All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  In the 1830 exodus from Kentucky, the one member of the Hay family who did not come along was son Charles, perhaps the most scholarly. Lexington, Kentucky, where Charles was raised, had a reputation as the Athens of the West, a prosperous hub of aristocratic refinement, where Mary Todd, future wife of Abraham Lincoln, learned to speak French with a southern accent. Charles Hay attended a “classical” school, where he made easy progress in Latin and Greek. His son later boasted that his father never lost his command of Virgil and Homer.

  Charles received a medical degree from Transylvania University in Lexington and, instead of joining his parents and siblings in Illinois, chose to set up a practice in the town of Salem, Indiana, thirty-five miles from Louisville. Here he married Helen Leonard.

  Charles was a man of broad curiosity, and he was by all reckoning a capable physician. But when it came to sheer, demonstrable intellect, the Leonards were of even finer weave. The family of John Hay’s maternal grandfather, David Leonard, had founded Bridgewater, Massachusetts. David graduated from Brown University, in Providence, where he delivered the class poem in 1792. While in college he was welcomed into the Baptist Church in “the rigorous fashion of those days,” John Hay recounted, “by immersion in the Seekonk River, a hole having been cut in the ice for the purpose.” He went on to a distinguished career in various Baptist pulpits in New York and New England; a number of his sermons were published and enjoyed wide circulation. He settled with his family in Bristol, Rhode Island, where he became postmaster, newspaper editor, and insurance agent. Eventually he shed the starched polity of the Baptists for the roomier doctrine of Unitarianism, undertaking his own translation of the New Testament, only to lose the manuscript in the great gale of 1815.

  Undaunted, in 1817 he answered the call of the West and set out for Indiana, buying a tract of land on the Ohio River. Two years later, he was dead, leaving a widow and eleven children, the fourth of whom was Helen, age fifteen. She was taken in by a sister married to a lawyer in Salem, named, apparently by pure chance, John Hay Farnham. The Farnhams chaperoned Helen’s courtship to the town’s bright young doctor, Charles Hay. They were married in October 1831.

  Charles did not exactly flourish in Salem—not at first, and only modestly during the decade that followed, despite the steady passage of immigrants through the Ohio Valley. “[Y]ou are no doubt anxious to know whether I am likely to make enough here to keep my masticators going,” he wrote his family in Illinois. In order to establish himself, he assured his relatives, he simply needed more time, “ ‘the nurse and breeder of all good,’ as Shakespeare expresses it.”

  Helen and Charles received a nest egg, perhaps as much as $1,000, from the estate of her father, and in November 1832, their first child, Edward Leonard Hay, was born. The following summer, an epidemic of cholera struck. “It has made our town look like a place besieged by Indians more than anything that I can compare it to,” Charles wrote to his brother Milton. “I am sure that Black Hawk with all his forces could [not] carry more terror and dismay into any place than the inhabitants of Salem have shown during this epidemic.” Try as he might, there was little Dr. Hay could do to stanch the suffering. His own family was spared, but sixty or seventy of his neighbors died within a few weeks.

  The doctor’s tireless service won him the admiration and loyalty of Salem, yet even then he pursued other interests besides medicine. He involved himself in Whig politics, needling the “ultra Jacksonians” in a Fourth of July speech and decrying the migration of pro-slavery Kentuckians to Indiana. He became part owner of a local printing office and assumed the editorship of the newspaper, changing its banner from Democratic to Whig. As the region continued to boom, he began speculating in real estate. Three more children were born: a son, Augustus Leonard (known first as Gus, then as Leonard); a daughter, Mary; and on October 8, 1838, a third son, named for Charles’s father John and his brother Milton. That an esteemed poet also bore the name was perhaps an added inducement.

  For all his engagement with the affairs of Salem, Dr. Hay still felt unsettled. More than anything, he craved a life of the mind, of literature—“the le[a]ven of a better character,” he called it. “He cared very little for light reading,” his son John recalled. “He barely tolerated the novelists later than Scott; from modern essayists he always went back with pleasure to Addison and Steele; the stately measures of Pope and Dryden were far more to his taste than the ingenious melodies of contemporary poets. But his favorite reading was in the departments of history and natural science.”

