Nicolay and Hay, who had only scorn for Little Mac, preferred to call the peace plank “the surrender platform.” “The Lord preserve this country [from] the kind of peace they would give us,” Nicolay wrote. “It will be a dark day for this nation if they should elect the Chicago ticket, and purchase peace at the cost of Disunion, Secession, Bankruptcy and National Dishonor, and an ‘ultimate’ Slave Empire. I cannot think that Providence has this humiliation or disgrace and disaster in store for us.”
Providence did not. The day after McClellan’s nomination, the Confederates evacuated Atlanta one step ahead of Sherman’s army, and the Democrats’ charge of “failure” seemed suddenly empty. “From the moment the Democratic Convention named its candidates the stars in their courses seemed to fight against them,” Hay was to write in the Lincoln biography. “During the very hours when the streets of Chicago were blazing with torches, and the air was filled with the perfervid rhetoric of the peace men, rejoicing over their work, [Confederate general John] Hood was preparing for the evacuation of Atlanta; and the same newspapers which laid before their readers the craven utterances of the [surrender] platform announced the entry of Sherman into the great manufacturing metropolis of Georgia—so close together came bane and antidote.”
In the weeks that followed, discord among Republicans subsided as they weighed the greater peril of a McClellan victory. Even those who had once wished to dump Lincoln from the ticket, a list that included the Gettysburg orator Edward Everett and Horace Greeley, now pulled for the president. “I shall fight like a savage in the campaign,” Greeley told Nicolay. “I hate McClellan.” One of Lincoln’s old irritants, General John C. Frémont, who had entered the race as a third-party candidate, dropped out. Lincoln was especially heartened by the resounding support expressed by the officers and soldiers who might have been expected to embrace their former general but now smelled victory and resolved to stay the course, guided by “Father Abraham.”
And while victory was not assured, it was coming. Admiral David Farragut had captured Mobile Bay. By strangling Petersburg, Grant was shortening Richmond’s breath. General Philip Sheridan was spurring his cavalry the length of the Shenandoah Valley, thrashing Jubal Early when he could, harassing him no matter what. Sherman was uncoiling his supply lines, preparing to march from Atlanta to Savannah, then to Columbia, gouging upward along every rib of the Confederacy “with the steady pace and irresistible progress of a tragic fate,” Hay was to write.
The political signs were favorable as well. On the evening of October 11, Hay accompanied Lincoln to the Telegraph Office in the War Department to follow the congressional, gubernatorial, and legislative elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. During the wait, Lincoln read aloud from a volume by the humorist Petroleum V. Nasby. His audience, which included Secretary of War Stanton, was amused, but not nearly as much as the president, who read on “con amore,” Hay noted cheerfully. Meanwhile the telegraph tapped out the returns that would foretell how the Union as a whole would behave in the presidential election one month hence. In Indiana and Ohio, the Republican gains were resounding. In the end, Pennsylvania went solidly Republican as well, thanks largely to the votes of absentee soldiers. More good news was not long in coming: on November 1, Maryland adopted a new constitution abolishing slavery.
On the night of November 8, Hay again joined Lincoln in the Telegraph Office to await the outcome of the national election, making special note of the evening in his diary. In many instances, his diary entries served merely as memoranda to be salted away for the Lincoln history that he, in partnership with Nicolay, would one day write. On other occasions, he extended himself, writing impressionistically, for no one knew better than he—the voracious reader of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Victor Hugo—that these novelistic entries would wind up being historically resonant. Granted, there were times, such as at Gettysburg, when he missed the moment almost entirely. But on others, such as election night of 1864, he was hyper-aware, recognizing that he was surrounded by posterity in the making.
“The night was rainy steamy and dark,” he began his sketch of the scene. “We splashed through the grounds to the side door of the War Department where a soaked and smoking sentinel was standing in his own vapor with his huddled up frame covered with a rubber cloak. Inside a half-dozen idle orderlies: upstairs the clerks of the telegraph.”
Hay seemed less attuned to the actual returns as they arrived from the states than he was to Lincoln’s every word and sentiment. When Thomas Eckert, chief of the Telegraph Office, came in, soaked and muddy from a fall in the street, the Tycoon was reminded of one of his country homilies. “For such an awkward fellow, I am pretty sure-footed,” Lincoln said, with Hay transcribing. “It used to take a pretty dextrous man to throw me. I remember, the evening of the day in 1858, that decided the contest for the Senate between Mr. Douglas and myself, was something like this, dark, rainy & gloomy. I had been reading the returns, and had ascertained that we had lost the Legislature and started to go home. The path had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’ ”
As the evening wore on and the dispatches brought good news from around the country, Lincoln relaxed into a mood of magnanimity. Of Henry Winter Davis, a Radical Republican who had fought bitterly with the president over plans for reconstruction, he said, “A man has not time to spend half his time in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.” Lincoln may as well have been addressing a different Davis, the one in Richmond.
