by Joshua Zeitz
“The Republican party had a noble origin,” he said to much applause. “It sprang directly from an aroused and indignant national conscience. Questions of finance, of political economy, of orderly administration, passed out of sight for the moment, to be taken up and dealt with later on. But in 1854 the question that brought the thinking men together was whether there should be a limit to the aggression of slavery; and in 1861 solemn inquiry turned to one still more portentous, ‘Should the nation live or die?’” The party that was born five decades earlier forced a “discussion of the right and wrong of slavery . . . the light was let in, fatal to darkness. A system which degraded men, dishonored women, deprived little children of the sacred solace of home, was doomed from the hour it passed into the arena of free debate. And even if we shut our eyes to the moral aspects of that heartless system, and confined ourselves to its economic merits, it was found to be wasteful and inefficient.”
They were the party that freed the slaves, built the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, redeemed the nation’s paper currency, presided over its historic postwar economic and geographic expansion. “The Republican party,” he proclaimed, “in the mass and in detail, has shown its capacity to govern.”
But if there was “one thing more than another in which we Republicans are entitled to a legitimate pride,” he continued, “it is that Lincoln was our first President; that we believed in him, loyally supported him while he lived, and that we have never lost the right to call ourselves his followers. There is not a principle avowed by the Republican party to-day which is out of harmony with his teaching or inconsistent with his character.”
John Hay was not the last living link between Lincoln and Roosevelt—1854 and 1904—or even the Civil War and the Progressive Era. But he was one of his generation’s most powerful memoirists, if only for the history he had seen and made. After his death, the distance between the two ages would grow longer.
• • •
Days after William McKinley’s death, John Hay rode by carriage from his home on Lafayette Square to Capitol Hill, where his oldest friend, George Nicolay, lay dying. He wore black crape on his arm, a sign of mourning for the president. Helen greeted him in the hall and explained that her father did not have long to live. She asked that Hay not tell him of the president’s assassination, for fear that the news would only agitate him. “I must take this off before I go up to him,” Hay said as he removed his armband. “I had to tell him that my father would not see it—that he was already more in the other world than in this,” Helen later wrote. “He mounted the stairs slowly. I stayed below. He came down more slowly still, his face stricken with grief. He never saw his old friend again, for before my father died, Colonel Hay had left town, and it was impossible for him to return in time for the funeral.” After settling her father’s estate, Helen turned over the Lincoln papers to John Hay, who deposited them in the State Department vault. They remained there until Hay’s death in 1905, whereupon Clara remanded them to Robert Lincoln’s care.
• • •
Shortly following Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1905, Hay took a protracted leave of absence from the State Department and traveled to Europe with Clara, where he hoped that doctors might help cure him of mounting heart trouble. The sojourn seemed to have had a restorative effect, though the family proved unsuccessful in holding various monarchs and ministers at bay. Yet by the time John and Clara boarded the RMS Baltic for the journey home, the old troubles seemed to afflict him once again. On June 14, a day after he dreamed one last time of Abraham Lincoln, Hay took stock of his life. “I say to myself that I should not rebel at the thought of my life ending at this time,” he wrote in his diary.
I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. I have lived my life. I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualification, which may, I suppose, be called fame. By mere length of service I shall occupy a modest place in the history of my time. If I were to live several years more I should probably add nothing to my existing reputation; while I could not reasonably expect any further enjoyment of life, such as falls to the lot of old men in sound health.
I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet—instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness and gained nearly all the great prizes.
After conferring with the president in Washington, Hay left for the Fells with Clara. He died there in the early hours of July 1.
Epilogue
July 25, 1947
On July 25, 1947, some thirty scholars and scions of the Civil War era gathered in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress for a gala dinner. Carl Sandburg was there—so were James G. Randall and Paul Angle, the leading expert on Lincoln’s Springfield years. Ulysses S. Grant III was pleased to attend; Helen Nicolay, now eighty-one years old, was compelled by poor health to send her regrets. “Not since that morning in the Petersen House have so many men who loved Lincoln been gathered together in one room,” remarked one of the attendees. Shortly before midnight, the party took leave of the banquet and walked across the street to the annex. There, on the third floor, they waited for the clock to strike twelve, signaling the twenty-first anniversary of Robert Todd Lincoln’s death. Among the crowd of two hundred onlookers, newspaper cameramen lit the room with their flashbulbs, while CBS Radio News interviewed several of the dignitaries. At the appointed hour, the library staff unlocked the vaulted doors that had for many years guarded the Lincoln collection, and the scholars rushed the card catalog. Overpowered by the grandeur of the moment, Randall recited a line from Keats—“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” Upon first inspection, Randall was delighted to discover that Nicolay and Hay had used and cited only a fraction of the collection. “Little of what was basically known has had to be discarded,” he explained, “but in vividness and glowing detail we have much more of Lincoln and his period than before.” Elated, he felt as though he were “living with Lincoln, handling the very papers he handled, sharing his deep concern over events and issues, noting his patience when complaints poured in, hearing a Lincolnian laugh.” What Randall sensed, only two men before him had truly experienced. Many of the Lincoln papers were written in their hand and signed by the late president. Most had passed through their fingers at least twice—during the war, when they were young men, and decades later, when they were old. Randall could close his eyes and imagine Lincoln’s laugh. In their lifetimes, they had heard it.
