by Joshua Zeitz
At the same time that Southerners were reconceptualizing the war’s meaning, many white Northerners acceded to a similar revisionist impulse influenced by a reverence for shared military experiences and progressively hardened racial sensibilities. Soured by the experience of Reconstruction and increasingly inclined to view biracial Southern democracy as a noble but failed experiment, many Northerners focused on what they shared with the Confederates, not on the bygone ideological differences that once caused them to raise arms against each other. A telling example of this transformation was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a scion of Boston’s Brahmin society who began the war as a firebrand abolitionist. After enduring four years of grim combat, Holmes found his faith in causes tempered. Decades later he reflected, “The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” In effect, action, rather than belief, was the true test of faith and courage. In his intellectual journey from idealist to pragmatist, Holmes may have been similar to many other men of the Civil War generation.
Toward the close of the nineteenth century, veterans and the public at large came to view the martial achievements of both sections as equally praiseworthy. This spirit of reconciliation, and its emphasis on combat over ideology, produced a new vogue in the late 1880s: Blue and Gray reunions. Over the next several decades, veterans and enthusiasts attended hundreds of battlefield and regimental reunions at which standard etiquette held that soldiers from both sides be honored guests. In 1887, Boston’s Granddaughters of the American Revolution post hosted members of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans, who were treated to a sightseeing tour of the city formerly regarded as the unofficial capital of abolitionism. That same year, the Seventh Connecticut held a reunion at which the honoree was the Confederate colonel Charles Olmstead, whom the regiment had captured during the war. Two years later, the Society of the Army of the Cumberland held a Blue-Gray reunion on a scale that would become increasingly common: twenty-five thousand people gathered at Crawfish Springs, near the Chickamauga Battlefield, for a picnic and public ceremony.
Further aiding the process of historical revisionism was a highly successful Southern literary assault on public memory. Beginning in the 1880s, a host of Southern writers—most notably Joel Chandler Harris, John Esten Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page, and Sara Pryor—flooded the nation’s mass-circulation fiction market with local-color stories depicting the antebellum South’s refinement and civilization. To court Northern readers (something they did exceedingly well), these writers scrupulously avoided topics that might rekindle old political flames and instead wove tales replete with beautiful plantation belles, dashing cavaliers, and dull-witted but cheerful black slaves. Between 1875 and 1900, Northern magazine fiction most commonly described black freedmen as “simple,” “fervent,” or “good-humored,” qualities that harmonized with Page’s stock story line: out-of-town traveler (often from the North) meets “old retainer” (a former slave remaining in his master’s service) who, after a great deal of prodding, reminisces wistfully of a bygone age when “nuttin warn too good for the niggers.” Above all, these writers celebrated the Southern heritage without dwelling on the nagging questions of slavery and treason. “For those who knew the old County as it was then,” read one of Page’s novels, “and can contrast it with what it has become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower ‘before the war’ than it is now.” Such sentimentality and romance played well with Northern audiences, whose memory of slavery and capacity for race liberalism had evaporated considerably since Reconstruction. Over were the days when Uncle Tom’s Cabin could enrage a nation of readers with its depiction of slavery’s violent assault on the cherished institutions of family and Christianity.
Not everyone bought into the spirit of selective national amnesia. In 1894, shortly before his death, Frederick Douglass, the aging lion of the abolitionist movement, warned that “death has no power to change moral qualities . . . What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war . . . Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.” It was a theme he had been sounding for almost thirty years—that the spirit of intersectional reunion must not blot out the moral dimension of the Civil War, that “there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.” Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious North to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished South. He was incredulous that Northerners seemed ready to permit Southerners to divest the bloody conflict of its ideological and moral components and to refashion the war as an epic family feud in which both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank fought courageously and honorably, buried the hatchet, and became brothers again. While Douglass vigorously rejected “that school of thinkers which teaches us to let bygones be bygones,” by the late nineteenth century more Americans chose to treat the 1860s with wistful but selective retrospection. At battlefield reunions, in popular fiction, inscribed on war memorials, a single theme reverberated clearly: the war was over, its cause was moot, and all should be honored.
