Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image

by Joshua Zeitz

  • • •

  Throughout the long interregnum between Lincoln’s election in November and his inauguration the following March (it was not until 1937 that the Twentieth Amendment, which was ratified in 1933, moved the start of presidential terms to January), Nicolay enjoyed greater exposure and insight into the president-elect’s thinking than anyone, except perhaps Mary Todd Lincoln. His role was not consultative, but in managing Lincoln’s relationships with national Republican officeholders and in communicating his instructions to members of the House and Senate, many of whom were in a state of panic at the prospect of disunion, George spent many hours in private discussion with the president-elect and came to know his point of view. In early December he told Therena that the Deep South states were likely to pass secession ordinances, but he believed that Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland would show “a decided disposition to remain in the Union.” Quite likely echoing Lincoln’s own thinking, he saw “no single reason why they should secede now, more than there was four years ago when Buchanan was chosen. True the Republican party have succeeded in electing their president. But neither Lincoln nor the party have ever avowed any purpose to interfere with, or deprive them of any recognized right, and as both Houses of Congress have a Democratic majority they could not do so if they wanted . . . The truth is that the State of South Carolina is a nest of traitors—disunionists per se who make Lincoln’s election the mere pretext not the cause of dissolution.” Nicolay also doubted very seriously that the seceding states could effectuate a break with the United States, as it was “easy enough for a State or States to resolve themselves out of the Union. But a State or nation cannot do without a government.” How would they re-create from scratch the elaborate web of institutions and services that the federal government had established gradually over the course of almost seventy-five years? “To maintain an independent government requires a lot of Executive officers, which must be paid,” he observed, “an army, which must be paid—a navy, which must be paid—ambassadors at foreign courts, which must be paid—a postal service, which must be paid—and a thousand other things which cost money. Where is the money to come from?” By and large, he did not regard secession fever as a particularly serious threat, and in holding this position, he very likely imitated the views of his employer.

  If Nicolay gave voice to Lincoln’s cool state of mind, many Republicans who should have been basking in victory quickly turned to jelly at the first threat of disunion. As early as the day before the election, a prominent New England merchant and politician beseeched Lincoln to stake out a compromise—“to reassure the men honestly alarmed.” Nicolay would long remember that his boss “bluntly replied” that there “are no such men . . . This is the same old trick by which the South breaks down every Northern victory. Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest, for the commercial gain of a new submission to the South, I would go to Washington without the countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election.” Throughout the winter, special House and Senate committees convened to explore potential compromises. Simultaneously, a group of aging political leaders gathered in Washington as an unofficial “peace convention” to consider a range of measures intended to mollify the Deep South. One proposal, offered by the Kentucky senator John Crittenden, would extend the Missouri Compromise line across the whole continent and forever protect the institution of slavery through the passage of an irrevocable constitutional amendment; another would require the Northern states to abrogate their “personal liberty laws,” meant to protect free black Americans from capture under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act. On all of these proffers, Lincoln held firm. “The tug has to come,” he privately told several congressmen, “& better now, than any time hereafter.” Even if the seceding states were in earnest, he advised wavering Republicans to hold firm, for there were moral and political considerations at stake. “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the very end of us, and of the government.” It was a refrain that he sounded for anyone who would listen. “Give them personal liberty bills, and they will pull in the slack, hold on, and insist on the border-state compromise,” he told Senator Charles Sumner. “Give them that, they’ll again pull in the slack and demand Crittenden’s compromise. That pulled in, they will want all that South Carolina asks . . . By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.”

  Events took a decisive turn on December 20, when South Carolina officially seceded from the Union. Two days later, when Lincoln arrived at his office to begin his morning meetings, Nicolay asked if he had read the latest telegraph reports. When Lincoln replied no, the secretary informed him of rumors that Buchanan intended to abandon federal forts in South Carolina, rather than risk armed conflict. “If that is true they ought to hang him!” the president-elect snapped, in a moment of uncharacteristic anger. As it became clear that the outgoing president would do nothing to protect federal property and installations, even allowing his secretary of war to transfer guns to Southern outposts, where they would surely fall into secessionist hands, Lincoln’s distrust of Buchanan hardened. Privately, Nicolay relayed his boss’s ire. “Just think of it!” he told Therena, in terms that very likely echoed his privileged conversations with Lincoln.

  The President of the United States—the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy—the man to whom thirty millions of people have confided their interests—sits in the capitol [sic] of the country, and regardless of the protestations and entreaties of twenty millions of his subjects to do his duty . . . whines and weeps and prays, entirely unmanned and unnerved by a remote and worse than babyish fear . . . Truly the country is in great danger—but it is from the traitors and imbeciles who are at the head of national affairs, and not from the beggarly mutinous crew down South.

  Hay, too, thought the lame-duck president a “weak, pottering old man” who would leave only a “dark footprint upon our history, one which a century will hardly obliterate.”

