by Joshua Zeitz
As for “gory exploits,” Hay did have the opportunity to witness some. Serving as a staff officer, he was near but not engaged directly in combat. “I have seen some rather rough incidents since I came here,” he told Nicolay. “But am pretty nearly emancipated from the nerves.” He also observed the performance of black soldiers and was impressed by what he saw. “The fighting on both sides was very fine,” he wrote. “The conduct of our troops was superb. The negro Regiments, 54th, 55th Mass. 8th U.S. and 3rd S.C. under Montgomery behaved like veterans, standing like rocks in a fire that decimated their ranks. The commanding officers of two regiments fell in the fight but they fought on without flinching.”
Like many Northerners who spent time in the Southern theater and observed the valor of black troops, Hay experienced a modest personal conversion on the issue of race relations. The lyricism of the black spirituals that he heard during both of his sojourns also struck a deep chord with Hay, who could not help but be moved by the stark way in which so many ex-slaves interpreted the Civil War as a liberation struggle. Later that summer, he privately noted in his diary that he was “glad the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization. I have always thought it a hideous & barbarous humbug.” In fact, he had not always thought so, or at least he had not always said so. Early in the war, Hay penned anonymous editorials that touted the president’s support of voluntary colonization. As was often the case, he may have been promoting administration policy even when it was not in accordance with his own beliefs. But his views on race had become noticeably more liberal. By no means did he shake off the prejudices of his age, but he privately acknowledged doubts about some of his earlier preconceptions. “There was a pic-nic yesterday, in the Presidents grounds, of the negroes of Washington,” he recorded just after Independence Day. It surprised him that “they were neatly & very carefully dressed very quietly & decently behaved . . . There were many of both sexes,” he observed with curiosity, “perfectly white and blue-eyed.”
• • •
Shortly after Hay returned from his unsuccessful mission to Florida, the president sent Nicolay on the first of two critical trips to New York, where he was tasked with assuaging the enormous ego of the political boss Thurlow Weed and sorting out a tangled mess at the New York Custom House. The most lucrative of all patronage mills in the federal government’s care, the customhouse technically fell under the aegis of the Treasury Department. To Weed’s great consternation, Chase had filled most of the coveted positions there with his own political supporters, willfully denying Weed—and by extension, Weed’s political partner Seward—the spoils of office. In early 1864, Weed warned the president that unless changes were made, he could not assure him that New York would remain in the Republican column. The customhouse dilemma was made easier when Chase’s candidacy petered out. Most of his allies came to the unhappy realization that Lincoln enjoyed too strong a base of support at the state and local levels. That summer, the Treasury secretary offered his resignation—for the fourth time in three years—over a matter of small consequence. This time, Lincoln stunned Chase by accepting the resignation. Hay privately thought that the president had “made a mistake” by allowing Chase to depart at so critical a time. The markets reacted unsteadily to the news, and it was by no means clear that the government could expect to continue raising funds with turmoil at the Treasury. But the president no longer felt the need to humor his chief administration antagonist.
Lincoln’s confidence in Nicolay had grown steadily since 1860. Though the secretary never played a consultative or strategic role in formulating administration policy, the president trusted him to manage key political relationships and gave him wide leeway in enforcing orders and directives. He sent Nicolay to Baltimore in June to be his eyes and ears at the Republican convention. He then sent him back to New York with a broad mandate to hear out influential members of the state party elite and hammer out a solution that would unite the different factions. The timing was critical. Lincoln’s new general in chief, Ulysses S. Grant, had launched a massive, coordinated assault on the Confederacy but had suffered a series of costly setbacks that spring and summer. Many Republican leaders were urging Lincoln to withdraw from the race, leading Nicolay to complain privately of “weak-kneed d——d fools” who conspired to “supplant the Tycoon. Everything is darkness and doubt and discouragement.” Writing to Therena, he admitted that the chairman of the national party, Henry Raymond, believed that “unless something was done, (and he thought that ‘something’ should be the sending [of] Commissioners to Richmond to propose terms of peace to the Rebels, on the basis of their returning to the Union) that we might as well quit and give up the contest.” Even the president conceded that “unless some great change takes place” on the battlefield, he would be “badly beaten” in the November election. Upon arriving in New York, Nicolay held a series of meetings with both Weed and Raymond. After a whirlwind round of conferences, the secretary secured the resignation of top customhouse appointees, doled out their positions to men favorable to the local party bosses, and left the city with its principal Republican leaders once again on the Lincoln bandwagon.
