by Joshua Zeitz
Mary waited patiently to settle scores. Early 1865 found her lobbying the president behind closed doors for a new presidential staff. Noah Brooks, a newspaper correspondent from California, emerged as the most likely candidate for the secretary’s post. One of the very few Washingtonians who bothered to befriend and publicly defend Mary, Brooks had also developed a close relationship with the president. A year and a half older than Nicolay, Brooks held the secretaries in ill regard and hoped to replace them. Apart from the first lady, he claimed powerful backers, including Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and Anson Henry, a longtime friend of the Lincoln family’s.
The possibility of a switch was not far from Nicolay’s mind. “As the case now stands,” he told Therena, “I am pretty well resolved not to remain here in my present relation” after March, “and I think the chances are also against my remaining in Washington. This feeling does not result from any talk with the President about the matter, although I have once or twice alluded to the subject in our conversation, but from other causes and considerations. I think he does not now wish to be troubled with the question in any way, and therefore I do not repeat it to him. After his inauguration, however, other changes will necessarily take place, and after which I will probably be able to determine my own course. So I remain as patient as I can, three or four weeks longer.”
George could wait patiently for three or four weeks, but Therena could not. Nicolay had met the love of his life when he was sixteen and she twelve or thirteen years old. They had grown up together but for the better part of a decade had to settle on a long-distance relationship. Therena was now twenty-eight years old, going on twenty-nine—older than most brides in her day. She had waited loyally but was at the end of her rope. Nicolay visited her in Pittsfield several times each year; they met occasionally in Springfield, when he was there on business; and from Nicolay’s letters, it is clear that Therena traveled to Washington several times over the course of the war. Their letters to each other were filled with local gossip about relatives and mutual friends, concern for each other’s health, discussions about religion and art, professions of love and admiration. It was not necessarily unusual that they put marriage on hold during the war. As it was customary for presidential secretaries to reside in the White House, it would have been impracticable for Nicolay to wed and establish an independent household with Therena during his term in office. But as the years wound on, she grew restive. George did not always pick up on the cues. In May 1864, he sent her a long letter full of war news and political prognostications. As an afterthought, he asked, “What did you mean when in your letter before the last you wrote that you thought we were slowly but surely drifting apart?” He was living on borrowed time, and in the weeks before the inauguration he seemed finally to know it.
Days before Lincoln was to be sworn in for his second term, Nicolay informed Therena that the president had named him to a diplomatic post in Europe, and the Senate had approved the nomination. “You have probably seen from the dispatches that I was yesterday appointed and confirmed as Consul to Paris,” he wrote. “The salary is $5000 per annum. I have not yet fully matured my future movements. The probability however is that I will not start there for two or three months yet, and that meanwhile I shall see you and ask you to be ready to go with me. While I have not yet fully decided this point, it will be well for you to be quietly getting your wardrobe ready for the trip.”
Some observers incorrectly concluded that Lincoln moved Nicolay out of his position in Noah Brooks’s favor. The evidence establishes otherwise. In late February or early March, Lincoln offered Nicolay a diplomatic post and the job of private secretary to Brooks. When it first seemed that Nicolay preferred to remain in the White House, Lincoln offered Brooks a well-paying patronage position at the customhouse in San Francisco as a consolation prize. Only when Nicolay changed his mind and accepted the consular position was the path clear for Brooks.
In Paris, George would not be alone. Two days before Lincoln’s assassination, Hay wrote to a friend that he planned to “sail as soon as the President can spare me . . . I am to be Secretary of the Legation of the United States at Paris. I think it will be a pleasant place for study and observation. I shall no doubt enjoy it for a year or so—not very long, as I do not wish to exile myself in these important and interesting times.” For some time, Hay had hungered for a larger role. An army major, he had done a brief turn as a staff officer in the field. He had gone to Florida in vain hopes of reconstructing its citizenry. He was now ready for a year abroad. A former presidential secretary and diplomat could surely return to a promising public or private career. Confiding to his brother Charles that the appointment presented a “pleasant and honorable way of leaving my present post which I should have left in any event very soon,” Hay admitted that he had grown “thoroughly sick of certain aspects of life here.” The plan was to remain in Washington to help effect a smooth transition. In early April, Nicolay embarked on a short trip to Cuba, to restore his health. Upon his return, the two men would train a new White House staff, return to Pittsfield for Nicolay’s wedding, and sail for Paris. “Every young man has work to do at home, in this age,” Hay affirmed. “I go away only to fit myself for more serious work when I return.”