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By 1885, Hay and Nicolay had reached a critical juncture. It had been a full decade since they embarked on the Lincoln project, and almost a quarter century since they left Springfield for Washington to take up their positions in the White House. They had already written some 500,000 words and were scarcely halfway through the Civil War. Hay grew increasingly concerned by the exhaustive scope and length of the undertaking. In late January he acknowledged receipt of a massive package of documents from Nicolay but confessed to “dread and terror” at its size. “I will try to tackle it next week,” he promised, though he did not “know where or how to begin.” With a light hand, he warned Nicolay that “if we give every incident a chapter, we will have a hundred volumes.” In April, Hay pleaded once again for concision, remarking with apparent exasperation that Nicolay had plotted out five chapters for events that Hay had assigned one. “There is certainly matter enough to make 15 or 50 chapters of it,” he wrote, “but I judge from my own weariness of the subject that no living man will read more than I am writing. We will be happy if they read as much.” Nicolay disagreed. For the duration of their work on the life of Lincoln, he wrote long, while Hay tried to write short. But he had known his partner for almost four decades and understood how to manage him. He assured Hay that his organizational scheme was provisional and that he had no fixed opinion on the number or names of the remaining chapters. At the same time, he gently suggested that “you are giving yourself needless worry about the chapters not being read. I have not the remotest interest that any living man woman or child will read them all . . . They will be read if at all, either individually as chapters, or by short periods and campaigns, and to secure that, I think the rather careful working out of details, giving their separate dramatic unity, is desirable. But people must buy our book whether they read it or not. It will be, as the Debating Society said of Shakespeare, ‘The best work on that subject,’ and the subject they cannot remain ignorant of.” Nicolay reminded his friend that they were writing for two “classes” of readers: those who experienced the war, knew a great deal about it, and expected new revelations, and those who were too young to have experienced the great events of the 1860s and who needed general instruction. Their mandate was to write large and thereby create a definitive record of events for all Americans and for all time.
What they needed was incentive to bring the project to a close. Roswell Smith and Richard Gilder provided just that motivation, and they were not coy about their intent. “We want your life of Lincoln,” Smith told Hay plainly. “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.” As publisher of the Century Magazine, Smith knew whereof he spoke. The successor outlet to Scribner’s Monthly, the Century, as it was formally rechristened in 1881, was America’s fastest-growing and most popular periodical, overtaking both the Atlantic and Harper’s in readership and literary influence. Edited by Gilder, who had apprenticed at the foot of Josiah Holland during the Scribner’s days, the magazine became a leading arbiter of taste and values among the nation’s growing postwar middle class.
Gilder was a native of Bordentown, New Jersey. Slim, debonair, and fashionably mustachioed, he was a poet of decent renown who had served briefly in the Union army. But his true genius was for reading the national mood, and by the early 1880s he realized that there was money to be made in the business of Civil War memory and national reunion. Under Gilder’s tutelage, the Century became an avid promoter of Southern romance literature by such leading authors as George Washington Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, and Grace King. By far the most popular of the early New South authors, Cable soon became a cautionary tale for those trafficking in the risky enterprise of local color and regional memory. A veteran of the Confederate army, by the early 1880s he had evolved into a searing critic of the emerging Jim Crow system and a thoughtful observer of Southern class and race relations. The magazine’s editors urged him to stick to stock story lines in which Union soldiers fell in love with, and married, Southern belles. “Hold up the best side of the South and North during the War of Secession,” they advised. “Here is romance ready made.” Cable resisted these calls to idealize the “invaded and desolated South,” and Gilder gradually stopped publishing his work. More popular among the Century’s readership were wistful (though manifestly ahistorical) descriptions of antebellum plantation life, in all its supposed harmony and beneficence. This type of literature attracted a growing Southern audience and encouraged the spirit of intersectional friendship that emerged from the ashes of Reconstruction. “It is hard to explain in simple terms what Thomas Nelson Page meant to us in the South at that time,” Grace King later observed. “He was the first Southern writer to appear in print as a Southerner, and his stories, short and simple, written in Negro dialect, and, I may say, Southern pronunciation, showed us with ineffable grace that although we were sore bereft, politically, we had now a chance in literature at least.”
Recognizing the appeal of reunion and romance, in July 1883 two of Gilder’s associate editors, Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Buel, hatched plans for a new series, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, which would capitalize on the emerging vogue for battlefield reunions and personal memoirs. Running between 1884 and 1887, the series featured first-person accounts by high-ranking officers of both the Union and the Confederate armies. Gilder was willing to pay top dollar, and contributions by Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George McClellan, P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, and James Longstreet, as well as many lesser-known veterans, helped expand the magazine’s readership from 127,000 to 225,000, making it first among equals in the stable of American periodicals. Each installment featured upward of 160 pages of war material, effectively subsidizing the Century’s serial efforts to acquaint its readership with the works of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. By the time Roswell Smith and Richard Gilder began courting Lincoln’s secretaries, their magazine had become America’s foremost curator of Civil War memory.
