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

by Joshua Zeitz

  To many Americans, it seemed that trains were responsible for all that was good and bad about the new economic order. “The locomotive,” argued the Nation, “is coming in contact with the framework of our institutions.” Railroad companies hired armies of lobbyists, placed state and federal legislators on “retainer,” and extracted grants of money, tax rebates, land, and monopoly rights from every level of government. “Corruption belongs to no one party but has invaded all,” claimed a Pennsylvania newspaper, an observation that was true but that sidestepped the inexorable bond the Republican Party forged with the emerging industrial and financial elite in the interest of prosecuting a war on slavery.

  Many Republicans, particularly the generation of soldiers and officeholders who rose up the party ranks in the 1860s, easily reconciled their antislavery origins with their party’s increasingly symbiotic relationship to the nation’s economic titans. Businessmen who helped finance and furnish the army had proven themselves patriotic partners in blotting out the dual sins of slavery and disunion. As Carl Schurz noted, his friend the financier and bond broker Jay Cooke had “rendered very valuable service to the country during the Civil War, and I do not think anybody grudged him the fortune he gathered at the same time for himself.” Many Republican elites recalled that during the New York City draft riots in 1863, working-class ruffians had shamelessly attacked defenseless black orphans, while the city’s business and professional classes, joined under the auspices of the Union League, lent their wealth and prestige to the struggle against slavery and secession. The antislavery position was itself grounded in a laissez-faire economic worldview that understood economic progress as a noble goal, ipso facto. The free-labor synthesis held that men should be unrestricted in their ambition to work, thrive, and accumulate wealth. Left to their own devices and unencumbered by artificial barriers to progress—the most egregious barrier being chattel slavery—the intelligent, worthy, better citizens would prosper, while society as a whole would benefit from the cumulative effect of self-interested competition. The rise of a prosperous industrial and professional class in the postwar period, and the party’s close association with its leading beneficiaries, did not strike most Republicans as a betrayal of their moral legacy. Most antebellum Republicans detested slavery because they believed that it impeded material progress. That the economic boom of the 1860s coincided with the destruction of the peculiar institution seemed only natural to many party leaders and supporters.

  Even on questions that bore no ostensible relationship to the old issues of secession and slavery, public men often filtered their ideas through the prism of the Civil War. While many Democrats supported an inflationary policy of redeeming war bonds with greenbacks, Republicans like Charles Sumner insisted on a hard-money policy that benefited bondholders at the expense of indebted farmers and workers. “Every greenback is red with the blood of fellow-citizens,” he intoned. It was the government’s obligation to redeem the bonds in gold, no matter the social consequences.

  The boom proved lucrative to the small number of men who controlled access to local resources, though much less profitable for the hundreds of thousands of ranchers, farmers, factory workers, miners, and railroad laborers who supplied the muscle. Rarely did it occur to business and political elites that they had not prospered strictly by the rules of the free-labor economy. Railroad companies profited heavily from government land grants and financial subsidies. The Timber Culture Act (1873) and the Desert Land Act (1877) gave away millions of acres of public land to those with the means to plant trees and irrigate arid allotments in the Southwest. The Mineral Land Act of 1872 sold access to valuable metal deposits at a song—no more than $5 per acre—to mining companies, while cattle ranchers freely availed themselves of grazing rights on public land. At every turn, an activist state born of necessity to prosecute the Civil War found new and increasingly inventive ways to subsidize business concerns that had grown out of the same armed struggle. Many of the primary recipients of this public largesse remained oblivious to the role that the government played in making them wealthy.

  The postwar economic boom profoundly altered the political landscape. By the early 1870s, many Republicans had tired of the Southern problem; twenty years of heated debate over slavery and the Civil War, race and Reconstruction, had diminished their interest. The rampant graft of the Grant years inspired many of the party’s founding stalwarts, including Charles Francis Adams Sr., to bolt and form a new Liberal movement founded on solid anticorruption and free-market ideas. When the Liberals nominated Horace Greeley for president in 1872, John Hay, as an employee of the Tribune, joined the reformist bandwagon and penned regular columns that lambasted the president’s organization men. Later that year, when the Democrats formed a coalition with the Liberals and also nominated Greeley as their standard-bearer, Hay gravitated back to Grant. In his capacity as a Tribune editorial writer, he might have been compelled to contribute anonymous broadsides for his boss, but as he later remarked to Whitelaw Reid, “The Democratic party is our Evil—our virtue is developed by fighting it.” Enough veterans of the antislavery political movement shared Hay’s animus for the Democratic Party and helped Grant secure a landslide reelection victory.

