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

by Joshua Zeitz

  Lamon’s history of Lincoln attracted wide attention, much of it stingingly negative. James Russell Lowell dismissed the book as the work of “a vulgar man who vulgarized a noble subject.” Writing for Scribner’s, Josiah Holland called the book a disgrace. The Lincoln family was naturally disgusted by Lamon’s apostasy. Before the book’s publication, Jeremiah Black had the temerity to ask David Davis to grant his son access to the Lincoln presidential papers. Responding as delicately as possible, Davis explained that only Robert could grant the authors access and would certainly not do so, as “Mr. Herndon has troubled the family greatly, by his indiscreet letters & publications,” and Lamon’s use of these materials left Robert and Mary bitterly disposed toward the authors.

  If Chauncey Black’s motives were not difficult to ascertain, why did Billy Herndon and Ward Hill Lamon disseminate such an unflattering account of a man for whom they professed nothing but loyalty? Lamon could be easily dismissed as a profoundly unsophisticated man boxing far above his weight. For Herndon, what began as devotion to “truth” morphed steadily into an obsession. The more resistance that he met with from respectable quarters, the more determined he was to introduce the world to a version of Lincoln that was complicated, flawed, and eminently human. “Would you have Mr. Lincoln a sham, a reality or what, a symbol of an unreality?” he asked a correspondent. “Would you cheat mankind into a belief of a falsehood by defrauding their judgments? Mr. Lincoln must stand on truth or not stand at all.” By no means did Herndon believe that he was breaking a sacred trust with his former partner. On the contrary, as he told Lamon, “Mr. Lincoln was my good friend, well tried and true. I was and am his friend. While this is true, I was under an obligation to be true to the world of readers—living and to live during all coming time—as long as Lincoln’s memory lived in this world.” In his increasingly stilted historiographical view, Herndon was helping the world to appreciate the complex of hurdles that Lincoln overcame, including bastardy, poverty, and obscurity, to become “the noblest and loveliest man since Christ.” Unsurprisingly, the Lincoln family took exception to his declarations of friendship. Robert also came gradually to understand that to tell the story his way, he would need help.

  • • •

  Hay and Nicolay had begun planning a biography of Lincoln as early as midway through their White House tenure. The president’s death upended whatever initial scheme they had in mind, though from their posts in Europe the secretaries continued to keep the project in mind. “Read (+ send back) . . . my Herndon,” Hay instructed Nicolay in late 1866, adding a disdainful aside that Herndon’s Ann Rutledge lecture was, according to the publisher, “‘the only biography of Lincoln in whom the future will take any stock.’” While visiting the United States between diplomatic assignments in 1867, Hay heard from Schuyler Colfax that “Arnold is to publish the works of Lincoln . . . at the request of the family.” The rumor proved untrue, as Hay would soon learn from Robert Lincoln, but at the time he told Nicolay that it “dishes our chances at the papers.” A few weeks later, after making inquiries in New York and Chicago, he reported with dismay that “nobody is keen for our book. We will have to write it and publish it on our own hook some day, when we can afford it.” The joint venture would remain on the back shelf for an indefinite period of time, sidelined but not forgotten.

  Over the next five years, the secretaries turned their attention to other endeavors. Nicolay took pleasure in his young family, while Hay kept busy as a newspaper editor and poet and devoted considerable time to his courtship of Clara. By 1872, however, Hay was “convinced that we ought to be at work on our ‘Lincoln.’ You might just as well be putting in your time collecting material as not. I don’t think the time for publication has come, but the time for preparation is slipping away.” The recent death of William Seward was a warning that an aging generation of public men would soon pass away, and if their memories and papers were not carefully preserved, the task of writing a definitive biography would prove all but impossible. Nicolay pressed the issue with Robert, who had vaguely committed use of his father’s papers to the secretaries at some future date but had not yet relinquished them. “There are in this city every winter during sessions of Congress from one to two hundred individuals” who could still provide an invaluable record of the Lincoln administration. “Cameron, Blair, Sumner, Wade . . . and others, the list of whom is too long for this letter.” The secretaries were prepared to begin interviewing dozens of public figures who could shed light on his father’s life and presidency, but only if they were first granted access to his archives and could formulate a “definite inquiry to present. To ask them for general information, would be simply asking them to write a book.” In the meantime, Nicolay went about the business of accumulating a vast library of manuscript collections, books, articles, and government documents, in anticipation of the heavy work that lay ahead.

  Robert’s resistance to unlocking his father’s papers gave way to new urgencies. Having ceded the stage to Herndon, Lamon, and a lesser band of Lincoln popularizers, the family had unwittingly allowed the primary focus of historical inquiry to rest with topics that fascinated the public but that invariably diminished the late president’s reputation and standing. Was he an atheist or a deist? Was Ann Rutledge the only woman whom he ever loved? Did he engage in crude wrestling matches with the Clary’s Grove boys? Was his mother a “bastard”? Was he a “bastard”? In the absence of state papers, no serious writer could hope to beat back the tide of amateur Lincolniana with a scientific study of the president’s public career.

