by Joshua Zeitz
Nicolay and Hay had devoted ten volumes, and over a million words, to establishing Lincoln’s everlasting greatness. But they would insist to the end on his humanity. In Lincoln’s “case, as in that of all heroic personages who occupy a great place in history, a certain element of legend mingles with his righteous fame,” Hay observed. But Lincoln was “a man, in fact,” not a God. Recalling his trip to the South Carolina coast in 1863, he described for readers “a religious meeting among the negroes of the Sea Islands,” where he heard a young man “wish that he might see Lincoln. A gray-haired negro rebuked the rash aspiration: ‘No man see Linkum. Linkum walk as Jesus walk—no man see Linkum.’” As a young man, he had been held rapt by the spiritual fervor that freedmen had for their president. Older now, he understood that these “fables” were but a “natural enough expression of popular awe and love.” He agreed with Emerson, in whose final estimation Lincoln was a “plain man of the people,” the “true history of the American people in his time.”
In the decades after their deaths, Nicolay and Hay left behind a thesis that remains embedded in historical consciousness to this day. Their rendering of Lincoln—the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln—was endowed with uncommon sagacity and humanity, but he was flesh and blood. Nicolay and Hay could fairly claim to have known Lincoln better than any other men of his day. It is therefore little wonder that their rendering has withstood the test of time.
PART V
CHAPTER 18
The Fellows Who Came of Age in the Lincoln Years
Though in his final years John Hay waxed eloquent about his upbringing along the Mississippi River, fondly recalling the forts and snow huts that he and his friends built along its wooded banks, he never shared George Nicolay’s boundless enthusiasm for outdoor life. In the lonely days of his childhood, Nicolay developed a love of nature during long walks through the woods. As a young presidential secretary, he delighted in visiting the far reaches of Minnesota and Colorado, where he hiked, rode along dirt trails, and slept under the stars or in crude canvas tents for weeks at a time. Later in life, he brought Helen and Therena to Colorado nearly every summer, where the family “hid away from the hot weather” and enjoyed weeks of rugged living. He managed to drag Hay with him several times, assuring his chronically laid-up friend that the cool mountain air would do wonders for the mysterious ailments that always seemed to sap him of his strength, and after several years of debating the issue, the two men went in together on a parcel of land near present-day Colorado Springs. They intended to build summer houses there but never did. Helen and Therena evidently enjoyed the setting as much as George, for in 1885 Nicolay reported that “the family council” had decided on “tent life pure and simple” during its upcoming trip to Crystal Park. Not the Hays. The whole family went west in 1888, where they stayed at a nearby hotel. (As Helen Nicolay delicately explained some years later, “Mrs. Hay could scarcely have been comfortable in that wild country.”) The children enjoyed themselves thoroughly, riding horses at “Buffalo Bill speed” and pretending to rough it, but Hay felt “under par” from the “air, or water, or age” and apologetically told Nicolay that he would “never again have the courage” to come back. Instead, John and Clara bought a large plot of land in New Hampshire, where they constructed a stately summer mansion, the Fells.
Tragedy struck the Nicolay family in November 1885 when Therena took ill and died suddenly, after a painful struggle of just two weeks. George was grief stricken. “You can appreciate my loss,” he wrote to Hay, “when I tell you that since the day you assisted me at my wedding she has kept me young and allowed one to smile complacently at my grey hairs. Now I am sundered from the past by a chasm, which can never be bridged. How I will walk in the twin shadows of conscious age and loneliness is more than my oppressed heart can now divine.” George and Therena had known each other for well over thirty years and had been married for twenty. “Maggie,” as he affectionately called her, had waited patiently through his years of service to Lincoln, proving his constant and steady confidante through the darkest days of the war. In the years since they left Pittsfield behind, George and Therena traveled Europe, hiked and camped in the Rocky Mountains, raised a daughter, and built a vibrant life for themselves in Washington. Therena shared in George’s passions, working by his side for the better part of a decade as he wrote his portion of the Lincoln biography. She copied, researched, and edited with tireless energy, Nicolay reminded Hay, and when the work was done, it would stand as a “monument to her zeal and labor, as well as our own.” December found him struggling to move past his loss. “For the present,” he told Hay, “Helen and I are filling up the hours with the habitual daily routine . . . I suppose too the sooner I get back to business of whatever nature, the nearer I will get to mental and bodily quiet.”
