by Joshua Zeitz
Hay’s friends and admirers would not likely have been surprised by the political principles sharply on display in his poem “Remarks of Sergeant Tilmon Joy to the White Man’s Committee of Spunky Point, Illinois.” First published in 1871, as the federal government was employing military and civil means to root out Klan violence in the former Confederate states, his polemic revealed the lasting effect of the war on his outlook on race and slavery, as well as the political prejudices of one who would never entirely disassociate the Democratic Party from disunion and disloyalty. In an address before a white vigilante mob, his title character, a Civil War veteran, begins:
I reckon I git your drift, gents,—
You ’low the boy sha’n’t stay:
This is a white man’s country;
You’re Dimocrats, you say;
And whereas, and seein’, and wherefore,
The times bein’ all out o’ j’int,
The nigger has got to mosey
From the limits o’ Spunky P’int!
Le’s reason the thing a minute:
I’m an old-fashioned Dimocrat too,
Though I laid my politics out o’ the way
For to keep till the war was through.
But I come back here, allowin’
To vote as I used to do,
Though it gravels me like the devil to train
Along o’ sich fools as you.
At the Battle of Vicksburg, the speaker was left for dead on the battlefield, his leg and rib cage shattered by a rebel bullet. As he lay wounded in the hot sun—“and br’iled and blistered and burned!”—and waited to die, suddenly “I seen a thing/I couldn’t believe for a spell.” Tim, a “contraband,” was wounded multiple times in saving the narrator.
So, my gentle gazelles, thar’s my answer,
And here stays Banty Tim:
He trumped Death’s ace for me that day,
And I’m not goin’ back on him!
You may rezoloot till the cows come home,
But ef one of you tetches the boy,
He’ll wrastle his hash to-night in hell,
Or my name’s not Tilmon Joy!
By the early 1870s, many erstwhile supporters of black civil rights had turned against the Reconstruction project. Some looked askance at biracial, reconstructed state governments in the South, some of which shared in the general corruption that pervaded politics in the late 1860s and the 1870s. Others grew tired of rehashing a decades-long debate over race relations and expected freedmen to fend for themselves, now that the work of emancipation and constitutional revision had theoretically been accomplished. Tilmon Joy continued to stand by Tim, just as John Hay continued to stand by the Southern Negro. In his mind, black soldiers earned their citizenship on the battlefield; white Democrats remained a suspect breed—disloyal in war, a mobocracy in peace.
“Remarks of Sergeant Tilmon Joy” (known in some editions as “Banty Tim”) was not Hay’s first literary treatment of race and slavery. In 1869, not long before the first of the Pike County ballads appeared in print, Harper’s Monthly published one of his short stories, “The Foster-Brothers.” Hay’s tale was set in two fictive Mississippi River towns (Thebes, Missouri, and Moscow, Illinois—perfect stand-ins for Hannibal and Warsaw, or countless other border villages), in a time “not many years ago,” before America had been “dipped in blood and . . . arisen from the red baptism cleansed of its deadliest sin.” A young Southern gentleman, Clarence Brydges, pays a visit to his college friend in Moscow. There, he falls madly in love with his friend’s comely, dark-haired neighbor, the enchanting Marie Des Ponts, who lives just across the river with her father. Mr. Des Ponts, Marie’s father, is a “lawyer by profession, gentleman by practice,” “the richest man in Thebes, and the best bred man in Missouri.” A French Creole, he has “the good taste to speak English without lisping . . . good books and good wine . . . The most curious thing about him is that every body owes him money and nobody hates him.” Des Pont’s late wife—Marie’s mother—was an “enthusiastic Southern woman,” according to their neighbor, and an inveterate white supremacist who “thought a free State the abomination of desolation . . . and she did not see how one could be a Christian and not own slaves, when their means permitted; and I believe honestly doubted whether negroes had souls.” Des Ponts honored his wife’s wish that he not bring Marie to dwell in the North, though in choosing Thebes for his home, he resided in the “extreme corner of a slave territory, in sight of free sky and soil.”
