by Joshua Zeitz
For their part, the secretaries genuinely admired Robert and regarded him as a friend, but they never mistook him for his father’s spirit incarnate. Robert kept a cool distance from the political anterooms where his father cultivated a studied appreciation of men and motives. The father made politics his avocation; the son held it at bay. Nicolay believed that Robert possessed that “latent power of observation and comparison which is evidently in the blood” but thought that he “still looks at politics through a reflecting medium—perhaps I should say an opaque one . . . making him incapable of assigning it a true estimate. Politics is a thing à laisser ou à prendre, but by no means to be despised, either in nobler or baser relations to the times we live in. Nobody had a clearer perception [on] that point than his father. A little more age and experience will probably enable Bob to see it as well.”
As their work progressed over the years, the authors routinely conferred with Robert on matters of style and emphasis. Hay, who was closer in age and with whom he had a more intimate bond, regularly assured Robert of their fidelity to his family. “I need not tell you that every line has been written in a spirit of reverence and regard,” he insisted, when sending him an early draft of the opening chapters. “Still you may find here and there words or sentences which do not suit you. I write now to request that you will read with a pencil in your hand and strike out everything to which you object. I will adopt your view in all cases, whether I agree with it or not, but I cannot help hoping you will find nothing objectionable.” These agreements were never made public, though astute observers like William Herndon suspected that the secretaries were “writing the life of Lincoln under the surveillance of Bob; he gives them materials and they in their turn play hush. That is my opinion and is worth no more than an honest opinion.”
Though only fragmentary copies of the original drafts survive, letters between Nicolay, Hay, and Robert testify to the heir’s “plenary blue pen powers”—in Hay’s words—over every word that the secretaries wrote. From those few extant drafts that bear his line edits, Robert appears to have played his heaviest hand in dictating cuts to those chapters dealing with Lincoln’s childhood and early career, most of which Hay composed on his own. He made liberal excisions to Hay’s description of his grandfather Thomas Lincoln, whom he had never met. “It is beyond doubt that my departed grandfather was not an enterprising man,” Robert conceded, “& it is likely that your graphic assaults upon him . . . are not undeserved but I could not help feeling better if you would ‘let up’ on him a little in a final revision. He did not have much chance to prepare & pose in the reflection of his son’s fame & I feel sorry for him.”
In his original draft, Hay judged Thomas “an idle, roving, inefficient, good natured man” and offered that he “appears never to have done [anything] especially deserving of mention.” It was a gentle way of dealing with a sensitive topic. Robert ordered the offending lines cut. Hay noted that “men like him may be seen every day in Western rural towns, fond of story-telling, of talking things over by the red-hot stove of tavern bar-rooms, or in the cool door ways of livery stables, according to the season. He was a Jackson Democrat, as those of his kind usually were. He was discursive in his religious affiliations, changing his church about as often as he changed his residence.” This, too, Robert called out, though he did not object to Hay’s observation that Thomas Lincoln was “generally called an unlucky man.” Gone also was Hay’s description of the family’s early settlement in Indiana. “When we consider that a weeks work was all that was required to make a cabin habitable,” read the offending passage, “and that Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter by trade, we can form some idea of the hopeless indolence which allowed him to live two years in a house without a door and without a floor.” Instead, the final manuscript noted simply that Thomas Lincoln’s “cabin was like that of other pioneers. A few three-legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs in the angle of the cabin . . . The boy Abraham climbed at night to his bed of leaves in the loft, by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.”
If Nicolay and Hay compromised the independence of their work in agreeing to grant Robert final editorial discretion, the standards of their day were unclear on the qualities that defined good history. They embarked on their project at a time when the American historical enterprise stood on the verge of a sea change in methodology and philosophical approach. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, most U.S. universities and colleges were incubators of discipline and morality but bore little resemblance to the centers of formal inquiry and training that would characterize higher education in the next century. Inasmuch as students mastered classical literature and mathematics by rote memorization, they inherited knowledge and skill sets that prepared them for professional endeavors, but there was as yet no American counterpart to the scientific methods and formalized degree programs preferred by the great German universities. History, as practiced by George Bancroft and his generation of scholars, remained a linear story of providence and progress, and its view of America was of a land endowed by God with a certain destiny. There was less regard for human agency in the development of political systems and governments and even less appreciation of impersonal economic or environmental forces in the shaping of human choices.
