Lincoln’s manifest calm and confidence helped to allay Hay’s fear that something bad might happen before they arrived in the capital. After bodyguards spirited Lincoln through Baltimore under the cover of darkness, Hay scoffed at various rumors of “an organized plan to throw the train off an embankment,” “sharpshooting desperadoes,” “torpedoes . . . thrown beneath the carriage,” and “so many desperate and murderous things . . . done that if the President elect had all the lives of a cat he would lose them all.” Arriving in Washington on a later train with the rest of the Lincoln party, he denied that Lincoln had altered his itinerary in order to avoid violence, explaining that Lincoln had not made a public appearance in Baltimore, which lately had earned the nickname “Mobtown,” simply because he had not been invited to do so.
But even while Hay outwardly doubted the existence of a plot against the president-elect’s life, he nevertheless jotted a hasty note to a cousin on the night before he was to leave Harrisburg: “Tomorrow we enter slave territory. . . . If all is well, this letter will do no harm. If anything happens, you will remember that I was, at the present date, very affectionately, your friend, John Hay.”
HE FOUND WASHINGTON AT once august and disgusting. Marble for the Capitol’s new wings lay stacked about the grounds; the statue of Freedom, intended for the dome, stood ominously earthbound. Below Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument was an unfinished stub of marble and granite, with cows grazing about its base. Streets throughout the city were unpaved, alternately rutted or choked with vile mud; garbage lay everywhere; the Potomac estuary was a swill of waste and fever.
The young secretary had never been in the American capital before, but he was familiar enough with the great cities of civilization—by way of the classics he had absorbed as a student. From afar, Washington appeared to him “in broad avenues, which converge upon the capitol as all roads of the Roman empire converged upon that golden milestone by the Pincian gate.” Pennsylvania Avenue took on “the stately air of a grand Appian Way.”
But on closer inspection he found Washington “a congerie of hovels, inharmoniously sewn with temples,” and he wondered, “Why did they attempt to build a city where no city was ever intended to be reared?” Within two weeks of his arrival, his young eyes could see into the future: “It will never be a capital, except only in name; never a metropolis, like Rome, or London, or Paris. . . . Yet it will sometime, of course, be clustered about with historic memories. Caesar will be slain in the capitol, and Brutus harangue the roughs from the terrace.”
Officially Hay was not a secretary at all. Lincoln had found a way around the restriction on the size of his personal staff by appointing him to a clerkship in the Department of the Interior at the modest salary of $1,600 a year, later increased to $1,800. His workplace, however, would always be the White House. John George Nicolay held the position of Lincoln’s private secretary; Hay’s title, to everyone but the federal paymaster, was designated as assistant private secretary.
He and Nicolay moved into the White House along with the Lincolns immediately after the inauguration on March 4. Hay was on hand when James Buchanan welcomed his successor. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weather-beaten head,” Hay wrote. “Every word must have its value at such an instant.” To his surprise and disappointment, Buchanan said merely: “ ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that at the left,’ and went on with many intimate details of the kitchen and pantry. Lincoln listened 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.”
Ever since John Adams, American presidents had lived where they worked, a point of pride for the American republic but, by the time the Lincolns moved in, a challenge to both practicality and privacy. The Lincoln family occupied just seven rooms on the west end of the second floor. The president’s office, which was also the cabinet room, was down a central hallway, buffered from the importunate public by only a small vestibule and waiting room. The president had no private entrance. Nor, for that matter, were the first floor and grounds of the White House off limits to the general populace most of the time. Hay and Nicolay shared a bedroom on the other side of the waiting room from the president’s office. Each had their own office—Nicolay’s immediately next to Lincoln’s in the southeast corner, Hay’s in the northeast corner, looking out to Lafayette Square.
The White House, like the country, had seen better days. Some visitors found the private and public rooms “seedy,” “shabby,” and “dilapidated”—an “ordinary country house wanting in either taste or splendor.” To another it had all the charm of “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” When Mrs. Lincoln counted the good china, she discovered there were not a dozen place settings that matched.
Her husband’s secretaries were too busy to complain much. “We have very pleasant offices and a nice large bedroom, though all of them sadly need new furniture and carpets,” Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, Therena Bates.
As they settled in, Hay and Nicolay assumed somewhat different duties. Nicolay tended to be more in charge of the office proper, including cabinet meetings, and Hay, the better writer, took greater responsibility for the correspondence. From the very first day, they were both astounded by “the intolerable press of business about the President’s office,” Hay wrote. “I have positively not had a moment’s leisure since we arrived in this city. The throng of office-seekers is something almost fearful. They come at daybreak and still are coming at midnight.”
Hay and Nicolay did their best to shield Lincoln from interruption, and their steadfastness elicited hard feelings. “The President is affable and kind, but his immediate subordinates are snobby and unpopular,” reported one visitor. Nicolay took the brunt of the ill will, earning a reputation as a “grim Cerberus,” after the multi-headed hound that guarded the gates of the ancient underworld. But where Nicolay was “sour and crusty,” Hay’s nimble humor bought him leniency. “[John Hay] might have drawn to himself more criticism in Washington had he not been born with peculiar charm of manner,” Nicolay’s daughter later explained.
