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

by Joshua Zeitz

  • • •

  If Gilder hoped that the Lincoln serial would continue in the vein of Battles and Leaders by fostering greater understanding between North and South, he was mistaken. He had read the first half of the secretaries’ manuscript. He met multiple times with Hay and spent several days in seclusion with Nicolay at a New Hampshire farmhouse, poring over the completed chapters. He was perceptive enough to understand the mind-set of his new authors. Confiding to a friend, he explained that the Nicolay-Hay volumes were “the secret history of the secession conspiracy” and a “complete, authentic, and logical account of the great political struggle in connection with the subject of slavery,” an assessment with which they would have heartily agreed. Yet he also believed—as Nicolay and Hay surely did not—that “Lincoln is now one of the most revered of our public men in the very South whose political unity he destroyed. They soon felt that in Lincoln’s death they lost their best friend.” (Had most Southerners believed it, the secretaries would not have cared.) Writing to Nicolay, Gilder struck the same optimistic note, wondering at the “universal tone of respect and even affection with which the memory of Lincoln seemed to be held in the South . . . It is hard to find the slavery or the secession sentiment in the South today.” “As for the Negro,” he added, liberal men like George Washington Cable and Thomas Dudley, the Episcopal bishop of Kentucky and outspoken supporter of black rights, were “fighting out the remaining problems in the pages of the Century.”

  Thus began a delicate balancing act. Gilder was giddy at the prospect of following the highly successful Battles and Leaders series with a two- or three-year run of “the only authorized life of the greatest man this country has ever produced—at least since Washington—and not only the greatest, but by far the most interesting.” But the aggressive Northernism of his authors was out of alignment with the Century’s ethos and diverse readership. At some point during their weeklong confab in New Hampshire, Nicolay casually offered the opinion that Robert E. Lee could or should have been shot for treason. This argument did not appear in the manuscript, but then, the manuscript was only half-complete. Gilder was “horrified” at the suggestion, Hay reported, and though he agreed that it was “a simple truth of law and equity,” he reminded Nicolay that such extreme displays of Northern sectionalism would not do for a national publication. Seeking clarification, Gilder sent a delicate note to Nicolay, who responded nonchalantly that he would “look up the exact language I used in reference to Lee. I think the phrase you called my attention to was merely used in conversation, and then only as a hypothesis on military law. I do not mean to say even in conversation that as a matter of policy the penalty he rendered himself legally liable to ought to have been inflicted. But I do mean to say that his adherents and admirers ought to be grateful to the people and the government of the U.S. for the Great Pardon with which they have covered all these offenses against law and humanity.”

  Nicolay and Hay spared Gilder’s readership lengthy fulminations on the crimes and applicable punishments of Robert E. Lee, but they did suggest in fairly plain language that the widely esteemed Virginian was a liar. Lee long maintained that when he was offered field command of the Union armies, he turned down the offer, for “though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” “A flat contradiction exists as to the character of Lee’s answer,” Nicolay and Hay wrote, citing the testimony of Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first war secretary, and Montgomery Blair, his first postmaster general, that Lee had in fact accepted his promotion before subsequently reneging. “In the course of events,” they continued, “we find him not alone defending his native State, to which he owed nothing, but seeking to destroy the Union, which had done everything for him; opposing war by promoting ‘revolution,’ and redressing grievances by endeavoring to establish anarchy.” True, the authors did not call for Lee’s head. But Gilder may have reeled in his chair when he read their “contrast” between “the weakness and defects of Lee” and “the honorable conduct and example of General Scott.” Nicolay ultimately thought that they did justice to the subject and that their chapter on Lee could “hardly be objected to, except by the utterly ‘unreconstructed.’”