The Civil War did much to shake the foundations of American historical consciousness. As scholars began to chronicle its causes and effects, it became impossible to escape the suspicion that the United States might not be a perfect, divinely ordained society—or at least that its progress might not yet be complete or strictly linear. New explanations required new methodologies. Only with the inauguration of new American institutions like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago, and the wholesale overhaul of older establishments like Columbia and Harvard, did Americans import the rigorous approach of the German academy. Underlying this transformation was a vogue for “objective, verifiable and clearly communicable truths,” as a contemporary scholar framed the challenge. Among historians, the earliest practitioners of this approach were the students in Herbert Baxter Adams’s pioneering history seminar at the Johns Hopkins University. Adams, who earned his Ph.D. at Heidelberg, established the research seminar in 1880 to help the university evolve “from a nursery of dogma into a laboratory of scientific truth.” That evolution would require an abandonment of romantic and subjective uses of history for a reliance on dispassionate and fact-driven analysis, grounded in evidence and divorced from ideology or bias. It is unclear how successful Adams was in inculcating his classroom with precisely this ethos. One of his students, J. Franklin Jameson, whom Johns Hopkins would ultimately award its first doctorate in history, complained that his professor was undisciplined and his seminars “tiresome,” given to “too much mutual admiration and not enough savage criticism”; “the staple of the meetings consists of outside ‘attractions,’ now a Confederate general to talk on a campaign, now an elderly party exhumed to ‘reminisce’ to us.” But the enterprise was fast becoming a profession. The American Historical Association was founded in 1884, and by the turn of the century increasing numbers of history professors claimed doctorate degrees from institutions that trained them to research and think like “cool, unbiased” social scientists. The era of romanticism had given way to a search for “objectivity” and “stern historical truth.”
Nicolay and Hay were not among this new generation of professional historians. They claimed no formal training (Nicolay did not even have a college degree) and made little effort to mask their bias. But they did set out to write a history grounded in evidence and fact. In the early days of the project, Nicolay spent several months interviewing dozens of individuals who had known Lincoln in Illinois and Washington. The transcripts of these discussions informed their work, but with time they came to cast a skeptical eye on memories recorded years or decades after the fact. If a fact or an anecdote could not be confirmed by the written record, they usually discounted it entirely. Luckily, what they could not find in Linco
ln’s vast manuscript collection they often found in their personal archives. Writing to Nicolay in 1878, Hay reported that he had “devoted a day or two to looking over my notebooks” from the White House years. “I have a large amount of valuable notes—made on the spot, the extent and value of which I had quite forgotten. They are weak in 1861, not very good in ’62 except in respect to 2nd Bull Run, but quite full and valuable for ’63 and ’64. They are not in good shape. I do not know but that I may try to have them copied by type-writer.” On rare occasions they relied on their personal recollection of events to bring the pages of the biography to life. Nicolay’s vivid description of the moment that Lincoln was nominated at Chicago was one such use of memory; their general descriptions of the Lincoln White House were another. In the final volume, Hay drew on his firsthand account of Lincoln’s death. But in their general methodological approach, they could not have differed more sharply from Herndon, Lamon, and most other early Lincoln biographers, all of whom relied almost exclusively on interviews conducted long after the fact. When chapters of their work were serialized in the late 1880s, Charles Dana, who had served as assistant secretary of war under Edwin Stanton, publicly challenged their assertion that Hay had been with the president at the War Department telegraph office on the evening of the 1864 election—“in face of my diary which says I was,” Hay wrote. “You see the sort of pig-headed contradiction we have got to go through on the part of conceited old men with bad memories, who have been lying for 20 years.” Writing to the former vice president Schuyler Colfax, he wryly observed that people grew self-aggrandizing over time, as their memories betrayed them. “You know it is impossible for any old Illinoisan to talk for five minutes without letting you understand that he made Lincoln all he was,” Hay said with a wink. Ultimately, the secretaries stopped conducting interviews altogether, Hay later explained to Charles Francis Adams Jr., “because it placed us in a dilemma of either being compelled to report a lot of worthless fiction, or of giving grave offense to our friends by declining to do so.”
To supplement the Lincoln archives and their personal diaries and letters, Hay and Nicolay set about acquiring as much additional material as they could buy. Robert helped them gain access to Gideon Welles’s diary and also granted them use of important genealogical documents. They scoured newspapers for speech transcripts. They collected vast quantities of government documents, both Union and Confederate, related to the war. They swapped materials with the War Department, which still retained copies of Lincoln’s ingoing and outgoing telegrams. They asked the children of long-departed Civil War notables to look through their attics for important documents and purchased materials from manuscript and book dealers. “I am getting together quite a little lot of books,” Nicolay reported as early as 1876. “I think I have the foundation for a Rebellion Library . . . There must be now between three and five hundred volumes, big and small, as you count, or omit to count, the trash in it.” Over the next decade, the oversized first-floor study in Nicolay’s Capitol Hill row house came to accommodate one of the largest private collections of Civil War documentation and secondary scholarship in the country. Both men paid out of pocket for the materials and conferred regularly to decide on the acquisition of particular items. To organize and store the vast stacks of paper and books that he consulted while writing, Hay ordered a custom-made desk, measuring seven feet by four feet. It was so bulky the workmen could not maneuver it up to the second-floor office in his Cleveland residence. “I shall get a carpenter to remove the banisters of the back stairs to get it up!!” he relayed with childish delight. When Hay lived in Washington, between 1879 and 1881 as assistant secretary of state, and again from 1885 onward, he and Nicolay would walk between each other’s homes to swap materials and chapter drafts. When Hay was in Cleveland, or traveling in Europe, and when Nicolay vacationed in New England or Colorado during the summers, they exchanged documents by post. Over the years, they both struggled with headaches, illnesses, and diminishing eyesight. By the mid-1880s, Hay found himself “breaking down with the nervous fatigue of writing & copying [and] therefore hired a stenographer—a dull young Englishman who has nothing in the world but handwriting.” Yet given the impediments to progress and the many personal and professional distractions that might have derailed their work, the pair made astonishing progress. Nicolay began the drafting process by fashioning a schedule of chapters. Once Hay agreed to the contents and order, they divided up the topics and set to writing.
