a good deal of regret is expressed by the ladies at his approaching departure for Harvard.” Finally, “the private secretaries of the President, Nicolay and Hay, are toiling early and late with a mass of correspondence, of the extent of which I can convey no adequate idea.” Most of the incoming mail was from office seekers, leading Hay to conclude that “the number of people in the United States who find it impossible to earn an honest living must be appalling.”
Monday, March 4, was Inauguration Day. From his suite at Willard’s, Lincoln listened calmly as Robert read aloud the final draft of his father’s address. Outside, the weather was “cold and bracing” as the outgoing president arrived at the hotel in a splendid carriage. A bystander reported that “the streets adjacent to . . . the Capitol were nearly impassable by the crowds of people . . . Every available spot was black with human beings; boys and men clinging to rails and mounting on fences and climbing trees until they bent beneath the weight.” Donning a “low-crowned, broad-brimmed silk hat,” James Buchanan stepped into the Willard’s lobby to meet his successor. Moments later, the two men exited the hotel together and took their places in the open carriage. Arriving a short while later at the Capitol, they attended the swearing in of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin in the Senate chamber and strode out to the east portico. The Lincoln family was already seated beneath the canopy; Hay and Nicolay were assigned chairs just next to Robert Todd Lincoln. They were only a few feet away when Lincoln delivered his inaugural address and Chief Justice Roger Taney administered the oath of office.
Years later, Hay recounted the moments following Lincoln’s swearing in. Back inside the Capitol, Buchanan pulled the new president aside for “some parting words in the corner where I was standing. I waited with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weathered head. Every word must have its value at such an instant. The ex-president said: ‘I think you will find the water on the right-hand well at the White House better than the left,’ and went on with many intimate details of the kitchen and pantry.” Hay recalled that Lincoln stood politely at attention, “with that weary, introverted look of his, not answering, and the next day, when I recalled the conversation, admitted he had not heard a word of it. Through every chamber of his heart and brain were resounding those solemn strains of long-suffering warning which he had that day addressed to the South. ‘With you, not me, rests the awful issue. Shall it be peace or the sword?’”
PART II
CHAPTER 6
A Young Man of His Age
As you see from the heading of my letter, I am fairly installed in the ‘White House,’” John Nicolay reported proudly to Therena on March 5. The orphan boy who just ten years earlier earned his keep as a printer’s devil now worked and resided in the Executive Mansion. He was pleased with his station in life and eager that Therena appreciate his newfound importance. “Since I commenced writing this I have again been called away to appease visitors who are importuning to see Mr. Lincoln,” he wrote, “so don’t be surprised if I break off anywhere and fold it up and mail it to you—for I am going to send you something to-night if it is only an envelope. The first official act of Mr. Lincoln—after the inauguration—was to sign my appointment as Private Sec’y, and I have been busy enough since . . . I assure you. As the work is now, it will be a very severe tax on both my physical and mental energies, although so far I have borne it remarkably well.”
Washington was the largest city in which either Nicolay or Hay had ever lived. Encompassing Washington City, Georgetown, and outlying rural areas, the district numbered seventy-five thousand people, including eleven thousand free black residents and three thousand slaves. Though cosmopolitan in the extreme when compared with Springfield—to say nothing of Warsaw or Pittsfield—it was nevertheless a poor cousin to New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Seventy years earlier, its founders resolved to turn swampland and tobacco fields into a capital city. By 1861 the city was still an incomplete mix of crude mud streets lined with two- and three-story brick row houses, ramshackle wood slums and boardinghouses, and roughly one dozen federal government buildings, which stood out in these rough environs for their aspirational grandeur. The Capitol, where workmen had recently completed north and south wings to house the new Senate and House chambers, was surrounded by unsightly scaffolding and toolsheds, as engineers and laborers awaited the new cast-iron dome that would soon replace the decades-old wood roof. In the vast spaces between buildings, city residents let their pigs and cattle graze freely. “To make a Washington street,” an English visitor scoffed, “take one marble temple, or public office, a dozen good houses of brick and a dozen of wood and fill in with sheds and fields.”
Nicolay had visited Washington once before. John Hay, who had not, agreed with critics that “the town is a congeries of hovels, inharmoniously sown with temples . . . Why did they attempt to build a city where no city was meant to be reared?” Still, the young presidential aide, not yet twenty-three years old, found his first few days in “this sprawling, chaotic town” electrifying. A city with strong Southern leanings, Washington had long been in the social and political grip of the Democratic establishment. Now it was overrun with Republicans. Incumbent officeholders
, all Democrats, grimly steeled themselves for dismissal, while thousands of Lincoln loyalists swarmed the White House in search of favor, fortune, and patronage. To get to the president, they had first to get past Nicolay and Hay.
