by Joshua Zeitz
Washington soon learned that the secretaries, though the closest of friends, were very different sorts of men. Nicolay quickly developed a reputation as “the bull-dog in the anteroom”—a “grim Cerberus of Teutonic descent,” often “very disagreeable and uncivil,” who bristled at the “impatient demands of the gathering, growing crowd of applicants which obstructs passage, hall and ante-room.” The journalist John Russell Young took a different view, admiring Nicolay’s “close, methodical, silent German way” and judging him “scrupulous, polite, calm, obliging, with the gift of hearing other people talk; coming and going about the Capitol like a shadow; with the soft, sad smile that seemed to come only from the eyes; prompt as lightning to take a hint or an idea; one upon whom a suggestion was never lost, and if it meant a personal service, sure of the prompt, spontaneous return.” Prone to frequent bouts of illness, George stood five feet ten but rarely weighed much more than 125 pounds, leading Young to remark on “the thin, frail body upon which disease seemed to be doing its work.” But much like another White House visitor, who found the secretary “a man of more ability than his appearance indicates,” Young was impressed by Nicolay’s discretion, loyalty, and talent. William Stoddard, the “third secretary” who filled in when the workload grew heavy, acknowledged that people often found Nicolay “sour and crusty,” but he added that it took “a steady fellow like Nicolay, or somebody as quick-witted as John Hay” to perform what was otherwise an impossible job. “The President showed his good judgment of men when he put Mr. Nicolay where he is, with a kind and amount of authority which is not easy to describe.” Thanks to his “dyspeptic tendency,” Nicolay developed “an artificial manner the reverse of ‘popular’ . . . That, however, for which we all respected him, was his devotion to the President and his incorruptible honesty Lincoln-ward. He measured all things and all men by their relations to the President.”
If Nicolay played the part of the stern gatekeeper, Hay was quick with a quip and more apt to wear a smile, even as he explained that, no, the president was not available to take a meeting. Like many Washington observers, John Russell Young found him “brilliant and chivalrous,” “independent, with opinions on most questions.” The young secretary had a “genius for romance and politics as no one . . . since Disraeli” and was eminently “suited for his place in the President’s family.” A close friend later noted that Hay “loved to talk, and his keen joy in it was so genuine and so obvious that it infected his listeners. He was as good a listener as he was a talker, never monopolizing the conversation . . . He talked without the slightest sign of effort or premeditation, said his good things as if he owed their inspiration to the listener, and never exhibited a shadow of consciousness of his own brilliancy . . . Every person who spent a half-hour or more with him was sure to go away, not only charmed with Hay, but uncommonly well pleased with himself.”
Despite being a bon vivant, Hay attracted his share of resentment and jealousy. A reporter who visited Washington in the early months of 1861 found him “a young, good-looking fellow, well, almost foppishly dressed, with by no means a low down opinion of himself, either physically or mentally, with plenty of self-confidence for anybody’s use, a brain active and intellectual, with a full budget of small talk for the ladies or anybody else, and both eyes keeping a steady lookout for the interests of ‘number one.’” The abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson thought him “a nice young fellow, who unfortunately looks about seventeen and is oppressed with the necessity of behaving like seventy.” He was a “nice, beardless boy,” a newspaperman wrote condescendingly, but his proximity to the president underscored a very real problem—that “Mr. Lincoln has no private secretary that fits the bill.”
In those heady first days, the secretaries struggled to conceal their self-satisfaction. George informed his fiancée that “in my position I necessarily hear something new almost every day, that would be of infinite interest sometime to one and sometimes to another, but about which my duty is to say nothing.” When the editors of the Chicago Tribune, a staunchly Republican paper with a robust circulation throughout the Midwest, asked if the president was still reading his paper, Nicolay replied tartly that it was “received very regularly, opened and kept with the other papers on the newspaper table in my offices . . . [T]he President rarely ever looks at any papers, simply for want of leisure to do so . . . I can assure you . . . that the President’s task here is no child’s play.” In a job that called for unconditional loyalty and unrelenting toughness, Nicolay provided both, often at the expense of his own popularity.
Hay was equally prone to demonstrations of braggadocio. Just prior to the departure for Washington, he confided to Hannah Angell that he had “showed part of your last letter (so long ago) to Mr. Lincoln at a little musical soiree, whereat he grinned his majestic delight. I am beginning to respect him more than formerly.” In his next dispatch, written on Executive Mansion stationery, he instructed, “If you do write to me I will get your letter addressed ‘Care of the President,’ Washington, DC.” The envelope was handsomely “franked: John Hay, Acting Private Secy.” At Willard’s, where he and Nicolay dined most evenings, Hay enjoyed the knowing stares of “office-seekers, wire pullers, inventors, artists, poets, prosers (including editors, army correspondents, attachés of foreign journals, and long-winded talkers), clerks, diplomatists, mail contractors, railway directors,” and politicians whom Nathaniel Hawthorne scorned. In his first few weeks in Washington, one of his classmates from Brown, Frederick Augustus Mitchell, happened across him at the hotel, where Hay was leaning casually against a cigar stand, taking in the scene. When Mitchell congratulated him on his appointment, Hay gave a wry smile and replied, “Yes. I’m Keeper of the President’s Conscience.”