Lincoln’s confidence also grew in Hay. Though unsuccessful in Florida, the junior secretary moved with ease among Washington’s opinion makers, collecting intelligence without ever betraying the president’s confidence. In a city where discretion counted for everything, Lincoln trusted him for his good judgment and loyalty. That summer, he deputized Hay for a critical political mission. In an extreme case of gullibility, Horace Greeley allowed himself to be taken in by two men purporting to bear authorization from Jefferson Davis to negotiate an armistice. Lincoln suspected a trick but felt compelled to hear Greeley out. Though exasperatingly fickle, the editor wielded considerable power through his newspaper’s vast circulation. Lincoln could not afford to slight him, even if he had no intention of empowering him to negotiate on behalf of the federal government. He also could not afford to seem inhospitable to peace talks. Boxed in by circumstances, the president dispatched Hay to deal with Greeley. Sitting across from the famous editor at the Tribune’s offices in Manhattan, Hay personally wrote out two safe-conduct passes for the Confederate commissioners and instructed Greeley to shepherd them from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to Washington. Arriving back at the White House, he received a telegram from Greeley, who had gone to Niagara as instructed. In fact, Greeley explained, the two envoys bore no official relationship to Jefferson Davis but believed that they had the ability to place a credible peace before the Confederate president. Suspecting that Greeley had walked into a trap, Lincoln sent Hay to Niagara Falls with a letter. “To Whom It May Concern,” the president’s message began. “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States will be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States.” Greeley resisted predicating peace talks on abolitionist terms, fearing that such a hard line would shut down the negotiations. Hay, who was skeptical that there were even peace talks to be had, was present to ensure that he held the line. After meeting at the International Hotel, the two men crossed the suspension bridge to the Canadian side of the falls and delivered Lincoln’s letter to the self-styled Confederate commissioners, who were taking tea at the Clifton House. In fact, it soon emerged that the entire affair was a political ruse meant to embarrass the president with the Northern electorate, by making him appear unwilling to negotiate an end to the war. When the fake Southern envoys leaked details of Lincoln’s letter to the press, it proved a great embarrassment for Greeley, who had clearly been duped. It also caused the president grief from conservatives in his own party. But by and large, the incident bolstered Lincoln’s position with the antislavery Republican base. When Hay told the president that conservative Republicans wanted him to repudiate his “Niagara manifesto,” Lincoln replied tersely, “L
ose ten times as much on the other side.”
Hay also worked with Nicolay to collect and disburse party funds. In the era before modern campaign finance law, this exercise usually involved soliciting tithes from federal officeholders and distributing the proceeds to central party committees in important swing states.
Military developments soon turned the political tide. On September 1, Atlanta surrendered to General William Tecumseh Sherman, delivering a massive blow to the Confederacy and a major military and political win to the president. Days later, Ulysses Grant lent aid to the Republican cause by issuing a highly acclaimed public letter that promised (in Nicolay’s words) “an encouraging view of the military situation” and that told the country “the true road to peace is through hard fighting till the rebellion is put down.” Revered by most of the country for his merciless pursuit of victory, Grant lent something of his own prestige to the party’s cause.
What the Republicans could not accomplish politically, their opponents did for them. Meeting in Chicago in late August, the Democratic convention nominated George McClellan for the presidency but saddled him with a peace platform that all but promised to end the war on terms favorable to the Confederacy. McClellan did not explicitly endorse the plank, but as Nicolay explained to his fiancée, “having attempted in [his acceptance letter] to ignore and dodge the question presented by the platform whether he was for war or peace,” the nominee found himself in the political crosshairs: Republicans would taint him with the charge of Copperheadism, while many Peace Democrats would doubt his reliability on the core question of the campaign. Writing again from Warsaw, Hay told Nicolay that “the Republicans here are talking better and sassier since the nomination of McClellan.” Writing to an influential New York newspaperman, Hay sharply observed that “this nation may have sinned grievously, but neither you nor I believe it deserves that the murrain of McClellan should fall upon it.” Many erstwhile dissenters in the Republican ranks agreed.
The fall campaign proved an unusually brutal affair. At Lincoln’s behest, the Republicans had adopted a convention platform calling for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. In turn, Democrats took race-baiting to a new extreme, unprecedented in American politics. Democratic newspaper editors coined a new term, “miscegenation,” and accused the president of fighting a war of race amalgamation. They claimed that Lincoln was in fact “the outcrop of a remote African in his ancestry” and mocked the Republican Party’s agenda as
Hurrah for the nigger
The sweet-scented nigger,
And the paradise for the undertaker!
Hurrah for Old Abe!
The president knew enough of popular opinion to understand that this line of attack could be devastatingly effective. On Election Day he ruefully told Hay, “It is a little singular that I who am not a vindictive man should have always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their bitterness; always but once: When I came to Congress it was a quiet time. But always besides that the contests in which I have been prominent have been marked with great rancor.” Even after Republicans swept state elections in October, racked up wide margins in Indiana and Ohio, and scored a smaller but still-definitive win in Pennsylvania, Lincoln predicted that he would lose New York and Illinois the following month and squeak by with a bare Electoral College majority of 117 to 114—assuming that none of his electors abandoned him.
Events proved him wrong. Lincoln carried every state except Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey, defeating McClellan in the popular vote by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent and in the Electoral College by a whopping 212 votes to 21. Most gratifying to the president was the soldier vote, which broke for Lincoln by a margin of 78 percent to 22 percent. John Hay was proven correct in judging that “the people”—or at least a strong majority of them—wanted Lincoln, even if the politicians did not view him as “their ‘kind of cat.’”
