Above all, the thing Hay and Nicolay resented most about Mary Lincoln was the strain she quite evidently put on the president, who on more than a few occasions let slip doleful references to his “domestic troubles.” They watched, exchanged worried looks, and, for the most part, chewed on their tongues. They knew, too, that she had it in for them and would scheme to get rid of them if she could. “The devil is abroad, having great wrath,” Hay confided to Nicolay early in the war. “The Hellcat is getting more Hellcatical by the day.”
ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1863, Hay, Nicolay, and Lincoln took a carriage to the photography studio run by the Gardner brothers, Alexander and James. Alexander had until recently worked for Mathew Brady, taking haunting postmortem pictures of Antietam, Gettysburg, and other battlefields. On this day his main subject was Lincoln, who looked squarely into the lens, firm of jaw, dour and determined. Hay called the images of the president “some of the best I have seen.” Next it was his and Nicolay’s turn. “Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in group with the Presdt.,” he wrote in his diary.
Lincoln sits between them, hands in his lap, looking away; Nicolay is also seated, gazing wanly into the camera, his chin strengthened somewhat by a goatee. Hay stands on Lincoln’s other side in light trousers, matching charcoal coat and vest, with watch chain. He can’t resist a little jauntiness: one hip is cocked, and his left arm is akimbo, holding a broad-brimmed hat; his right is placed familiarly on the back of Lincoln’s chair. His cheeks are smooth but no longer adolescent, and his mustache now looks as if it belongs. He is a month past his twenty-fifth birthday. Altogether, it is a stiff portrait, due more to the chemistry of the camera than of the subjects. They had done it just for themselves, and if Hay and Nicolay had known that it would be the only photograph ever taken of them with Lincoln, they might have striven for better.
The next evening, the two secretaries joined the president and Mrs. Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. “J. Wilkes Booth was doing the ‘Marble Heart,’ ” Hay mentioned in his diary. “Rather tame than otherwise.”
Two nights later, Hay returned to the theater to see Booth as Romeo, though he was far more taken with the character of the witty, gregarious Mercutio, who is slain while standing up for his star-crossed chum. After the play, Hay and several of his own chums repaired to Willard’s Hotel “and drank a good deal.” Indeed, if his diary is any measure, he was drinking more now. This was certainly the case when he and Nicolay accompanied the president on a trip to Gettysburg on November 18 to consecrate the cemetery to the soldiers who had perished there four months earlier.
OF ALL THE EVENTS of the Lincoln presidency witnessed by John Hay, from surprise election to sudden death, the Gettysburg Address is notable not for Hay’s immediate observance of its magnitude but for his benign disinclination to do so. Hay got drunk the night he got to Gettysburg, and he was likely hungover the next day when Lincoln gave the most famous speech in American history.
They arrived from Washington late in the afternoon aboard a special train provided by the B & O Railroad; the passenger list included Secretary of State Seward, Interior Secretary John Usher, several foreign ministers, and a few military men. They found Gettysburg packed with thousands of out-of-towners, many of them relatives of the soldiers who had fought and fallen in July. The mood, however, was far from funereal. While Lincoln, Seward, and the elder statesmen in the party were escorted to their lodgings, Hay joined a group of revelers that included the young chairman of Pennsylvania’s Republican Committee, Wayne MacVeagh; Edwin Stanton, son of the secretary of war; and John Forney, owner of the Philadelphia Press and Washington Daily Chronicle, two of the newspapers most loyal to Lincoln, the latter occasionally publishing Hay’s anonymous White House commentary.
The whiskey began and then the serenading. They joined the celebrants and military band that interrupted the president’s supper with singing and cheers for “Father Abraham.” Finally Lincoln appeared at the door, “said half a dozen words meaning nothing & went in,” Hay remarked blithely. “We went back to Forney’s room having picked up Nicolay and drank more whiskey.” They sang “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” and soon a “large and clamorous” throng gathered outside. More singing. Forney and MacVeagh made short speeches. More drinking. Another round of “John Brown.” And finally to bed, though no one got much rest.