  Throughout it all, the president-elect maintained his official silence. Even as he privately beseeched his party brethren to hold firm, Lincoln hewed carefully to a policy that his friend Congressman Elihu Washburne dubbed “masterly inactivity.” Declining almost every opportunity for public comment, he studiously avoided the appearance that efforts at compromise bore his sanction or endorsement. Which was not to say that the months between his election and his inauguration were idle ones. With Nicolay at his side, joined later by John Hay, he received what the journalist Henry Villard dismissed as a “motley” array of office seekers, advice offerers, and hangers-on. “Muddy boots and hickory shirts are just as frequent as broadcloth, fine linen, etc.,” Villard snorted. The incoming correspondence started as a trickle but soon became a flood. Hay watched as the president-elect “dived into his capacious coat pocket, and bringing up a handful of letters began to look over them.” With the secretaries sifting the wheat from the chaff, Lincoln carefully considered the most important dispatches, many dealing with the portentous issues of war and disunion, others dedicated to more pedestrian but highly consequential matters of patronage. “He reads letters constantly,” Hay observed sympathetically. “At home—in the street—among his friends. I believe he is strongly tempted in church.”

  With the president-elect maintaining his deliberate public silence, newspapermen struggled to find something to write about. Lincoln’s decision to grow a beard in the months before his inauguration offered Americans temporary refuge from the more sobering intelligence coming in from all points southward. “The President’s whiskers continue to flourish vigorously,” Hay told readers of the Providence Journal. “Some assume to
say that he is putting on ’airs, and the following is a frantic distich that I rescued to-day on its way to the stove”:

  Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant—

  Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.

  By January, with the new governor about to be sworn into office and the state legislature poised to begin its session, Lincoln left his quarters in the statehouse and set up temporary shop in Johnson’s Building, an office complex on the square. It was a “good room, about twenty feet square, newly painted, papered and carpeted, and pretty well furnished,” Nicolay reported. The president-elect had gone “to his own house where he will stay most of the time . . . I shall be here all the time at work . . . Mr. Lincoln will come here occasionally, when I need his advice or he my immediate assistance.” Soon enough, the throng of visitors threatened to overtake Lincoln in his own home. February found the president-elect taking refuge in the attic above his brother-in-law’s dry-goods store, on the south side of the square, where he was able to cull together the fragments of the address that he had been drafting over the preceding weeks. Occasionally walking finished pages to Nicolay, for review and copying, he found much-needed solace in what Herndon later described as an “unromantic,” “claustrophobic . . . dingy, dusty, and neglected back room . . . [T]hen and there he wrote his first inaugural.”

  • • •

  Monday, February 11, was gray and cold. The Lincolns had already emptied and rented out their house at Eighth and Jackson streets and were staying at a downtown hotel. After breakfast, the president-elect made his way to the Great Western depot and prepared for his journey to Washington. The plan called for a whistle-stop tour lasting ten days and winding through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, allowing Lincoln to introduce himself to the citizens of the North and to build popular support for the decisions that lay in the immediate weeks ahead. It was to be a grueling trip. On the first day alone, there would be more than twenty stops, most lasting just minutes. William Wood, the official advance man, stipulated that at every overnight destination local organizers should arrange hotel accommodations for Nicolay and Hay, “contiguous to the President elect.” In a sign of how far he had risen from his days as a Senate candidate in 1858, when he rode coach, Lincoln now occupied a specially outfitted railcar that afforded him and his family all of the comforts then available in train travel. Nicolay was assigned a place in the third carriage, and Hay, the fourth, though as a matter of necessity they spent most of the journey beside the president-elect. “The scene at the depot before starting was impressive and touching in the last degree,” Hay recorded. “Upward of a thousand people were assembled, and Mr. Lincoln, taking his place in one of the rooms at the station, bade farewell to his friends and neighbors, to the number of several hundreds, with an affectionate grasp of the hand. As the time approached for the departure of the train, he mounted the platform, and, in a brief and touching speech, which left hardly a dry eye in the assemblage, bade them farewell.” Years later, Hay and Nicolay still remembered the scene, as “Lincoln appeared on the platform of the car, and raised his hand to command attention. The bystanders bared their heads to the falling snowflakes, and standing thus, his neighbors heard his voice for the last time.”

  The speech in question would go down in the annals of history as one of Lincoln’s finest, and certainly the most personal ever delivered by a singularly private man. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing,” he told the crowd.

  Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

  Moments after retiring to his railcar, Lincoln began transcribing to the best of his recollection—and with some edits for the sake of posterity—the words that he had uttered moments before. Nicolay helped him reconstruct the speech. The surviving manuscript copy shows the opening lines in the president-elect’s hand, at first steady, but then faltering as the train began rocking into motion. Midway through, the handwriting becomes Nicolay’s. The closing lines are again in Lincoln’s script.