Helen was nineteen years old when Therena passed away. A younger brother had died in infancy. She would never marry, and until his death in 1901 she remained her father’s closest companion, travel partner, and research assistant. In later years, she picked up George’s work and wrote extensively on Lincoln, as well as other American historical topics. Hay had always been fond of Helen, whom he affectionately dubbed “Butterfly” during their days in Paris. Now he and Clara took care to include her in their lives. There were invitations to lunch and tea, and when vacationing at the Fells, Hay made sure to identify motifs that Helen, a budding artist, might want to paint. Before Helen set sail for Europe in 1900, Hay, who was by then secretary of state, told her, “As I shall probably never have any more fun on my own account, I want to have a little vicarious enjoyment.” He enclosed a check and instructed her to “‘blow it’ in any way that may seem to you amusing.”
In his twilight years, George traveled often, spending most summers either in Colorado or in New Hampshire, where he and Helen eventually built a small cottage that could have doubled as servants’ quarters at the Fells but that “suited our needs perfectly,” Helen later remarked. There were frequent trips to Europe, and in 1900 George fulfilled a long-deferred dream when he and his daughter visited Egypt in the company of S. S. McClure, the publisher of McClure’s Magazine (and Ida Tarbell’s editor). For two months, their small party traveled the Nile on a well-appointed dahabeah. Though growing frail, George was able to climb the Cheops, from which he could “look down on the wounded Sphinx.” Father and daughter “dropped completely out of the present, while centuries long ago became real and vital.”
It did not require a trip to Egypt to make George Nicolay drop out of the present and live in the past. While Hay spent his last decade deeply engaged in statesmanship and politics, Nicolay continued to labor in Lincoln’s shadow. He contributed articles on various matters of Lincoln lore and legend. He condensed the ten volumes of his joint effort with Hay, creating an abridged history that achieved robust sales. At Hay’s suggestion, Lord Acton, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, invited him to contribute chapters on the American Civil War for The Cambridge Modern History. Nicolay eagerly took to the task. Following on the heels of the Princeton University professor Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia-born scholar whose chapters on the sectional crisis of the 1850s offered a charitable portrayal of the antebellum South’s political position but maintained a ponderous, academic distance from the passions of the bygone era, Nicolay provided a roughly 150-page account of the war, largely drawn from the Nicolay-Hay work. (Hay had no qualms about this approach, advising his friend to “take most of it out of our book . . . as any body else would do the same.”) In his conclusion, Nicolay returned to the meaning of Abraham Lincoln’s life, explaining to English readers that the sixteenth president “was beloved by his countrymen because he was the full embodiment of American life, American genius, American aspiration.” A self-made man whose experience proved that the son of the humblest farmer could one day rise to the White House, he wielded frightening power but used it judiciously and without arrogance. Foreigners might not readily understand Lincoln’s “typical American
characteristics,” Nicolay conceded, but they grasped his “greatness and achievements for more universal reasons.” Though it was no longer fashionable to say so, Nicolay would go to the grave believing that it was Lincoln’s “great act of Emancipation that raised his administration to the plane of a grand historical landmark, and crowned his title of President with that of Liberator.”
That his life had become an extension of Lincoln’s did not seem to trouble Nicolay in the least. He had not grown as rich as Hay (though he surely understood that Hay married, rather than earned, his money). He was by no means as famous. He never held high office or seemed even to aspire to it. In the last decade of his life, Nicolay observed with pride his friend John Hay’s late but spectacular political ascension, first as minister to Great Britain and then as secretary of state. “Of course I am proud of Hay’s success,” George wrote to William Stoddard, “especially as it is fully merited both by his ability and experience.” He and Helen lived a comfortable and fulfilling life, he assured his old White House colleague, “and I do not let any unsatisfied ambitions worry me.”