The following morning, Hay did not join Lincoln and Seward on their tour of the battlefield. But shortly before noon, he reported, “I got a beast and rode out with the President’s suite to the Cemetery”—a procession that included nine governors, three members of the cabinet, foreign ministers, dignitaries of every rank and rung, a Marine band, and an escort of cavalry and artillery.
Hay did not mention whether he sat on the platform or stood in the crowd of nine thousand during the memorials that followed. Edward Everett, nationally renowned for his tribute to “The Character of George Washington,” spoke for two hours in the autumn air. He compared Gettysburg with the Peloponnesian War and lyrically, reverently, painstakingly iterated every thrust and parry of the northern “martyr-heroes,” some of whose corpses still lay within view, unburied and a-mouldering. Hay said Everett spoke “perfectly,” but even Lincoln was fidgety by the end. Everett was the country’s greatest orator, but he could enrapture an audience for only so long.
Nor when time finally came for Lincoln to make a few “remarks” could he hold the crowd in the palm of his broad hands, for his address was over almost as soon as it began—“Four score and seven years” lasting barely four minutes. His auditors were foot- and, for some, head-sore, and they hardly had time to take in the 260 or so words delivered in Lincoln’s high-pitched, prairie cadence. Hay heard him clearly, but as Lincoln’s secretary and after-hours companion, he had listened to the president read aloud many times, from Richard III to Robert Burns. Hay was attentive, but he could be forgiven for not being entirely transfixed. The same could be said for most everyone present, for the momentousness and resonance of the Gettysburg Address would only begin to be recognized once it was transcribed and printed in hundreds of newspapers, and read and reflected upon by the greater populace.
Throughout the rest of his life, in conversation with poets and plenipotentiaries and in service to three of Lincoln’s successors, Hay could recreate with dignified detail that sunny, somber afternoon when Lincoln, with signature self-effacement, suggested, “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.” But on November 19, 1863, Hay recorded in his diary, almost in homage to Lincoln’s own lapidary concision: “[T]he President in a firm free way, with more grace than is wont, said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home.”
THREE WEEKS LATER, LINCOLN issued another proclamation, this one nowhere near as eloquent as his address at Gettysburg or the Emancipation Proclamation of the previous year. He attached the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction to his annual address to Congress. As Hay reported, the plan was a reflection of the president’s increasing optimism that “the rebel power is at last beginning to disintegrate.” Yet even as the momentum shifted, Lincoln felt a sense of urgency, pressed as he was on one side by the Peace Democrats, who wanted to negotiate a truce, even if it meant legitimizing the Confederacy and perpetuating slavery, and on the other by Radical Republicans, who wanted to crush and punish the Confederacy and remake the South according to their abolitionist designs. Lincoln, who did not recognize the Confederacy, or rather, did not acknowledge the legality of secession, sought a middle road that would permit states to “reconstruct” on their own, without reprisal. Toward this end, his proclamation of December 8 delineated the so-called Ten Percent Plan, whereby a state would be welcomed back into the Union once 10 percent of its citizens (based on 1860 voter rolls) swore an oath of allegiance to the Union and agreed to accept emancipation. The first place he proposed driving this wedge was Florida, to which he dispatched Hay at t
he first of the year. To succeed he would need only fourteen hundred signatures.
No longer was Hay merely the president’s private secretary. To invest him with the authority commensurate to the task ahead, Lincoln commissioned Hay as a major in the army and assigned him to the position of assistant adjutant general. He sailed, in uniform, from Washington on January 15, arriving in Hilton Head four days later, where he reported to General Quincy Adams Gillmore, commander of the Army of the South.
A year earlier, Gillmore had welcomed the addition of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry to his command, a regiment comprised entirely of black enlistees and led by the Boston abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw. Two weeks after Gettysburg, Gillmore had chosen the 54th to spearhead the assault against Fort Wagner, near Fort Sumter. The charge was repulsed, but the black troops fought bravely, and their showing went a long way toward validating Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and encouraging further enlistment of black troops.