Living down the hall from the president and spending nearly every waking hour in his presence, “the boys,” as Lincoln called them, soon came to know him intimately. He often took carriage rides with the boys, and when the first lady was out of town or indisposed, they accompanied him to the theater. To distinguish between the two Johns, the president referred to Hay by his first name and to Nicolay by his last. In good humor, they referred to him privately as “the Tycoon” and “the Ancient,” though they always addressed him directly as “Mr. President” (“it still seems queer” to call him that, Nicolay admitted to Therena in early 1861). Charles G. Halpine, an Irish-born writer who came to know Hay during the war, later judged that “Lincoln loved him as a son,” a sentiment shared by Galusha Grow, the House Speaker, who remembered that “Lincoln was very much attached to him, and often spoke to me in high terms of his ability and trustworthiness. I know of no person in whom the great President reposed more confidence and to whom he confided secrets of State as well as his own personal affairs with such great freedom.” Sharing a love for witty verse and wordplay, the president and Hay developed a close bond. Nicolay’s rapport with Lincoln was more formal but still close. The president trusted him to manage delicate political relationships and to act as his political gatekeeper. Nicolay decided which visitors would enjoy a presidential audience and which dispatches would fall under Lincoln’s gaze. In many cases, he issued orders and responses without consulting the president, whose policies and priorities he came instinctively to understand and anticipate. Even his detractors did not second-guess his standing.
As the responsibilities of war bore down hard on Lincoln, the president’s sleep became more fitful. Many evenings, he wandered down the hall in his nightclothes, seeking out the company of his secretaries. Hay took note of a typical occasion when he and Nicolay were finishing the day’s business “a little after midnight [and] the President came into the office laughing,” clutching a volume of verse by the English humorist Thomas Hood.
“An unfortunate Bee-ing,” seemingly utterly unconscious that he with his short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at.
What a man it is! Occupied all days with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own fame & future hanging on the events of the passing hour, yet he has such a wealth of simple bonhomie & good fellow ship that he gets out of bed & perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that we may share with him the fun of one of poor Hood’s queer little conceits.
The door swung both ways, as the secretaries enjoyed access to the family quarters. Early in 1861, Hay received a late-night call from Jean Davenport Lander, a famous stage actress now married to a Union officer. Lander shared news of an improbable plot to kill or kidnap the president. Though he thought nothing of the story, Hay nevertheless enjoyed meeting “the Mona Lisa of my stage struck days.” After seeing her out of the mansion, he walked to the private quarters and “went to the bedside of the Chief couché. I told him the yarn; he quietly grinned.”
Hay later claimed that there “was little gaiety in the Executive house” during the Civil War. “It was an epoch, if not of gloom, at least of a seriousness too intense to leave room for much mirth.” But Lincoln had a sharp sense of humor and told his secretaries that “he must laugh sometimes, or he would surely die.” William Stoddard recorded the events of a typical Sunday afternoon, when he was finishing a batch of correspondence in the president’s office. Lincoln was in the family quarters, and “the whole floor [was] as silent as a graveyard or a hospital,” when “in came John Hay, all one bubble. He is sober enough most of the time, but he had heard something funny, and he was good-natured about dividing it.” In repeating the joke for Stoddard, Hay broke down in laughter “before he got well into it. The door was open and so was Nicolay’s, and he heard the peal of laughter when the story proved too much for its narrator, and over he came, with a pen in one hand and a long paper in the other, and he sat right down to listen. Hay began at the beginning, and went on very well until the first good point was reached,” but all three men again “exploded as one” before reaching the punch line. In their fit of laughter, none of the secretaries noticed Lincoln slip through the office door. “Down he sank into Andrew Jackson’s chair, facing the table, with Nicolay seated by him, and Hay still standing by the mantel.” From behind his gentle grin, the president said, “Now, John, just tell that thing again.” As Hay reached the end of the joke, “down came the President’s foot from across his knee, with a heavy stamp on the floor, and out through the hall went an uproarious peal of fun.” Moments later, the secretary of war appeared in the doorway bearing bad news, and “the shadow came back to Lincoln’s face, and he arose, slowly, painfully, like a man lifting some enormous burden.”