Neither Nicolay’s Germanic tenacity nor Hay’s affability was enough to insulate Lincoln, however, for the president was reluctant to cooperate. When Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson suggested to the president that he limit interviews, Lincoln purportedly replied, “They don’t want much; they get but little, and I must see them.”
And yet, Lincoln confided to his secretaries that he felt as if he were “letting lodgings at one end of the house, while the other end was on fire.”
THE SURRENDER OF FORT Sumter in mid-April, followed by the secession of Virginia and three more states, soon brought the war that Lincoln never wanted but was now his to end. And as the nation split apart, Washington found itself surrounded and vulnerable. Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia allowed slavery, and their allegiance to the Union could not be taken for granted. Confederate campfires were visible across the Potomac, and the White House was within range of rebel mortars. Some of the first northern volunteers who arrived to defend the capital were billeted temporarily in the East Room. “The White House is turned into barracks,” Hay wrote in the very first entry of the diary he kept through most of the war.
He did not feel so much endangered by the southern threat as insulted by the low-down gall of the Confederacy. “I have seen rough company in the west and north, but never in the kennels of the great cities or the wild license of flat boating on the Mississippi did I ever hear words that were not purity, compared with the disgusting filtrations of the Chivalric Southern mind,” he snorted after sampling the mail addressed to the White House from the rebel states. “The history of the world is leprous with . . . instances of national folly and crime, but it was reserved for the Southern States to exhibit an infamy to which other crimes show white as mother’s milk, and a madness to which a
n actor’s phrensy is sane.”
When Lincoln mentioned to him privately that he would like one day to go down to Charleston “and pay her the little debt we are owing her,” Hay recorded in his diary, “I felt like letting off an Illinois yell.”
Yet for Hay the war began not with a yell but a sob. In May, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who had studied law in Lincoln’s office and accompanied the Lincolns from Springfield, was killed while cutting down a Confederate flag that waved from atop a hotel in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. Hay knew Ellsworth well and mourned him as everything a soldier and a gentleman ought to be. “He always seemed like a Paladin or Cavalier of the dead days of romance and beauty,” Hay wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, yet another outlet for his pro-Union evangelizing. “He was so generous and loyal, so stainless and brave.” After paying his respects to Ellsworth’s uniformed body as it lay in state in the East Room, Hay wrote to Hannah Angell (who by now was married): “When Ellsworth was murdered all my sunshine perished. I hope you may never know the dry, barren agony of soul that comes with the utter and hopeless loss of a great love.”
With the war now pressing on the White House, there was no such thing as routine. Nevertheless, Hay and Nicolay tried as best they could to make a life of their own. They took their meals at Willard’s Hotel, nearby on Pennsylvania Avenue—“[m]iraculous in meanness; contemptible in cuisine,” Hay reviewed. They were no strangers to the “blear caravanserai” of the city’s barrooms, where Hay catalogued a clientele representing “every stage of official eminence and every grade of inebriety. There are generals, and colonels, and majors, and captains, governors, senators, honorables; all chew tobacco; all spit; a good many swear, and not a few make a merit of being able to keep two cocktails in the air at once.”
The society they kept was not always so raucous. Hay was a regular at the Sunday evening “drop-ins” of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eames, émigrés from Massachusetts whose drawing room was a gathering place for “the brains of society”—politicians, diplomats, authors, and artists speaking a variety of languages. As an eligible bachelor, he was invited to levees and soirées, though he admitted to his deficiency as a dancer: “ ‘Those light at heart tickle the senseless rushes with their heels,’ says Romeo, and though I am rarely heavy in the vicinity of that organ, I am saurian in the deliberation of my movements; never dance, in fact.”
As much as his busy schedule would allow, he went to the theater, including several trips to Ford’s with the president. Somehow, too, he found time for literature, reading, among other books, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in French. Besides keeping up his diary, letters, and submissions for publication, he also wrote the occasional poem, customarily sentimental but now bathed in patriotism:
O strong, free North, so wise and brave!
O South, too lovely for a slave!
Mostly, though, the days and many nights overflowed with secretarial duties. “I am getting along pretty well,” he joked. “I only work about 20 hours a day.” The war increased the size and persistence of the crowd that lined up each morning in the waiting room, corridor, and stairway—thousands seeking “the crumbs of official patronage”; “cold-water” temperance committees who blamed the Union’s early setbacks on the military’s weakness for alcohol; Quakers petitioning for peace; mothers begging pardons for sons; and more than a few callers of uncertain sanity. When a man appeared in the waiting room, claiming to be the son of God, Hay assured him that the president would be delighted to see him—but first would the caller mind providing a letter of introduction from his father?
Letters arrived at the rate of two or three hundred a day. Hay and Nicolay soon realized that they would never be able to manage the volume and asked the president to find them more help. William Stoddard, a newspaperman from Illinois, had wanted Nicolay’s or Hay’s job but initially had to settle for a menial position in the Department of the Interior. By the early summer of 1861, however, he was brought aboard the White House staff, chiefly to help with the mail. He was given a desk in Hay’s office, where he sorted letters by category: requests for jobs, contracts, money, and autographs—intermixed, Stoddard recalled, with “the rant and drivel of insanity, bitter abuse, foul obscenity, [and] slanderous charges.”