The Century’s editors believed that “no time could be fitter for a publication of this kind than the present, when the passions and prejudices of the Civil War have nearly faded out of politics, and its heroic events are passing into our common history where motives will be weighed without malice, and valor praised without distinction of uniform.” The series would endeavor to show a generation that was too young to remember the war how men “who were once divided on a question of principle and State fealty” were now bound by a “respect for each other which is the strongest bond of a reunified people.” As a magazine with a national readership, the Century, Gilder hoped, could exert a “moral effect in helping to bring the once warring sections into a better understanding and a higher mutual regard.” It was “time for the ‘unveiling of all hearts,’” he confided to a potential Confederate contributor. “If the North can see the heart of the South, and the South’s the North’s they will love each other as never before! This is truth, and not sentimentalism.” Opting to title the series “Battles and Leaders,” rather than “Men and Events,” Gilder told his staff that “‘Battles’ is the main thing. ‘Events’ might seem as if we were going into, say, the condition & action of the freedmen—the Emancipation Proclamation—& other events not connected with battles.” Johnson agreed, promising to “soften controversy” through the “exclusion of all political questions.” Thus sanitized of race, ideology, or partisanship, the result was pleasing to all concerned. Northern and Southern readers devoured the Century’s Battles and Leaders series, while the editors crowed that it “did more to bring together North and South than anything that had happened since they were torn apart in 1861.”
Gilder began courting Hay and Nicolay as early as 1874, when he was an assistant editor at Scribner’s. Over the years, he continued to send the secretaries hopeful letters, and in 1880, even before he launched Battles and Leaders, he approached them with an unusual offer to serialize their work. “Flattering as his suggestion is,” Nicolay told Hay, “I do not after a week’s reflection see that it is at all practicable. To begin with, we are not ready; second, the full work would occupy five magazines for five years—and finally, I think the historical effect of the work would be substantially lost if published serially in chapters.” Hay was inclined to agree. It was not until five years later, after persistent entreaties from Gilder and Roswell Smith, that he entered into serious discussions with the magazine, though for rights to the entire book, not serial publication. Visiting New York, Hay met with the Century’s publishers, who proffered a 10 percent royalty on all sales. He was unimpressed by the proposed authors’ cut and skeptical of their competency, as a magazine, to sell books along the subscription circuit. Like Nicolay, he felt that serialization was an acceptable format for other subjects, “but they are not on a level with Lincoln.” He suggested that they entertain a competing offer from Harper.
The power of persuasion—and money—soon caused both men to think anew. Hay’s palatial home in Washington, D.C., was near completion; it would require furnishings and trimmings. Nicolay, who lived in modest comfort, had his eye on land in Colorado and New Hampshire, where his family enjoyed spending summers. It was time to publish. “The unprecedented success of the Century articles,” Hay told Nicolay, in reference to Battles and Leaders, “and the fair sale even of Stoddard’s book”—a reference to the release of William Stoddard’s White House memoirs—“show that the market is ready. I am getting anxious to print a volume or two.” In late March, Hay instructed Nicolay to meet with representatives of the Century and “get from them as much information as possible & give them as little. I think it is best not to let publishers know anything about our methods of work—who writes what—&c. &c.” Gilder’s response was sufficient to earn him, at long last, an invitation to review the incomplete manuscript. Vacationing with his family in New England, Nicolay asked the editor to join him for several days of review. Gilder was “visibly interested,” Nicolay reported. Poring over twelve chapters each day, he “said several times he was hoping to find a dull chapter which he could skip . . . We are only at about the middle of the reading as yet. G. has not said much, and I have put no questions to draw out the impressions which he may be gathering in his mind.”
By fall, they had a contract. Century offered the secretaries terms unprecedented in the publishing industry. They would be paid $50,000 for the serial rights to their work, as well as royalties on sales of the full ten-volume set, which would be issued following the completion of the magazine run. All involved assu
med that the serial run would last more than two years. If the first installment ran sometime in 1886, Hay and Nicolay would have almost three years to complete their life of Lincoln. “The work will have a great moral and political effect,” Gilder crowed, “in that it will help unite the North and South as never before, around the story and experiences of the great President.”
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If Gilder hoped that the Lincoln serial would continue in the vein of Battles and Leaders by fostering greater understanding between North and South, he was mistaken. He had read the first half of the secretaries’ manuscript. He met multiple times with Hay and spent several days in seclusion with Nicolay at a New Hampshire farmhouse, poring over the completed chapters. He was perceptive enough to understand the mind-set of his new authors. Confiding to a friend, he explained that the Nicolay-Hay volumes were “the secret history of the secession conspiracy” and a “complete, authentic, and logical account of the great political struggle in connection with the subject of slavery,” an assessment with which they would have heartily agreed. Yet he also believed—as Nicolay and Hay surely did not—that “Lincoln is now one of the most revered of our public men in the very South whose political unity he destroyed. They soon felt that in Lincoln’s death they lost their best friend.” (Had most Southerners believed it, the secretaries would not have cared.) Writing to Nicolay, Gilder struck the same optimistic note, wondering at the “universal tone of respect and even affection with which the memory of Lincoln seemed to be held in the South . . . It is hard to find the slavery or the secession sentiment in the South today.” “As for the Negro,” he added, liberal men like George Washington Cable and Thomas Dudley, the Episcopal bishop of Kentucky and outspoken supporter of black rights, were “fighting out the remaining problems in the pages of the Century.”