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

by Joshua Zeitz

  Though their paths occasionally crossed in the following years, Adams and Hay did not have occasion to revisit their friendship until two decades later. In the fall of 1880, Adams and his wife, Clover, rented a comfortable town house at 1607 H Street, adjacent to Lafayette Park and just a stone’s throw from the White House. They quickly connected with Hay. Together with Clara, who joined him for most of the winter of 1880–81, and Clarence King, a dashing, Yale-educated geologist who earned fame for surveying the spans of the transcontinental railroad, Hay found fast and enduring fellowship among a self-selected set of wealthy, educated peers. Calling themselves the “Five of Hearts,” the group went so far as to design its own emblem, which they then emblazed on stationery and dinner menus and even on custom-made china and tea sets and enamel breast pins. From the recesses of Clover and Henry’s drawing room, the five “hearts” talked art, politics, literature, science, and gossip. Of the group, Clara was the least worldly and the most reticent. She “never speaks,” Clover noticed, which was fine, since John “chats for two.”

  George Nicolay was Hay’s oldest friend. Henry Adams became his closest. Over the next quarter century, they traveled together, dined together, and, when apart, wrote each other nearly every week. In later years they would even build adjacent mansions on Lafayette Square, with direct views to windows of the White House bedroom that Hay had once shared with Nicolay. But in 1880, Hay longed once again to break free from Washington. With Clara back in Ohio, he looked forward to March 1881, when the new president, James A. Garfield, would take office. “I cannot really say I regret having come here,” he told his wife, “because it was a duty & the experience will be good to remember. But it is a hard business to live in a tavern, when one has a pretty house, and a pretty wife, and three pretty babies somewhere else.” His workdays were long. He grew weary of the “clamorous greedy host that comes continually for offices that are not worth having.” While the parties were exciting at first, it soon got “a little tiresome to meet the same diplomats every night.” Even filling in at cabinet meetings grew routine. But Hay knew that he would be “glad all my life to have had the opportunity of serving” and “to have had my little share in the work of carrying on the government of a great nation.”

  Hay still entertained the notion of running for Congress in 1880, though his position would require that he skip the fall canvass and leave it to friends to present his case to the voters. If elected, he could bring his family to the capital. But Clara preferred Cleveland to Washington. Neither did she care for many of the dinners, teas, and salon parties that had sustained her husband for two decades and counting. Mark Twain later remembered a Sunday afternoon when he and Hay were “chatting and laughing and carrying on almost like our earlier selves of ’67.” In came “Mrs. Hay, gravely clad, gloved, bonneted, and just from church, and fragrant with the odors of Presbyterian sanctity.” When Twain stood up to exchange pleasantries, Clara brushed right past him, offering a cool “Good morning, Mr. Clemens,” before leaving the room. Embarrassed but not surprised, Hay offered feebly that his wife was “very strict about Sunday.” If he were to convince her to move to Washington, life as a congressional spouse would not likely be the right inducement. For her sake, he assured Clara that he could not be nominated if he did not work for it, and when another man was chosen to be the party’s standard-bearer, he pretended to content himself with the knowledge that “I should have been nominated if I had stayed in—but I am glad I did not.” “The more I see the life of a congressman here,” he told her on another occasion, with uncertain conviction, “the less agreeable it appears.”

  In the months between Garfield’s election and his inauguration, Hay prepared to close up shop at the State Department and go home. In December, the president-elect tendered an unexpected offer: he wanted Hay to return to the White House as presidential secretary. Technically, during the Lincoln administration Nicolay had been secretary and Hay, assistant secretary. But Garfield was sensitive to the appearance of asking Hay to take two steps back, to a job he had essentially occupied twenty years earlier. He meant for his chief aide to play a consultative role in developing administration policy, much as later presidential secretaries would do. He was also prepared to ask Congress to make the position equal in rank and pay to an assistant cabinet position. Hay waited a decent interval before politely declining the offer. “To do a thing well,” he told Garfield, “a man must take some pleasure in it.” He held the president-elect in the highest esteem, but he could not stomach the constant “envy, meanness, ignorance, and the swinish selfishness” that necessarily greeted the gatekeeper to the most powerful person in the land. “I am not going back on Democracy,” he promised. “It is a good thing—the hope and salvation of the world. I mean simply that I am not fit for public office.”

  The Hays were in Washington for Garfield’s inauguration and stayed for several weeks after so that John could be on hand to advise the new president on cabinet and diplomatic appointments. In late April, Clara returned to Cleveland with the children, while John headed north for New York. Whitelaw Reid was in Europe for six months on his honeymoon, and Hay reluctantly agreed to fill in as acting editor of the Tribune. It had been some twenty years since he arrived in the capital with Lincoln. He looked forward to the day when he could set aside all other pursuits and join Nicolay in the serious work of writing their authorized biography.

