Whether or not Hay knew the content of the message he delivered to Frémont, he concurred with the president’s opinion that Frémont had grown too big for his breeches. In his diary he called the general “imperious.” Meanwhile, writing for the New York World, anonymously as usual, he endeavored to quell attacks on Frémont—and attacks on Lincoln by abolitionists who approved of the general’s initiative—by calling the general a “born leader . . . always equal to himself and the occasion.”
Regardless of the outcome, for Lincoln to send his young secretary on a mission of such enormous political and military delicacy was testament to the growing trust he had in Hay’s discretion and diplomacy. More such assignments would follow. For Hay, by far the best part of the trip west was the chance to stop in Warsaw for a visit with his family.
IN WASHINGTON, LINCOLN WAS already having trouble with General McClellan. On October 21, the Union was again routed, this time at Ball’s Bluff, where hundreds of soldiers were presumed drowned as they attempted to retreat across the Potomac. The following night, Lincoln summoned McClellan to the White House for a talk. Hay listened in. Despite the latest loss, the commander of the Army of the Potomac “seemed very hopeful and confident,” Hay noted in his diary. But as the conversation continued, Hay commented, “it became painfully evident that [McClellan] had no plan.”
Ten days later, Lincoln and McClellan met again; this time Lincoln, accompanied by Hay, called on McClellan at his house on Lafayette Square. The purpose of the visit was to inform McClellan of the resignation of General Winfield Scott as general in chief and to promote McClellan to the supreme command of the entire army. McClellan was honored but hardly humbled. “I can do it all,” he told the president.
The honeymoon lasted scarcely two weeks. “I wish to record what I consider a portent of evil to come,” Hay recorded in his diary on November 13. “The President, [Secretary of State] Seward and I went over to McClellan’s house tonight. The Servant at the door said the General was at the wedding of Col. Wheaton at General Buell’s, and would soon return. We went in, and after we had waited about an hour McC[lellan] came in and without paying any particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half-an-hour and sent once more a servant to tell the General they were there, and the answer came that the General had gone to bed.”
Lincoln appeared not to be offended, but Hay was incensed, as evidenced by his diary and by more subtle criticism published, without byline, in the Missouri Republican a month later. “[I]t is ill for a Republic when the military arm begins to rival the civil power,” he admonished, adding more pointedly: “Gen. McClellan has always recognized this. . . . He is a soldier, and knows that his duties in that capacity will occupy all the time he has.”
Hay’s resentment of McClellan began but did not end there. He would wait twenty years to settle his grudge against the general afflicted with the “slows”—who was too cautious to fight or follow orders; who committed repeated acts of near treason; who called Lincoln an “idiot” and a “baboon” behind his back; and who strategized to bring about, if not the defeat of the Union, then certainly of the president. In reviewing a book on McClellan’s military career for the New York Tribune, Hay would call McClellan “weak, vacillating, insubordinate.” And in a long screed in the Lincoln biography, Hay would lambaste McClellan for his “long mismanagement of a great, brave, and devoted army, backed by a Government which strained every nerve to support him, and by a people whose fiery zeal would have made him the idol of the nation if he had given them the successes which their sacrifices deserved, and which was a dozen times within his grasp.”
Hay’s low regard for the president’s enemies, doubters, and detractors—which did not stop at the Confederacy but also included the Democratic Party and the Radical wing of his own party—was an accurate, if inverse, gauge of his increasing affection for his employer. The nicknames that he and Nicolay gave to Lincoln—“the Ancient,” “the Tycoon”—while never used within earshot of the president, were an acknowledgment of his Olympian stature and of their wholehearted and steadfast commitment to him.
Although Lincoln, for the most part, treated the two secretaries equally, he did not treat them the same. Not that he gave Nicolay short shrift, but Hay filled a space that only he could occupy. He was so quick-witted, precociously canny in the ways of men, savvy in the customs of both East and West. Perhaps for these reasons, Hay was more often at Lincoln’s side when he ventured away from the White House—say, to McClellan’s house or to the theater. In summers, when the Lincolns escaped the close air of the White House by sleeping at the Soldiers’ Home on the northern fringe of the city, Hay would often ride out with the president and spend the night. Of one such evening, he mentioned, “I went with him to the Soldiers’ Home & he read Shakespeare to me, the end of Henry VI and the beginning of Richard III till my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.”
Lincoln, though, was a poor sleeper, and insomnia frequently drew him to pace the White House—whence comes one of the oft-told stories of the president in his nightshirt. One evening after midnight, as Hay and Nicolay readied for bed, the president appeared at their door, laughing at a caricature he had come across in a book by the humorist Thomas Hood. Lincoln, as Hay recorded in his diary, was entirely unconscious of his “short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers on an enormous ostrich.” The president, Hay wrote, “was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at.”
Rather than laugh at Lincoln, Hay could only admire him the more: “What a man it is! Occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own fame & future hanging on the events of the passing hour, he yet has such a simple wealth of simple bonhomie & good fellowship that he gets out of bed & perambulates the house in his shirt to find us.”
