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

by Joshua Zeitz

  In any event, Hay dismissed as “an idle waste of labor” any attempt to pinpoint with precision Lincoln’s conversion to the antislavery cause, as these “sentiments came with the first awakening of his mind and conscience, and were roused into active life and energy by the sight of fellow-creatures in chains . . . on the wharf at New Orleans.” Hay chronicled Lincoln’s first public utterances against slavery, when he and his fellow Whig legislator Dan Stone introduced a temperate resolution in the Illinois House, declaring that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.” Having witnessed and experienced firsthand the evolution of Northern thought on slavery—as young men, after all, the authors had been more ambivalent about the morality of the institution—Hay knew that “there was a long distance to be traveled between the guarded utterances of this protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of emancipation. But the young man . . . had in him the making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr. His whole career was to run in the lines marked out by these words, written in the hurry of a closing session, and he was to accomplish few acts, in that great history which God reserved for him, wiser and nobler than this.”

  On the subject of slavery, Hay and Nicolay sounded nothing like their younger selves. They did not summarize the Republican Party’s platform as land “for white men without niggers,” as Nicolay indelicately framed the matter in 1858; Hay no longer blamed the war on “traitors North and South” or maintained that “the life of the nation, and not the condition of the nigger, is at stake,” as he did early in the war. They had long ago evolved on issues of race and equality. The sectional conflict, they insisted, was caused by America’s sinful “traffic in human beings” and the need to blot out that crime. They roundly condemned the bygone Fugitive Slave Act, which elevated “the master’s right to slave property” over “any black man’s right to personal liberty,” and recalled with disgust how “persons in the free States were pursued, seized, handcuffed, gagged, bludgeoned, or shot.” In their discussion of the Dred Scott decision, the authors suffered a convenient bout of historical amnesia. Northerners, they now claimed, had viewed the court’s abrogation of popular sovereignty as a grave moral transgression, but “much more offensive to the Northern mind than his conclusions of law were the language and historical assertions by which [Taney] strove to justify them.” According to Nicolay, who wrote most of the chapters on the politics of the 1850s, Roger Taney’s infamous assertion that black men had no “rights which the white man was bound to respect” rankled the Northern conscience profoundly. “This cold and pitiless historical delineation of the bondage, ignorance, and degradation of the unfortunate kidnaped Africans and their descendants in a by-gone century, as an immutable basis of constitutional interpretation, was met by loud and indignant protest from the North,” he claimed. Here, Nicolay’s memory was highly selective. As a young antislavery editor, he, like most of his political compatriots, had deeply resented the Dred Scott decision, which, as he complained at the time, held that “white men, after running their race according to Democratic terms, and winning it under all these difficulties, are cheated out of the prize [western land] by three Democratic judges, who give it to the niggers.” A quarter of a century later, he denounced Taney for denying African Americans “their birthright in the Declaration of Independence” and for “unmerciful logic [that] made the black before the law less than a slave; it reduced him to the status of a horse or dog, a bale of dry-goods or a block of stone. Against such a debasement of any living image of the Divine Maker the resentment of the North was quick and unsparing.” The social revolution unleashed by the war had created a similar evolution in thought on the part of many Northerners, but within the space of twenty years the brief burst of racial liberalism that emerged from the ashes of the battlefield had given way to a hardening of sentiment. Writing at a time when the tide of popular racism was once again on the rise, Lincoln’s secretaries were swimming against the currents.

  In the Nicolay-Hay volumes, Lincoln walked a fine line between the radicals and the conservatives who made up the Republican Party’s uneasy electoral coalition. Throughout late 1861 and 1862, he urged border-state congressmen to accept a compensated emancipation scheme. “The antislavery feeling at the North,” they wrote, “excited by the ten-years’ political contention, intensified by the outbreak of rebellion,” weakened slavery with every passing day that the war visibly ate away at its very fabric and stability. “Conservative opinion could not defend a system that had wrought the convulsion and disaster through which the nation was struggling. Radical opinion lost no opportunity to denounce it and attack its vulnerable points.” According to the authors, Lincoln negotiated the tug-of-war between pro-slavery border-state unionists and antislavery Republicans, but “on the kindred policy of emancipation the President” pursued a course that was “in advance of the views of his entire cabinet.” When he announced his intention to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, all of his ministers were stunned, save Seward and Welles, whom he had informed in advance. Introducing for the first time documents that later became familiar to generations of Civil War scholars, the authors cited Lincoln’s own assertion that he was “naturally antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.”

