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

by Joshua Zeitz

  In 1862, while visiting for several weeks with General Hunter in South Carolina, Hay informed Nicolay that “the General says he is going to announce me tomorrow as a Volunteer Aide, without rank.” His mind clearly straying to the possibility of a political career, Hay was “glad of it, as the thing stands . . . I want my abolition record clearly defined,” and serving under Hunter would “do it better than anything else, in my own mind and the minds of the few dozen people who know me.”

  The discordance between Hay’s private utterances and his public newspaper work was a matter of politics. In a day before there was such an institution as the White House communications office, and long before such conventions as the press release and the press conference came into wide use, presidents communicated at large through various means. They issued public letters and proclamations, as Lincoln did in his response to Greeley. They raised money for, or steered government advertising to, friendly editors, who repaid the kindness by toeing the administration line. Though Hay took up midnight journalism on his own initiative and in part to supplement his government salary, he did so with Lincoln’s knowledge and at every turn crafted his articles to appeal to the particular prejudices and concerns of a key readership—Republicans and War Democrats in the border states.

  In April 1862, he told Missouri newspaper readers that “one thing we have certainly gained by the fierce convulsions of the past year . . . is the power of discussing the question of slavery in a practical, common-sense way, without any of the former captiousness and irritability that has marked all disputations upon this delicate subject . . . The people of the North are discussing it, not with the heat and fervor of former fanaticism, but with the practical perception of economic and political influence.” Hay maintained that “conservative citizens and presses of the Border States” were moving toward an embrace of gradual, compensated emancipation. They saw the writing on the wall: the war had weakened the institution of slavery beyond repair, and better to come to terms with this truth now than to let the vagaries of battle settle terms. Writing at a time when the president was urgently pressing such a scheme on border-state congressmen, he framed the administration’s policy as a conservative middle ground between fire-eaters and abolitionists. “It is true,” he wrote, “that the philosophers of the Hub of the Universe”—Boston—“still talk of the Oppressed Type as a Man and a Brother, and call down Heaven’s vengeance on his wrongs, but the mass of the people are beginning to talk and think of slavery as an ugly question, to be discussed and settled coolly, and not, as in all former years, to be shelved quietly out of sight.”

  Hay and Nicolay were among the handful of people who first knew that Lincoln was contemplating emancipation as a war measure. Days after the president announced his intentions to Welles and Seward, Hay wrote to Mary Jay, the daughter of a prominent New York abolitionist. “How gloriously General Hunter has justified my statement that the future would prove his soundness in hatred of slavery,” he wrote.

  He has done the greatest thing of the war even though unfruitful of results. Although the President repudiated his order he regards him none the less kindly, and so told the Border State Slaveholders the other day. The President himself has been, out of pure devotion to what he considers the best interests of humanity, the bulwark of the institution he abhors, for a year. But he will not conserve slavery much longer. When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound. Even now he speaks more boldly to slaveholders than to the world. If I have sometimes been impatient of his delay I am so no longer.

  While Hay genuinely resented the sharp censure that his boss endured from the radical wing of his own party, he freely acknowledged in print that they “far more nearly sympathize[d] with the President on all questions of National concern” than conservative Republicans and Democrats. He was bothered less by their politics than by their constant attempts to undermine their own president. A year later, he took note in his diary of a private conversation with Lincoln. Speaking of the radicals, Lincoln said, “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all their faces are set Zionwards.”

  Like his friend and colleague, Nicolay exhibited many of the contradictions of his age. Personally opposed to slavery, he viewed himself as a moderate of the Lincoln persuasion, and like that of many moderates his thinking evolved as the war dragged on into its second and third years. “I walked up this morning to the Senate Chamber to hear a sermon by [Moncure] Conway, an Abolitionist, but one of the most eloquent men of the country,” he told Therena in early 1863. “I should be willing to go to Church every Sunday, if I could hear a sermon of equal power.”

  However much his position on abolition had evolved, Nicolay struggled like many Americans to make sense of a post-emancipation world in which black Americans operated on nominally equal footing with whites. Writing to Therena, he related details of “a party at Mrs. Hoopers, where the new Haytian [sic] charge d’Affaires (Col. Ernest Romaine he calls himself) made his social debut. I suppose he is a negro, although he does not look like one, having straight black hair, and a very brown, Spanish looking face. His secretary of legation, who was with him had more unmistakable African features. They were quiet and well-behaved, and said to be quite intelligent; but on the whole it was rather difficult to disassociate them in one’s mind from the other colored waiters in the room.” Unable to distinguish physical difference from social inequality, Nicolay puzzled at the sight of a black diplomat from a sovereign black nation. His opposition to slavery notwithstanding, he was more accustomed to meeting black servants or slaves. Early during their White House tenure, Nicolay, Hay, and Robert Todd Lincoln mounted horses and rode over the Long Bridge connecting Washington with occupied northern Virginia. There, they visited the stately Custis mansion at Arlington, where Robert E. Lee and his wife made their home before abandoning it at the start of the war. “In the garden we found an old negro at work, who was born at Mt. Vernon before General Washington’s death,” he explained to Therena. “We asked him many questions—delighted him in introducing Bob the President’s son, in whom the old darkey expressed a lively interest—and further pleased him with a gift of small change. Altogether I don’t know when I have passed so satisfactory and pleasant an afternoon.” For Nicolay, as for many Northerners, wishing for the destruction of slavery was not the same as believing in the social equality of black and white Americans.

