WHAT FINALLY DREW JOHN Hay into the affairs of Abraham Lincoln, other than his ambivalence for the law, was his renewed friendship with John George Nicolay. If Hay had kept to the periphery of public debate, Nicolay had jumped in with both feet. He and Lincoln had first met in 1856, when Nicolay was editor of the Pike County Free Press and Lincoln needed someone to print campaign literature. That same year, Nicolay attended the Republican Convention as a Free-Soiler. After the election, in which the Republicans’ first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, lost to James Buchanan, Nicolay sold the Press and moved to Springfield, going to work for Lincoln’s close friend Illinois secretary of state Ozias Hatch. Nicolay studied law under Hatch’s supervision and was admitted to the bar in 1859, a few months before Hay arrived in Springfield. By then Nicolay had been under the sway of Lincoln for three years.
Nicolay and Hay mixed in the same society, which centered on the Ridgley household. Nicolay was neither as handsome nor as outgoing as Hay. He had “the close, methodical, silent German way about him,” commented John Russell Young, who later got to know Nicolay in the White House. “[He was] scrupulous, polite, calm, obliging, with the gift of hearing other people talk . . . [and] with the soft, sad smile that seemed to come only from the eyes.” Nicolay compensated for his reserve with a sweet tenor voice and by playing the flute. And unlike Hay, who in those days was sometimes too quick to please, Nicolay was admired for his quiet industriousness; already he had several patents in his name. “[I]f ever there was a man who worked, John Nicolay was that man,” Mary Ridgley attested.
Nicolay was in the colossal Wigwam in Chicago on May 18, 1860, when an invigorated Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln, everybody’s second choice, as its candidate for president. Lincoln had remained in Springfield; the news reached him by noon, and the rest of the capital was soon notified by the ringing of church bells and the firing of a cannon, one round for each state of the beleaguered Union. Crowds packed the State House, then moved to Lincoln’s house, where “the Rail-Splitter,” as he was now known, made a few modest remarks.
Hay, it must be said, was slow to join the Lincoln bandwagon. He had returned to Illinois from Providence in plenty of time for Lincoln’s titanic debates with Douglas. But, while he likely read transcripts in the local papers and could hardly have ignored the enormous hoopla surrounding the seven encounters between the race-baiting Democrat and his unshakeable, anti-slavery nemesis, he never mentioned attending one of them. (The nearest debate to Warsaw took place on October 13, 1858, at Quincy, some forty miles away; none was held in Springfield.) And despite Lincoln’s ever-growing stature as a leader of the national Republican movement, nevertheless the ungainly, unkempt lawyer who came and went to and from the adjoining office on Fifth Street may at first have struck Hay as another of the backwoods strivers whom he thought he had escaped when he had gone east to college. Then, too, Lincoln would have been far too preoccupied to pay more than cursory attention to the sharp but slightly glib young man with the clean cuffs and tidy cravat who was making a halfhearted stab at learning laws that Lincoln had absorbed by a far dimmer light more than twenty years earlier.
At best, Lincoln was a long shot. Few men, not even in Springfield, honestly believed he had a chance to be president. (While Lincoln did win Springfield, barely, in the fall election, a majority of Sangamon County voted against him.) For the moment, Lincoln was merely a dark-horse politician—after which, it was assumed, he would be a lawyer again.
Hay still regarded himself as a poet, lukewarm at best about joining the profession of his uncle and the other occupants of the musty, cluttered office on Fifth Street. And so, for the sake of his literary cohort back in Providence at least, he adopted a condescending antipathy. “My insanity has not yet changed its form from rhyme to politics,” he told Hannah Angell in early May 1860, two weeks before the Republican Convention. “I occupy myself very pleasantly in thoroughly hating both sides, and abusing the peculiar tenets of the company I happen to be in. . . . This position of dignified neutrality I expect to hold for a very long time unless Lincoln is nominated at Chicago.”
With the surprising outcome of May 18, the view from Logan & Hay was transformed dramatically. Lincoln’s horse was no longer so dark, and the moody young dilettante could suddenly see the heroic possibilities of the drama taking shape in his midst. “Dignified neutrality” was abandoned. To borrow a term from the forthcoming presidential campaign, he was now Wide Awake.