At midnight, they ate fried oysters, the president shoveling his down “awkwardly and hospitably.” More good news arrived from Missouri and Michigan. At half past two, a party of serenaders appeared outside the War Department with a band playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Lincoln obliged them with a short speech. Finally, he and Hay walked, as they had so many times during the war, the short distance across the grounds to the White House, weary but replete. Upstairs they found Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s old friend from Illinois who now acted as the president’s bodyguard. Once Lincoln had gone to bed, Lamon accepted a glass of whiskey from Hay and, “rolling himself up in his cloak lay down at the President’s door; passing the night in that attitude of touching and dumb fidelity with a small arsenal of pistols & bowie knives around him. In the morning he went away leaving my blankets at my door, before I or the President were awake.”
Lincoln had predicted that he would be lucky to beat McClellan by 3 electoral votes; he beat him by 191. The popular vote was much closer, but still commanding: 55 percent for Lincoln. Most gratifying was the military vote: McClellan, who had once professed, “I can do it all,” and modeled himself on Napoleon, received only one in five votes cast by soldiers.
ON THE NIGHT OF the tenth, two days after the election, Lincoln spoke to a second crowd of serenaders, this time from a window of the White House beneath the north portico. The president declared that his victory was proof that “he who is most devoted to the Union and most opposed to treason can receive most of the people’s votes.” Calling for “common interest [to] unite in a common effort to save our common country,” he declared, “So long as I have been here, I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”
Lincoln wrote this speech in haste, admitting to Hay that it was “[n]ot very graceful . . . but I am growing old enough not to care much for the manner of doing things.” Hay also mentioned that both serenade speeches were “very highly spoken of” and that he had written down the first of the two “after the fact”—one of the few times that Hay acknowledged casting, or recasting, any of Lincoln’s words. In retrospect, it is apparent that he did so quite often.
A year after Lincoln’s death, Hay told Lincoln’s old law partner, William Herndon, that the president wrote very few letters and did not read one in fifty that he received. “At first we tried to bri
ng them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name,” Hay admitted. In fairness to William Stoddard, this was not always the case; Stoddard did most of the opening, passing the letters on to Hay. But even Stoddard acknowledged that “Colonel Hay imitated the signature of his Excellency very well.”
Hay made no record of the letters he drafted and signed—as Lincoln—but one that seems most likely is the now immortal Bixby letter. Sometime not long after the election, John A. Andrew, governor of Massachusetts and a loyal Lincoln man, asked a favor of the president. It had recently been brought to the governor’s notice that one of his constituents, Lydia Bixby of Boston, had lost five sons in the war. Andrew hoped that the president would write a letter to “the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman . . . yet seen.” In late November 1864, the White House was flooded with an inordinate quantity of congratulations and solicitations of patronage, in addition to the constant cataract of war-related correspondence. Andrew’s request most probably came across Hay’s desk, and it fell to him, as the in-house eulogist, author of heroic verse, and deft conveyor of countless condolences during the previous three and a half years of wartime fatalities, to draft a response.
“I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement . . . that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle,” the letter began. “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.” And in closing: “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of Freedom.”
The letter was signed “A. Lincoln”—whether in the president’s handwriting or in that of his clever secretary will never be known, since the original letter was apparently destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who, it turned out, was not a “true-hearted Union woman” but a southern sympathizer with only two dead sons, not the five she first claimed. The depth and validity of the woman’s grief is now beside the point, but the text of the Bixby letter, as reprinted in newspapers, endures as part of the Lincoln canon. Admirers place it in a peerage with two other jewels of Lincoln prose, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, both of which are inscribed in the marble of the Lincoln Memorial. Carl Sandburg, a Lincoln biographer and a poet himself, vouched the Bixby letter “a piece of the American Bible.”
The argument that Lincoln did not write the Bixby letter and that Hay did is persuasive. For one thing, Hay never denied writing it, and he pasted newspaper clippings of the letter in two of his scrapbooks, alongside poems he published anonymously during the Civil War. Over the years, several people close to Hay testified that he had alluded to being the author.