• • •
As George Nicolay settled contentedly into retirement, John Hay, now approaching sixty, finally achieved the political heights that many of his friends had expected of him decades earlier. Though he and Clara spent very little time in Cleveland, preferring to split the majority of their time between Washington, New Hampshire, and Europe, they remained deeply connected to Euclid Avenue. By happy coincidence, Ohio had been a powerhouse in national Republican politics since the Civil War era. Two Ohioans served as president (Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield; three, if one includes Benjamin Harrison, who was born in Ohio but built his political career in Indiana), and by the early 1890s it was clear to most careful observers that Governor William McKinley, a Civil War combat veteran and former congressman, would likely make a run for the White House. First, however, there was the matter of avoiding bankruptcy, for McKinley had carelessly co-signed a series of banknotes for an old friend whose business interests had collapsed because of bad luck and poor management, leaving the governor on the hook for $100,000 that he could not afford to repay. Quietly, a group of wealthy businessmen, organized by the Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna, McKinley’s chief political strategist and backer, arranged a bailout fund. Hay’s initial contribution of $3,000 was one of the largest, but more important it was one of the first. Hanna never forgot the gesture, and neither did McKinley, who gratefully told Hay that he could find “no words with which to adequately thank you.” Two years later, Hanna called on Hay to line up delegates in advance of the 1896 Republican convention, particularly in delegate-rich Pennsylvania, where Hay enjoyed a longtime relationship with Senator Don Cameron, his neighbor on Lafayette Square (and the son of Lincoln’s first war secretary, Simon Cameron). “I think you are as good at the game as either of the Penna Senators,” Hanna told Hay, “and I am perfectly willing to leave them in your hands.”
Hay also contributed liberally to the McKinley campaign, as he had to most earlier Republican canvasses. Henry Adams, a Democrat in a family of Republicans, later rued the way in which prior administrations had abused his good friend. “The Republican leaders treated Hay as one of themselves,” he observed with a scowl. “They asked his services and took his money with a freedom that staggered even a hardened observer; but they never needed him in equivalent office.” He was the “only competent man in the party for diplomatic work,” Adams continued angrily, but a long succession of Republican presidents “were always using him; always invited his services, and always took his money.” That trend stopped with William McKinley, who valued Hay’s long record of service and deeply appreciated his past fidelity. In the weeks following the 1896 presidential election, Hay’s name was widely circulated as a contender for secretary of state or ambassador to Great Britain. Mark Hanna was eyeing one of Ohio’s seats in the U.S. Senate. Because neither was up for grabs that year, McKinley moved the aging senator John Sherman over to the State Department in order to clear the path for his campaign manager. After some jockeying, Hay was offered England, a post for which he had aggressively lobbied.
John and Clara would in many regards consider the next year and a half one of the best periods in their life together. Having spent many extended visits in the country, they were familiar with the ways of England’s wealthiest subjects and determined to make a good showing for themselves, as well as for the U.S. government. The ambassador’s salary of $17,000 per annum did not even begin to cover the cost of their extravagant lifestyle. After renting a stately home that overlooked St. James’s Park, they shipped over silver, carriages, and horses from the United States; once arrived in England, they secured the services of three footmen, a butler, several housemaids, and a chef. “The scale of expenditure on which he has established his household and the gorgeousness of his entourage causes even the English people to gape,” one newspaper reported with wonder. Hay was an instant success at his job. He charmed English audiences with a grueling schedule of speaking engagements, dispatched his official duties with the ease and skill of a veteran diplomat, and surprised even himself when he proved a favorite with Queen Victoria. Clara was shocked—and pleasantly so—when the aging monarch shook her hand upon first meeting, and when the ambassador and his wife were later invited to dine and spend the evening at Windsor Castle, the queen herself rearranged the seating chart to ensure that Hay would be situated next to her. “She was extremely gracious and talked freely with me for an hour,” Hay reported to the president. Victoria, who had known every American envoy since Martin Van Buren’s administration, privately called Hay “the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known.”