At the urging of his Brown professor James Angell, Hay submitted an eyewitness account of the Lincoln victory celebration in Springfield to the Providence Journal under the pen name Ecarte. Clearly the author of the following item was no fence-sitter: “When the lightning came down from Chicago . . . to tell us that the nation had honored the honest man whom we have so long delighted to honor, the deep and earnest enthusiasm of the hearty western populace burst forth in the wildest manifestations of joy.” Suddenly the skies were bright. “No more of the martyr-spirit of four years ago; no more of the forlorn-hope appeals; no more of that feeling of contention against overwhelming odds. . . . [E]very heart seemed filled with the dauntless energy which comes from a premonition of success. . . . The Republicans of the Prairie State feel large-hearted and jubilant.”
Hay loved seeing his words in print—and if he could not gain attention as a poet, he would carry on as a propagandist. Anything was better than the programmatic prose of the law. After his first item appeared in the Providence paper, he was invited to submit articles to the Missouri Democrat of St. Louis (which, despite its name, was sympathetic to the Republican cause). Lincoln, however self-effacing, had never eschewed publicity, and he and his fellow Republicans understood all too well that to improve the chance of victory in November, they must put a face and personality to the rail-splitting debater from Springfield and create an aura of enthusiasm that, they hoped, would become contagious.
Hay was only too eager to oblige. After another rally in Springfield in August, Ecarte wrote breathlessly: “The deluge of enthusiasm that has swept over us has left no soul unsubmerged by the swelling waters. Lincoln men are too jolly to give any particular reason for the faith that is in them. . . . It was certainly the greatest political demonstration that our State has ever seen. Veteran stumpers, who have mingled in every fight since Jackson’s time, fail of comparisons to describe it. Editors and reporters who have haunted for years the mass meetings of the nation, say they have seen nothing to be compared to it. Grey-haired Whigs”—another of Hay’s puns—“who shouted and drank hard cider on the Tippecanoe battle field, at the monster meeting of twenty years ago and have lived ever since in the confident belief that no other meeting ever would be like it, shake their heads since yesterday, and mourn over a broken idol, an ideal eclipsed. . . . It was worth many years of ordinary life to see the wild rush and impetuous enthusiasm of the crowd when Mr. Lincoln appeared upon the grounds, to see for a moment, and be seen by the eager thousands who had come so many miles with that one purpose and hope; and to hear when he had been forced onto the stand by their loving violence, the friendly, yet dignified words by which he stilled their clamorous plaudits.”
A month later, he wrote, again as Ecarte, “It is one of the truest evidences of the innate nobility of Abraham Lincoln, that he impresses all with whom he is brought in contact, lofty or lowly, with the irresistible magnetism of a large and catholic nature.”
One of the magnetized was John Hay, and for the next four years he would make the most of his conversion, sharing his views anonymously or pseudonymously with the press and observing the Lincoln presidency like no other. His bombast was born of artistic ego, but, as time passed, it was even more a measure of his appreciation and admiration for his subject.
NOT LONG AFTER THE nomination, it became obvious that Lincoln could not run a presidential campaign out of a cramped law office. In early June, he moved into the more commodious governor’s office on the second floor of the State House, unoccupied when
the legislature was not in session. It had room for ten or twelve people, at least before it became cluttered with the miscellany sent by supporters: axes, split rails, surveying tools, and a twelve-foot chain, its links carved from a single piece of wood “to symbolize the indissoluble union of the states.” Mail arrived by the bushel. “I wish I could find some young man to help me with my correspondence,” Lincoln asked Ozias Hatch. “I can’t afford to pay much, but the practice is worth something.” Hatch recommended Nicolay, who had initially hoped for the assignment of writing Lincoln’s campaign biography. When the job went to a young William Dean Howells, Nicolay readily took the secretary position for $75 a month.
Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nicolay was Lincoln’s only secretary; his job was to greet prominent Republicans and manage the mail. Ever more swamped, Nicolay suggested to Lincoln that they enlist John Hay to turn his gifted hand to answering letters. Hay had already proven himself in the articles for the Providence and St. Louis newspapers, and Milton Hay further vouched for his nephew’s “great literary talent and great tact.”