  Though Southern partisans much preferred Lee, the general, to Jefferson Davis, the politician, in the chapter describing Abraham Lincoln’s death, Hay rankled Southern sensibilities by writing that Jefferson Davis rejoiced at news of the Great Emancipator’s murder. He later defended this claim in the face of bitter criticism. In their assessment of another Confederate icon, Thomas Jackson, the secretaries smiled as they cut. Hay, who drafted most of the material on Stonewall, thought that the late general was a “howling crank” but feared that it would “be the greatest folly for me to say so.” As it was, he told Nicolay, “I am afraid that I have come too near saying so in what I have written about him.” Offering that “Jackson was by far the most interesting and picturesque figure in the Southern army” and “a man of extraordinary qualities,” he proceeded to dismiss the Confederate “saint and hero” as a “slow, dull, unprepossessing youth” who, “had the war not come to call him forth to glory and the grave . . . would probably have lived and died in the mountain village known only to his neighbors . . . ‘as a sincere, odd, weak man.’” Jackson “believed himself to be under the immediate and partisan protection of his Creator; he believed . . . that Heaven helped him plan his campaigns and battles; his Creator was ever present to his mind, in his own image—as a good Southerner, as earnest a hater of the Yankees, as stern a fighter as himself.” Stonewall was “a fanatical Sabbatarian; he would not read a letter, which arrived Saturday night, until Monday; he would not post one in such a way that it would travel on the Sabbath. Yet he would not scruple to bring a bloody battle on Sunday.” He was a hypochondriac who believed that one of his legs was growing shorter than the other, that he only perspired on one side of his body, and that he needed to maintain his opposite limbs in perpetual motion to sustain proper circulation. “If John Brown of Ossawatomie had been bred in a slave State and had received a West Point training,” he remarked, evoking the South’s greatest bête noire, “it is hard to see in what particular he would have differed from Stonewall Jackson.”

  The secretaries did not enjoy full leeway in hacking down the idols of Confederate mythology. They were being paid handsomely for their efforts and could not disregard the Century’s concerns. Though rarely one for diplomacy, Nicolay assured Gilder that he agreed with “the principles laid down in your letters.” “I believe I have adopted all your corrections,” he added, “and I think the text the better for them . . . We want to make the text as acceptable as we can without sacrificing essentials.” In practice, the cuts and modifications irritated Nicolay. Defeated on several editorial points, and in a rare display of pique with Hay, who urged him to temper some of his language, Nicolay rued that he lacked the “grit to stand up against the demoralizing sugar coated historical principles you lay down. In fact, I think my wings had been sprouting just a little before that. Gilder’s pencil went through a great many of my strong and most picturesque adjectives, and I agreed that on the whole it improved the text. When we come to revise I suppose that very few if any of them will go back.” (Their friendship was too long-standing to suffer for a minor literary disagreement. In his next breath, Nicolay expressed concern at Hay’s frequent illnesses and counseled him to take a month off from writing to restore himself to good health.)

  The Century ran excerpts of the Nicolay-Hay enterprise between 1886 and 1890, ultimately exposing hundreds of thousands of readers to roughly one-third of the total work. Toward the end of the serial run, Gilder congratulated the authors on their success. “Lincoln’s fame, for all time, has been more firmly established for your labors,” he told them, and “the people now living, so many of whom were also living during his lifetime, have had an opportunity of knowing the man, such as would never have occurred if the history had only appeared in book form.” As a
n aside, Gilder allowed that some critics had charged Hay and Nicolay with “partisanship,” but

  even those most opposed to certain deductions and general remarks of the authors, would recognize that an honest attempt has been made to present the truth as you were convinced of it . . . It may be that future historians, and critics of history, will be less severe in the judgment of some you have thought it right to condemn;—and such historians or critics may be called upon to take into view the “personal equation”;—but when all is said that can possibly be said in criticism, the fact will remain that you have followed your convictions, and by your devotion and industry have presented a picture of the man, and of the times, which will have an indistinguishable value.