• • •
Less than two weeks after the election, the president received an unusual request from Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts. Lydia Bixby, a widow and resident of the Bay State, had lost five sons in the Union cause. In a country that had grown too accustomed to the death of its young men on the battlefield, her sacrifice stood out as tragically exceptional. Andrew asked the president to send a personal tribute to Mrs. Bixby. Though no original copy of Lincoln’s message survives, his letter was widely disseminated in the Northern press later that month.
Dear Madam—
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln
In the aftermath of Lincoln’s own martyrdom, the Bixby letter quickly ascended to the highest echelons of American letters. The poet Carl Sandburg later called it a “piece of the American Bible.” Other scholars revered its “haunting strain of poetry” and compared it to the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural. It was, in the estimation of a journalist in 1925, “one of the finest specimens of pure English extant.” So enduring was its influence that more than 125 years later a film set in World War II (Saving Private Ryan) based its plot on the story of Lincoln’s famous communication.
Few Americans in 1864 knew that Lydia Bixby was not what she appeared. A Southern sympathizer, she “had ‘little good to say of President Lincoln,’” according to her granddaughter, and destroyed the original letter immediately upon receipt. She lost two sons, not five. Few Americans knew as well that the Bixby letter was probably the work of John Hay, not Abraham Lincoln, though it gave subtle and dignified voice to the sentiment of a president who was himself no stranger to a parent’s grief. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, historians debated the letter’s origin. Most refused to believe that a sometimes glib twenty-six-year-old political aide, accomplished though his later career may have been, could have captured so perfectly the voice of a great American statesman. But as Hay later told William Herndon, Lincoln “wrote very few letters. He did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name. He wrote perhaps half-a-dozen a week himself—not more.” Several of Hay’s associates, including his private secretary, claimed after his death that he privately admitted to authorship of the Bixby letter, though he swore them to secrecy. A subsequent analysis of its wording persuasively suggests that it was a strong literary imitation of Lincoln that could only have been written by John Hay.
Unlike many men of their generation, Hay and Nicolay avoided direct experience with combat by virtue of their political positions. But some of their closest friends and family members lost lives and limbs in battle. As residents of the White House, they witnessed firsthand the profound toll that the war took on grieving widows and parents, and indeed on the president himself. In future years, both men would work to ensure that the sacrifice of those who had fought in the Civil War would not be stripped of its meaning and purpose. Particularly for Hay, who would one day occupy a seat at the cabinet table, the violence of armed conflict held little allure. It was a terrible reality to be avoided at almost all costs.
CHAPTER 10
His Heart Was Too Sad
In the weeks following Lincoln’s reelection, the presidential secretaries quietly contemplated their own futures. Though their devotion to the president
was steadfast and their proximity to power difficult to relinquish, they were physically drained and also increasingly uneasy about their personal and professional destinies beyond the White House. In early February, Nicolay assured Therena that just “because I have written nothing of it,” she should not assume that he had “not been engaged in considering the question as to where I shall stay and what I shall do after next fourth of March. I have thought about the matter almost constantly ever since we talked it over in Delphina’s parlor last fall; but I have not as yet reached any definite conclusion.”
Left unsaid, but probably not unbeknownst to Therena, was the possibility that Lincoln might effect a change in White House personnel. For one, the relationship between the secretaries and the first lady (whom they privately dubbed Her Satanic Majesty) had grown poisonous. The year before, Mary had exploded in anger when Nicolay included the Rhode Island senator William Sprague and his wife, Kate Chase, on the guest list for a major state dinner. Mary was not without cause for complaint. Much younger and exceedingly popular among the city’s political barons, Kate had shown the first lady little courtesy over the previous three years and had, with limited success, even managed to displace her from her rightful position as hostess in chief of the capital city. Kate was also an effective political agent for her father, who was then plotting openly to remove the Lincolns from the White House altogether. But where Mary let personal (albeit legitimate) grudges trump political consideration, the president understood the value of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. “When it came time to direct the cards for the dinner,” Nicolay informed Hay, “I referred the question of [the] snub to the Tycoon who after a short conference with the powers at the other end of the hall came back and ordered Rhode Island and Ohio to be included in the list. Whereat soon arose such a rampage as the House hasn’t seen for a year, and I am again taboo. How the thing is to end is yet as dark a problem as the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. Stod[dard] fairly cowered at the violence of the storm, and I think for the first time begins to appreciate the awful sublimities of nature.” In the aftermath of the tempest, Mary took control of the dinner arrangements and banned Nicolay from even attending. “She fished around with Stod to try to get posted about managing the affair,” Nicolay continued, “but I instructed Stod to tell her, 1st that there was no way of his obtaining the requisite information, and 2ndly that if there were, yet as it was exclusively my business he could and would not do anything in the premises.” The standoff continued, according to Nicolay, until “the afternoon of the dinner, when Edward,” the White House doorman, “came up to tell me that she had backed down, requested my presence and assistance—apologizing, and explaining that the affair had worried her so that she hadn’t slept for a night or two. I think she has felt happier since she cast out that devil of stubbornness.”