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

by Joshua Zeitz

  None of these maneuvers sat well with Nicolay and Hay. At the beginning of the term, their relationship with Mary was cordial, though not particularly friendly. Hay accompanied the first lady and Robert Todd Lincoln to the seaside resort town of Long Branch, New Jersey, in August 1861. It was “hideously dull,” he told a friend, “the crowd a sort of queer half-baked New Jersey confectionery.” Inventing a reason to depart early, he took the train to New York and then returned to Washington, bypassing the Jersey shore altogether. “If you see Mrs. Lincoln,” he implored, “don’t hint to her that anything but inexorable necessity called me from Long Branch. I impressed her with the belief that the delay of another day, would break the blockade, recognize Davisdom, impeach the Cabinet and lose the Capital. Like a Roman matron she sacrificed her feelings to save the Republic.”

  By November 1861, with the first lady attempting to siphon off the White House stationery fund, relations between Mary and the secretaries deteriorated rapidly. Having long been a partner in building her husband’s political career, she resented her relegation to the lesser status of presidential spouse and coveted the professional relationship that Hay and Nicolay had built with Lincoln. She also needed their complicity in jiggering various White House funds, a service that they consistently refused to supply. Conflict was almost inevitable. The secretaries privately took to calling Mary “the Hellcat.” In March 1862, Hay warned Nicolay, who was traveling in the West, that “the ‘enemy’ is still planning Campaigns in quiet.” When Mary asked Hay to pay her the salary of the White House steward, whom she had recently fired, the young secretary refused. “I told her to kiss mine,” he told Nicolay. “Was I right?” Mary would not let the matter drop. “The devil is abroad,” he moaned a few days later, “having great wrath. His daughter, the Hell-Cat . . . is in ‘a state of mind’ about the Steward’s salary. There is no Steward . . . She thinks she will blackguard your angelic representative into giving it to her ‘which I don’t think she’ll do it, Hallelujah!’” Days later, the trouble was still not settled. “The Hellcat is getting more Hellcattical, day by day,” he complained to Nicolay.

  Mary grew tougher to manage when personal tragedy was visited upon the first family. In early February, the Lincolns’ young boys, Willie and Tad, fell grievously ill. The White House drew its water from the Potomac River; with tens of thousands of soldiers camped along its banks and their latrines in a constant state of overflow, contamination was inevitable. Stricken by typhoid, the older boy, Willie, aged eleven, endured weeks of agonizing cramps, diarrhea, and spasms before slipping into a coma. For the Lincolns, who adored their sons, it was pure hell to see Willie suffer so long and without relief. Late in the afternoon on Thursday, February 20, Nicolay was half-asleep on his office sofa when the president walked in. “‘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.” Some time later, George walked over to the family quarters to speak with the president, who had “lain down to quiet [Tad],” the younger son, who, though very sick himself, was beside himself with grief. “[I] asked him if I should charge Browning with the direction of the funeral,” Nicolay noted, in reference to Lincoln’s longtime friend Senator Orville Browning of Illinois. “Consult with Browning,” the president agreed.

  In the months that followed, the president and first lady dealt with their heartache in different ways. Mary was too inconsolable to attend Willie’s funeral or burial, though it was not altogether unusual for women to absent themselves from such public rites. For the rest of her days in the White House, she never again set foot in the Green Room, where Willie’s body had been laid out for mourning. Mary later turned to spiritualists in a desperate effort to speak with her son from beyond the grave. This practice, too, was not unheard of in its time. Queen Victoria was said to have consulted spiritualists who enabled her to communicate with her late husband, Prince Albert, and no lesser figures than Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Senator Ira Harris of New York, and Mrs. James Gordon Bennett, wife of a prominent Democratic newspaper publisher, dabbled in the movement after their children died. Even so, more than a few of Mary’s enemies scoffed at her efforts, demonstrating little sympathy for a mother’s loss. “Our home is very beautiful,” she confided to a friend. “The grounds are very enchanting, the world still smiles and pays homage and we are left desolate—the world has lost its charm.” Neither Hay nor Nicolay made mention in letters or diaries of the private anguish to which the secretaries bore intimate witness. But they knew how deeply affected the president was by Willie’s death. Every Thursday, the president locked himself in the boy’s bedroom, leaving the secretaries to fend off congressmen and office seekers while their boss mourned in silence. “He was too good for this earth,” Lincoln said of Willie, with tears in his eyes, “but then we loved him so.”

  • • •

  Willie’s death came at a time of great military and political strain. In 1862, Lincoln’s war plan could fairly be described as two-pronged: in the East, the great army under George McClellan’s command was tasked with invading the Confederate capital of Richmond; in the West, armies under the command of Henry Halleck were systematically choking off Southern commerce and communications by securing a long perimeter along the Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers. With the Union navy successfully blocking Southern access to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, the loss of major river arteries would deal a significant blow to the fledgling Southern nation.