Matters come to a head when Marie accepts Clarence’s marriage proposal. With the river rising to dangerous heights, Des Ponts watches from the banks as a steamboat engine explodes, leaving the water filled with “struggling and drowning passengers.” Des Ponts rows out to the scene and rescues one of the drowning men, who turns out to be not only Clarence’s father—en route from Mobile to attend the wedding—but none other than his former master. Des Ponts, the reader now learns, is a runaway slave who has been passing for several decades as a white man. “Sam, you’re a d——d lucky nigger!” his onetime owner says with a smirk. “You have saved your hide forty by picking me up to-night.” Des Ponts—the former slave boy Sam—does not deny his identity. “I have no legal existence, you say; I have no child, no name,” he concedes. “Granting that, your son is legally married to the natural daughter of Miss Julia Shelby of Glenarthur . . . Our children are married and happy. Let them alone. I have given my daughter a dowry of one hundred thousand dollars. I will give you the highest market-price for myself. In return, you will bind yourself by oath, in writing, to silence—that is all.” In the ensuing argument, Victor Brydges counters with his own offer. “Consent to break up this marriage, pay me for yourself and the girl, and we will fix it up without scandal. I don’t forget that we are foster-brothers. You have received much kindness from my family.”
“Stop there!” Des Ponts cries.
I was brought up with you to serve you. I learned to read, helping you. I learned French to be useful to you when you went abroad. I studied at the University to coach you through. I got my degree, and you failed. When at last I offered to buy myself and remain in France, you cursed me and struck me; and after that you were fool enough to trust me. You made me use my credit at the Prefecture of Police to get you a passport under the name of Des Ponts, to assist you in some scandalous intrigue. I swear that until I had that passport in my hands I never dreamed of running away.
The two men come to blows as the boat drifts perilously near the fiery steamboat. Victor’s “whole soul revolted against making any compromise with his slave.” At the last instant, the “foster-brothers” go overboard and sink “to the bottom locked in each other’s arms. They were found in the same posture two days later, lying on the shining sand.” A neighbor comforts the grieving newlyweds with the assurance that “from their graves your beloved fathers—one of whom lost his precious life in this noble effort to rescue the other from the waves—exhort you continually to love one another.” None would be any the wiser in seeing the tragedy for what it was: a metaphorical case of fratricide.
Hay’s short story presaged a larger body of literature featuring African American characters who pass for white. From Charles Chesnutt and Mark Twain in the late nineteenth century to James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Ralph Ellison, and Philip Roth in the twentieth century, authors made wide use of the “passing” trope to question the boundaries of race. Although the black author William Wells Brown may have pioneered this literary convention in 1853, with the publication of his novel, Clotel, Hay was one of its earliest practitioners. The arbitrary bifurcation between black and white had been on his mind at least since the war, when he wondered at the “perfectly white and blue-eyed” Negroes, “neatly & very carefully dressed very quietly & decently behaved,” among the larger crowd of black picnickers on the White House lawn. Nicolay, too, had grappled with these questions after meeting the Haitian chargé d’affaires, a man whom he supposed was “a negr
o, although he does not look like one, having straight black hair, and a very brown, Spanish looking face.” The war compelled both men to rethink many of their assumptions about the meaning of race, and if neither became an outright egalitarian, they emerged with a greater respect for black Americans and a fundamental commitment to ensuring that they be treated equally under the law.