  CHAPTER 13

  Breadwinners

  The house that Amasa Stone built for his daughter and son-in-law on Euclid Avenue was a lasting monument to his family’s wealth. Fashioned out of sandstone, it boasted intricate, hand-carved woodwork made of black walnut, furnishings selected by the same interior designers who had refurbished the White House, “gilding and black dado,” and a rolling front lawn tucked neatly behind a row of tall elm trees and flagstone sidewalks. Incredibly, the mansion served as John and Clara’s primary residence for just a handful of years. Soon after returning to Cleveland in 1881, Hay began suffering from debilitating headaches, nausea, and dizzy spells that would bedevil him for the rest of his life. His friends privately judged him a hypochondriac, but they encouraged his frequent sojourns in Europe, where he ministered to his ailments at clinics and spas then regarded as the most advanced in the world. In 1883, when a large parcel of land on Lafayette Square went onto the market, Hay and Henry Adams decided to buy it and build adjacent homes. John and Clara took the larger, corner plot, at a price of $50,000, while Henry and Clover purchased the smaller plot for $25,000. Over the next two years, both families oversaw the construction of manors that put Euclid Avenue to shame. The Hay mansion ultimately cost $100,000 to construct. At twelve thousand square feet, it featured marble fireplaces in almost every room, an entire floor for servants, a sprawling parlor and library, five bedrooms, three bathrooms with modern plumbing, mahogany woodwork, wainscoting, and a grand stairway “so wide that ten persons could walk abreast without jostling,” according to one newspaper account. It was filled to the brim with ornate furnishings from what Hay sardonically referred to as a “$1,000 store,” as no item could be bought for less. And yet the Hays barely lived there, either, until John’s appointment as secretary of state in 1898. Despondent over the death of her father, Clover Adams committed suicide shortly before the twin houses were complete. Grief-stricken, Henry set out for years of travel, stopping only intermittently to visit his new house. With Clover dead and Henry gone, the entire rationale for living in Washington seemed obviated. The Hays spent only half of each year in Washington and no more than a few weeks in Cleveland. The rest of their months were spent traveling in Europe. Effectively, they had two mansions but no home.

  Hay, who was raised solidly middle-class, soon learned by observation that wealth cannot necessarily buy happiness. In December 1876, shortly after John and Clara moved into their house on Euclid Avenue, a railroad bridge over Ohio’s Ashtabula Creek snapped under the weight of a heavy snowfall, causing an engine and several passenger cars to fall in
to the ravine below. Ninety-two people perished in what was then the worst train accident in American history. Amasa Stone owned controlling interest in the Lake Shore Railway, which had built—and owned—the Ashtabula Creek bridge. In the ensuing months, he and his company withstood blistering attacks in the press for allegedly shoddy engineering work. His chief engineer, Charles Collins, committed suicide after withstanding hours of hostile questioning in front of a state legislative investigative committee. The Lake Shore Railway paid out fines and damages in the amount of half a million dollars, and though Amasa’s personal fortune remained intact, his reputation lay in tatters. He never recovered from his psychological scars. In 1883, while John and Clara were in Europe, Stone shot himself to death in the upstairs bathroom of his Euclid Avenue estate.

  In the aftermath of his death, Amasa’s two daughters and sons-in-law split an estate valued at between $6 million and $20 million, equivalent in today’s money to over $400 million. Effortlessly—by no more than marrying the right bride—Hay acquired more wealth than he could have imagined in his youth. He was free to write books, play at politics, serve in high office, travel, or do nothing at all for long stretches at a time.

  Affluence had an indelible influence on Hay’s worldview. As he associated more exclusively with well-to-do peers, he grew more removed from the world he had known as a young man. In distance, his oldest friends, George and Therena Nicolay, lived just a quarter mile away, where they built a fine new house on Capitol Hill (“it is a new large roomy one,” Hay reported to Clara, “and cost almost nothing, $5400”). But they might as well have lived a continent apart. After gentle prodding from Therena, Hay genially dropped by for an early evening meeting of a “literary society” that the Nicolays hosted regularly in their parlor. “It was not very gay,” he told Clara. “Mr. Wordhoff read an essay on Darwin and a large artist, 7 feet high, with hair seven inches long, read a paper on art.” Going forward, he would find a polite way to decline such invitations. In later years, Nicolay and Hay vacationed together in Colorado, followed each other’s sicknesses and family crises attentively, and devoted the better part of two decades to their Lincoln biography, an endeavor that required close and constant collaboration. They spent countless hours in each other’s studies and parlors and were the closest of friends until they died, but more and more it was history that formed their bond, rather than a commonality of lifestyles or interests. Their worlds were no longer quite the same.

  Hay’s critics would later criticize him as an elitist. A financial booster of the Republican Party, he came to be associated with its conservative, hard-money wing. He opposed labor unions and government regulation of the economy. He fraternized easily with the barons of industry and sympathized with their laissez-faire worldview. The onetime champion of European revolutionary movements now feared blood in the streets at every work slowdown or strike. It was easy to assume that Hay’s social and economic conservatism sprang from his newfound wealth. But it was not money—which he acquired by accident more than anything else—that informed his social outlook. Hay traveled the same ideological road as many men of his generation. In their youth, they cut their teeth on political reform; as older men, they settled comfortably into conservatism. As with so many other pieces of their lives, the Civil War had much to do with the trajectory of their thinking.