  As young White House aides, Nicolay and Hay complained bitterly of the grief that radical Republicans visited upon the administration. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, they remembered the division between radical and conservative Republicans as “those who were anxious to destroy and those who were willing to preserve slavery.” “Antislavery opinion in Congress not only had the advantage of overpowering numbers,” they wrote, “but also of conspicuous ability . . . [A]mong those whose zeal gave them especial prominence in these debates, the names of Charles Sumner in the Senate and of Thaddeus Stevens and Owen Lovejoy in the House need only be mentioned to show what high qualities of zeal and talent pursued the peculiar institution with unrelenting warfare.” The only difference between Lincoln and his radical critics, the authors argued, was one of time. Radicals could demand immediacy, because they did not live in the White House; Lincoln could not, because he did. “Could antislavery people not realize and rest content with the undreamed-of progress their cause had already made—slavery abolished in the District of Columbia, the Territories restored to freedom, almost wholesale emancipation provided through the Confiscation Act?” they wrote of the months preceding Lincoln’s emancipation decree. “Had he not aided these measures, signed these laws, ordered their enforcement; and was he not, day and night, laboring to secure compensated emancipation in the border States? Had he not the very proclamation they sought lying written in his desk, waiting only the favorable moment when he might announce it?”

  In their treatment of black soldiers, Nicolay and Hay demonstrated the sweep of this ideological and moral evolution. Both men had encountered black regiments in and around Washington, but in his travels through the coastal South in 1863 and 1864, Hay enjoyed a special proximity to troops fresh from the front, as well as to the “contrabands” who pitched tents in Union army camps. He witnessed black regiments in battle, spoke with black enlisted men, and conferred with white officers who commanded black regiments. These experiences left an indelible mark on his thinking. “It had been a serious question with many thoughtful men whether the negro would fight,” Hay and Nicolay noted. “Practical trial in skirmish and battle, however, proved the gallantry and reliability of the black soldier in the severest trials of devotion and heroism. Within half a year after Lincoln’s order of enlistment the black regiments had furnished such examples of bravery on many fields that commanders gave them unstinted praise and white officers and soldiers heartily accepted them as worthy and trusted companions in arms.” The authors were particularly unforgiving of Confederate war crimes against captured black
soldiers. “Under the barbarous institution to perpetuate which they committed treason and were ready to die,” white Southerners “had punished their human chattels with the unchecked lash, sold them on the auction block, hunted them with bloodhounds; and it is hardly to be wondered at that amid the license of war individuals among them now and then thought to restore their domination by the aid of military slaughter.” Writing just before the dawn of the Jim Crow era, and in the wake of stark political violence that reversed the political gains of Reconstruction, Nicolay and Hay condemned the “revolting crimes” perpetrated against “captured colored soldiers” and unmanned those white Southern officers and enlisted men who “did not scruple to murder negro prisoners, and then lie about it to avoid retaliation . . . It is hard to enter into the minds of men to whom these things are possible, unless we reflect that an environment of slavery created peculiar ideas of humanity and morals.”

  The secretaries lamented that the term “contraband” “acquired much more than a mere slang value. One would be sadly puzzled to read the literature of the war in detail without knowing that ‘an intelligent contraband,’ or ‘reliable contraband,’ meant some man, woman, or child of the enslaved race.” Lincoln’s secretaries had long been shrewd observers of political and popular sentiment. They almost certainly understood that the humanity of African Americans, long a subject of debate among white Americans, was fast slipping back into disputed territory by the time they wrote these words. They were not alone in embracing a more advanced position on race in the aftermath of the Civil War, but their enduring consciousness, in the midst of a national retrenchment, likely owed in some fashion to their close association with Lincoln. As an antebellum politician, the late president—though not an abolitionist or a radical—had boldly affirmed that black Americans were fellow men and women. After four years of war, Lincoln’s own thinking evolved even further. The secretaries followed his moral and intellectual lead. They also understood that his legacy would forever be linked with his emancipation agenda. In this regard, they were writing for posterity, not for the present day.