  Charles could be stuffy in his own literary tastes, but he was the first to acknowledge that education, by any means, was the key to advancement and well-being. In a letter to Milton Hay, he declared, “There are quite as many distinguished orators, writers, lawyers, and doctors amongst those who have never been to college as are to be found amongst those who have. . . . But there must still be opportunity, there must be books, there must be society, there must be congenial minds.”

  How surprising, then, that when Charles at last decided to leave Indiana for Illinois, instead of choosing Springfield, the burgeoning state capital, he picked Warsaw, a Mississippi River town no bigger than Salem.

  Warsaw is situated on a high, wooded bluff on the Illinois shore of the Mississippi, opposite the mouth of the Des Moines River, one hundred miles west of Springfield. First it had been Fort Johnson, which quickly burned, then Fort Edwards, both constructed by the army to discourage downstream incursion by the British during the War of 1812. After the war, John Jacob Astor made it a fur-trading post. Speculators arrived in the 1830s, optimistically platting a town they named Warsaw, after the popular historical novel, Thaddeus of Warsaw, written by Jane Porter, an Englishwoman. In the heyday of Mississippi steamboats, the location was promising. Rapids immediately upstream prevented bigger boats from navigating farther north in certain months, and many of their goods and passengers wound up on the wharf at Warsaw.

  John Hay, who was roughly the same age as his fictional neighbors, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, soaked up the sights and sounds of river life. “[H]e had an inexhaustible repertoire of ‘river slang,’ ” recalled one school chum. On the map his hometown may have been called Warsaw, but he preferred the more colorful nickname used by pilots and river men: Spunky Point. “[S]ome idiots . . . who had read Miss Porter thought Warsaw would be much more genteel,” Hay griped to an eastern acquaintance, “and so we are Nicodemussed into nothing for the rest of time.”

  But it wasn’t the name that aborted Warsaw’s destiny. Sandbars, the blockades of the Civil War, and the eventual decline of steamboats had much more to do with stunting the town’s growth. As Henry Adams later remarked, Warsaw was “one of the many western towns which then aspired to the rank of future western metropolis, and which the course of time has not carried perceptibly toward its object.”

  John Hay’s memories of Warsaw cut two ways. In a short story he published in 1871, he reflected on the Mississippi “reposing from its plunge over the rapids” and the rolling hills “patched with the immortal green of cedars and gay with clambering columbines.” In a poem, “On the Bluff,” his nostalgia was even more mawkish:

  O grandly flowing River!

  O silver-gliding River!

  Thy springing willows shiver

  In the sunset as of old;

  They shiver in the silence

  Of the willow-whitened islands,

  While the sun-bars and the sand-bars

  Fill air and wave with gold.

  On the other hand, he was ever so eager to be shut of his roots. When he left Warsaw as a teenager, he would dismiss western Illinois as “a region whose moral atmosphere was never remarkable for purity.” And on visits home, he would lament to eastern friends that he was in “exile”—that is, exile from the East. He likewise spilled his disdain for the “barbaric” Illinois frontier in the early pages of the Lincoln biography: “The ruling motive which led most [settlers] to the wilds was that Anglo-Saxon lust of land.
. . . Accompanying this flood of emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in fresher and simpler regions.”

  Like two of his lifelong literary friends, William Dean Howells, born in small-town Ohio in 1837, and Samuel Clemens, born in Hannibal, Missouri, just downriver from Warsaw, in 1835, Hay did not regard the West as the Holy Grail. Their forefathers had wandered in the wilderness long enough. The rosier horizon lay in the direction of the sunrise: New England, New York, Europe. While absence tended to soften John Hay’s heart toward home, absence is what it took, for over the years he made it plain that he was glad to have Warsaw in his past and doubly glad that he had made for himself a more cosmopolitan future, as a son who did not so much follow his father’s example as his father’s vision of a wider world rich with higher ideas.