  • • •

  When he returned to the United States with his father in 1868, after serving for eight years as private secretary at the American embassy in London, Henry Adams had been astounded by the vast changes that the Civil War had wrought. “Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000,” he later reflected, “landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before.” In 1861, when he departed Washington for England, four million African American slaves lived in a state of perpetual, hereditary bondage. Thousands of these enslaved souls lived within a stone’s throw of the Capitol. Now they were all legally free, invested with the rights and immunities of citizens and well on their way to enjoying the right of manhood suffrage—at least for a time, and in certain parts of the country. Within months of Adams’s return, the first African American congressmen would take their seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, where his grandfather and father had served honorably in early times. The sweep of history had indeed been profound. But Henry was likely thinking of a larger and more encompassing change, best expressed that year by James Garfield. “In April 1861, there began in this country an industrial revolution . . . as far-reaching in its consequences as the political and military revolution through which we have passed,” the young war hero turned congressman told the House. A country of small towns, small shops, and small farms was well on its way to becoming an urban, industrial behemoth, and to many Americans this transformation was owed at least in part to the modernizing influence of the war. It was little wonder that the historian George Ticknor, writing in 1869, perceived a “great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.”

  In truth, the change was not so complete, nor wholly a product of the war. But the challenges of paying, feeding, clothing, arming, and transporting two million soldiers and sailors dramatically accelerated economic transformations that were already evident by 1860. To fund the Union war effort, Congress borrowed heavily and passed a legal tender act, creating the nation’s first uniform paper currency. The resulting expansion of the monetary supply spurred economic development throughout the North and the Northwest, while widespread bond sales cemented the attachment between ordinary citizens and the federal state. For those who invested their savings in 5-20 and 7-30 Civil War bonds, inflation likely ate away at many of the profits, but the financier Jay Cooke and his army of subscription agents earned a fortune, as did speculators who later gobbled the notes up at a discount. So, too, did a new industrial class grow rich off government contracts—men like Philip Armour, who revolutionized the canned-meat industry; John D. Rockefeller, who conceived new processes for oil refinement; and Thomas Scott, a wartime innovator in railroad management. The economic revolution did not stop there. With Democratic opposition sharply curtailed by the withdrawal of Southern congressmen, Republican congressional leaders enacted a sweeping legislative agenda that fundamentally transformed the country. They passed the Homestead Act, which bequeathed 160 acres of federal land to any western settler who lived for five years on his allotment and made requisite improvements to the land. They passed the Land-Grant College Act, which provided each state with 30,000 acres of federal land for each of its senators and congressmen; the states, in turn, were empowered to dispose of their grants and dedicate the sale proceeds to the establishment of state universities. Finally, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, granting private railroad companies 6,400 acres of federal land, and between $16,000 and $48,000 in loans, per mile of track laid. One hundred and twenty million acres and thirty-five thousand track miles later came the realization of a long-deferred dream: a transcontinental rail system that opened the “vast, trackless spaces” of the West (in Walt Whitman’s words) to settlement and economic development.

  The results of this catalytic spurt of spending, monetary expansion, and railroad construction baffled the mind of young Henry Adams, who had been abroad for most of it. Between 1865 and 1873, industrial production increased by 75 percent, allowing the United States to leapfrog ahead of every other nation, save Britain, in manufacturing output. Giant trunk lines absorbed smaller railroad companies, while the rush for construction caused iron and steel demand to double. The burgeoning system unified the inhabitants of a sprawling continent and created new opportunities for farmers, ranchers, miners, and industrialists to exploit, finish, and merchandise the vast resources of the trans-Mississippi West. Now connected to major centers of trade and commerce, cattle ranchers moved the
ir herds into the flat plains of Kansas and Nebraska. Wheat fields flourished from the Dakotas down to Oklahoma. Timber flowed in from the Pacific Northwest, while miners tapped enormous deposits of gold, silver, and copper from California, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. These extractive and productive industries sparked an economic boom that lasted well into the early 1870s, and the boom created unprecedented opportunities for graft. In 1872, the Crédit Mobilier scandal implicated thirty sitting congressmen, as well as Vice President Schuyler Colfax, in an elaborate double-billing and securities fraud scheme associated with the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad line. The Republicans were ultimately forced to replace Colfax on the ticket, bringing the vice president’s public career to an inglorious close. Three years later, the Whiskey Ring affair exposed dozens of federal revenue collectors in a massive kickback scheme. On the state and local levels, corruption was equally rampant, though nowhere more brazen than New York City, where William M. Tweed, the boss of the Tammany Hall Democratic organization, made an art form of public graft and fraud. Through the good offices of Thomas Nast, the staff cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly, Tweed became an emblem for the excesses of the new age.