  • • •

  In the early weeks of the war, John Hay found Lincoln reclining on a chair by his office window, “calmly looking out of the window at the smoke of the two Navy steamers puffing up the way, resting the end of the telescope on his toes sublime.” Nicolay followed, carrying a batch of paperwork, and the conversation soon turned to the cause and scope of the conflict. “Some of our northerners seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour” and seem “inclined to think that this war is to result in the entire abolition of Slavery,” the president noted. At this stage in his presidency, Lincoln still believed that the war would test the strength of popular democracy, not the institution of slavery. “We must settle this question now,” he told his secretaries, “whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

  By late 1862, Lincoln understood that it was no longer possible to preserve “the government as we found it.” As he explained to Congress in his annual message in December, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” The country understood what he meant. Just over ten weeks earlier, George McClellan, newly reinstated to command, had pursued Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia across the Maryland border,
where the two forces fought a bloody, one-day battle alongside Antietam Creek. It proved the deadliest day of the war, with twenty-three thousand Union and Confederate troops left dead, wounded, or missing in action. Though the battle resulted in a technical loss for Lee, whose army limped back into Virginia badly depleted in manpower and supplies, McClellan characteristically failed to give chase, resulting in his second, and final, dismissal. Still, the day provided Lincoln with enough cause to issue his edict.

  On Tuesday, September 22, Hay sat in the president’s office as Lincoln informed his cabinet that he had resolved to issue his edict. “It is a despotic act in the cause of the Union,” noted Gideon Welles, “and I may add of freedom.”

  The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on January 1, 1863, all slaves behind rebel lines would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Rebel states still had until New Year’s Day to lay down their arms, in which case they would be permitted to keep their slaves. The edict exempted roughly 800,000 of the nation’s 3.9 million bondsmen who lived in the loyal border states and in areas of the Confederacy already under Union control. It also disappointed some abolitionists and radicals, who regretted its dispassionate, legalistic tone. Nevertheless, the moment was greeted with tremendous excitement. The nature and stakes of the war had changed with the single stroke of a pen. “I told the President of the Serenade that was coming,” Hay recorded in his diary, “and asked if he would make any remarks. He said no, but he did say half a dozen words, & said them with great grace and dignity.” Later that evening, Hay went to Chase’s house, where several of the cabinet secretaries addressed the revelers still animating the streets with torchlight and song. “They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life,” Hay remarked of the cabinet members and congressmen who “staid at the Governors [Chase’s] and drank wine.” “They breathed freer; the Prest. Procn. had freed them as well as the slaves. They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”

  Writing that week for the Missouri Republican, Hay took care once again to position the president between Southern fire-eaters and “extremists from the North.” Appropriating the rallying cry of the Democratic representative Clement Vallandigham—a slavery apologist from Ohio and the most outspoken war critic in Congress—he asserted that Lincoln had begun the war seeking to preserve “the Union as it was and . . . the Constitution as it is.” At all times the president “stood between slavery and those who would destroy it, as a strong and steadfast bulwark, waiting, hoping, praying to God that the Border States would read the signs of the times.” Now, Lincoln had extended to the “murderous traitors” of the South “but one more opportunity for repentance and safety. If they reject this, let their ruin rest upon their own heads.” Writing as always with an eye on the critical swing states of the Midwest and the border region, Hay claimed the middle ground for the administration.

  That fall, Republicans braced for steep losses in congressional and statewide elections. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation armed Democrats with a powerful rhetorical cudgel. Denouncing the measure as “an act of Revolution,” Democratic newspapers complained that it made “the restoration of the old Constitution and Union impossible.” One of Chase’s political allies placed the matter in sharp relief when he explained that Democrats could now look moderate and conservative voters in the eye and say, “I told you so; can’t you see this is an Abolition war and nothing else?” Lincoln expected losses, and he expected to be blamed for them. His armies were bogged down. The human toll of the war had become shocking even to the most sanguine of observers. Emancipation was a deeply controversial measure. And the government was incurring piles of inflationary debt to fund the military. But to the president’s surprise, Democrats profited less from his emancipation edict than from popular opposition to his heavy-handed censure of public debate. Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and under the stern direction of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton the administration had imprisoned multiple newspaper editors, small-time politicians, and opponents of the war effort. On a visit to Springfield in late October, Hay told Nicolay that he was “astonished to hear so little objection to the proclamation. Republicans all like it and every Democrat who does not swear by Vallandigham comes up to it.” Nevertheless, “things look badly around here politically. The inaction of the Army & the ill success of our arms have a bad effect and worse than that, all our energetic and working Republicans are in the Army . . . This state is in great danger.”