Those who were jealous of the secretaries sneered at their familiarity with the president. Those who understood the art of politics took them under their wings, regardless of ideology or party. Hay and Nicolay were frequent dinner guests of the increasingly conservative cabinet secretary William Seward, whose son Frederick, serving as his father’s assistant secretary of state, also struck up a warm friendship with the White House aides. Gideon Welles, the moderate secretary of the navy, invited them into his home, as did the Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, and Lyman Trumbull, radicals who grew estranged from the president over the course of his first term. These men appreciated the utility of remaining on good terms with Lincoln’s gatekeepers.
As Washington, D.C., swelled with tens of thousands of soldiers, journalists, petitioners, and hangers-on, the city became “as gay, as jolly and as dissolute as in the flush times that are gone,” Hay wrote. He and Nicolay spent their evenings at Willard’s, “the most crowded, extortionate and uncomfortable of caravansaries,” but a place to see and be seen. They strolled Pennsylvania Avenue, with its “flood of uniforms” and parade of “Northern beauty and fashion.” They frequented the “brilliant succession of reviews” on offer at the city’s playhouses and theaters. They haunted the salons of leading socialites like the Eames family, whose parlor, Nicolay assured his fiancée, “is really a sort of focal point in Washington society, where one meets the best people that come here.” Charles Hay, who had only recently despaired of John’s aimlessness, proudly boasted that his son had “obtained a position, in a social and political point of view, never before reached by a young man of his age in this generation . . . The guest of Cabinet Ministers [and] foreign ambassadors, and occupying a position in the public mind, which causes a day’s illness to be flashed across the Continent as a matter in which the nation felt an interest. His arrival in a city noticed in the dailies as much as General Jackson’s would have been thirty years ago.” The secretaries later developed a deep appreciation of their good fortune. But they did not always grasp the significance of events as they lived them. In no small way, they were living in “stirring times,” Nicolay told Therena, though he confessed to “hardly realize that they are so, even as I write them.”
• • •
Despite the secession of seven Deep South states, the first month of Lincoln’s presidential tenure saw no formal declaration of hostilities. As late as April 1861, Nicolay still dismissed “all the excitement . . . over the prospect of a war with the South.” There might be “a little brush at Charleston or Pensacola,” but no one expected a full-blown military engagement. These predictions faded away with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, the secession of four states in the upper South, and the president’s order calling up seventy-five thousand militiamen to quash the insurrection. With the administration intent on keeping the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri squarely in the Union ranks—together, they would have added 45 percent to the Confederacy’s white population and 80 percent to its manufacturing capacity—the city of Baltimore, already a hotbed of secessionist conviction, fell into a state of armed chaos. On April 19, as the Sixth Massachusetts attempted to pass through the city en route to Washington, an armed mob attacked the soldiers, who returned fire, killing twelve local citizens. To prop up the faltering unionist governor, Lincoln agreed that troops arriving from Northern states would travel around, not through, Baltimore.
From his office in the White House, Nicolay privately believed that the skirmish in Baltimore, more so than the attack on Fort Sumter, was “likely to become historic in the nation’s annals.” It was, he told Therena, “the first bloodshed in this civil war, and singularly enough,” it fell on the “anniversary of the first bloodshed in the Revolution. We are expecting more troops here . . . but are also fearful that secessionists may at any hour cut the telegraph wires, tear up the railroad track, or burn bridges, and thus prevent their reaching us, and cut off all communications.” In fact, that is precisely what happened, when the mayor and the governor ordered the detonation of railroad bridges that connected Baltimore to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, as well as telegraph lines that serviced Washington, D.C. For days, the capital lay in siege, with no effective means of sending or receiving news. No one knew when Northern troops would complete their circuitous route to defend Washington, which lay vulnerable to an attack from the South.
For Lincoln, these were dark days. The president stared out at the Potomac, wondering repeatedly, “Why don’t they come!” While Lincoln was visiting wounded soldiers from the Sixth Massachusetts, Hay heard him offer, darkly, “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. R. Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.” To buck up the capital’s defenses, Senator James Lane of Kansas recruited a company of fellow Jayhawkers (veterans of the border wars of the 1850s) who happened to be in town seeking government employment. His so-called Frontier Guards camped out in the East Room at the White House, lending an almost carnival atmosphere to the mansion. Hay found them “a splendid company.” Over at the Capitol, the Sixth Massachusetts took refuge in the new House and Senate chambers. Nicolay and Hay ventured over to inspect the “novel” scene. “The contrast was very painful between the grey haired dignity that filled the Senate Cham
ber when I saw it last and the present throng of bright-looking Yankee boys,” Hay noted, “the most of them bearing the signs of New England rusticity in voice and manner, scattered over the desks, chairs and galleries, some loafing, many writing letters, slowly and with plough hardened hands,” while Speaker of the House Galusha Grow “stood patient by the desk and franked” mail for the line of soldiers. Hay lay down on a leather sofa toward the rear of the chamber and stared at the “wide-spreading skylights over arching the vast hall like heaven blushed and blazed with gold” and thought it a fitting place to quarter the troops.