  Hay was not yet three when his family settled in Warsaw. His eldest brother, Edward, had died the previous fall, at the age of seven, perhaps one more reason Salem had lost its appeal to his parents. Charles Hay built a handsome two-story brick house upon the bluff and set about reestablishing himself as a physician. His wife bore him two more children, Charles and Helen.

  In Warsaw, Dr. Hay was a solid citizen, but he did not make much from either his medical practice or several farms he had bought in the county. “They were not especially profitable,” his son recollected. “[H]e treated his tenants somewhat as if they were his children or his wards.” But, Hay added, “[T]he hours he spent among them were at least wholesome and agreeable. They gave him a beneficial contact with reality, and a reason for being in the open air and on horseback.”

  Dr. Hay much preferred to devote his time to books—he was a founder of the Warsaw library—and to the education of his children. He sent them to a schoolhouse in town, and he and his wife, who had received an uncommonly good education from her own father, administered an even more rigorous curriculum at home. “The rule of the household was never lax,” John Hay recalls. “Obedience was very much a matter of course.”

  Young John demonstrated an early facility with languages, beginning with Latin and Greek, followed by German, taught at night by a German immigrant. “John was a student with the others, who were all grown men,” his brother Charles remembered. “John was so small that he would occasionally fall asleep during the evening, but he surprised them all by showing he had learned his lesson and could recite easily well with the best of them when awakened.”

  IN HAY’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, two events stand out vividly. Both involved acts of violence against outsiders seeking freedom. In each case, Hay was only vaguely aware of what had transpired at first, although in later years, once he was able to place these disturbing instances in the context of his own and the nation’s history, their import struck a deeper nerve.

  In 1839, just as Warsaw was getting its footing, a rival town sprang up twenty miles upstream. Expelled from Missouri, Joseph Smith and his Mormon followers founded Nauvoo; by 1844 its population had swelled to more than twelve thousand, making it the second largest city in Illinois, after Chicago, with more church members pouring in every day from as far away as England. Anti-Mormon hatred was fanned by the Warsaw Signal; its editor accused Joseph Smith and his elders of every form of turpitude: perjury, robbery, counterfeiting, and fleecing of their own flock. The most inflammatory offense by far was polygamy and the sexual predation said to go with it. “It can be proven,” the Signal charged, “that Smith’s principal supporters and confidential friends are among the basest seducers and violators of female virtue—that Smith himself has aided villains to accomplish their unholy designs; and . . . that he acted from the impulse of Heaven’s dictation, while endeavoring to rob virtuous females of their chastity.”

  Yet the threat to Warsaw went beyond outrages of morality or religious doctrine. By sheer number of Mormon voters, Joseph Smith, “sitting on his throne,” the Signal warned, could control the government of Hancock County, which included both Nauvoo and Warsaw, and “without molestation hold over us an iron rod.” (Mormons voted solidly Democratic.) Such was Smith’s vision of grandeur that he declared his candidacy for president. Another cause of contention was economic: Mormons had nearly succeeded in buying a section of land immediately downstream from Warsaw, which, if the deal had been completed, would have effectively surrounded Warsaw and quite possibly rendered the town obsolete as a viable port.

  The crisis came to a head at the end of June 1844, when anti-Mormon militias from Warsaw and nearby Carthage converged on the Carthage jail, where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were being held on a flimsy charge of treason. The vigilantes forced their way into the jail and murdered both men. The succession of Brigham Young and the great Mormon trek to Utah were the direct result of this extralegal aggression.

  The only account of Charles Hay’s role in the Mormon “war” comes from his son John, who was five years old at the time. “[H]e was everywhere known to be a strong and determined opponent of the Mormons,” Hay acknowledged after his father’s death. Yet he quickly clarified that his father’s “voice and influence” had always been firmly on the side of law and order. “[H]e protested vigorously, but ineffectually, against the march to Nauvoo,” Hay insisted. Even so, Dr. Hay did join the Warsaw militia as its surgeon. It was only after the governor of Illinois ordered the regiment disbanded that he and several dozen others decided to turn back.