  It did not help matters that so many of Lincoln’s friends in Springfield seemed ready to take potshots at his memory. Having stood by his side and carried his banner throughout the political battles of the 1850s, many of these men felt betrayed when, as president, Lincoln declined to furnish them with patronage and favor. Others harbored lifelong resentments of Mary Todd Lincoln, who had never been deft at mending fences. John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner and political mentor, furnished Herndon with fodder when he described his former protégé as “a kind of vegetable . . . the pores of his flesh acted as an appropriate organ for . . . evacuations &c.” N. W. Edwards, Mary’s brother-in-law and a prominent civic leader in the state capital, offered that “Lincoln was not a warm hearted man—seemed to be ungrateful.” Jesse Dubois, a longtime confidant who once told Lincoln that he was “for you against the world,” later determined that the president “has for 30 years past just used me as a plaything to accomplish his own ends: but the moment he was elevated to his proud position he seemed all at once to have entirely changed his whole nature and become altogether a new being.” Joining the chorus of critics was a host of prominent Illinois politicians who once counted themselves as Lincoln’s allies and intimates—men like Lyman Trumbull, Orville Browning, John Palmer, Leonard Swett, and even, to a certain degree, David Davis—but who gradually came to assess the late president with a more critical eye. Many of these figures had migrated to the Democratic Party by the 1870s, driven by concerns over political corruption and monetary policy. Lincoln’s legacy was closely tied to a political economy that they viewed with distrust. As the years progressed, their opinions of the Great Emancipator became less approving.

  If it were solely the Illinoisans who refused to canonize Lincoln, the matter could have been written off as a family squabble. But by the early 1870s, national voices had joined the conversation. In 1872, Charles Francis Adams—a scion of the famous Massachusetts family (and father of Henry Adams) who had served in the Lincoln administration as minister to Great Britain—delivered a memorial address on William Seward. Adams held up Seward as the glue that kept the government together in perilous times. “I must affirm, without hesitation,” he avowed, “that in the history of our government, down to this hour, no experiment so rash has ever been made as that of elevating to the head of affairs a man with so little previous preparation for the task as Mr. Lincoln.” Only by good grace and luck did Lincoln possess
the wisdom to appoint as his first minister Seward, the “master mind” of the government and savior of the Union. The speech infuriated Lincoln’s stalwart defenders, first among them Gideon Welles, who issued a stinging rebuke. But Adams was not alone in assessing Lincoln as an ill-prepared, weak wartime leader. In his popular account of the war years, The American Conflict, the ever-erratic Horace Greeley similarly portrayed Lincoln as a bungling leader who squandered multiple opportunities to end the war early, either on the battlefield or through negotiation. Lincoln acolytes might have rolled their eyes at the aging bomb thrower, but he sold books, so his opinion mattered.

  Shortly after Seward’s death, Nicolay wrote once more to Robert, denouncing the “contemptible assertions of Chas. Francis Adams” and urging him to allow for the “collection and arrangement of the materials which John and I will need in writing the history we propose. We must of necessity begin with your father’s papers, because everything else must be grouped and accumulated around them.” Still Robert dragged his feet. The dam finally broke in April 1874. From his perch in New York, where he was still writing editorial content for the Tribune, Hay shopped their project around the city and received tremendous interest from all corners. Richard Gilder, the editor of Scribner’s, had sent Hay a brief note, asking if it were not “time about a ‘Life of Lincoln’ & are you looking for publishers? Or they for you?” On the reverse side of Gilder’s note, Hay scribbled a quick valedictory to Nicolay. “Bob promised to give us the papers as soon as we are ready to begin work on them.” That summer, several dozen boxes finally made their way from Bloomington to Washington, D.C., where Nicolay deposited them in his office. There, in the vast marble confines of the Capitol building, they would be safe from fire, water damage, or theft. It would take years to cull through the voluminous correspondence and identify the documents on which their work would be based.

  By 1875, the secretaries were fully immersed in research and slowly coming to appreciate the mammoth task for which they had volunteered. “The work is a heavy one,” Hay informed the former vice president Schuyler Colfax, “continually growing on our hands. I have many misgivings about it, but we shall put in it all we can.” Writing from Springfield, Milton Hay offered Nicolay some unsolicited but undoubtedly welcome advice. “The reading public in this country (those who mainly buy books),” he began, “were in full sympathy with Mr. Lincoln and his administration, and they believe and sympathize with the idea that he was the greatest figure in that revolutionary period which began with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and ended with the suppression of the rebellion and the emancipation of the slaves.” Milton reminded Nicolay that the better sort of citizens were sincere in their religious convictions and would never consent to “bring into their family libraries, a book which shall either deprecate Lincoln, or clothe him with heterodox religious views.” He was glad to know that the secretaries were committed to the Lincoln enterprise, because Americans “want a model for all the good little boys to follow, and Billy Herndon’s model won’t do.”