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John Hay would later remember April 14 as “a day of deep and tranquil happiness throughout the United States. It was Good Friday, observed by a portion of the people as an occasion of fasting and religious meditation . . . The thanksgiving of the nation found its principal expression at Charleston Harbor, where . . . at noon General Robert Anderson raised over Fort Sumter the identical flag lowered and saluted by him four years before; the surrender of Lee giving a more transcendent importance to this ceremony, made stately with orations, music, and military display.” The Union victory at Appomattox Court House just days earlier sounded the final death knell for the Confederacy, and though the war was not yet formally concluded, most Americans understood that they were living in its final hours. Hay, who spent the afternoon at the White House, testified that
the day was one of unusual enjoyment to Mr. Lincoln. His son Robert had returned from the field with General Grant, and the President spent an hour with the young captain in delighted conversation over the campaign. He denied himself generally to the throng of visitors, admitting only a few friends. In the afternoon he went for a long drive with Mrs. Lincoln. His mood, as it had been all day, was singularly happy and tender. He talked much of the past and future; after four years of trouble and tumult he looked forward to four years of comparative quiet and normal work; after that he expected to go back to Illinois and practice law again. He was never simpler or gentler than on this day of unprecedented triumph.
Hay spent that evening drinking whiskey and talking with Bob Lincoln at the White House. Shortly before 11:00 p.m., Tad Lincoln burst through the front door of the mansion, crying to the doorkeeper Thomas Pendel, “They’ve killed Papa dead!” The young boy had been attending an evening performance of Aladdin in the company of his tutor when the management of Grover’s National Theatre interrupted the show to announce that the president had been shot. His chaperone returned the grief-stricken boy home just minutes later. Upon learning the news, Hay and Robert rushed by carriage to Tenth Street, where the mortally wounded president had been transferred to the Petersen House, a boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre. Upon their arrival, a doctor informed them that the president would not survive his wounds.
With John Hay at his side, Robert Todd Lincoln walked into the room where his father lay stretched out on a narrow bed. Unconscious from the moment of his shooting, the president “breathed with slow and regular respiration throughout the night,” Hay later recalled. A hodgepodge of family friends and government officials filed in and out of the chamber: Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles; Elizabeth Dixon, the wife of Senator James Dixon of Connecticut and a close friend of the first lady’s; Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had all but assumed the r
eins of power in the wake of the shooting; Generals Henry Halleck and Montgomery Meigs; and Vice President Johnson, who briefly paid his respects but left at the urging of Stanton, who knew that Mary thought poorly of him. Robert maintained his composure throughout most of the ordeal but broke down several times in tears, leaning on Charles Sumner for support. “As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale,” Hay remembered, the president’s “pulse began to fail; but his face, even then, was scarcely more haggard than those of the sorrowing men around him. His automatic moaning ceased, a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features, and at twenty-two minutes after seven he died. Stanton broke the silence by saying: Now he belongs to the ages.” Hay was at the president’s side when he passed.
The day after Lincoln’s death, Nicolay was aboard a navy warship, returning from a brief excursion to Cuba. As his party entered Chesapeake Bay, they
took a pilot on board to enter Hampton Roads [and] heard from him the first news of the terrible loss the country had suffered . . . It was so unexpected, so sudden and so horrible even to think of, much less to realize that we couldn’t believe it, and therefore remained in hope that it would prove one of the thousand groundless exaggerations which the war has brought forth during the past four years. Alas, when we reached Point Lookout at daylight this morning, the mournful reports of the minute guns that were being fired, and the flags at half-mast left us no ground for further hope.
In his sorrow, Nicolay admitted to Therena that he was “so much overwhelmed by this catastrophe that I scarcely know what to think or write . . . It would seem that Providence had exacted from him the last and only additional service and sacrifice he could give his country—that of dying for her sake. Those of us who knew him will certainly interpret his death as a sign that Heaven deemed him worthy of martyrdom.”
Nicolay arrived back in Washington on Monday, April 17. Writing to Therena, he struggled to “describe the air of gloom which seems to hang over the city. As I drove up here from the Navy Yard almost every house was draped and closed, and men stood idle and listless in groups on the street corners. The Executive Mansion was dark and still as almost the grave itself.” At the White House, he paid his first respects to Lincoln’s corpse, which was displayed in the East Room, where “crowds are taking their last look at the President’s kind face, mild and benignant as becomes the father of a mourning nation, even in death.”
Hay, who was seldom at a loss for words, left little record of his feelings in the days and weeks following Lincoln’s assassination. Of the two men, uncharacteristically, it was Nicolay who opened up. “After the funeral of the President on Wednesday last I felt entirely too depressed in spirits to write you a letter,” he told Therena. “Words seemed so inadequate to describe my own personal sorrow at the loss of such a friend as the President has been to me . . . that I could not bring myself up to the task of attempting to portray them in language. I think that I do not yet, and probably shall not for a long while realize what a change his death has wrought in my own personal relations, and the personal relations of almost everyone connected with the government in this city, who stood near to him.”