When Hay reported to Gillmore, the commander was preparing to launch a fresh offensive, this one in northeastern Florida. His goals, in addition to cutting off Confederate access to cattle and other desperately needed supplies, were to recruit former slaves into his black regiment and now, with Hay’s arrival, “to inaugurate measures for the speedy restoration of Florida to her allegiance.”
Hay lingered several days in South Carolina, waiting for the Florida campaign to concentrate. Since his visit the previous year, the siege of Charleston had escalated, with gargantuan Parrot guns pounding the battlements of the guardian forts, Sumter, Moultrie, and Wagner. The enemy’s fire got “pretty warm” as well, he wrote in his diary after an excursion to within range of Fort Wagner’s batteries. The incoming shells had a “regular musical note like Chu-chu-wachu-wachu-brrr and each of the fragments a wicked little whistle of its own. Many struck in the black marshy mud behind us burying themselves & casting a malodorous shower. . . . I often saw in the air a shell bursting—fierce jagged white lines darting out first, like javelins—then the flowering of the awful bud into full bloom.” He saw men torn apart by shrapnel, and when a shell exploded close by, “I made a bad dodge,” he confessed. Yet for a brief moment he had come under fire while wearing the uniform of the Union.
FROM THE INSTANT HAY arrived in Fernandina, Florida, on February 5, 1864, his motives for issuing the amnesty proclamation came under suspicion. The president’s opponents saw the Ten Percent Plan as a ploy to bring Florida back into the Union merely to provide pro-Lincoln delegates to the Republican Convention in June. Hay, too, had much to win—and lose—personally. If Florida rejoined the Union, the orange groves he had purchased a year earlier would increase in value immensely and he might not need to worry about money for a long while. If, on the other hand, the Confederacy were to prevail, keeping Florida in its fold, his groves would likely revert to the previous owners and his ambition of a life of languid leisure would be nullified.
It was no coincidence that the biggest promoter of the amnesty plan was Lyman Stickney, the federal tax commissioner who had facilitated Hay’s land speculation. Stickney himself had everything to gain politically and financially by returning Florida back to the Union. He was a well-connected scoundrel and a confidant of Treasury Secretary and presidential hopeful Salmon Chase, and he knew just how to sweeten the pot for Lincoln’s young secretary. He suggested that, once Florida was reconstructed, Hay would be the right man to serve as its representative in Congress.
Hay’s presence in Florida, meanwhile, made General Gillmore’s job more complicated. From the start, the army’s objective was to occupy Jacksonville and, only if opportunity presented itself, to drive westward as far as the Suwanee River. Before leaving Hilton Head, Hay had tried to explain to Gillmore that “it was not the President’s intention to do anything to embarrass the military operations—that all I wished from him was an order directing me to go to Florida & open my book of records for the oaths.” Nevertheless, the general recognized the added political dimension of the operation, believing that the president would not have sent his own secretary if he did not regard the mission as vital.
Hay’s project got off to a less than rousing start. “Opened my book [of loyalty pledges] in an office over Robinson’s Store, sent out my posters [of the proclamation] & sat like a spider,” he wrote on his first day in Fernandina. “A few straggled in and swore [allegiance]. One hesitating cuss who evidently feared he was going to be tricked into the army swore, but dallied so on the signing that I shut the book & told him to make up his mind before calling again.”
The next day, he was with the first troops, led by the all-black 54th Massachusetts, to land in Jacksonville, which they found undefended by the rebels. He immediately renewed his effort to gather signatures, writing optimistically to Lincoln, “I have the best assurances that we will get the tenth [ten percent].” But he also acknowledged that the state was “well-nigh depopulated,” and those citizens whom he did encounter were “ignorant and apathetic.” With the pickings so slim, he was not choosy about who took the oath of loyalty. Some of his early successes were deserters and prisoners of war, hardly the most promising material for reviving the state. One Union officer described Hay’s prospects as “a lot of stragglers, poor, white-livered, fever-stricken, scrawny, ignorant creatures.”