  • • •

  As young presidential aides, living and working in real time, Nicolay and Hay often missed the significance of the events that they witnessed and in which they participated. They were actors in “stirring times,” Nicolay told Therena in the first weeks of the war, though “I hardly realize that they are so, even as I write them.” In November 1863, the secretaries drank their way through a twenty-four-hour trip to Gettysburg, in part because it was their job to work the swing-state reporters and politicians who were on hand for the dedication of the cemetery, but also because they were young men who enjoyed a good time. In hindsight, they appreciated the gravitas of the moment.

  It is unclear exactly when (let alone how) the Gettysburg Address became part of America’s secular gospel, though the critical moment seems to have coincided roughly with the publication of the Nicolay-Hay serial. The term itself, “Gettysburg Address,” appears less than two dozen times in a search of major newspapers between 1864 and 1890; between 1891 and 1910 it appears well over five hundred times. By 1894, the speech had become sufficiently important in the popular mind that Nicolay felt compelled to write a stand-alone article in the Century debunking the common myth that Lincoln had written it on the train, while en route to Gettysburg. In 1900, he instinctively included the “immortal Gettysburg address” among a select list of milestone Lincoln moments that it was his “privilege to witness.” After the secretaries died, Robert Todd Lincoln and Helen Nicolay spent the better part of a decade in vain pursuit of what they believed to have been the original manuscript; it had appeared as a facsimile in the Nicolay-Hay volumes but mysteriously disappeared after Helen transferred possession of the Lincoln papers to Hay in 1901. Alice Hay Wadsworth, John and Clara’s younger daughter, found the document among her possessions in 1916 and donated it to the Library of Congress. It is possible, even likely, that her father removed the manuscript from the larger collection after Nicolay’s death and retained it in his own files. Somehow, a speech that had not registered as seminal as late as the 1880s had become a national heirloom by the early twentieth century. Scholars and collectors—to say nothing of Robert Todd Lincoln, Helen Nicolay, and Clara Hay—devoted much energy to understanding the subtle differences between the several extant drafts, as well as the chain of custody of each copy.

  In their history, Nicolay and Hay acknowledged the growing consensus around the magnitude of the Gettysburg Address when they devoted a stand-alone chapter, thirteen pages long, to the speech. They reproduced the entire address in their text, along with a photo facsimile of the original manuscript in Lincoln’s hand. But after establishing the context of the occasion, the authors devoted eight pages to reviewing Edward Everett’s peroration and only two pages to Lincoln’s. Writing in the late 1880s, they understood that the speech was somehow an important one, “for then and there the President pronounced an address of dedication so pertinent, so brief yet so comprehensive, so terse yet so eloquent, linking the deeds of the present to the thoughts of the future, with simple words, in such living, original, yet exquisitely molded, maxim-like phrases that the best critics have awarded it an unquestioned rank as one of the world’s masterpieces in rhetorical art.”

  Nicolay and Hay did not single-handedly raise the profile of the Gettysburg Address, but they contributed to a growing consciousness of its importance. In 1863, Hay barely noted the contents of the speech in his diary, noting simply that “all the particulars are in the daily papers.” Only long after the fact did he—along with millions of his fellow countrymen—understand the full import of what he had heard.

  • • •

  In securing Lincoln’s historical legacy, Hay believed it was imperative that the biography diminish the reputation of George McClellan, the former Union general and Democratic presidential candidate. A thorn in Lincoln’s side during the war, McClellan proved a lasting difficulty to the authors. In 1875, Prince Philippe d’Orléans, the comte de Paris, published the first volume of his highly influential military history of the Civil War. A French nobleman who had served on McClellan’s general staff during the Peninsula Campaign, the count was a fierce partisan for his former commander, whose exploits and achievements he exaggerated beyond recognition. He also took frequent opportunity to denigrate Lincoln’s skills as a political and military leader. Apart from these efforts, McClellan frequently put pen to paper, offering up his stilted version of events for magazines and, in 1887, his posthumously published memoirs. Perhaps because of his army service, or because he spent more time than Nicolay in the general’s presence during the winter of 1861–62, Hay tackled most of the chapters dealing with Little Mac. “I think I have left the impression of his mutinous imbecility,” he assured Nicolay, “and I have done it in a perfectly courteous manner . . . It is of the utmost moment that we should seem fair to him, while we are destroying him.”

