Lincoln's Boys

by Joshua Zeitz

  In his youth, Hay had been deeply embarrassed by the “sharp points and salient angles of Western life.” As a White House aide, he came to miss the rustic beauty and quiet charm of the place where he grew up. Toward the close of the Civil War, on a visit home, he marveled at the “beauty of our river society.” “You can scarcely find a quieter place to write your romance,” he told Nicolay. “There is no society here. You can pass a couple of months here entirely undisturbed by visitors . . . I would give a great deal to pass a month here.” Later, as poet and author, Hay became an accidental authority on western habits and mind-sets. Always, his relationship to the region was complicated. He did not romanticize the world of Lincoln’s childhood. “In most respects there had been little moral or material improvement since the early settlement of the country,” he wrote. “Their houses were usually of one room, built of round logs with the bark on . . . Their dress was still mostly of tanned deer-hide, a material to the last degree uncomfortable when the wearer was caught in a shower. Their shoes were of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin ‘a decent way of going barefoot.’” Kentucky and southern Indiana were “full of strange superstitions,” and a “vague and ignorant astronomy governed their plantings and sowings.” Pioneer residents were rough and unsophisticated. “Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham Lincoln passed his childhood and youth. He was not remarkably precocious. His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at a rate of progress marvelously regular and sustained. But there was that about him, even at the age of nineteen years, which might well justify his admiring friends in presaging for him an unusual career.”

  Hay’s deep admiration and love for Lincoln shine through in his imagination 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’s 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.” None of these morsels were new to the reading public, but Hay cast them in a new light. Whereas Herndon and Lamon sought to knock Lincoln off his godly pedestal, Hay presented the future president as a hero in the wilderness, doing solitary battle against the physical and emotional privations of his upbringing.

  At times, he applied a simple western essentialism to explain Lincoln’s personal attributes and characteristics. In describing Lincoln’s “constitutional sadness,” a trait that most of the late president’s close associates readily acknowledged, Hay offered that “it may be said to have been endemic among the early settlers of the West. It had its origin partly in the circumstances of their lives, the severe and dismal loneliness in which the struggle for existence for the most part went on. Their summers were passed in the solitude of the woods; in the winter they were often snowed up for months in the more desolate isolation of their own poor cabins. Their subjects of conversation were limited, their range of thoughts and ideas narrow and barren.” This “generic tendency to melancholy,” Hay surmised, could be traced to the bleak world of the pioneer generation, to which Abraham Lincoln’s parents belonged and which the future president knew intimately in his youth. “There was as little cheerfulness in their manners as there was incentive to it in their lives.” What could not be explained by geography could be ascribed to science. Malaria and other killer diseases were rife in the woodlands and prairies of southern Indiana and Illinois. “Abraham was exposed through all the earlier part of his life to those malarial influences.” In an effort to ward off sickness, pioneers routinely consumed “various preparations of Peruvian bark . . . In many instances this miasmatic poison did not destroy the strength or materially shorten the lives of those who absorbed it in their youth; but the effects remained in periodical attacks of gloom and depression of spirits.” William Herndon, who generally viewed such geographic explanations favorably, dismissed as complete rubbish the suggestion that “we of the great West of an early day were unsocial and never smiled, only laughed . . . That Mr. Lincoln was a sad, gloomy, and melancholic man, I admit,” but “his sadness, etc., were principally and chiefly caused by his organism, his make-up and his constitution . . . These, with the untimely death of Ann Rutledge, and his unfortunate marriage to Miss Mary Todd, and the hell that came of it, caused Lincoln’s sadness.”

  That Hay dispensed with the Ann Rutledge story in just two sentences also struck Herndon as pure folly. On this topic, the authors said only that during the New Salem days, Lincoln “made the acquaintance of the best people the settlement contained, and among them had become much attached to a girl named Ann Rutledge, the daughter of one of the proprietors of the Rutledge place. She died in her girlhood, and though there does not seem to have been any engagement between them, he was profoundly affected by her death.” Of Mary Todd, who had been dead for over a decade, Hay and Nicolay wrote relatively little. They glossed over the often-told story of the Lincolns’ first, abortive intent to marry, in a fashion that reflected well on both parties (arguing, in essence, that neither had been ready to take the leap); they also withheld judgment as to Mary’s character, or the character of her marriage to Lincoln, and remarked simply that “on the 4th of November, a marriage license was issued to Lincoln, and on the same day he was married to Miss Mary Todd, the ceremony being performed by the Rev. Charles Dresser. Four sons were the issue of this marriage . . . Of these only the eldest lived to maturity.” Given the unhappiness of her latter days, and his Victorian belief that the women behind public men should remain shielded from scrutiny or attention, Robert may well have preferred that they gloss over his mother’s role with minimal fanfare or mention. An intensely private man, he may also have appreciated the infrequency of his own appearances throughout the Nicolay-Hay opus.