A British journalist visiting Washington described the Executive Mansion as “beautiful on a moonlight night, when its snowy walls stand out in contrast to the deep blue sky, but not otherwise.” William Stoddard, an Illinois journalist who later joined Lincoln’s staff as an assistant secretary, found the White House a “dirty rickety concern,” its rooms in disrepair, its carpets threadbare, its walls badly in need of a new paint job, its china and crystal half-broken and mismatched after decades of neglect. By and large, it had the look of “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” On the first floor were the family and state dining rooms; the East Room, where past occupants (and now Lincoln) staged large receptions, or “levees”; and several parlors—the Blue, Red, and Green rooms—where the president and first lady entertained visitors. Upstairs, on the west side of the building, were the family quarters, including an oval-shaped library that the Lincolns used as a family room and separate bedrooms for the president and Mrs. Lincoln, their sons Tad and Willie, and Robert, who was away at Harvard.
On the east side of the second floor, accessible through a central corridor that ran past the library, were the presidential offices. Adjacent to the reception room was the president’s office (known today as the Lincoln Bedroom), with an adjoining door to Nicolay’s office (known today as the Lincoln Sitting Room). The journalist Noah Brooks found the suite “very meagerly furnished, and old-fashioned in appearance as, in fact, is all of the upper part of the mansion—the dark mahogany doors, old style mantels and paneled wainscoting being more suggestive of the days of the Madisons and Van Burens than of the present.” All three rooms had windows facing the south lawn, though midway through the term Nicolay and Hay ordered a slice of the reception hall cordoned off, to create a private passageway through which the president could access the family quarters unmolested. Across the narrow corridor were Hay’s office (known today as the Queens’ Sitting Room) and a large bedroom that the two secretaries shared for the next four years (now called the Queens’ Bedroom). Nicolay was happy with the “very pleasant offices” and the “nice large bed room, though all of them sadly need new furniture and carpets. That too we expect to be remedied after a while.”
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Both the secretaries and the Lincoln family soon learned that the White House would afford them very little privacy. Though the gates and doors were under military guard—later, as the war progressed, plainclothes detectives mingled among the household staff for added security—the public was perfectly at liberty to enter the mansion during regular business hours. As a general rule, visiting hours “began at ten o’clock in the morning,” Hay later explained to William Herndon, “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 over the morning dispatches from his generals, reviewed paperwork with his secretaries, and when necessary conferred with members of his cabinet. He was “extremely unmethodical,” Hay noted. “It was a four-years struggle on Nicolay’s part and mine to get him to adopt some systematic rules. He would break through every regulation as fast as it was approved—although they”—the congressmen, the office seekers, the widows seeking pensions, and the mothers begging clemency for their deserter sons—“nearly annoyed the life out of him by unrealistic complaints & requests.” 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, though when possible he indulged in a late afternoon carriage ride on the wooded edges of town, often with his wife.” Dinner was served at six, when Lincoln “ate sparingly of one or two courses,” preferring simple country fare like corn pone, cabbage, and chicken fricassee to more extravagant dishes. “Before dinner was over members [of Congress] would come back up & take up the whole evening. Sometimes though rarely he shut himself up & would see no one. Sometimes he would run away to a lecture or concert or theatre for the sake of a little rest.” Most days, Lincoln worked until 11:00 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, fifty-two 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. Faced with the demands of governing a divided nation in times of war, Lincoln worked harder than any president before him and arguably harder than most who succeeded him in office.
For the secretaries, too, the work was punishing. When their boss was in the office, often fourteen hours each day, they remained on call. In late March, Nicolay reported to Therena that he and Hay “took quite a stroll this afternoon, and I feel much rested and refreshed by it. So far we have been out very little, but we shall not neglect the opportunities we expect to have by and by. I have not yet spent a single hour in sight-seeing although there is much about the city that is well worth seeing.” They were astonished to find themselves devoting the better part of their days to negotiating the swarm of office seekers who besieged the president from morning to night. Especially in the first weeks of the new administration, before the war effort consumed his attention, the portion of time given over to filling patronage positions was disproportionate. Nicolay frequently complained of “being continually haunted by some one who ‘wants to see the President for only five minutes.’ At present this request meets me from almost every man woman and child I meet—whether it be by day or night—in the house or on the street.” William Seward, the newly confirmed secretary of state, was no stranger to the ways of Washington. A veteran member of the Senate and protégé of New York’s Thurlow Weed, arguably the most powerful political boss in the country, he understood the game. But even he was astonished to find the White House “grounds, halls, stairways, closets . . . filled with applicants, who render ingress and egress difficult.” Hay told his college roommate that “the throng of office-seekers is something absolutely fearful. They come at daybreak and are still coming at midnight.”