  For many onetime Republicans, the short-lived Liberal Party proved a temporary byway to the Democrats, as concern over political and economic corruption displaced race as a primary driver of political identification; those who traveled this migratory route included Charles senior and Henry Adams, Lyman Trumbull, George Julian, and John Andrew, many of whom believed that the Grand Old Party had lost its way and become a permanent governing fixture of industrial interests. Others, like John Hay, remained in the Republican fold, though they regarded themselves as friends of reform. Writing to William Dean Howells several months after Rutherford B. Hayes triumphed over the Democratic nominee, Samuel Tilden, Hay admitted that he “liked Tilden very much, I voted for him for Governor [of New York]—the only Democratic vote I ever cast—I did not vote for Greeley. But I never allowed myself to expect as much from any man as I feel forced now to hope from Hayes. We are in a bad way. That herd of wild asses’ colts in Washington, braying and kicking up their heels, is an unsatisfactory result of a hundred years of democracy.” Hay did not believe that the incoming president possessed sufficient political capital to achieve meaningful civil service reform, but he hoped that he could “chasten the outrageous indecency of the present system as much as any one could.” Privately, Hay dismissed most congressmen as “asses” but laid ultimate blame for the sorry state of politics on the voters themselves.

  Political corruption was one part of the political debate in the 1870s. Economic justice was another. Most Republicans, be they reformers or “stalwarts,” and even many Democrats (particularly those who had once been Liberal Republicans), were united in their hostile reception of so-called class legislation—laws intended to blunt capitalism’s rougher edges. “I am utterly opposed to the idea of regulating hours of labor by law,” declared Senator William Pitt Fessenden, who had served as Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, following Salmon P. Chase’s departure from the cabinet. Many Republicans similarly decried efforts to regulate labor and factory safety as akin to “subverting the right of individual property.” “The government,” wrote E. L. Godkin, the influential editor of the Nation and a leading liberal reformer, “must get out of the ‘protective’ business and the ‘subsidy’ business and the ‘improvement’ and ‘development’ business . . . It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.” In theory, Republicans were equally offended by the “class” demands of organized laborers and industrial titans. Francis Parkman, a noted historian and author, spoke for many upwardly mobile professionals when he lamented the rise of an “ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy.” Most liberals shared with their more conservative brethren an overriding fear of working-class excess. In their minds, as a threat to public institutions, it far outweighed the immoderation of the railroad or mining interests. Men
who once used a strong central state to destroy slavery and promote economic development now lambasted the “fallacy of attempts to benefit humanity by legislation” and believed any such effort “by nature wasteful, corrupt, and dangerous.” “Things must regulate themselves,” one newspaper argued, in a pithy but powerful iteration of prevailing Republican wisdom.

  If liberals were more offended than party stalwarts by public corruption, they shared with most Republicans a theoretical commitment to laissez-faire capitalism—except when their personal interests demanded state intervention. When times were good, it was easy to preserve the fiction that the free-labor society had created the same shared prosperity and harmony of national interests that its theorists had long posited. With real wages up roughly 40 percent since the end of the war, there seemed to be something for everyone to enjoy in the new order, at least outside the South, a region that would struggle for decades to overcome staggering wartime losses—roughly one-third of its livestock, half the value of its land, and the expropriation of slave property worth at least $3 trillion in today’s currency. But when the economy crashed in 1873, brought on by the failure of Jay Cooke to market $300 million in Northern Pacific Railroad bonds, increasing attention turned to the political corruption that had fed the cycle of overbuilding and overspeculation and to the class inequities that seemed to have deepened over the previous decade and a half. In the wake of the crash, various labor and reform movements took center stage, their partisans decrying the practical demise of the old free-labor dream in which each man owned his own farm or workshop, and where even the hired man could earn sufficient wages to become economically independent one day. This ideal was fast giving way to “the wages system,” whereby most men, and now many single women, worked for someone else. Reflecting popular dismay at the rise of a permanent workforce of employees, one union cried that “the masses will never be completely free—until they have thrown off the system of working for hire.”

  Tensions boiled over in 1874 when a massive strike wave hit the nation’s mines and railroads. The following year, thousands of miners brought operations in the anthracite coal region to a virtual standstill. Republican newspapers railed against the workers, deeming them “enemies of society” who believed that “the world owes them a living.” Horace White, a veteran of the political antislavery movement who had traveled the rails with Lincoln during the 1858 Senate race, warned of a “communistic war upon vested rights and property” and bewailed the extent to which universal manhood suffrage had “cheapened the ballot.” These concerns reached a crescendo in 1877 when workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad staged a walkout over scheduled wage cuts, provoking a nationwide general strike that paralyzed commerce across the emerging industrial belt of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic states. In Pittsburgh, working-class protesters clashed with the state militia, resulting in a fire that destroyed a hundred locomotives and two thousand railroad cars. General work stoppages quieted factories and mills in Chicago and St. Louis. In the coalfields of western and southern Pennsylvania, forty thousand workers walked off the job. Predictably, Republican organs, both reform and regular, bitterly condemned these actions. The Nation, once known for its strident support of civil rights for freedmen, now rebuked “the most extensive and deplorable workingmen’s strike which ever took place in this, or indeed in any other country.” In cities across the country, wealthy and middle-class professionals formed armed militia groups to protect private property against the “Great Strike.” Many militiamen even donned tight-fitting army uniforms that had been gathering dust in their closets for over a decade. From Washington, President Hayes ordered the military to break the strike, which it did with overwhelming force, reopening clogged rail lines, busting up union meetings, and escorting strikebreakers through the line. “The strikers have been put down by force,” noted Hayes, a Civil War combat veteran who had fought enthusiastically against slavery just a decade before. In their zeal for a free-labor economy free from state intervention, Republicans could be brutally inconsistent when their economic or political interests were on the line. Years after they left active duty, they continued to view themselves as citizen soldiers, now engaged in an armed struggle to protect private property rights.