  Hay portrayed McClellan at his worst—an inept general given to “delusions” and “hallucinations of overwhelming forces opposed to him,” a man who “rarely estimated the force immediately opposed to him at less than double its actual strength.” Hay disclosed for the first time McClellan’s discourteous refusal to meet with Lincoln, when the president called at his house in late 1861, and zeroed in mercilessly on the general’s botched effort at the Battle of Antietam, where, thanks to a Union private’s discovery of Lee’s battle plans, he “knew not only of the division of his enemy’s army in half, but he knew where his trains, his rear-guard, his cavalry, were to march and to halt, and where the detached commands were to join the main body.” McClellan failed to act on this intelligence, Hay disclosed, and “every minute which he thus let slip away was paid for in the blood of Union soldiers the next day.” McClellan’s “deplorable shortcomings” were a constant source of agony, as was his “mutinous insolence” in routinely denigrating the president behind his back.

  Taking care to seem “courteous,”
Hay assured his readers that McClellan was “as far from being the traitor and craven that many thought him as from being the martyr and hero that others would like to have him appear.” He was a knowledgeable officer with a “pure and upright” character but a weak leader whose “native inability to use great means to great ends” led to repeated failure on the battlefield. In a coup de grâce, and to explain why Lincoln came to the conclusion that his commanding general had “no real desire to defeat the enemy,” Hay reviewed at length McClellan’s blunders and missteps, setting in stone an argument and chronology of events that have dominated Civil War historiography to this day:

  His lethargy of six months in front of Washington, to the wonder and scorn of the Southern generals; his standing at gaze at Yorktown, halted with his vast army by Magruder’s men in buckram; his innocent astonishment at Williamsburg at finding the rebels would not give up Richmond without a fight; his station astride the Chickahominy, waiting for the enemy to grow strong enough to attack him, while his brave soldiers were fading to specters with the marsh fever; his failure to assume the offensive after the Confederate repulse at Seven Pines; his second refusal of the favors of the fortune of war when Lee took his army North of the Chickahominy . . . his starting for the James, in this crisis of his fate, when he should have marched upon Richmond; his final retreat from Malvern Hill to Harrison’s Landing, breaking the hearts of the soldiers who had won on that field a victory so complete and so glorious—all these mistakes proved how utterly incapable he was of leading a great army in a grand war . . . With such limitations as these it is not likely that posterity will rank him among the leading generals of the war.

  If George McClellan stood out as Lincoln’s chief tormentor, Salmon P. Chase ran a very close second. Here, the secretaries had to walk a fine line. McClellan had been a leading Democratic opponent of Lincoln’s emancipation policy; Chase was a venerated public servant with unimpeachable antislavery credentials. Nicolay and Hay knew Chase intimately and remained on friendly terms with his family. He was going to be a “tough nut to crack,” Hay admitted, especially given their solicitousness for the feelings of his surviving daughters. He informed readers that Chase brought “great natural abilities, unswerving integrity and fidelity, and unwearying industry” to his post as Treasury secretary and “grappled with the difficulties of the situation in a manner which won him the plaudits of the civilized world and will forever enshrine his name in the memory of his fellow-citizens.” Comparing him with Seward, Hay acknowledged that the two cabinet secretaries developed a deep enmity for each other but judged that “Lincoln, Chase, and Seward were, by a long interval, the first three Republicans of their time, and each, by what would almost appear a special favor of Providence, was placed in a position where he could be of most unquestioned service to the country. Had either of the three, except Lincoln, been President, the nation must have lost the inestimable services of the other two.” But for all of his “untiring zeal and perfect integrity,” his “attitude towards the President . . . varied between the limits of active hostility and benevolent contempt. He apparently never changed his opinion that a great mistake had been committed at Chicago, and the predominant thought which was present to him through three years of his administration was that it was his duty to counteract, as far as possible, the evil results of that mistake.” Hay described in detail Chase’s various machinations for the Republican nomination in 1864, revealing his chronic indiscretion and ineptitude at backroom political intrigue. In his description of the cabinet crisis of December 1862, in which radical members of Congress attempted to secure the dismissal of the president’s secretary of state, Lincoln emerges, as always, the consummate strategist, cornering Seward and Chase into tendering their resignations, which he refused to accept but filed away for contingency purposes. “Now I can ride,” Hay quoted Lincoln. “I have got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”