The contrast between the president’s lofty station and his austere habits was a source of constant wonder to the young secretary, whose own proclivities were hardly so reserved. “He was one of the most abstemious of men; the pleasures of the table had few attractions for him,” Hay would write of Lincoln in Century Magazine. “His breakfast was an egg and a cup of coffee; at luncheon he rarely took more than a biscuit and a glass of milk, a plate of fruit in its season; at dinner he ate sparingly of one or two courses. He drank little or no wine; not that he remained always on principle a total abstainer, as he was during a part of his early life in the fervor of the ‘Washingtonian’ reform; but he never cared for wine or liquors of any sort, and never used tobacco.”
Beyond serving merely as a sidekick on rides to the Soldiers’ Home or as audience to Lincoln’s recitations of Shakespeare and lesser literature, Hay also gave as good as he got. Recognizing that Lincoln relied on humor to distract him from the pain of war, Hay did his best to divert the president’s attention whenever he could—although not even he could soothe the mood for long.
One quiet Sunday, Hay returned to the White House “all one bubble,” William Stoddard recalled. “Generally he could tell a story better than most, but this time he broke down with a laugh before he was well started. Through the open door Nicolay heard the peal of laughter and came over from his room, pen in hand, and sat down to listen. Hay began at the beginning and went on very well until the first good point was reached . . . and all three of us exploded as one.” Suddenly, there stood Lincoln at the door, drawn by the uproar, and demanded, “ ‘Now, John, just tell that again’ . . . and he sank into Andrew Jackson’s chair . . . with Nicolay seated by him and Hay still standing by the mantel. The story was as fresh and was even better told that third time up to its first explosive place. Down came the President’s foot from across his knee with a heavy stamp on the floor, and out through the hall went an uproarious peal of laughter.”
“It was dying away,” Stoddard continued, “and Hay was about to go ahead when we heard, ‘Mr. President, if you please, sir, [Secretary of War] Stanton is in your room.’ . . . There was something all but ghastly in the manner of the death of that story. Through all the sunny, laughter-filled chamber of the Executive Office poured thick and fast the gloom of death in life. The shadow came back to Mr. Lincoln’s face, and he arose, slowly, painfully. . . . [T]he worst news of the war [came] on Sundays, such as brought Stanton in person. . . . What was the point of [Hay’s] story, the thing so irresistibly funny? Nobody can tell.”
Anecdotes like this have led those with only secondhand knowledge of the war years to suggest that Hay “laughed through his term.” But while his levity was welcome in the White House, he was hardly the White House’s court jester. Like Lincoln, he frequently sagged under the gloom of war, especially in the early going when the fortunes of the North appeared not so favorable. On days when the Telegraph Office brought word of yet another setback for the Army of the Potomac, Stoddard remembers Hay “mourning around . . . as he always did after bad news, for his patriotism was fairly a burden to him.”
Other burdens were even harder to shake. Friday was the usual day for Lincoln to review court-martial cases in which convicted soldiers, at the president’s signature, could be executed for crimes that included desertion and sleeping on guard duty. Lincoln called it “butcher’s day.” As the war continued, the volume of cases grew astronomically. Hay recalled one six-hour session during which the president slogged through a hundred of them. Lincoln, though, was no butcher. “I was amused at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier,” Hay wrote in his diary. (In at least one instance, Hay himself played a direct role in a pardon: that of a Theta Delta Chi fraternity brother.) The president was “only merciless in cases where meanness or cruelty were shown,” Hay observed. “Cases of cowardice he was specially averse to punishing with death. He said it would frighten the poor devils too terribly, to shoot them.” Lincoln, after all, had been a soldier, too, during the Black Hawk War of 1832.
And he understood too well the pain of losing a loved one. A son, Eddie, had died in 1850 at the age of three. Then in February 1862 the two younger Lincoln sons, eleven-year-old Willie and eight-year-old Tad, fell ill with fever. Willie was by most accounts Lincoln’s favorite—smart and good-hearted. Tad was sweet-tempered in his own way, but more unruly, hampered by a speech impediment and learning disabilities. The two boys had the run of the White House, interrupting their father at will, playing pranks on visitors and the staff, and frequently pulling the spring bell that connected the president’s office to the secretaries’.
On February 20, Willie, the golden boy, died. Hay’s diary and correspondence are silent on the tragedy that brought the White House to a standstill, but Nicolay wrote in his journal: “At about 5 o’clock this afternoon”—minutes after Willie’s death—“I was lying half asleep on the sofa in my office, when [Lincoln’s] entrance aroused me. ‘Well, Nicolay,’ said he choking with emotion, ‘my boy is gone—he is actually gone!’ and bursting into tears, turned and went into his own office.”
Tad Lincoln survived and was loved even more dearly by his parents, sleeping many nights in his father’s bed. But Tad, who could not, or at least did not, dress himself while he lived in the White House, was not capable of filling the void. Robert Lincoln, never entirely at ease at home, came down from Harvard when he could, but over the next three years, from the death of Willie to Lincoln’s assassination, it was Hay who became, if not a surrogate son, then a young man who stirred a higher form of paternal nurturing that Lincoln, despite his best intentions, did not successfully bestow on either of his surviving children.