  • • •

  Neither Hay nor Nicolay believed that geographic or environmental influences could explain the entirety of Lincoln’s character. Much of his course in life, they argued, owed to blood and providence. Remarking on the superficial similarities between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis—both roughly the same age and Kentucky-born, both claiming service in the Black Hawk War, each a successful politician in his own right—they offered that “if chance or fate had guided their parents to exchange their routes of emigration from Kentucky; if Lincoln had grown up on a Southern cotton plantation, and Davis had split rails to fence a Northern farm; if the tall Illinois pioneer had studied trigonometry at West Point, and the pale Mississippi student had steered a flat-boat to New Orleans, education might have modified but would not have essentially changed either. Lincoln would never have become a political dogmatist, an apostle of slavery, a leader of rebellion; Davis could never have become the champion of universal humanity . . . Their natures were antipodal.”

  Though Hay cautioned Nicolay that they must not seem like two ancient relics rehashing the great sectional crisis of their youth, his opening chapters were thoroughly unforgiving of Southern politics and character. Describing the end of the “pioneer period of Illinois,” which coincided roughly with the Lincoln family’s migration across the Indiana line, he noted matter-of-factly that “the earlier emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers, shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into fertility at the slightest provocation of culture.” These Southern pioneers, who dominated the settlement of Illinois until the late 1840s and the 1850s,
“were mostly a simple, neighborly, unambitious people, contented with their condition, living upon plain fare, and knowing not much of anything better.”

  • • •

  In dwelling on the cultural and political differences between Northerners and Southerners before the war, the authors presaged the larger sectional bias that ran through their work. Nicolay and Hay were writing against the popular grain of sectional reunion—a sentiment that their publisher, the Century, arguably did more to foster than any other institution. In 1881, even as he labored at their life of Lincoln, Nicolay found time to write the first volume of a popular series published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, titled Campaigns of the Civil War. Nicolay’s contribution, The Outbreak of Rebellion, flatly rejected the vogue for reconciliation and portrayed secession as a long-held, deeply laid plot to subvert the tenets of democratic government. Dismissing South Carolina as a “school of treason for thirty years,” he assailed the “unthinking masses of the South” for their hysterical reaction to the 1860 presidential elections and for initiating a bloody and expensive war in the service of a “counterfeit philosophy.” Identifying the “prominent office-holders, governors, senators, congressmen, [and] judges” as the “central clique of conspiracy,” Nicolay laid wider blame on the “inexorable tyranny of Southern opinion.” This was not an argument likely to win the hearts and minds of Southern readers, a fact that several reviewers pointed to in their sharp criticism of the volume.

  “I confess I learned something from the criticisms of your book,” Hay told Nicolay. “All the reviews acknowledged its merits of style, accuracy and readableness—but nearly every one objected to its tone of aggressive Northernism. This was a surprise to me. I read it in M.S. and thought it perfectly fair and candid—but I am of that age and imbued with all its prejudices.” His “prejudices” notwithstanding, Hay warned that they must not appear as “two old dotards fighting over again the politics of their youth.” “The war has gone by,” he counseled Nicolay. “It is twenty years ago. Our book is to be read by people who cannot remember anything about it . . . We must not write a stump speech in eight vols., 8vo. We will not fall in with the present tone of blubbering sentiment, of course. But we ought to write the history of those times like two everlasting angels who know everything, judge everything, tell the truth about everything, and don’t care a twang of their harps about one side or the other. There will be one exception,” he added. “We are Lincoln men all through.”