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Widely known as “an immense favorite of the ladies,” Hay was content to lead a bachelor’s life until 1872, when he met Clara Stone, the daughter of a wealthy railroad magnate from Ohio. The attraction was instant. “I have been brought down,” Hay admitted to a friend. “Mourn for me. La femme has ceased to exist for me. There is only one—and one is enough . . . I part from the old life without regret save for the dear old reprobates whom I shall hereafter love in secret and remorselessly cut in public . . . Believe me, I am not the thing I was.” After Clara returned to Cleveland, Hay struck up an intense correspondence with her. He was smitten. Passing through Ohio, he made a stopover to meet her parents, Amasa and Julia Stone. A self-made millionaire many times over, Amasa was formally trained as an engineer and had first made his mark by designing railroad bridges and trestles. He then branched out into railroad management and later assumed a place on the board of directors at both Western Union and Standard Oil. By the time Hay made his acquaintance, the Stone family patriarch had built an enormous mansion on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland’s “Millionaires’ Row,” where his neighbors included John D. Rockefeller. Amasa took an instant liking to Hay and freely gave Clara his permission to return to New York the following winter, where she stayed for three months with her aunt and uncle and saw Hay almost daily. “I have sometimes gazed at you until your eyes and mouth seemed radiant and glorified with some divine beauty and promise,” Hay wrote, “until it seems to me that I could not live without falling at your feet and pouring out my full heart in worship.” Later that year, Hay asked Amasa for his daughter’s hand in marriage, a request to which Stone happily gave his consent. Clara’s mother proved a tougher nut to crack. “There will be an internecine war before Mrs. Stone consents to give up her daughter,” Hay informed Nicolay. “But before many centuries I shall win.” It was not lost upon his friends that marrying into the Stone family would make Hay a millionaire by default. In a letter to Nicolay, Robert Todd Lincoln observed that Amasa Stone would one day be “obliged to leave to . . . J.H.” somewhere between $6 million and $8 million, “which will make John to write with a first class gold pen.”
Hay’s marriage to Clara in February 1874 profoundly changed his material fortunes. On the occasion of the wedding, Amasa Stone gifted his son-in-law $10,000 in railroad bonds, a portent of good bounty to come. “Both my books got more praise than they deserved,” John admitted with satisfaction to a friend, soon after moving with his bride to a comfortable home at 111 East Twenty-fifth Street. “My work in journalism is successful and well paid. And now my father-in-law wishes me to go into a new line of business, which will bring me immediate wealth.” Sensitive to Clara’s longing for the familiar home and hearth of her childhood, Hay agreed the following year to leave the New-York Tribune and move to Cleveland, where Amasa installed the newlyweds in a handsome new mansion of their own on Euclid Avenue. John entered the employ of his father-in-law, who, true to his word, rewarded him with a handsome income. Privately, Hay conceded that his work was “merely the care of investments which are so safe that they require no care.” Amasa had done the hard work in creating the family’s wealth; Hay was now responsible for managing it. He joined the board of the Western Union Telegraph Company and soon proved deft at protecting and growing his wife’s fortune. As an unsympathetic biographer later remarked, “Known best as a verse-maker, John Hay became actually a better businessman.” In truth, he devoted the better part of his time to literary and political pursuits and made a mere sideline of railroad management and bonds. Owing mostly to the generosity and financial tutelage of his father-in-law, within ten years John was worth at least $3 million, a sum equivalent to well over $50 million in today’s money.
When the couple’s first daughter, Helen Julia Hay, was born, John found to his great delight that domestic life suited him well. “My wife keeps well and lovely,” he told a friend, “and my daughter is . . . nine months old and fat and rosy and her only defect is that she looks like me to an extent which is absurd.” Over the next decade, John and Clara would have another daughter, Alice, and two sons, Adelbert (Del) and Clarence. After his death, his daughters would remember him as a kind and doting father. “He was so tender-hearted,” remarked Alice, “that my mother always had to deal with our youthful injuries, illnesses & discipline. He couldn’t bear to see us hurt or made unhappy even for our own good. He spoiled us shamefully.” To Helen, her father was “the jolliest kind of pal” who taught the children “old war time songs & plantation melodies.” When she was older and moved away to attend boarding school, “he used to come out & always arranged a program ahead which began with ‘we will have a nice sandwich for lunch at the Station, we then will go & call on an old lady who wishes to see you & we will finish the day with a delightful & improving lecture on Astronomy’—which of course meant that we lunched at Delmonico’s on whatever I wanted to order . . . & shopped & ‘played’ all afternoon & finished up with a musical comedy.” John was less at ease with his sons, particularly Del, whom he privately ridiculed as “fat and dull.” Father and son had great difficulty in connecting, though it pleased Hay to no end when, years later, President William McKinley appointed Del to an assistant secretary’s position in the White House. Tragically, Del died in an accident in New Haven, just weeks before he was to take up his post.