  Writing to a friend, Ulysses S. Grant, whose presidential administration, if corrupt, had nevertheless attempted to protect the rights and safety of Southern freedmen, found the entire episode “a little queer.” “During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and ‘reformatory’ portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes . . . the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens.” Grant did not disapprove of his successor’s actions. “All parties agree that this is right,” he explained, “and so do I.” Unlike most members of his party, he simply demanded that the forces of Confederate retrenchment be met with the same steady hand as the fomenters of labor unrest. Republicans continued to insist on the benefits of unfettered markets, free of government interference, even as they supported policies that converted public lands and resources to private wealth. By the same token, the experience of war made them comfortable with the existence of a strong central state, armed with a strong standing army that could be put to use in the protection of capital. It is hard to imagine such equanimity in the face of government coercion before the Civil War. But as a speaker at the Williams College commencement explained in 1864, “We at the North, all learned that there was in our . . . Government a power of which we never dreamed.”

  • • •

  For John Hay, the Great Strike of 1877 was no mere abstraction. Following the collapse of the railroad bridge at Ashtabula, Amasa Stone left the country for a long sojourn in Europe, where he could close his ears to the widespread censure of his managerial and engineering skills. Left to manage the family’s business affairs, Hay reported with disgust and alarm that “the country has been at the mercy of the mob, and on the whole the mob has behaved rather better than the country.” With the city’s businesses at a standstill and strikers preventing merchants from receiving their goods, Cleveland was a powder keg, vulnerable to the first spark of violence. “A few shots fired by our militia company would ensure their own destruction and that of the city,” he wrote. His ideology still colored by memories of the Civil War, Hay condemned the “unarmed rebellion of foreign workingmen, mostly Irish,” who at “any hour the mob chooses can destroy any city in the country.” He assured his father-in-law that he would send Clara and the children away if the strikers grew violent. “There is a mob in every city ready to join with the strikers, and there is no means of enforcing the law in case of a sudden attack on private property. We are not Mexicans yet—but that is about the only advantage we have over Mexico.” In the aftermath of the disturbances, Hay took spiritual refuge in his partisan Republican temple, daring to hope that “the law-and-order men may rally to the party which is unquestionably the law-and-order party.”

  Like many of his party and class, Hay was profoundly unnerved by the labor strife of the mid-1870s. “The very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of working men,” he told Stone, “and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them to all lengths.” He soon enough resumed the easy task of running Amasa’s business concerns and researching the first chapter of the Lincoln biography. Two years later, he returned to Washington to take up the second chair at the State Department. But the strikes seared his political consciousness. During the winter of 1882–83, while traveling through Europe with his family, Hay dashed off a short novel that he titled The Bread-Winners and sent it off to his old friend William Dean Howells. Howells had by then departed the Atlantic but readily agreed to share the manuscript with the new ed
itor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Upon reviewing Hay’s work, Aldrich offered to serialize it in the magazine, provided that he be permitted to publish the author’s name. Hay preferred to lob his brick through the enemy’s window anonymously. He found another magazine, the Century, that was willing to safeguard his privacy. The Bread-Winners appeared chapter by chapter from August 1883 through January 1884 and was issued in book form by Harper & Brothers. It proved an instant success and provoked widespread speculation as to its authorship.

  Set in the fictional city of Buffland—a medium-sized industrial town on Lake Erie, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Cleveland—The Bread-Winners told the story of Arthur Farnham, a wealthy former military officer who lives a refined life of leisure in his mansion on Algonquin Avenue. When an unscrupulous labor agitator, Sam Sleeny, calls a general strike and threatens the town’s better citizens with several nights of violence and expropriation, Farnham organizes a militia company of army veterans to protect the city’s homes and businesses. Other characters include Maud Matchin, a carpenter’s daughter who imprudently fritters away her days dreaming of ascendance to the upper class, even at the expense of a marriage offer from a perfectly respectable, if dim-witted, apprentice craftsman; Maud’s father, who is wisely content with his place in the world; and Alice Belding, the fair-haired daughter of Farnham’s next-door neighbor, and his eventual love interest. In the novel, as in life, the mob ultimately meets with swift justice, while Sleeny dies at the hands of a gullible young tradesman whom he had shamelessly manipulated. The London Saturday Review declared the novel “one of the strongest and most striking stories of the last ten years.” Other critics were less effusive in their praise, arguing that “Thackeray and Dickens were powerful because they supported justice against prejudice . . . [T]he author of The Bread-Winners will never turn out permanently valuable work, so long as he misrepresents a legitimate force in the interest of a false political economy and an antiquated spirit of caste.” Some readers took note of Hay’s mocking treatment of Buffland’s new-money arrivistes, judging the novel a “free-hand sketch in which the follies and fads of all classes are shown with marvelous impartiality.” But most reviewers took it for what it was: a full-throated attack on organized labor and a defense of property rights.