Ironically, Hay, who is best remembered by many students of American history for declaring the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 a “splendid little war,” played almost no part in its precipitating events. Instead, he was out of pocket for most of the buildup, vacationing with Clara, their daughters, Helen and Alice, and Henry Adams in Egypt. Their party was sailing down the Nile when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, and even when word reached him, Hay decided there was little he could do by returning to London and instead chose to spend several days in Cairo and Athens. In the coming weeks, Hay observed from afar the events that led to America’s acquisition of an overseas empire, including Admiral George Dewey’s defeat of Spain’s Pacific naval forces and the brief, three-month engagement that led to Spain’s ejection from Cuba. In his famous letter to Theodore Roosevelt dated July 27, Hay did in fact hail the successful conclusion of a “splendid little war,” but not in the spirit of conquest and empire that many readers then and since ascribed to him. Instead, he was relieved that the conflict had ended quickly and with minimal loss of American life, and he believed that it had been “begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave. It is now to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.”
That fall, McKinley forced the increasingly senile John Sherman out of the State Department and tapped John Hay to replace him. Over the next six and a half years, until the day of his death, Hay played an instrumental role in expanding America’s economic and strategic position over two oceans and two hemispheres. He orchestrated treaties that extended American control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam; he authored the famous Open Door note, which asserted America’s trade rights in China; he negotiated first with Britain, then with Colombia, and then with the breakaway state of Panama, to facilitate the construction of a canal across the Panamanian isthmus. Raised to consciousness by the war against slavery, the onetime champion of democratic reform in Europe became an architect of American imperialism. How to square his transformation?
In the 1890s, Americans straddled opposite instincts. The country was in many ways brimming with confidence, the product of unparalleled size, economic output, wealth,
and innovation. “We are sixty-five million of people,” declared one member of Congress, “the most advanced and powerful on earth.” John Hay shared this feeling of buoyancy, proudly averring that the “greatest destiny the world ever knew was ours.” The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, known popularly as the Chicago World’s Fair, stood as a literal monument to America’s glory and triumph. But alongside this spirit of optimistic chauvinism ran a parallel sense of dread. Too much had gone wrong in recent years, from the panic of 1893, which bankrupted untold American businesses and households, to major class disturbances—the Pullman strike, the Homestead massacre, the unprecedented march on Washington by Jacob Coxey’s army of unemployed workers. Large corporations like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel seemed to have bought or co-opted public institutions that should have been looking out for the public interest. Equally alarming, in 1890 the U.S. census declared the western frontier officially “closed.” At the Chicago fair—seemingly the apex of national greatness—the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a disturbing lecture that seemed to augur poorly for the coming century. The frontier, he claimed, was the source of American democracy and ambition. In taming wild and unsettled lands, earlier generations had developed the spirit and institutions that underpinned American greatness. Now, with no more territory to conquer and civilize, the country’s raw ambitions and talent would surely dissipate. The speech struck a resonant chord, for already many people saw signs of weakness in the culture. As more men worked as clerks and professionals, they let atrophy the muscle, brawn, and sheer courage that it took to break the land. Even manual laborers were now more likely to be employees of other men, rather than self-sufficient yeoman farmers or shop owners, whom earlier generations of Americans regarded as the foundation of the republic. With women enjoying more prominent roles in churches and reform organizations, and even entering the workforce in sizable numbers, the old barrier between the public and the private spheres no longer seemed impenetrable. Worse still, millions of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe threatened to dilute the heritage that many “old-stock” Americans viewed as central to the nation’s past success. The United States was losing its edge, or so people worried.