Hay, needless to say, was all too willing to set aside his legal education. Always a quick study and now a Lincoln believer, he stepped in nimbly, writing letters for the nominee’s signature and continuing to beat the Republican drum in his Ecarte submissions. When Milton Hay offered to underwrite his nephew for the first six months, Lincoln declined the offer, pledging to pay the salary out of his own pocket, if it came to that. For the time being, Hay worked for nothing.
With the astonishing victory of November—in which Democrats splintered their ticket, allowing Lincoln to win every northern state but one, while earning only 40 percent of the popular vote—the office in the Illinois State House was deluged with exponentially more letters, some seeking autographs, interviews, and jobs in the new administration; others offering congratulations, advice, and, from more than a few southerners, condemnation. Yet as capable and indispensable as Hay was proving to be, Lincoln wasn’t sure whether he would be able to keep his new aide on the presidential staff. Officially the White House payroll allowed for only one private secretary, Nicolay. “We can’t take all Illinois with us down to Washington,” Lincoln supposedly said. And then, after a moment’s reflection, he gave in: “Well, let Hay come.”
A QUARTER CENTURY LATER, when Nicolay and Hay at last divided up the job of writing Lincoln’s biography, Hay would assume responsibility for the chapters dealing with Lincoln’s years in Indiana and Illinois and his emergence as a lawyer and political figure. Like Hay, Lincoln had endured bouts of melancholy—“a sea of perplexities and sufferings beyond the reach of the common run of souls”—most famously after the death of a girl he had loved, Ann Rutledge, and after his fitful engagement to Mary Todd. By the time Hay sat down to chronicle this period of Lincoln’s life, he had spent four years in intimate contact with the president and understood him much more thoroughly than he did in November 1860. Yet Hay had not been acquainted with the young Lincoln at all, and when he gave himself to the task of explaining the travails of Lincoln’s early life, he brought to bear two frames of reference, both of them sentimental and entirely subjective: one was his appreciation of the Lincoln he had come to know; the second, perhaps more insightful, was his own poetic passage from self-absorbed adolescence to more enlightened manhood.
“In many respects he was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence,” Hay was to observe of Lincoln. “[T]he whole course of his development and the tendency of his nature made it inevitable that his suffering should be of the keenest and his final triumph over himself should be of the most complete and signal character. In that struggle his youth of reveries and day-dreams passed away. Such furnace-blasts of proof, such pangs of transformation, seem necessary for exceptional natures. The bread eaten in tears, of which Goethe speaks, the sleepless nights of sorrow, are required for a clear vision of the celestial powers. Fortunately the same qualities that occasion the conflict insure the victory also. From days of gloom and depression . . . no doubt came precious results in the way of sympathy, self-restraint, and that sober reliance on the final triumph of good over evil peculiar to those who have been greatly tried but not destroyed.”
Through his own experience, Hay came to know Lincoln. Through Lincoln, he began to find himself.
CHAPTER 3
Potomac Fever
Abraham Lincoln, who had served a single previous term as a congressman and had traveled beyond the prairie of Illinois only on rare occasions, could have chosen any number of private secretaries more worldly than John George Nicolay and John Milton Hay. Doubtless there were many in the Republican Party who advised him to cast a wider net for men of greater experience and sophistication. But out of loyalty and surely because of the competence and compatibility that his two young aides had demonstrated thus far, he stuck by them. These were two of the easiest decisions he would make over the next four years.
For Hay, the invitation to join the White House staff came as an enormous reprieve from a profession he had chosen by default. “It is cowardly in me to cling so persistently to a life which is past,” he had written to Nora Perry before Lincoln had won the party nomination. “It is my duty, and in truth it is my ultimate intention to qualify myself for a Western Lawyer, et praeterea nihil, ‘only that and nothing more.’ ” Lincoln’s coattails spared him, and he gave no further thought to being a lawyer, although on February 4, 1861, one week before the presidential train left for Washington, he was admitted to the Illinois bar. “I never practiced law myself,” he would tell his son Del almost forty years later, “but I have never considered the time wasted I spent studying it.” Perhaps not, but in 1861 he was glad to apply himself otherwise.