Soon after the release of the Lincoln manuscript collection, Roy P. Basler, the forty-one-year-old secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, entered into an agreement with the Library of Congress to edit The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Armed with a doctorate in literature (his dissertation was a study of Lincoln literature) and an exhaustive knowledge of his subject, he devoted the next six years to his task. The result, a nine-volume edition comprising 6,870 documents—triple the number that Nicolay and Hay produced in their Complete Works—sold forty thousand copies and netted a small fortune for its academic publisher, Rutgers University Press. Basler, who died in 1989, never authored a Lincoln biography of his own, but he was among a handful of individuals, then and since, who could claim to have read almost every extant scrap that Lincoln ever wrote—from the mundane to the truly profound—with the exception of the late president’s legal papers. In 1974, speaking as “one of the few people yet alive who once read Nicolay and Hay complete,” he judged their work “indispensable” and predicted that it “will not be superseded.” Theirs was “not merely a biography of a public man but a history of the nation in his time.” It “stands up today in my opinion better than any other work so comprehensive, written by any historian cont
emporary of Nicolay and Hay.” Sandburg and Randall “fill in many niches, of course,” but they did “not . . . ma[k]e revisions of the essential story told by N. & H.” The secretaries, he concluded, made “use of the stuff of history” in a way that few of their successors could claim.
“Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having [a photo] done in group with the Presdt.” John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, and John Hay, November 1863
“I’m Keeper of the President’s Conscience.” John Hay in 1861, as a new presidential secretary
John Hay, summer 1862, in a photograph taken at the Treasury Department
“To learn to write is like learning to swim; everyone must teach himself.” John G. Nicolay as a young editor, 1850s
“All these things will make stirring times, and I hardly realize that they are so, even as I write them.” John G. Nicolay as presidential secretary
Robert Todd Lincoln, circa 1865
John G. Nicolay with Indian Commissioner William P. Dole, Minnesota, 1862
“She has kept me young and allowed one to smile complacently at my grey hairs.” Therena Bates Nicolay in later years
“The mere money value was greatly enhanced by the . . . opportunity of looking down from the organ loft, on Sunday mornings, on an olive cheek and a knot of blue-black hair.” Therena Bates, 1860s
John G. Nicolay in his study; his daughter, Helen Nicolay, seated on the sofa
“I do not let any unsatisfied ambitions worry me.” John G. Nicolay in later years
John Hay signing a treaty with Spain in the president’s office, 1899
“I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood.” Secretary of State John Hay, 1905
Acknowledgments
Books like this are not written in a vacuum. They are the product of years of collaboration with friends and colleagues. Along the way, I’ve benefited greatly from the advice, counsel, training, and critical feedback of countless historians. The best parts of this book come from their influence; the errors are all mine.
At Brown University, where I conducted my graduate studies, I was fortunate to work with James T. Patterson, Gordon S. Wood, Howard Chudacoff, and John L. Thomas. Their professionalism and intellectual rigor set a high standard to which all of their students continue to aspire. Sean Wilentz, whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing through my political work, has influenced my thinking about the role of history (and historians) in public life. During my tenure at Cambridge, Tony Badger and John Thompson were great mentors, both as teachers and as writers.
During my time as a contributing editor at American Heritage, I was fortunate to work with Richard Snow and Fred Allen, both stellar writers, editors, and historians. Many of my early chapters on the antislavery movement grew out of conversations with them. Ken Burns, the great filmmaker and chronicler of American life, has been a constant source of encouragement.
I owe thanks to editors at the Atlantic Monthly, for whom I reviewed the 2012 film Lincoln. They afforded me the opportunity to set down some early observations about Nicolay’s and Hay’s roles in forging a lasting historical image of the sixteenth president. Thanks are also due to the editors of Dissent, who kindly allowed me to adapt and include portions of my article on Civil War memory in the 1880s and 1890s.