“The two would never divulge how the actual writing was divided between them,” Helen Nicolay later explained. “They seemed to take a mischievous delight in keeping it a secret, saying they were coauthors, and that was all the public need know.” In some cases they alternated chapters. In other cases, each might assume responsibility for an entire volume. Though strains of Hay’s lyricism are evident in his chapters, particularly those dealing with Lincoln’s childhood and early career in Springfield, he and Nicolay had been so long acquainted, both professionally and personally, that they were able to develop a common prose style with little effort. “I write with great labor,” Hay admitted early in the process. “My imagination is all gone, a good riddance. I think my judgment is improved. I shall never write easily and fluently again.” That was not quite true. Six years later, he dashed off The Bread-Winners. But Hay clearly compartmentalized the project from his literary efforts. The Lincoln biography was to be a work of politics and memory. It demanded a different kind of diligence. He was content to favor exposition and analysis over style.
Reporting from Cleveland in the summer of 1877, Hay, who was responsible for chronicling the majority of Lincoln’s early life, promised that “if nothing happens adversely, we can have Lincoln inaugurated by the 4th of March 1878.”
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By the time Nicolay and Hay began their writing in earnest, roughly fifteen years after the collapse of the Confederacy, prominent Southerners had already begun crafting a new narrative—one that would afford their people a modicum of self-respect in the wake of devastating defeat and inspire Northerners to embrace a revisionist history in which everyone was right and no one was wrong. In these efforts, the progenitors of America’s reunion romance achieved considerable success. It was against this backdrop of apologia and reunion that the secretaries set out to fashion their interpretation of Lincoln’s story.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the business of recording and remembering the rebellion fell to a small group of hard-line, unreconstructed rebels. The first fomenters of Confederate revivalism included such figures as Jubal Early, B. T. Johnson, Fitz Lee, and W. P. Johnson, most of whom shared aristocratic credentials, nominally distinguished war records, and a venomous hatred of all things Northern. Although their calls for defiant commemoration met with widespread apathy throughout the 1860s and 1870s, these men ultimately formulated the ideological underpinnings of what would become, under new leadership in the 1880s, the standard Southern interpretation of the Civil War.
The prevailing themes of this Southern historical rendering were veneration of an antebellum South that was both aristocratic and, by implication, better mannered than the North, with its pervasive spirit of avarice and cruel economic competition; confirmation that secession had been a legal response to incursions against states’ rights rather than a revolutionary action; and finally, insistence that slavery had been only a remote cause of the war. As one Hunter McGuire explained in a historical report for the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia, “however brave” rebel soldiers had been, to acknowledge that they fought to preserve slavery would only “hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor . . . [O]ur children, instead of revering their fathers, will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.” With the nettlesome issue of slavery thus disposed of, new officials of the Confederate memory machine could stress more desirable subthemes of the Lost Cause saga, including Confederate respect for social discipline, Southern womanhood, and private property.
The 1880s and
1890s saw the rapid proliferation of Confederate commemoration as a new trio of associated organizations—the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV)—institutionalized the related themes of intersectional reconciliation and a vague form of Southern pride, rooted in heritage but devoid of overt ideology. These groups appealed to a far wider swath of the white Southern population than Early and Fitz Lee because they offered a compelling postwar epilogue in which almost everyone could believe. Rather than bewail what could have been, they worked to create a spirit of sectional reconciliation based on a unity of experience among combat veterans of the Blue and the Gray. The first large-scale manifestation of this new wave of Confederate commemoration occurred in May 1890, when between 100,000 and 150,000 onlookers gathered in Richmond for the unveiling of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Throughout the late 1880s and the 1890s, hundreds of towns across the South undertook the commission of similar monuments to their heroes and war dead. Unlike the initial wave of graveyard memorials that Southerners unveiled in the 1860s, these structures tended to be placed in town squares and by county courthouses, and in keeping with the new emphasis on comradeship in arms, more often than not they featured statues of Confederate veterans.