Hay welcomed Stoddard but never entirely embraced him, calling the third secretary “statuesque,” whether for his vanity or his immobility is not clear. Stoddard was more generous in his appraisal of Hay, remembering him as “quick witted,” “a born diplomat.” Stoddard also noted Hay’s “almost boyish complexion” and remarked that he was “quite a favorite among the ladies . . . with a gift for epigram and repartee.” And there was no denying Hay’s potential. “What he will make of himself remains to be seen,” Stoddard commented, “but he is capable of something far better.”
Hay’s emergence from boyishness to manliness is evident in a photograph he had printed on a carte de visite, the calling card of Washington society. Hay wears a smartly tailored double-breasted coat and broad-looped bow tie; on one hand he wears a leather glove; his other hand is bare, gracefully gripping its glove—the casual but decorous pose of a gentleman wishing to appear somewhat rakish but not so young. (“Ah me! whither are gone my adolescent days?” he groused in one of his newspaper columns.) His dark eyes hold the camera, while his mouth withholds a smile. Like Lincoln, he is now hirsute: draped across his upper lip is a wispy but promising mustache that he would tend for the rest of his life. “I think the mug is absurd,” he said of the photo self-consciously. “The expression of the features reminds me of the desperate attempts of a tipsy man to look sober.”
THE WAR NEWS WAS sobering enough. On July 21, the Confederates routed the federal army at Bull Run, near Manassas, Virginia, stampeding the troops across the Potomac, briefly sparking alarm that the capital would be overrun. The fighting came so close to the city that the thunder of artillery rumbled through the open windows of the White House. Hay rode out to the battle, returning at dawn the following morning amid the ongoing rout. “With the ushering in of daylight there came pouring into the city crowds of soldiers, some with muskets, some without muskets, some with knapsacks, and some without knapsack, or canteen, or belt, or anything but their soiled and dirty uniform, burned faces and eyes . . . to indicate that they were soldiers,” he reported to the New York World. “The bodies of the dead were piled on top of one another; the pallid faces and blood-stained garments telling a fearfully mute but sad story of the horrors of the war. And the appearance of the wounded, bereft of arms, of legs, eyes put out, flesh wounds in the face and body, and uniforms crimsoned with blood, proclaimed with equal force the savage horrors of humans battling with weapons of war.”
In the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley had described Bull Run as the “shipwreck of our grand and heroic army.” In his role as White House propagandist, Hay begged to differ, insisting that “the defeat was not a defeat—only a victory of vastly superior numbers over a few segmentary regiments.” Lincoln, who had stayed awake all night absorbing the first major reversal of the war, offered Hay a more honest and self-reproachful assessment: “There is nothing in this except the lives lost and the lives which must be lost to make it good.”
Lincoln’s first step after Bull Run was to relieve General Irvin McDowell as commander of the Army of Northeastern Virginia (soon reformed as the Army of the Potomac) and replace him with General George McClellan, whose credentials were both impressive and worrisome. As a veteran of the Mexican War and an observer of the Crimean War, he was one of the country’s foremost experts on military science. A West Point engineer who became a railroad president, he was superbly qualified to manage men and matériel. But he was also a conservative Democrat who had actively supported Stephen Douglas. He had witnessed at least one of Douglas’s debates with Lincoln, whom he regarded as “not a man of very strong character.” McClellan’s opinion of his own character was considerably greater. Upon accepting the promotion from Lincoln, the general confid
ed to his wife, “I almost think that if I were to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.” “Little Mac,” as his troops called him, was an avid student of Napoleon.
Hay, too, received a new assignment. At the end of August, the president sent him to Long Branch, New Jersey, with Mrs. Lincoln and the children, ostensibly as their caretaker but also to give him a needed respite from the White House. Returning to Washington somewhat refreshed, he promptly came down with bilious fever, known not so endearingly in Washington as “Potomac fever.” The cause was usually pinned on the fetid summer air. “The ghosts of twenty thousand drowned cats come in nights through the South Windows” is how Hay described the toxic atmosphere.
By September 1 he was better, in time to make another trip at Lincoln’s request. He traveled to St. Louis, carrying a letter from the president to General John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West. The venerable Frémont—explorer, conqueror of California, and the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate—had committed one egotistical blunder after another in Missouri, leading indirectly to the debacle at Wilson’s Creek on August 10, which caused the Union to surrender control of nearly half the state. Lincoln was already losing faith in his less than obedient general, when on August 30 Frémont declared martial law in Missouri and freed slaves belonging to anyone considered disloyal to the Union. His reckless initiative threatened to undermine the adherence of border states. Moreover, emancipation was a decision that the president would make in due time and not on a piecemeal or temporary basis. Lincoln was highly irritated and began the delicate process of removing the popular Frémont.
All the Great Prizes Page 6