by Joshua Zeitz
For a time, it seemed that George would assume the editorship of the Chicago Republican, but upon inspecting the paper’s books, he determined that the venture was financially untenable. Instead, he continued to wander with the seasons. For the first time in over two decades, he had no career, no job, no goals. Years later, Helen recalled the delight that her father took in sitting by the side of a stream that ran through their rented farmhouse in New England. “Small water lilies floated on its surface. Little pools along its edge reflected the gorgeous red of cardinal flowers, and there were shade trees near by. My father enjoyed such small beautiful things more keenly than any other man I have known.” Helen remembered that “when he needed all the courage and patience he could find, he found both on the banks of that little river.”
Absent from Washington for five years, George had not been present for the political mayhem of the early Reconstruction era. He remained on close terms with most Republican members of Congress, but Lincoln’s death and Seward’s retirement left him without power or standing. He tried his hand at poetry but was disappointed when his old acquaintance William Dean Howells politely declined his submission for the Atlantic. He attempted to start a newspaper in St. Louis, a growing border-state city with a sizable German population and a vibrant Republican Party. That, too, proved a nonstarter. During the winter of 1870–71, he wrote a series of dispatches from Florida for the New York Times. Focusing raptly on the same exotic landscape that John Hay had found so beguiling during his journeys in 1863 and 1864, Nicolay described in vivid terms the half-finished regeneration of a tropical paradise laid to ruin not so much by battle as by abandonment during the war. Otherwise silent on the political issues of the Reconstruction era, George betrayed an unforgiving political bias when he praised the “Northern men” who “restored business, reorganized society, reestablished political order. They re-built the burned piers and warehouses of Jacksonville, they started anew its dilapidated sawmills, they repaired its railroad, they freighted its boats and schooners with Northern goods. They reconstructed the state and provided it with a new Constitution.” He likened Northern-born “carpetbaggers” to the “Daniel Boones and the Davy Crocketts of our Western history”—storied pioneers who tamed and democratized an unruly land. In a revealing aside, Nicolay regretted that the war failed to eradicate Florida’s plantation system and instead “kept the ownership of large tracts in single hands.” Though he did not elaborate on how Congress might otherwise have remedied the concentration of economic and political power in the postbellum South, Nicolay surely understood that his position aligned neatly with the land redistribution policies recently advocated by radical Republicans.
On the strength of his Florida articles, Nicolay explored the possibility of a permanent position at the Times but learned that the only open spot was for an evening editor, an unsuitable arrangement for a husband and father. The publishers invited him to contribute more freelance work, but at $10 per column the offer was nowhere near lucrative enough. When the American minister to Bogotá resigned in 1872 to run for Congress, George appealed to anyone who would hear him out—Senators James Harlan and Zachariah Chandler, Vice President Schuyler Colfax, Secretary of the Treasury George Boutwell—for an endorsement. That all pledged their support spoke to the enduring strength of Nicolay’s relationships. That the president gave the job to another man spoke to the limits of his influence. Later that year, at the prodding of Robert Todd Lincoln, who was married to Harlan’s daughter, Nicolay was appointed marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court. With relatively easy duties when the court was in session, and virtually none at all when it was not, the post came with a comfortable salary, a plum office in the U.S. Capitol, and renewed proximity to Washington’s power center. From Springfield, Milton Hay sent hearty congratulations. He could name “few more desirable” assignments and would not, if he were Nicolay, trade it for one paying twice the salary. Milton was being kind. It had been many years since Lincoln’s secretaries rolled their eyes at the hordes of office seekers banging down their doors for favors. Now, as they approached middle age, their perspective on political patronage had changed markedly. “M. Hay told me you might have been Secretary of State if you had made any push for it: or Clerk of the Supreme Court,” John Hay wrote in jest. “A man’s friends have excellent memories for these things after the thing has gone by. But you ought to keep your eyes peeled, and ask without reserve for anything you want. Modesty is the most fatal . . . of vices.”
• • •
Shortly before leaving his post in Madrid, Hay assured his former boss John Bigelow that he would not be without wherewithal upon his return to the United States. “I have a sure income of two or three hundred dollars in ordinary times,” he figured, taking into account his freelance writing and interest in government bonds, “and that is opulence in Warsaw—where living costs nothing and where I have all the comforts of a home, within five minutes walk of the station. If I go away from that bower of innocent repose, I shall spend more and make more.” Though Hay genuinely hoped to spend time tending to his vineyard and visiting with family, his friends hoped that he would put his talents to more productive work. He initially agreed to join George as assistant editor at the Chicago Republican, but, as he explained to William Dean Howells, the paper was “hopelessly” mired in financial trouble. “Nicolay and I agreed in advising the proprietors to sell out on any terms, and they have done it.” From Warsaw, where his “shy little vineyard made its debut with 240” gallons of “good wine,” Hay told Nicolay that he had been in conversation with their friend Whitelaw Reid, then deputy editor of the New-York Tribune. On the strength of Hay’s foreign contacts, Reid was interested in offering him a position as the newspaper’s Paris correspondent, but after five years abroad the prospect of returning to Europe was unappealing. “I will try to shin around and keep afloat until spring,” he decided, and would be “tempted to follow you to Florida—a position which will probably increase as the mercury sinks.”