On April 21, a week after the president’s assassination, Hay and Nicolay traveled directly to Illinois, declining to join the nine-car funeral train that would transport the slain president to his final resting place in Springfield. The procession retraced the route that the presidential party had followed in 1861 to Washington, with only a few minor deviations. In every small town and city along the way, mourners lined the railways and crowded the train depots. As the train passed through Lancaster, the town’s most prominent citizens, Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan, lifted their hats solemnly. In New York City, young Theodore Roosevelt watched the procession from the second floor of his parents’ Gramercy area town house, as two hundred African American soldiers joined the official cortege; though the city had attempted to bar them from the proceedings, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sternly interceded. Ultimately, some five million Americans paid their respects, either at public viewings of the president’s casket or in somber funeral trains along packed city streets.
Hay and Nicolay were present in Springfield, where thousands of old friends and neighbors—veterans of the great political battles of the prior decade—walked somberly past the president’s coffin as it lay in state at the old capitol building, where Lincoln once prophesied that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. The next day, May 4, they accompanied the procession to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where the Great Emancipator was laid to final rest. Later that evening, Anna Ridgely happened across Nicolay at a small gathering of friends. “He looked very much fatigued and his face was the picture of despair,” she observed. “He did not stay very long. I suppose his heart was too sad.”
The secretaries returned to Washington, where they worked at a feverish pace to box up Lincoln’s papers and effects, remove their personal belongings from the White House, and prepare themselves for the trip to Europe. They were present for the grand review of the Union army, as its columns marched by the tens of thousands through Washington. Nicolay found it an impressive affair, though left unsaid was his obvious heartache at knowing that Abraham Lincoln, not Andrew Johnson, should have been present on the grandstand. In early May, he told Therena that he was “sorry to say that I think I shall not be able to take you to Paris with me this time—but this I will talk over fully with you while at Pittsfield. I am still trying to get ready to sail about the first of June.” Therena left no record of her disappointment, but she evidently presented George with a stark choice when he reached Illinois. And he took heed. Upon returning to Washington several days later, he sent instructions for their wedding:
We will have the ceremony performed either at your house in the presence of a few friends, or at the Congregational Church by Mr. Carter, at six or seven o’clock in the evening, and then go out to Mrs. Garbutt’s and have a party or reception from eight to ten o’clock as you may decide. Major Hay will be groomsman, and you must select a bridesmaid for him . . . Tell Mrs. Garbutt not to worry herself about any elaborate preparations, and we will save her what trouble and expense we can by bringing cakes, confections and berries from St. Louis . . . Make a list of Pittsfield people to be invited—only let it be large enough. Let the house be filled to overflowing—a perfect jam—and everybody will be entertained and delighted.
Nicolay asked Hay, who was in Springfield tying up loose ends, to meet him in St. Louis in early June, from which they would journey “to Pike so as to be there certainly on the evening of the 15th, when (if my plans don’t fail), I shall need your services.” After the wedding, Hay would have sufficient time to take a few meetings in New York and pay a last visit to the White House, “which I think you had better do, as there are still lots of your little traps lying around that I don’t know what to do with.” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had offered to send their personal boxes home to Illinois, sparing them any further trouble. In closing, Nicolay relayed more good news. “You may sport eagles the first time you wear shoulder straps. The President yesterday signed the order giving you indefinite leave of absence, without pay, but with a brevet colonelcy.”
On June 15, with John Hay at his side, George was married to Therena in her parents’ front parlor in Pittsfield. The ceremony was delayed a half hour by a ferocious thunderstorm, “such as Illinois can manufacture very suddenly on a June evening,” their daughter later wrote. “The storm passed; the minister at last arrived. The reception at Mrs. Garbutt’s was as much of a ‘jam’ as the bridegroom desired and proved a great success. It went down in local history as the first time ice cream was served in Pittsfield to a large evening party.”
After the wedding, Hay paid a brief visit to Washington to clear his belongings out of the Executive Mansion and “found the shadow of recent experiences resting on everything.” “The White House was full of new faces,” he mournfully told Robert, “a swarm of orderlies at doors and windows—the offi
ces filled with new clerks, the anterooms crowded with hungry visitors. It was worse than a nightmare. I got away as soon as I could from the place. I think it will never be again anything less than the evil days in which we left it.” He walked away expecting never to set foot in the building again.