  The western campaign at first proved a qualified success. On February 6, General Ulysses S. Grant’s forces overtook a small Confederate outpost at Fort Henry in just three hours, thereby securing for the Union control of the Tennessee River. Several miles to the east, it took slightly longer for Grant’s men to wrest Fort Donelson from Confederate hands, but after a three-day pitched battle the Union controlled the fort—and thus, the Cumberland River—and effectively cordoned off Confederate access to the key border state of Kentucky. Over the next month, Grant marched his men down the Tennessee River, allowing the Union to occupy the western half of Tennessee. These efforts culminated in a bloody confrontation with Confederate forces at Pittsburg Landing, near the border of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Known thereafter as Shiloh, the two-day battle exacted a fearsome toll, with thirteen thousand Union soldiers—and ten thousand Confederates—dead, wounded, or missing in action. Nicolay may have echoed the president’s thinking when he told Therena that Shiloh “finishes the rebellion in the West—they can never recover . . . It may take us some time yet to secure and make fast all we have gained, but the work is substantially done.” In fact, just one month later, Union forces captured New Orleans, thus cutting off Confederate access to the lower Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Later that fall, the Union army dislodged Confederate forces from Corinth, a key railroad junction in Mississippi that connected east–west and south–north trunk lines. On balance, the western campaign had been a success. But the intensity of the fighting and the full extent of the carnage at Shiloh came as a shock to the Northern public. By the year’s end, with Grant’s army stalled outside the vital river outpost of Vicksburg, many Northerners despaired of the quick victory they had hoped—and expected—to achieve.

  Matters were worse in the East. In late March, after months of delay, McClellan, whom Lincoln had replaced as general in chief but who retained command of the Army of the Potomac, finally began moving on the Confederate capital. Rather than a confrontation with Southern forces by land, his plan called for a complicated amphibious approach down the Chesapeake Bay. Union soldiers would land at the mouth of the Rappahannock River, flank the Confederate army, and conquer Richmond. The elaborate scheme left Washington with only a thin line of defense and opened McClellan to criticism by radical Republican opponents that he was either averse to fighting a real battle or somehow in quiet collusion with the rebels. Over the course of the spring and summer, the Peninsula Campaign proved a sp
ectacular disappointment, as time and again McClellan advanced, fought, and stalled, allowing the Confederates to gather their forces and hold their line. By midsummer, Lincoln was sufficiently worried about the lack of progress that he visited McClellan in the field. After inspecting the troops at Harrison’s Landing, the president retired into private conference with his general.

  Seemingly oblivious to his own tenuous position, McClellan handed a letter to Lincoln, in which he laid out his view of the sectional conflict. He instructed the president to conduct the war “upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organization. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Lincoln ignored the advice and soon began redeploying McClellan’s troops in northern Virginia. The Peninsula Campaign was effectively over.

  Though a troubling show of insubordination, McClellan’s letter spoke to the intense pressure that Lincoln faced to broaden the scope of the conflict. As the war dragged on, many Northerners came to believe that abolition should be a goal, or at least a tool, of battle. For some, it seemed a just way to punish traitors and to deprive the Confederates of a vital economic resource. For others, the war prompted a change in thinking about the morality of slavery. Determined to keep the border states in the Union, Lincoln walked a tightrope. Privately, he agreed with many Republicans that the war could and should open new opportunities to attack slavery. Publicly, he insisted that he had no intention of expanding the scope of the war. When, in May 1862, General David Hunter declared all slaves in his portion of the Department of the South “forever free,” Lincoln reversed the decree, just as he had when Frémont issued his directive a year earlier. Yet in his statement countermanding Hunter, Lincoln also urged the border states to initiate their own programs of compensated, gradual emancipation. “You cannot if you would, be blind to the signs of the times,” he warned them.

  The signs were many. Throughout the South, slaves were walking off farms and plantations by the tens of thousands, flooding Union army camps and forcing military commanders to create ad hoc solutions to an unprecedented race problem. Faced with the prospect of a long and costly war, many Northerners grew averse to protecting an institution that they abhorred but that their enemies seemed to cherish more than the Union itself. The year 1862 saw Congress pass, and Lincoln sign, a series of laws abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. (with government-funded compensation for slaveholders); barring slavery in the territories; and providing for the confiscation of all rebel property, including slaves. “Only the damnedest of ‘damned abolitionists’ dreamed of such a thing a year ago,” marveled the New York financier George Templeton Strong.