  Gilder wrote the letter in the spirit of friendship and as a valedictory on the closing of an important chapter in the lives of his authors and his magazine. Nicolay saw only criticism. In a blistering draft reply, he asserted that neither he nor Hay was

  conscious of having written a word of censure of any person, party or principle which is not in accord with the standard recognized by the civilized world. We fail to see how any secession conspirator can ask the tolerance of reasonable minds in claiming for South Carolina the right to secede from the United States . . . With what claim to pardon could Jefferson Davis incur the penalty of death or treason to the United States, and immediately thereafter take an oath to inflict the death penalty upon others for treason to the Confederate States? With what sense of military duty and honor could Robert E. Lee render himself liable to be shot for desertion from the U.S. Army and then take an oath to shoot a Southern soldier for desertion from the Confederate Army?

  After cooling his heels for a few days, Nicolay filed the letter away, unsent, much as Lincoln often drafted dispatches that he later opted not to transmit. Two weeks later, he mailed a gracious response to his editor, agreeing heartily that the serial run had proven a great success. In closing, he added, “As to the possible accusations of partisanship, we stand in no awe of them. We deny that it is partisanship to use the multiplication table, reverence the Decalogue, or obey the Constitution of the United States. When logic, morals and law all unite to condemn the secession of the rebellion of 1861, he will be a rash critic to pronounce censure upon any who helped put down that secession and rebellion, or who venture truthfully to record its incidents.”

  More so than Nicolay, Hay was sensitive to appearance. He worried that he and his co-author might appear to current and future readers as still being “in the gall and bitterness of twenty years ago.” But on points of substance, there was little daylight between the two men. In its final form, Abraham Lincoln: A History presented in ten volumes, and 1.2 million words, the authorized biography of a slain leader and the unofficial Northern, Republican Party interpretation of the Civil War.

  CHAPTER 16

  We Are Lincoln Men All Through

  The long-awaited serial publication of the Nicolay-Hay biography began in late 1886. Almost from the start, the work proved controversial. While many observers debated its treatment of specific persons or themes, others were baffled by its long digressions into general historical topics in which Lincoln emerged only as a minor player and sometimes not at all. One of Richard Gilder’s correspondents privately lamented that because he had a “very great interest in Lincoln,” he was “disappointed at finding so little concerning him” in the magazine’s excerpts. Expecting to read a biography of the late president, this dissatisfied reader instead found “biographical remarks on the great men of Abraham Lincoln’s time, with a few bits of irrelevancy about Lincoln himself thrown in. The historical narrative that Messrs. Hay and Nicolay are giving us is a great success as a picture of days gone by, and it is a great pity that it should be marred by those personal details of an obscure Illinois lawyer which we notice have crept into the story from time to time.” One critical reviewer quipped that the book ought really to be titled “From Boone to Booth; or, The Surprising Adventures of Senator Tom, Governor Dick, and Congressman Harry, in the Early Days of the Roaring Republic.” Life magazine even proposed a new game whereby players would spread copies of the Century out on a table and attempt to locate five references to Lincoln in a particular volume; a successful player could then jump to the next issue. “Chapters of the history which contain five allusions to the subject must be provided for the game,” the editors warned; “otherwise the evening is likely to go by without any winners, and drag correspondingly.”

  Odd, indeed, was a biography whose subject all but disappeared for an entire volume. Yet by virtue of their exhaustive treatment of Lincoln’s political career, Nicolay and Hay seared into the national awareness episodes that were then largely unknown to the public, and themes and arguments that would influence Lincoln scholars and Civil War historians for generations to come. Among its many famous contributions to the nation’s shared historical consciousness were revelations that William Seward drafted the closing lines of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, which the president-elect then fashioned into a work of literary genius, and that early in his term Seward attempted to assert himself as “first minister” by provoking a war with Britain and France, in an ill-conceived attempt to unite North and South against a common enemy. Lincoln, they revealed, stopped the secretary in his tracks, rejecting his proposal outright and warning that even “if this must be done, I must do it.” Nicolay and Hay were the first to report George McClellan’s vainglorious assurance that he could “do it all” when Lincoln gave him command of the entire Union army. They were the first to write of Lincoln’s great distress early in the war, when Washington, D.C., was cut off from the rest of the North and the president, keeping an anxious vigil for fresh troops, wondered, “Why don’t they come!” They offered unprecedented insight into Lincoln’s decision making around emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers and an insider’s view of his interaction with the Union’s high military command. Few Americans knew that when Lincoln appointed Joe Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac, he also seized the opportunity to dress him down for having argued that “both the army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain success can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”