Hay soon resumed talks “au sérieux” with Reid and joined the Tribune’s New York staff at a salary of $50 per week, a generous sum for that time. If he felt strange being in the employ of a man whom he had once chaperoned at Niagara Falls, Hay said nothing about it. Almost instantly, he became one of “Greeley’s young men,” a group of thirtysomethings to whom the venerable old editor gradually relinquished control of his newspaper. Reid was first among equals and de facto editor in chief. Among the other wunderkinder was Noah Brooks, who had conspired years before to replace the secretaries during Lincoln’s second term. Hay explained to Nicolay that his principal responsibility involved writing editorials—mostly, but not exclusively, on foreign and diplomatic affairs. The first few weeks proved difficult, as he was unaccustomed to churning out regular copy. Having held three diplomatic posts in five years, on the heels of his White House tenure, he was uniquely qualified to comment on a range of topics. “I cannot regard it as a successful experiment as yet,” he admitted, “though Reid and the rest seem satisfied.” In fact, only weeks after his arrival, Reid raised his weekly salary to $65. A year later he was earning $100. “I have seen now enough of your capacity in sudden emergencies and in a wide scope to be ready to repeat the assurance which I gave you at the beginning,” Reid told Hay, “that journalism is sure to prove your true field.” Once again, Hay accidentally found himself in a position of real influence. Though the paper was undergoing a generational change in leadership, what Ralph Waldo Emerson once told Thomas Carlyle—that “Greeley does the thinking for the whole West at $2 per year for his paper”—was essentially still true.
In October 1871, just a year into his tenure at the Tribune, Hay hastily packed his bags and made the arduous, thirty-eight-hour journey by rail to Chicago, where a great fire lasting three days ultimately consumed the whole of downtown. Finding that the telegraph lines were backlogged by many thousands of messages, he managed to talk the Associated Press into transmitting one of his columns; he sent the others back
to New York by mail. Enjoying front-page placement in the Tribune, as well as national distribution in other papers, Hay described for millions of readers “six miles, more or less, of the finest conflagration ever seen. I have here before me smoking ruins and ruins that have broken themselves of smoking; churches as grand in their dilapidation as Melrose by moonlight; mountains of brick and mortar and forests of springing chimneys; but I turned to them all this morning to hunt for the spot where the fire started.” Venturing through the smoke and rubble to that “mean little street of shabby wooden houses” where Mrs. O’Leary (soon of lasting fame) lived, he managed to find the “warped and weather-beaten shanty” where “last Saturday night, came a woman with a lamp to the barn behind the house, to milk the cow with the crumpled temper, that kicked the lamp, that spilled the kerosene, that fired the straw that burned Chicago.” Walking around the rear of the house, Hay spied “Our Lady of the Lamp” knitting by the window. Her husband was talking with two neighbors and greeted the inquiring newspaperman with “sleepy, furtive eyes. I asked him what he knew about the origin of the fire. He glanced up at his friends and said, civilly, he knew very little; he was waked up at about 9 o’clock by the alarm, and fought from that time to save his house . . . He seemed fearful that all Chicago was coming down upon him for prompt and integral payment of that $200,000,000 his cow had kicked over.” His work done, Hay left Chicago for Springfield, assuring Reid that he had “done as well as I could. I have a clean conscience, [having] given the Great Moral Organ 16 hours a day ever since I arrived.”
Hay kept late hours at the paper, often working until two o’clock in the morning to shepherd his copy through editorial review and layout, though he admitted to John Bigelow that he “waste[d] two-thirds of my time trying to think of something to write about.” For hours at a time, he sat “staring at the City Hall in blank imbecility.” At his best, Hay churned out as many as four columns each day, on topics as diverse as European diplomacy, the dissolution of liberty, the secretary of the Treasury, and the defects of the jury system. The Tribune offices were a flurry of activity at almost all hours, with some of the brightest men of their generation jockeying for chairs and desks, of which there seemed to be a chronic shortage. When Greeley left the paper in 1872 to run for president, Reid inherited his mantle. Without formal title, Hay became his second-in-command. Among his peers, he was greatly admired. Widely read and traveled, formally educated, and a veteran of the Lincoln White House, he struck his fellow journalists as several cuts above ordinary. “It was a liberal education in the delights of intellectual life,” observed one of his colleagues, “to sit in intimate companionship with John Hay and watch the play of that well-stored and brilliant mind . . . the wide knowledge of men and nations, of peoples and governments; the familiar and ever-ready knowledge of all that is best in literature, and over it all the play of a humor which was next-door neighbor to melancholy and all the finer for that close association.” It was around this time that friends saw Hay and Reid playing a game of leapfrog over the ash cans outside the Century Club, after shutting down its bar in the twilight hours of morning. After years of wandering, he had regained his “rocking walk” and stride.