And Hay, who held his own father in high regard, found something more, and surely more immediate, in the example and attentions of Lincoln. Lincoln was every bit as high-minded as Charles Hay, but unlike Hay’s father, Lincoln was also quintessentially reasonable and pragmatic. “With the fire of a reformer and a martyr in his heart he yet proceeded by the ways of caution and practical statecraft,” Hay was to write of Lincoln in the biography. “He always worked with the things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire to make them better.”
When the time came to embark on his own career as a statesman, Hay would take almost precisely the same approach.
THE GREATEST DEMONSTRATION OF Lincoln’s philosophy of achieving lofty goals through practical means was the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s views on slavery, if not abolition, had been well known for some time. As an Illinois legislator in 1837, he stated that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Twenty-one years later, at the Republican state convention in Springfield, he said in his famous “house divided” speech that the government could not endure “half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing, or all the other.” He left little doubt which outcome he preferred.
Yet Lincoln was no rabidly abolitionist Radical; he felt that the gradual decline and ultimate demise of slavery could be achieved through gradual measures such as proscription of slavery in territories, compensation to states that agreed to free slaves, and voluntary colonization. His goal, above all others, was not abolition but the restoration and preservation of the Union.
By the spring of 1862, the slavery, or rather the anti-slavery, issue was threatening to get ahead of him. Congress had already passed a Confiscation Act, the first of two bills authorizing the government to seize and free slaves of southerners actively supporting rebellion. Slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia and prohibited in United States territories. Following Frémont’s example, two more generals issued orders without first consulting the president, one of them freeing slaves outright, the other holding them as contraband of war. Lincoln’s reservations and, in some instances, resistance toward all these measures had to do with their constitutionality, their feasibility, and the effect they would have on border states and millions of constituents in the North, Democrats mostly, who perceived only mayhem and little advantage in emancipation, compensated or otherwise. What Lincoln wanted was more time to sell the border states on some form of gradual emancipation, believing that if the border states could be persuaded to end slavery, the rest of the South would soon fold.
On the other hand, if the border states bolted under the goad of abolitionist impatience, the consequences for the Union might be disastrous. Doubtless speaking for Lincoln in one of his anonymous newspaper columns, Hay urged the public to stay the course on slavery at least for the time being and to maintain faith in the president’s strategy. He assured his readers that Lincoln had good reasons for continuing “to conserve and protect an interest which he would rejoice to see equitably blotted forever from the face of the earth.” Hay beseeched the border states in particular to believe that Lincoln had their interests at heart. “It is to them,” he explained, “that the President chiefly looks for effectual strength and co-operation in his great work of pacificating the storm-rent republic.”
Lincoln hoped that Union successes in the spring of 1862 would bring the border states around, but none was forthcoming. In early April, General Ulysses S. Grant, who believed that one great battle could decide the entire war, fought to a bloody draw at Shiloh, Tennessee, suffering more than thirteen thousand casualties. Wrote Hay: “There was onset and repulse, yell of assault and cheer of defiance, screeching of shells and sputtering of volleys, advance and retreat. . . . It was like the flux and reflux of ocean breakers, dashing themselves with tireless repetition against a yielding, crumbling shore.”
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s recalcitrant general, George McClellan, was botching his grand thrust toward Richmond, squandering the initiative (despite Lincoln’s exhortation that “you must act”), and losing the Peninsula campaign—sixteen thousand Union killed and wounded—and along with it the confidence of Congress, the cabinet, and his commander in ch
ief. “[T]he little Napoleon sits trembling . . . afraid either to run or fight,” Hay complained during the timid siege of Yorktown.
So willfully craven was McClellan’s performance throughout the campaign that many Republicans close to Lincoln suspected that the general was actually conspiring against the president. Clearly the general was not making Lincoln’s job any easier, his resistance made evident in a letter that McClellan delivered to Lincoln personally, criticizing the president’s desire to free slaves. The commander in chief, McClellan asserted, “should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master.” The letter also carried a warning that verged on threat: Unless Lincoln heeded McClellan’s suggestion to forgo emancipation, the effort to recruit fresh troops, which the army sorely needed, would be “almost hopeless.”
With good reason, Lincoln soon removed McClellan as general in chief, replacing him with General Henry Halleck, nicknamed “Old Brains” for his heady leadership in the recent campaigns of the Department of the Mississippi. (Grant took Halleck’s place out west.) Rebuked and embarrassed, McClellan cursed the administration: “God will yet foil their abominable designs & mete out to them the punishment they deserve.”
But even without momentum on the battlefield or the blessing of his best-known general, Lincoln’s scheme for emancipation took shape. On July 13—one week after talking to McClellan, one day after Congress passed its second Confiscation Act, and after failing to sell twenty-nine border state senators and representatives on his plan for gradual emancipation—Lincoln took a carriage ride with two of his more moderate cabinet members, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William Seward, and for the first time openly broached the subject of issuing a proclamation of emancipation on a national, rather than state-by-state, basis. Welles and Seward offered encouragement.
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