  Milton’s counsel did not fall on deaf ears. Nicolay was disgusted, as was John Hay, by the ham-fisted way in which men like Lamon, Herndon, and even Charles Francis Adams had butchered Lincoln’s reputation. They had known William Seward intimately and admired him greatly, but they could not concur that he was somehow the invisible hand guiding the Union war effort. They had worked beside Lincoln for more than four years, day and night, and believed that they understood him better than nearly anyone else alive. Theirs would be a corrective enterprise, though they scarcely appreciated the immensity of the task to which they were committing themselves. The biography would consume their professional attention for the next fifteen years. During that time, both men held other jobs: Nicolay remained at the Supreme Court until 1887, while Hay worked for his father-in-law and served briefly as assistant secretary of state. Their labors were frequently interrupted by their own illnesses or those of their wives and children. Editors begged them for an advance peek at the work. Publishers courted them persistently. For the time being, they held their suitors at bay. “We [are] in no hurry to make arrangements,” Hay told one hopeful. Heads down, they set themselves to the work of presenting the historical Lincoln to the world.

  CHAPTER 15

  Our Ideal Hero

  John Nicolay was forty-two years old when he started work on his life of Lincoln; by the time he completed the manuscript, he was fifty-seven. John Hay began drafting his portion of the collection at age thirty-six; he was fifty-one when the book went to print. In the years since the two secretaries first went to Washington with the president-elect, both had married and started families of their own. They held diplomatic positions in Paris, Vienna, and Madrid. One was appointed the chief executive officer of the Supreme Court. The other published acclaimed works of literature and served as assistant secretary of state. But more than the popular image of Abraham Lincoln had effectively frozen in time on April 15, 1865. Many people who remembered the secretaries as young men encountered difficulty in appreciating that they had grown up with the world around them. One newspaper critic, upon learning of their project, complained that “whoever attempts to limn for future ages the characteristics of Abraham Lincoln . . . must possess the ability to survey very much more than comes within scope of ordinary mortal vision.” The secretaries, he concluded, fell short of the mark. “Time enough for them to try biography when they are forty.” Hay was enraged. “That scoundrel . . . has persuaded these idiots that you and I are about nineteen years of age,” he fumed in a letter to Nicolay.

  Even Robert Todd Lincoln sometimes had trouble imagining them in their passage to middle age. Though he was several years younger than Nicolay and Hay, Robert enjoyed meteoric career advancement that owed much to the good fortune of his last name, a fact that led many to believe—perhaps himself included—that he was wiser than his years. A prominent Chicago attorney, he turned down an offer to serve as assistant secretary of state in 1877 but entered the cabinet in 1881 as secretary of war just before his thirty-eighth birthday. Having entrusted his father’s archive to Nicolay, he kept close watch on the secretaries’ progress, sometimes to their consternation. “I beg of you to no longer think of us as mere boys,” Nicolay pleaded on one occasion, “but as men who have learned something in the school of experience at least, and who believe ourselves capable of doing creditable work.” Nicolay reminded Robert that his father was “our ideal hero. We wish to delineate the grandeur of the era in which he lived, the far-reaching significance and influence of the events he led, and to set him in history as the type, the Preserver and Liberator of the People.”

  Robert’s sensitivity belied his personal fondness for Nicolay and Hay. He had known them for a very long time and remained on close terms with them over the years, exchanging personal well wishes on the births of their children, sharing gossip about mutual friends, and keeping them apprised of his family’s milestones and hallmark moments. They were his closest partners in securing the Lincoln legacy. When Bob’s youngest brother, Tad, passed away in 1871 at the age of eighteen, Hay acted in effect as the family’s official spokesman, penning a widely read obituary for the New-York Tribune, still the paper of record for Republican stalwarts. “Most of those who read the dispatch announcing the death of Thomas Todd Lincoln will never think of the well-grown gentleman who died on Saturday at Chicago,” Hay began. “The name of ‘Tad’—a pet name given by himself with his first stammering utterances and adopted by his fond parents and the world—recalls the tricksy little sprite who gave to that sad and solemn White House of the great war the only comic relief it knew.” Hay remembered fondly and vividly the “chartered libertine” who was “idolized by both his father and mother, petted and indulged by his teachers, and fawned upon and caressed by that noisome horde of office-seekers which infested the ante-rooms of the White House. He had a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline, and thought very little of any tutor who would not assist him in yoki
ng his kids to a chair or in driving his dogs tandem over the South Lawn.” To the world, Tad had seemed a one-dimensional character, easy to know and easy to like, but Hay recalled that he could treat “flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness and contempt,” even as he “often espoused the cause of some poor widow or tattered soldier, whom he found waiting in the ante-rooms, and it was most amusing to see the hearty little fellow dragging his shabby protégés into the Executive presence, ordering the ushers out of the way, and demanding immediate action from headquarters.” “The Tad Lincoln of your history ceased to exist long ago,” he observed. In his place had emerged a “well-grown gentleman,” the “modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New-York a few weeks ago with his mother [but] who will never be known outside the circle of his mourning friends.” In the annals of history, he would forever remain “the child whose gayety and affection cheered more than anything else the worn and weary heart of the great President through the toilsome years of the war.” Robert was deeply moved by the effort. “John Hay’s screed is like a picture,” he told Noah Brooks. Pry and edit as he might, the president’s sole surviving son trusted that the secretaries saw and understood his father, and the entire Lincoln family, with greater clarity and loyal purpose than anyone else.