• • •
Hay’s growing influence at the New-York Tribune dovetailed with his emerging renown as a poet, essayist, and short-story writer. Though he contributed occasional poems to Northern newspapers and magazines during the war, his breakthrough moment came in 1871, when his work appeared five times in the Atlantic, six times in Harper’s Weekly, and once in Harper’s Monthly. Finally abandoning his trademark mimicry of romantic English verse, Hay returned to the dialect and setting that he knew most intimately. His Pike County ballads, cast in the vernacular of southern Illinois, were first published and then republished in dozens of newspapers and magazines in 1870. A pamphlet edition sold as quickly as it came off the presses, followed shortly thereafter by a 167-page book. Hay initially played down the value of his poems. He professed to have dashed them off mostly for sport, as well as for easy money (Harper’s paid him as much as $50 per contribution). He told Nicolay that he was amazed to find that his “ridiculous rhyme” was having a “ridiculous run.” “Little Breeches,” the first of his efforts, “has been published in nearly the whole country press from here to the Rockies. As my initials are not known . . . I have not been disgraced by it.”
Hay’s volume opened with “Jim Bludso,” a poem that he privately judged “more widely liked and denounced than Little Breeches.” Like all of the verse in Pike County Ballads, it spoke the vernacular that Hay knew as a young boy living in a river town along the Mississippi.
Wall, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,
Becase he don’t live you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Bell?
The story of a steamboat engineer who sacrifices his life to hold off a boiler-room fire long enough for the crew and passengers to debark to safety, “Jim Bludso” revealed Hay’s evolving relationship with the West. As a college student, he apologized awkwardly for his coarse upbringing; now in his thirties, with a decade of political and diplomatic experience under his belt, he saw something valuable in the small river towns and prairie villages he had known so intimately in his youth. Also evident in the Pike County ballads is a strong democratic spirit, nurtured during his White House tenure. In his younger days, as in his later years, after he married into considerable wealth, it was easy for Hay’s detractors to write him off as a snob. It was true that he did not suffer fools (or, more accurately, that he suffered them all too gladly). But his lifelong devotion to Lincoln fostered in Hay a theoretical reverence for common men and common places. His wartime diaries and letters often compared the Washington cognoscenti in terms sharply unflattering with the collective wisdom of Northern soldiers and voters. His regard for hardworking, honest, common people—people with whom Hay grew up but now rarely mingled—was on full display in his tale of the riverboat engineer. Jim, his title character,
. . . weren’t no saint,—but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
In its day, Pike County Ballads won wide acclaim and placed its young author squarely within the early ranks of the American literary realist movement. Though unromantic, the poems were sentimental, as was the case with “Little Breeches,” the adventure of a toddler who goes missing in the snowy woods when the team harnessed to his carriage scares at a foreign sound and bolts off, leaving his helpless father to give chase by foot. Just four years old, young Gabe is a salty character:
Peart and chipper and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight,—
And I’d larnt him to chaw terbacker
Jest to keep his milk-teeth white.
After hours of vain pursuit, and despairing of ever finding his son, his father stumbles upon Gabe in a small wooden shed, buried deep in the snow-covered forest.
How did he git thar? Angels.
He could never have walked in that storm.
They jest scooped down and toted him
To whar it was safe and warm.
And I think that saving a little child,
And fotching him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around The Throne.
Among the many American literary types who admired Hay’s new departure was Mark Twain. Just a few years Hay’s senior, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, six hundred yards across the Mississippi Riv
er from Pike County. Largely populated by the same transplants from Virginia and Kentucky, Hannibal shared almost every cultural trait with Warsaw and Pittsfield, except slavery. Fourteen years after Hay’s collection appeared in print, Twain explained that in his new work, Huckleberry Finn, “a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; . . . the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” After Hay’s death in 1905, Twain recalled that Pike County Ballads was the first literary incarnation of the dialect now so intimately associated with heroes of his own work. In fact, Hay’s good friend Bret Harte had beaten him to the punch by two months. Harte’s immensely popular poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (known alternatively as “The Heathen Chinee”), delighted readers of the Overland Monthly in September 1870, just a few weeks before the first of Hay’s ballads appeared in print. Inspired by native Pike County migrants whom he met in the gold mines of California, Harte technically pioneered the use of regional vernacular in realist poetry. But to both men went the credit for making American characters speak in authentic American accents. Hay’s “sense of the backwoods” and “knowledge of the frontier . . . loom large and rude” in these poems, Howells told readers of the North American Review. “They belong to the very few results in any of the arts which have been absolutely of the Western cause.” Only someone with Hay’s “scope and penetration” could have written so vivid a portrait of “that bygone West.” The college sophomore who had once been so thoroughly embarrassed by the return address on his trunk had made it safe for a generation of authors to extol the virtues of the ascendant West.