But now that he was at last getting to escape what so recently he had regarded as the coarse, stunting climate of the West, he found himself unexpectedly wistful for Warsaw. “I shall never enjoy myself more thoroughly than I did that short little winter [1858–59] I spent at home,” he wrote a friend in Springfield. “It was so quiet and still so free.”
In the four months between the election and inauguration, the mail kept everyone busy. Hay noticed letters overflowing from Lincoln’s coat pockets. He spotted Lincoln reading letters as he trod down the street with his distinctive mule’s gait. “I believe he is strongly tempted [to read] in church,” Hay chuckled.
Lincoln had prudently decided to say as little as possible about his intended positions and appointments until after he was in office. Yet despite campaign assurances that he would not interfere with slavery in states where it already existed, the South declined to give the new administration the benefit of the doubt. Between December and February, seven states seceded from the Union to form their own confederacy. Departing President James Buchanan, eager to keep the peace—and pass the buck—weighed whether to abandon one or more forts in South Carolina.
Hay, in the role of Lincoln’s press agent, exhorted the public not to jump to conclusions. “Mr. Lincoln will not be scared or coaxed into any expression of what everybody knows are his opinions until the will of the people and the established institutions of the Government are vindicated by his inauguration,” he wrote as Ecarte in the Missouri Democrat. “Then if anybody doubts his integrity, his liberality, his large-hearted forbearance and his conservatism, their doubts will be removed. Until then let them possess their souls in patience.”
Lincoln left Springfield on February 11, accompanied by Hay, Nicolay, twenty or so friends, colleagues, military escorts, and seventeen-year-old Robert Lincoln. Hay and Robert had first met during Hay’s pre-college days in Springfield, and the two had become better friends during Robert’s recent visits home. Lincoln, too, was just now getting reacquainted with his eldest son. Thus far they had never been close for the simple reason that they had been too often apart. Lincoln was frequently absent from home as a circuit lawyer when Robert was a boy. Then it was Robert’s turn to go away, graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and ente
ring Harvard College in the fall of 1860.
Mrs. Lincoln and Robert’s younger brothers, Tad and Willie, joined the train in Indianapolis, and over the next ten days and two thousand miles, Lincoln would deliver more than a hundred speeches to crowds totaling nearly a million. Yet the journey had only just begun. For better or worse, this small nucleus, consisting of the Lincolns and the presidential secretaries, would continue as fellow travelers for four more years, living in close quarters, baring every seam of their natures, as war and the affairs of the nation enveloped them, and they in turn endeavored to steer the nation’s course.
Hay took advantage of the shared captivity to sketch his employer. “If the reader could see him, as the writer hereof sees him,” Ecarte wrote as they passed through Buffalo, “sitting upon yonder seat, deep-eyed, bending forward, his face channeled with deep wrinkles, which hold a shadowy significance of the man within—large-browed, thoughtful, an aspect generally expressive of rugged strength in repose, and of resolute decision in action—the reader would probably arrive at the conclusion that he was the man, of all others, to see that he was right, and then to go ahead. If he be not such a man, why, then physiognomy is a delusion and a snare.” Hay’s message, above all, was that Abraham Lincoln was in possession of a singular greatness.
Equally evident was Lincoln’s unusual, unaffected humanness. After a speech in Trenton, Hay described Lincoln’s voice as being “as soft and sympathetic as a girl’s.” Although he never raised it “above the tone of average conversation, it was distinctly audible throughout the entire hall.” After pledging his devotion to “peace and conciliation,” Lincoln had added emphatically, “ ‘[B]ut yet I fear we shall have to put the foot down firmly.’ ” And with “a subdued intensity of tone,” Hay observed, Lincoln “lifted his foot lightly and pressed it with a quick, but not violent, gesture upon the floor.” Hay noticed that “[t]here was a peculiar naiveté in [Lincoln’s] manner and voice, which produced a strange effect upon the audience. It was hushed for a moment to a silence which was like that of the dead. I have never seen an assemblage more thoroughly captivated and entranced.”
All the Great Prizes Page 5