To my good friend Troy Rondinone I owe enormous gratitude. A fine scholar of nineteenth-century America, Troy gave my manuscript a close read and offered insightful feedback that saved me from errors of fact and interpretation.
At Princeton University, where I taught between 2010 and 2012, Christina Paxson (then the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and now the president of Brown) offered both great encouragement and resources that aided me in my research.
Special appreciation goes to several archivists and librarians who gave freely of their time and expertise. Holly Snyder of the John Hay Library was an early and frequent source of wisdom about the Hay Papers. The professional staff at the Library of Congress was indispensable as I sifted through both the Nicolay and Hay collections. Jane Gastineau, the Lincoln librarian at the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was more than generous in identifying and providing me with access to rare manuscripts and photographs associated with Nicolay.
I began this book under the thoughtful and steady guidance of Scott Moyers and later had the great fortune of working with Andrew Wylie, who has proven a great champion of the project. Wendy Wolf, my estimable editor at Viking, was a source of both tough criticism and calm encouragement. Her positive influence is everywhere in these pages. Wendy’s deputy, Maggie Riggs, has been a great colleague throughout, as has production editor Bruce Giffords, who ushered the project from rough manuscript to finished product. Ingrid Sterner is probably the finest copy editor whom I’ve had the opportunity to work with. She saved me from many a poorly turned phrase and more errors than I’d like to admit.
My wife, Angela, offered me love and encouragement throughout. Her support, in turn, gave me the confidence to keep at it. On many a Saturday and Sunday, our daughter Lily crawled (then toddled, and later sprinted) into my office to inform me that it was time to stop writing and start playing. She occasionally hopped into my chair and, when no one was looking, typed her own observations into the manuscript. This book is dedicated to Angela and Lily, and to Naomi, who joined our world just as the final touches went to press.
Notes
Abbreviations
AL-CW Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953).
ALS Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
CF A College Friendship: A Series of Letters from John Hay to Hannah Angell (Boston: privately published, 1938).
Hay Diary Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).
HN-ACPL Helen Nicolay MSS, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Ind.
JGN John George Nicolay.
JGN-LC John G. Nicolay MSS, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
JH John Hay.
JH-BU John M. Hay MSS, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
JH-LC John M. Hay MSS, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
JH-LL William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).
LJOUR Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
N&H-AL John G. Nicolay and John M. Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890).
PCFP Pike County Free Press.
RTL Robert Todd Lincoln.
TB Therena Bates.
TR The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols., selected and edited by Elting E.Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–54).
WH Emanuel Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940).
Prologue: June 13, 1905
three weeks before his death: JH-LL, 2:404.
“I dreamed last night”: JH Diary, June 13, 1905, box 1, JH-LC.
in the words of Noah Brooks: Burlingame, Lincoln Observed, 83–84; Hay Diary, Aug. 25, 1864.
“decidedly German in his manner”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, xi, 57.
Hay cultivated a softer image: Donald, We Are Lincoln Men, 183.
worked hard at being inscrutable: Current, Lincoln Nobody Knows, 6, 12–13.
“came from Illinois to Washington”: N&H-AL (repr., New York: Century, 1918), 1:xii.
Leading into the 1864 election cycle: Donald, Lincoln, 524, 531.
“died in the days of doubt”: N&H-AL, 10:341.
“help unite th
e North and South”: Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 119.
“an uprising of the national conscience”: N&H-AL, 10:352.
Chapter 1: Exile in the West
“As I am now”: JH to “Friends,” Sept. 30, 1855, reel 5, frames 1219–21, JH-BU.
Springfield, Illinois: Angle, “Here I Have Lived,” 91, 165.
John Hay was born: Christian Advocate, July 20, 1905, 1130.
“The days of my boyhood”: JH, “The Press and Modern Progress,” in Addresses of John Hay, 244–45.
It was clear from the start: JH-LL, 1:6–7.
Writing to his sister: JH to “My Dear Sister,” March 5, 1854, reel 5, frames 1213–15, JH-BU.
With backing from his uncle Milton: JH to “Dear Friends,” Nov. 28, 1855, reel 5, frames 1222–24, JH-BU.
“red-cheeked, black-eyed, sunshiny boy”: Sears, John Hay, Author and Statesman, 8.
recollections of other contemporaries: LJOUR, xxv; William Leete Stone, “John Hay, 1858,” in Brown et al., Memories of Brown, 153–54.
“In those days, all text”: JH-LL, 1:41.
Hay’s senior-year roommate: Stone, “John Hay, 1858,” 154.
College library records: Dennett, John Hay, 22.
outsized personality and charm: JH-LL, 1:35, 47.
“love for and appreciation”: Ibid., 41–42.