  Though “aggressive Northernism” pervades all ten volumes of the Nicolay-Hay history, it assumed full primacy in Nicolay’s chapters on the sectional crisis of the 1850s and the secession winter of 1860–61. Largely a rehash of his book for Scribner’s, Nicolay’s account of this period featured only two kinds of Americans: traitors and patriots. The vast majority of Southerners fell into the former category, along with a despised fifth column of Northern doughfaces, while the Northern public embodied the spirit of the latter category, along with an unrepresentative number of brave Southern souls. Revealing their shared sectional bias, the authors did not merely denigrate Southern motives and mores, but also held up the antebellum and wartime North as an advanced and superior civilization. “The lion of the North was fully roused,” Nicolay wrote of the immediate reaction to the fall of Fort Sumter. “Betrayed, insulted, outraged, the free States arose with a cry of pain and vengeance. War sermons from pulpits; war speeches in every assemblage; tenders of troops; offers of money; military proclamations and orders in every newspaper; every city radiant with bunting; every village-green a mustering ground; war appropriations in every legislature and in every city or town council; war preparations in every public or private workshop.” Even Northern children “abandoned their old-time school-games, and played only at soldiering.” Having anticipated a “‘peaceable secession,’” the South was soon “fully awakened when regiment after regiment came pouring into Washington, when treason was choked in Maryland, when the Western capitals became great camps, when the blockade began to close the seaports of the South. More alarming was that increasing activity of the Northern uprising, the earnestness of which could no longer be denied or mistaken.”

  In resisting the prevailing romance of sectional reunion, 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, but Nicolay and Hay resisted the popular consensus. They were not writing, however, as aging, unreconstructed abolitionists. In the years since they first engaged the issue as young men, both authors had evolved considerably in their thinking. They had always counted themselves as antislavery men, but they now remembered the war as having been rooted deeply in the moral offense of the peculiar institution, a position that they did not hold in 1861, or even as late as 1865. In his discussion of the sectional politics that formed the backdrop of Lincoln’s political rise, Hay 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 out of hand the increasingly popular 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; between the thralldom of public opinion and liberty of conscience; between the greed of gain and the Golden Rule of Christ.”

  Addressing the causes of the war, Nicolay acknowledged that Jefferson Davis had written some fifteen years after the war that “the equality of the States,” rather than slavery, had precipitated the conflict. “The generation which fought the war needs no proof of the incorrectness of this declaration,” he scoffed, before devoting another twelve pages to dissecting Davis’s public statements to the contrary. Nicolay decried the “spirit of bullying” and “resort to violence” that besmirched the halls of Congress in the mid-1850s, stipulating that “it all came from the pro-slavery party.” Revisiting the same theme that he had sounded as the young editor of the Pike County Free Press, he asserted that “proslavery sentiment rendered the constitutional right of ‘freedom of speech or of the press,’ and rights of domicile and of citizenship, practically a dead letter throughout the South.” Of the antebellum South, he held that “the great plantation master dominated society and politics; there was no diffused and healthy popular action, as in the town-meetings of New England. Even the slaves of the wealthy proprietors spoke with habitual contempt of the ‘poor white trash’ who lived in mean cabins and hoed their own corn and cotton.”

  The authors were also strident in their consideration of slavery as a social and economic system. Paraphrasing Lincoln, Hay described the institution as “one of the many ‘relics of barbarism’—like the divine right of kings, religious persecution, torture of the accused, imprisonment and enslavement for debt, witch-burning, and kindred ‘institutions’—which were transmitted to that generation from former ages as so many burdens of humanity.” 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 told William Herndon about a trip that he and Lincoln had taken many years before. Hired to escort a barge full 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 his opinion of slavery.” The story may very well have been true, as many Northerners reacted with the same revulsion upon first laying eyes on Southern slave pens, but in all likelihood John Hanks had debarked from the journey before his party arrived in New Orleans.

  In any event, Hay dismissed as “an idle waste of labor” any attempt to pinpoint with precision
Lincoln’s conversion to the antislavery cause, as these “sentiments came with the first awakening of his mind and conscience, and were roused into active life and energy by the sight of fellow-creatures in chains . . . on the wharf at New Orleans.” Hay chronicled Lincoln’s first public utterances against slavery, when he and his fellow Whig legislator Dan Stone introduced a temperate resolution in the Illinois House, declaring that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.” Having witnessed and experienced firsthand the evolution of Northern thought on slavery—as young men, after all, the authors had been more ambivalent about the morality of the institution—Hay knew that “there was a long distance to be traveled between the guarded utterances of this protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of emancipation. But the young man . . . had in him the making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr. His whole career was to run in the lines marked out by these words, written in the hurry of a closing session, and he was to accomplish few acts, in that great history which God reserved for him, wiser and nobler than this.”