  The critics were not without reason. In some ways the term “biography” was a misnomer when applied to the Nicolay-Hay enterprise. More accurately, it amounted to a “life and times” account that drew on vast and heretofore unreleased document collections to offer a comprehensive portrait of Lincoln’s career and to situate the late president within the broader universe of actors and events that formed the backdrop of his tenure in office. In fifteen chapters (totaling more than three hundred pages) covering the period between October 5, 1860, and January 9, 1861, Nicolay admitted that he scarcely even addressed “the acts of Lincoln or the Republican Party.”

  Above all, Nicolay and Hay created a master narrative whose influence would ebb and flow over the years but that continues to command serious scrutiny and engagement more than a century after its initial introduction. Early in the writing process, Nicolay assured Robert Todd Lincoln, “We hold that your father was something more than a mere make-weight in the cabinet . . . We want to show that he formed a cabinet of strong and great men—rarely equaled in any historical era—and that he held, guided, controlled, curbed and dismissed not only them but other high officers civilian and military, at will, with perfect knowledge of men.” This overarching theme pervades the ten volumes of their work. Populating his original cabinet with former opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, Lincoln demonstrated his discernment and magnanimity in choosing men whom he “did not know . . . He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt to be due to themselves.” Presaging by one hundred year
s the popular argument that Lincoln forged a “team of rivals,” Nicolay and Hay insisted that the strong personalities and talents who constituted his inner circle did not always appreciate “the stronger will and . . . more delicate tact [that] inspired and guided them all.” “The President was gifted by nature with a courtesy far excelling the conventionalities of an acquired politeness. With a delicacy which has rarely been equaled, he respected not merely their official authority but also their sentiments.” With few exceptions, they, in turn, yielded to “the superior sagacity and authority of the President.”

  The Lincoln who filled the pages of the Nicolay-Hay volumes was “almost a giant in physical stature and strength” and “combined in his intellectual nature a masculine courage and power of logic with an ideal sensitiveness of conscience and a sentimental tenderness as delicate as a woman’s. The Presidential trust which he had assumed was to him not a mere regalia of rank and honor. Its terrible duties and responsibilities seemed rather a coat of steel armor.” Though both authors died some twenty years before the completion of the Lincoln Memorial, their description of the slain president could not have anticipated its design more perfectly.

  • • •

  The Century’s Lincoln series started at the beginning, quite literally. To John Hay had fallen the task of writing most of Lincoln’s early life, which made up the first volume of the joint enterprise. Despite his deep skepticism of oral history, Hay relied heavily on Lamon’s work, which was in turn rooted in Herndon’s extensive interviews. Supplementing these sources with genealogical materials, public records, and print sources, he devoted himself to the task of recasting an old story, rather than new digging for new research. The heart of the larger enterprise would concern Lincoln’s presidential tenure, not the minutiae of his upbringing. “Of all these years of Abraham Lincoln’s early childhood,” Hay wrote, “we know almost nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his lonesome little games to his cheerless home. He never talked of these days to his most intimate friends.” Hay’s volume included lively accounts of familiar stories, from Lincoln’s first arrival in New Salem, to his service in the Black Hawk War and the Illinois state legislature, to his courtship and marriage to Mary Todd and his one term in Congress. In no way did he contribute any new information, but in leaning on Herndon and Lamon for these details of Lincoln’s early life, Hay fashioned a new interpretation rooted heavily in the antebellum western experience.