  Twenty-five years later, in an effort to give shape to the wisps of memory of the Mormon unpleasantness and Warsaw’s part in it, Hay submitted an article to the Atlantic Monthly, which, while denouncing Smith and his leaders as “blackguards” and Mormons in general as “bad neighbors,” also castigated the anti-Mormon mob of Warsaw as loutish and craven. “The moment the work was done,” Hay wrote, “the calmness of horror succeeded the fever of fanatical rage. The assassins hurried away from the jail, and took the road to Warsaw in silence and haste. They went home at a killing pace over the wide dusty prairie. Warsaw is eighteen miles from Carthage; the Smiths were killed at half past five: at a quarter before eight the returning crowd began to drag their weary limbs through the main street of Warsaw,—at such an astounding rate of speed had the lash of their own thoughts driven them.”

  In expectation of Mormon vengeance, the women and children of Warsaw—no mention of whether John Hay, his mother, and siblings were among them—fled to safety across the Mississippi while the men “kept guard in the hazel thickets around the town.” The reprisal never came, and when the state eventually endeavored to bring the murderers of the Smiths to justice, it took ninety-six men, Hay chided, “before twelve were found ignorant enough and indifferent enough to act as jurors.” Every citizen of Warsaw knew who had done the deed. None talked; none was convicted. “And you cannot find in this generation an original inhabitant of Hancock County who will not stoutly sustain that verdict,” Hay concluded snidely.

  The second violent incident of Hay’s childhood was slighter but in many ways more terrifying and far-reaching. He himself left no written record of it; the following account is from his brother Charles:

  “When we were both quite young [John] told me he was in the basement of our house, and he heard a ghost. [The ghost] spoke to him and said, ‘Little Master, for the love of God bring me a drink of water.’ [John] said he was so frightened he hurried upstairs and went to his room. The next day my father told at the table that a party of three runaway slaves had been overtaken by a party of officers from Missouri and the slaves had resisted arrest, and one was captured and taken back, one of the other two was fired upon and killed, and the third had been badly wounded but escaped leaving blood tracks in the wood. I saw my brother John staring at me across the supper table, but saying nothing. After the meal, he told his father about the voice he heard in the basement, and my father, John and I went down to investigate and on a pile of kindling wood was the appearance of some one having used th
is for a bed, but there was a stain of blood shed there nearly eighteen inches in diameter. This was probably the blood shed by the runaway slave who had escaped capture. What became of the slave afterward, I never heard. Fully forty years afterward I asked John if he remembered this occurrence, and he replied, ‘I will never forget it, and that incident has given me a greater horror than anything I have ever read about slavery.’ ”

  This same brother, who went on to serve in the army and later became mayor of Springfield, offered one final glimpse of John’s formative years. “[H]e was spoken of as ‘Honest and Efficient,’ ” recalled the younger Hay. “He repeated this remark to me and said, ‘I feel my character has been established,—honest and efficient,—this is my pride for my after life.’ These words were spoken by a boy not ten years of age.”

  BY THE AGE OF thirteen, Hay had exhausted the educational possibilities of Warsaw. In 1851 he moved to Pittsfield, in nearby Pike County, to live with his uncle Milton in order to attend a private classical school that would better prepare him for college. A fellow student remembers him as a “red-cheeked, black-eyed, sunshiny boy, chock full of fun and humor and devilment that hurt nobody.” Hay instantly won over his schoolmaster, an Irishman named Thomson, with the ease and fluency of his Virgil translation, and he spoke German “like a native.” His knowledge of natural history was equally impressive. “[T]he boy could talk of the Eocene period and the old red sandstones like a professor,” the classmate attested.

  It was in Pittsfield that Hay first made the acquaintance of John George Nicolay. Nicolay was born in Bavaria in 1832, and his family immigrated to the United States when he was six; by the age of fourteen he was an orphan. When Hay arrived to attend school, Nicolay was nineteen, self-educated, and employed in the printing office of the Whig weekly, the Pike County Free Press. Within three years he would be the paper’s editor and sole proprietor. Gaunt and earnest, he was in many respects the opposite of the younger, more winsome Hay. Still, Pittsfield was a small town and they were two of its brightest residents. They took each other’s measure and evidently took a liking as well. Ten years hence they would be roommates in the White House.