• • •
When Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio won a sharply contested presidential election in 1876, John Hay, now a resident of the Buckeye State, sent him a gold ring that contained a strand of George Washington’s hair, a souvenir that Alexander Hamilton’s grandson had given him years before. The incoming president was deeply moved by the gesture and promised to “prize it [and] wear it on special occasions if not constantly.” Over the next two years, Hay assumed an ever more active role in Republican Party politics, stumping for local and statewide candidates in Ohio and contributing funds to the national and state parties. Growing restless, he took an immediate interest when friends suggested that he run for Congress. Though he had not considered running for office since his abortive trip to Florida some fifteen years earlier, the prospect of returning to Washington, where he now made periodic trips to visit Nicolay, was appealing. Still, the “Congress matter is not so simple as my high-toned friends think,” he told Whitelaw Reid. “All Euclid Avenue says with one accord that I am the man, but E.A., with all its millions and its tone, does not influence a single primary.” Washington beckoned in other ways. In late 1879, Frederick Seward resigned his post as assistant secretary of state, a position that he also held under his father during the Civil War. As a veteran of three diplomatic stations and a former foreign affairs columnist for the New-York Tribune, Hay was as good a candidate for the job as could be found. He first demurred when Secretary of State William Evarts asked him to serve but soon relented. Over the next year and a half, Clara would remain in Cleveland with the children, making occasional visits to the capital.
By November, Hay had taken up his office at the State Department, where he oversaw a staff of eighty employees, in addition to hundreds of diplomatic and consular appointees serving in foreign posts. On his first day of work, he wandered over to the White House. The president was not in, though Hay experienced an eerie sense of déjà vu upon being ushered into his secretary’s office to leave his card. Two days later, Evarts announced that he was leaving town on personal business and that Hay would serve as acting “Secretary of State in his absence.” “Think of that and hold up your head,” Hay gushed to Clara. “Today was an important one in our history,” he reported the following day. “I sat for the first time in Cabinet meeti
ng, and took the place of highest rank in the room, at the President’s right.” His mind flashed back to the days when he sat against the wall during cabinet meetings and observed William Seward occupying the very place he now claimed. “I felt very odd and modest,” he admitted, “sitting there among the grey-haired elders of the land.” As a secretary, he had stayed silent through countless meetings. Now he was “entitled to speak first on matters of national importance. You may imagine I did not avail myself of the privilege. But I enjoyed listening to the discussions of the others very much indeed. It seems a much more important matter to me now, to be so near the source of authority than it did when I was younger. I did not appreciate it in Lincoln’s time.”
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Hay’s tenure at the State Department also afforded him the opportunity to rekindle an old friendship with Henry Adams. The two men had first met in early 1861, when Henry, the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents, had been in Washington serving as private secretary to his father, Congressman Charles Francis Adams. Neither Adams thought much of Lincoln and hoped that more experienced political hands would steady the ship of state. But Henry quickly found much to admire in the president-elect’s assistant secretary. “Friends are born, not made,” Henry wrote. “From the first slight meeting in February and March 1861, [I] recognized Hay as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of [our] paths.” Shortly after taking office, Lincoln appointed Charles to the critical American ministry in Great Britain. Henry sailed with him, serving simultaneously as his father’s secretary and as the anonymous London correspondent for the New York Times.