  Antislavery activists had long maintained that the federal government had the legal right to attack the institution in the service of suppressing a rebellion. Now they seized every opportunity to put that theory into practice. When Charles Sumner urged the president to issue a general emancipation order on July 4, the president replied that he would do it, if he did not think that “half the army would lay down their arms and three other states would join the rebellion.” When Horace Greeley called publicly for abolition, Lincoln responded that his “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Careful observers took note of the president’s closing lines, in which he promised that he would “correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”

  This was no hollow warning. In recent months, Lincoln had consistently pleaded with border-state elected officials to enact gradual emancipation schemes and even proposed a bill that would provide federal bonds to enable such states to compensate slave owners for their loss of property. Every day that the war dragged on, Lincoln privately argued, the peculiar institution dissolved “by mere friction and abrasion.” He reminded border-state congressmen that his reversal of Hunter’s emancipation edict gave “dissatisfaction, if not offense, to many whose support the country cannot afford to lose” and warned that “pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and increasing.” Was it not better for the border states to reach “a decision at once to emancipate gradually,” and with compensation, rather than risk losing their slaves immediately, and with no recompense?

  The stubborn resolve of border-state leaders convinced Lincoln that the time had come to change course. In mid-July, while en route to the funeral of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s infant child, the president confided to Welles and Seward that he was prepared to embrace emancipation as a “military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” The next week, he assembled his cabinet and read aloud the draft of a proclamation emancipating all slaves behind enemy lines on January 1, 1863, unless the rebels in those states laid down their arms and pledged allegiance to the United States. The cabinet members, except Welles and Seward, were stunned. After heated debate, Seward convinced the president to shelve his proclamation until the Union achieved a decisive victory on the battlefield. To act before such time would convey the appearance of desperation. Nevertheless, word of the meeting soon leaked. “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln told the New York financier August Belmont in late July. “The government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.”

  • • •

  Prior to his service as Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay left little record of his thinking on race relations. In 1856 he calmly applauded the election of the first Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and related his disgust in hearing a Southern acquaintance “flaying the Abolitionists alive. Southern Chivalry is in the ashes at present. ‘Sic semper Tyrannis’ says the North.” Born into an antislavery family, he held the peculiar institution in low repute, even if he did not share the ardor of more committed abolitionists. Like Nicolay, and even Lincoln, Hay trafficked casually in racial slurs, though seldom if ever in public. In his first weeks in the White House, he wrote in his diary of “a jolly-hearted old Shaker from N.H.” who came to see the president. “He said they were late getting here, as their driver who was a constable had to stop to whip a nigger. It was a rich and novel idea to the broadbrimmed Northerner.” He also wrote frequent, anonymous dispatches for several Missouri newspapers in which he spoke indifferently of “the nigger question.” Cotton from the South was “nigger wool.” Confederate sympathizers in England had “a natural inclination for rebellion and niggers.” The nation had been “dragged into this bloody strife by traitors North and South”—by abolitionists and secessionists alike—“and now that the life of the nation, and not the condition of the nigger, is at stake, we must fight through it.” During a visit to Yorktown in June 1862, Hay described a wasteland of “old houses and old darkies—big guns and little niggers—dull skies and bright mulattos—complex uniforms and complexions not uniform—piccaninnies and Enfans Perdus—and a general flavor of colored person.” Repeating the well-worn logic of the free-labor critique of slavery, he marveled at the

  pall of densest indolence and sloth [that rested] palpably on the face of this unparalleled richness of nature. Anywhere but here the fields would be opulent with grain; those hill sides would be fragrant with fruit and picturesque with vineyards . . . What good reason is there why this region should not be as rich, inch for inch, as Rhode Island?

  There may be many answers to this question, but only one suggests
itself to me. It will suggest itself to you, if you sail down this river. There it stands now in the front door of the negro quarters with no shoes on its feet—its white tow breeches held up by one suspender—its black face agrin with childish delight—its shock head bare, while it waves its old wool hat as a banner in welcome to what it considers the Abolition invasion. It is the oppressed type, as Brother [Wendell] Phillips calls it—the man and brother as Exeter Hall hails it—the impending crisis as Helper names it—the contraband as General Butler styles it—the image of God cut in ebony as Fuller phrased it—the what-will-we-do-with-it as the earnest spirit of American patriotism must regard it.

  In his unsigned articles, Hay took special care to lay blame for the war at the foot of “fanatics and fire-eaters . . . Both equally mad and equally criminal.” Carefully positioning Lincoln as a good-faith broker for the loyal slaveholders of the border states, he affirmed that “this bloody revolution was brought upon the country by the slavery propagandists of the South and the radical abolitionists of the North. They can divide the honor and responsibility of the matter in such proportions as they like.”

  There was a wide divergence between what Hay wrote for public consumption (though never under his own byline) and what he wrote and said in private company. As early as May 1861 he told Carl Schurz that the army ought not return fugitive slaves who fled behind Union lines. “Their owners are in an open state of rebellion against the government & nothing would bring them to their senses more readily than a gentle reminder that they are dependent on the good will of the Government for the security of their lives and property. The action would be entirely just and eminently practicable.” In the pages of his private diary, he noted with approval Schurz’s assessment that “slavery offers itself more vulnerable to our attack than at any point in any century and the wild malignity of the South is excusing us, before God & the World.”