  Though it was certainly not his first time on the rails, Hay found the first day of travel exhilarating. He noted that Lincoln seemed to betray “something of the gloom of parting with neighbors and friends, bidding farewell to the community in the midst of which he has lived for a quarter of a century,” and found the president-elect to be “abstracted, sad, [and] thoughtful . . . [he] spent much of his time in the private car appropriated to his use.” But at every small depot, “Mr. Lincoln left the car, moving rapidly through the crowd, shaking hands vigorously, and incurring embraces and blessings to an extent that must have given him a slight premonition of what was in store for him.” Nicolay took note of the “crowds of people at every station” and the large welcoming party at the first overnight stop in Indianapolis (“if it were during a campaign,” he quipped, “it would be called fifty thousand”). Hay admired the “President’s coolness under the terrific infliction of several thousand hand-shakings . . . I have made some amateur studies of the art of hand-shaking at the West, and I think I may say that the rack, the thumb screw, King James’s boot, the cap of silence, with all the other dark and recondite paraphernalia of torture, become instruments of cheerful and enlivening pastime, beside the ferocious grip and the demonic wrench of the muscular citizen of the West.” From their quarters at the Bates House hotel in Indianapolis (“don’t I feel at home?” Nicolay kidded his fiancée, Therena Bates), the secretaries revealed something of their polar dispositions. Nicolay thought the horde of onlookers a “severe ordeal.” “The House is perfectly jammed full of people,” he complained. “Three or four ladies and as many gentlemen, have even invaded the room assigned to Mr. Lincoln, while outside the door I hear the crowd pushing and grumbling and shouting in almost frantic endeavors to get to another parlor in the door of which Mr. Lincoln stands shaking hands with the multitude.” Hay, on the other hand, fully enjoyed himself. “Men embrace each other wildly without provocation,” he remarked with wry bemusement. “Shorthand reporters, with the great speech in phonetic characters, resembling flys’ legs, are surrounded and smothered. The bar-room throbs with patriotic sentiments and calls for drinks. ‘Lincoln and Union forever’ is intoned with subdued emphasis in every direction. Indianapolis is not one of the great western towns, but a stranger, visiting it to-day for the first time, would have suspected its population numbering several millions.” Their reverse attitudes toward the trip hinted at the roles they would soon play in Washington, with Nicolay assuming the part of grim enforcer and Hay the smiling emissary to cabinet members and congressmen.

  Over the next ten days, Lincoln and his entourage traveled nineteen hundred miles, visiting seven states and making brief—sometimes just momentary—appearances in hundreds of small towns and villages. The president-elect delivered at least 101 speeches—in state capitol buildings, from the back of his railcar, in crowded streets, hotel lobbies, and restaurants. He appeared in no fewer than twenty-four parades and shook tens of thousands of hands—a punishing schedule for even the most ardent politician. By one account, three-quarters of a million people got to see Lincoln in person during his swing through the Northern states, making his inaugural journey an unprecedented show of political muscle. Everywhere they went, Hay noted, there were “crowds, cannon, and cheers.” “Such crowds—surging through long arches, cursing the military and blessing Old Abe; swinging hats, banners, handkerchiefs, and every possible variety of festive bunting, and standing wit
h open mouths as the train, relentlessly punctual, moved away.” Nicolay enjoyed the stopover in Cleveland, where “for the first time we found the crowd tolerably well controlled by the police and military” and “were assigned to comfortable quarters, treated to a good dinner, and altogether about as well taken care of as was possible.” Buffalo was a different matter. The crowd was so aggressive that Lincoln’s military escort suffered a dislocated shoulder, and once the presidential party “arrived at the hotel all was confusion—the [local] committee not only did nothing but didn’t know and didn’t seem to care what to do.” As usual, Hay found more light than darkness, agreeing that the arrangements in the city were “utterly inadequate” but finding much to admire in the streets “densely thronged, the cheers unremitting, the stars and stripes wav[ing] everywhere, from roofs, from windows, from balconies,” where “all the traditionary accessories of popular demonstration were copiously distributed throughout the entire route.”

  In New York City, Lincoln stared down a group of Wall Street financiers who urged compromise for the sake of keeping the wheels of commerce well greased. When one of his breakfast hosts remarked that he would “not meet so many millionaires together at any other table in New York,” the president-elect responded tartly, “I’m a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million in the votes last November.” At Trenton, the “official display was embarrassingly elaborate,” Hay reported. Official marshals bearing white satin badges escorted the presidential party to the gold-domed statehouse, where Lincoln delivered separate speeches to each chamber of the legislature. In a dramatic display of resolve, the president-elect pledged every effort at peace but also promised that “we shall have to put the foot down firmly.” At that moment, he “lifted his foot lightly,” according to Hay, “and pressed it with a quick, but not violent gesture upon the floor. He evidently meant it. The hall rang long and loud with acclamations.” In Philadelphia, the next day, Lincoln swore to a crowd at Independence Hall that he would sooner be assassinated than betray his constitutional duty to defend the integrity of the Union, and at Harrisburg—where even Hay, normally good-natured to the extreme, admitted that the crowds were “uniformly rough, unruly, and ill bred,” and the accommodations “unprecedentedly bad”—the presidential party made its final stop on free soil. “This trip of ours has been very laborious and exciting,” Hay wrote to a friend. “I have had no time to think calmly since we left Springfield. There is one reason why I write tonight. Tomorrow we enter slave territory . . . There may be trouble in Baltimore. If so, we will not go to Washington, unless in long, narrow boxes.”