  Republicans were routed in the fall elections. The party lost key legislative and statewide contests in the battleground states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and saw more than twenty congressmen, including Speaker of the House Galusha Grow, ousted from their seats. Though they retained control of both chambers of Congress, they now had to contend with an enlarged and emboldened Democratic minority.

  The year 1862 ended as it had begun for Lincoln: badly. Disgruntled Republicans blamed him for the party’s electoral defeat and for the slow pace of the war. Newspaper editors scored him for political and military ineptitude. A restive citizenry began to chafe against the privations and costs of war. And no one could be sure if the final Emancipation Proclamation would foster solidarity or dissent among the rank-and-file soldiers in the field.

  On New Year’s Day 1863, Lincoln and his wife opened the doors of the White House to the same throng of visitors who overtook the Executive Mansion a year before: senators, congressmen, the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, and, finally, the public. Later that afternoon, the president retreated to his upstairs office. Sitting before the final copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, he lifted his pen and prepared to affix his signature. But then he stopped. His hand was sore and spasmodic from hours of hand shaking. “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he said, knowing that the document would define his legacy for all time. Then, with a steady hand, he signed it. “This temple of our idolatry is cast down,” wrote Nicolay in an unsigned newspaper column. “This Baal of our wickedness is destroyed . . . To-day, the principle of right and justice and liberty has dealt its antagonist the mortal wound from which it can never recover.”

  Nicolay had revered Abraham Lincoln from the moment they first met. The year 1863 marked a turning point in Hay’s perception. The junior secretary had served the president loyally but came gradually to perceive his mastery of people and politics. “We shall never agree on some points,” he told a friend later that year. “You must pardon me for saying that if the Tycoon had kept his fingers from meddling with the war, we should now have had neither war nor government I think.” The manner and timing with which Lincoln unleashed the blunt instrument of emancipation convinced Hay of his superior skills as a statesman and leader. “I have to a great extent stopped questioning where I don’t agree with him, content with trusting to his instinct of the necessities of the time and the wants of the people. I hardly ever speak of him to others than you, because people generally would say, ‘Yes! of course: that’s how he gets his daily bread!’ I believe he will fill a bigger place in history than he even dreams of himself.”

  CHAPTER 8

  God Placed Him Where He Is

  It was not long into their White House tenure that the grind of eighty-hour workweeks began to exact a severe physical toll on the president’s secretaries. Especially when Congress was in session, the pace and intensity were grueling. Slight of frame and prone to frequent bouts of illness, both Hay and Nicolay worried constantly about their health. “I had a sore mouth, and it has troubled me considerably ever since until today,” Nicolay told Therena in a typical dispatch. “It seems to have resulted from my being ‘bilious,’ to remove which I have been taking medicine for a couple of days and as a consequence have been moping around the house, playing ‘sick.’” The doctor’s prescription for bile, he explained, was “to wake up my liver from its torpidity,” a task
that required frequent ministrations of “calomel pills, seidlitz powder, coffee, tea, and chicken-soup.” For days, he had felt nothing but

  nausea and weakness . . . I am feeling a personified anomaly, being in a state, at the same time of great muscular lassitude, and great nervous vigor and excitement. I can’t possibly lie still, and yet the muscular effort of even raising a finger. The consequence is that I lie down on the bed, turn over, change my pillow, throw out my arm, get up again, go to the window and look out, walk across the room, stop in the middle of the floor, whistle half a bar of Yankee Doodle, take two steps of an extempore and original pas sent, and instantly becoming disgusted, with the whole matter go lie down again, and so repeat ad infinitum.

  Months later, Hay, too, was “flat of my back with bilious fever.” Writing to Nicolay, who was visiting New England, he reported that he “had a gray old delirium yesterday, but am somewhat better today . . . The air here is stifling. You had better stay as long as you like for there is nothing but idleness here. As soon as I get on my pins I shall shab.”

  The primitive discomforts of Washington scarcely helped matters. In the summer, the White House was stiflingly hot. Leaving the windows shut was not an option, but opening them—for there were no screens—invited “all bugdom outside . . . to have organized a storming party,” Nicolay complained. “The air is swarming with them, they are on the ceiling, the walls and the furniture in countless numbers, they are buzzing about the room, and butting their heads against the window panes, they are on my clothes, in my hair, and on the sheet I am writing on.” The heat also intensified the noxious and disease-ridden fumes from a marsh adjacent to the White House grounds, where local residents discarded their dead animals. “I am all alone in the White pest-house,” Hay quipped one summer. “The ghosts of twenty thousand drowned cats come in nights through the South Windows.” In the winter, the Executive Mansion was damp and drafty, so much so that Nicolay’s hand was “almost too numb to write, sitting here in my own office.” It was in these months that the secretaries often came down with debilitating colds and fevers. “So Washington weather goes,” Nicolay wrote. “Rain or dust—cold or heat—always a disagreeable extreme, that adds to the annoyance of its people, and increases their ill-temper.”