Many seasoned political professionals faulted the president for his inordinate attention to patronage. The New York Times, a moderate Republican organ, groused that “Mr. Lincoln owes a higher duty to the country, to the world, to his own fame, than to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters, in whose eyes the loss of a thousand-dollar clerkship would be a catastrophe little inferior to the downfall of the Republic!” But the president’s strategy was not without rhyme or reason. In 1861 the federal government employed roughly forty thousand civilians either directly or as third-party contractors. The jobs ranged from highly lucrative (customs collectors, port inspectors, government printers) to respectably middle-class (lighthouse superintendents, government clerks, consulate employees) to painfully modest (the postmaster of New Salem, Illinois, who earned $74.10 per year). Over the next four years, the Union war effort vastly enlarged the number of military commissions, civilian posts, and government contracts under the direct control of the administration. Patronage was the glue that held the Republican Party together. State and federal officeholders derived much of their local prestige from their ability to command influence in the assignment of government perquisites. For the Republican Party—still a shotgun marriage of former Democrats, Whigs, and Know-Nothings, many of whom instinctively distrusted one another—the challenge was all the greater. “It is morally impossible for any man, even of transcendent ability, to so distribute his patronage and shape the policy of his administration as to gratify and keep together such a heterogeneous compound of discordant materials as that of which the �
��Republican’ party is composed,” observed an editor from Ohio. Lincoln’s ability to command congressional and gubernatorial support for his war program hinged on his success at rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Estimates suggest that in the course of his administration, the president replaced upward of 78 percent of federal officeholders—most of them beneficiaries of the Democratic Party, which had controlled the White House for twenty-four of the preceding thirty-two years—with Republican loyalists. In hindsight, his attention to the power of federal appointments proved critical in cementing a temporary coalition into an institutional, ruling party.
As gatekeepers to the president, the secretaries made enemies as well as friends. Claiming no prior tenure in Washington and lacking a strong understanding of the city’s political habits and power structures, they were outsiders trying to learn an insider’s game. Their quick ascendance raised more than a few eyebrows among more experienced hands. Noah Brooks, a reporter with close ties to the president and first lady who coveted the secretaries’ jobs and schemed to replace them, wrote them off as “snobby and unpopular.” His was probably a minority opinion, though even their admirers sometimes wondered whether they were up to the task at hand.
Technically speaking, the position of secretary to the president was relatively new. Though every president since Washington had used personal funds to employ a private secretary, it was not until 1857 that Congress made the job official and appropriated government money to cover the salary and expenses of the incumbent officeholder. Many of Nicolay’s predecessors played important roles both during and after their tenure in the executive branch. Washington’s first secretary, Tobias Lear, went on to serve as an American envoy during the first and second Barbary wars. He was succeeded by William Jackson, former secretary to the Constitutional Convention and combat veteran of the Revolutionary War. Meriwether Lewis, who earned fame as an explorer, was private secretary to Thomas Jefferson, as was William Burwell, who held the post until his election to Congress in 1806. Edward Coles, secretary to James Madison, went on to serve as governor of Illinois, while Nicholas Trist followed his stint under Andrew Jackson with a controversial diplomatic career. Some presidential secretaries played consultative roles and managed congressional and political affairs for the White House; others were little more than clerks. In later years, the role would grow exponentially in power and influence, as men like George Cortelyou (William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt), William Loeb (Theodore Roosevelt), Joseph Tumulty (Woodrow Wilson), and Louis Howe (Franklin Roosevelt) assumed the prerogatives and responsibilities of a modern-day chief of staff. Nicolay and Hay occupied the middle ground. Lincoln preferred to keep his own counsel, but he relied on his secretaries to execute his decisions. They played no role in developing strategy for the administration, but when they issued directives or orders, it was widely understood that they spoke for the president. As time wore on, Lincoln entrusted them with more sensitive political tasks. They learned how to anticipate his thought process, and he increasingly granted them leeway in managing access and work flow.