His experience in Jacksonville was marred further by a ghastly exhibition of military justice—the hanging of a black man convicted of rape. “In [the] middle of the square a gallows was erected,” Hay recounted. “A cart drove in & after pulling & hauling & swearing was backed under the gallows: the poor devil stood upright. . . . His sentence was read, the noose adjusted, [and with] the cart beginning to move he jumped up & tried to break his neck but failed & gasped & jerked & struggled dreadfully. His stertorous breathing could have been heard over the square. A man jumped up to his shoulders & hung on him swinging—No Effect: Another man got on: he still gasped. At last they raised him up & jerked him down hard: & he ceased struggling & after a while the crowd dispersed.”
Hay moved on to St. Augustine, now accompanied by Stickney, the opportunistic tax commissioner and land shark. Evidently Hay was confident enough in the amnesty campaign that he committed to buy several more orange groves, again with Stickney’s encouragement, and attended a lecture on orange horticulture. All was going well enough until February 20.
General Gillmore had returned to his headquarters, leaving the Florida expedition under the command of General Truman Seymour, who, for reasons still not entirely comprehensible, ignored Gillmore’s firm instructions to consolidate his forces around Jacksonville and avoid overextending his lines. Instead, Seymour grossly underestimated the size and resolve of the Confederate Army in Florida and impetuously marched into a fight at Olustee, fifty miles west of Jacksonville. Five thousand entrenched rebels shredded a federal advance of equal size. “The fighting on both sides was very fine,” wrote Hay, who was well removed from the action. He singled out the bravery of the Negro regiments, who stood “like rocks in a fire that decimated their ranks.”
Finally, the Union Army retreated to Jacksonville, leaving all but the blockaded coast in rebel hands. In the course of an afternoon, the federal army had suffered eighteen hundred dead and wounded, or 40 percent of its force, one of the worst casualty rates of the entire war. Hay blamed the defeat on General Seymour, who had been “unsteady and queer since the beginning of the campaign . . . subject to violent alternations of timidity & rashness.”
Seymour was not the only one whose behavior came under criticism for the debacle at Olustee. Three days after the battle, the New York Herald charged Hay and Lincoln with “Executive intermeddling” with the military campaign in Florida. “[I]t is rumored that the expedition was intended simply for the occupation of Florida for the purpose of securing the election of three Lincoln delegates to the National Nominating Convention, and that of John Hay to Congress. The cost of the operation to the government is estimated at about one million of dollars.” Unrelentingl
y, the Herald excoriated Lincoln and Hay for sending “brigades of our brave armies . . . into rebellious states to water with their precious blood the soil that may produce Presidential votes. . . . [T]he President and his secretary are the only ones to blame in the business.”
After Olustee, Hay tried not to be discouraged, although the portion of the state under federal control was now reduced and even more sparsely inhabited. “I can’t think of leaving the field till it is ours,” he wrote Nicolay immediately after the battle. “I don’t believe I could take my daily tramp down [Pennsylvania] Avenue, if I skedaddled just now.” Four days later, though, he saw that his efforts were futile. The few citizens who remained in Florida, even if they did represent 10 percent of the state’s population, “would not give us the moral force we want,” he acknowledged. “The people of the interior would be indignant against such a snap-judgment taken by incomers & would be jealous & sullen.” Still he followed through on his orders, traveling as far as Key West, where he found the civilian population either disinterested or “unscrupulous scamps.”
By March 10, he was headed home. Passing through Fernandina, he read for the first time the press allegations of his and Lincoln’s ulterior scheming in Florida. He could only wonder what recriminations awaited his arrival in Washington. As his ship bucked northward through a raw headwind, he fought seasickness by writing verse and reading Charles Dickens’s American Notes.
His folly was complete and undeniable. The Ten Percent Plan was a bust, first in Florida and thus nationally. And thanks to Stickney, his life savings were invested in Florida real estate, a venture that now seemed speculative in the extreme.
All the Great Prizes Page 10