And he was certainly capable of imitation. By the time the Bixby letter was written, Hay had read thousands of pages of Lincoln’s words. The sleepy boy who had mastered German by mimicking his teacher, the college man who could recite entire verses of Horace and Poe from memory, the son of the soil who could replicate the patois of Mississippi rivermen and South Carolina slaves—for him, imitating or, better said, honoring the prose style of Lincoln would not have been difficult.
In the end it is his own prose that gives him away. While the cadence and tone, majesty and tenderness of the Bixby letter are thoroughly Lincolnesque, words and phrases such as “beguile” and “cherished,” “I cannot refrain from tendering,” and “I pray that our Heavenly Father” are more characteristic of Hay, appearing over and over in his own letters and seldom in Lincoln’s.
Hay harbored no desire to upstage Lincoln; he was only doing his job, and if he did it well, who would be the wiser? “The more [Lincoln’s] writings are studied in connection with the important transactions of his age,” Hay would write in the conclusion of the Lincoln biography, “the higher his reputation will stand in the opinion of the lettered class.” For Lincoln’s loyal secretary, to bask in a patch of reflected light was flattery enough.
“FROM THE HOUR OF Mr. Lincoln’s reelection the Confederate cause was doomed,” Hay was to write of the war’s final act. “A slow paralysis was benumbing the limbs of the insurrection, and even at the heart its vitality was plainly declining.” It was easy to write with such bravura two decades after the fact, but at the end of 1864, Hay seemed no less certain that the war would soon end.
Four days after the election, he—that is, Major John Hay, Assistant Adjutant General—accompanied Admiral David Porter on a trip to City Point, Virginia, to confer with General Grant, whose army now invested Richmond. What impressed Hay about Grant was what impressed him about Lincoln: the fact that a man of such little pretense could radiate such thorough trust and confidence. Hay reported that when Porter knocked on the door of Grant’s “common little wall tent,” the general answered the door himself, looking “neater & more careful in his dress than usual; his hair was combed his coat on & his shirt clean, his long boots blackened till they shone.” At dinner, Grant further impressed his audience with his iteration of how the war would end, telling Porter, Hay, and the other assembled officers that “he does not think [the rebels] can recover from the blow he hopes to give them this winter.”
And Grant was entirely correct. Before Christmas, federal armies pressed down upon the Confederates at Nashville and Savannah, and Admiral Porter commenced the bombardment of Fort Fisher, the last rebel port open on the Atlantic. “The Anaconda is beginning to squeeze,” Nicolay wrote to Therena Bates. “There remains but the army of Lee to be caught and overcome, and the military strength of the rebellion is at an end. I think this result will almost certainly come within the next year, and I hope that we may even gladden our next fourth of July with the rejoicing over the great event.”
LINCOLN LIKEWISE SAW HIS chance to bear down. All along he had worried that the Emancipation Proclamation was a constitutionally shaky wartime exigency that might not survive once the rebellion ended. Lincoln had initially wished that abolition would be accomplished on a state-by-state basis, but in the spring of 1864, a group of senators and congressmen, led by Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull, and Isaac Newton Arnold, had drafted a constitutional amendment to end slavery entirely and forever. In April, the Senate had approved the Thirteenth Amendment by a wide margin, but the vote in the House had fallen short of a two-thirds majority. But then in June, Lincoln had been nominated on a Republican platform calling for a permanent prohibition of slavery, and the November elections had boosted the ranks of Republicans in the House. With the mandate he had received at the polls and with momentum building on all battlefronts, the president threw his weight behind the amendment, arguing that its passage would further dishearten the South and shorten the war. Still, even he had his doubts. Hay and Nicolay overheard him admitting to Senator Edwin Morgan of New York: “We are like whalers who have been long on a chase: we have at last got the harpoon in the monster, but we must now look how we steer, or with one ‘flop’ of his tail will send us all into eternity.”
The abolition amendment was reintroduced in the House on January 6, 1865. To win a two-thirds majority, more than a dozen Democrats would have to be pried from the grasp of the Copperheads, led by men like minority leader George Pendleton, who had been McClellan’s running mate, and Representative Fernando Wood, who, when mayor of New York, had wanted the city to secede from the Union.
Lincoln, with the help of stalwart allies, cajoled Congress by every method possible. For some members, a moral argument was enough, now that the outcome of the war appeared inevitable. For others, the time-honored approach of dangling favors and patronage did the trick. Up until the last minute, the pro-slavery forces were confident they could block the bill. But on January 31, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery passed t
he House by a vote of 119 to 56—more than a dozen of the ayes coming from border slave states. Even then the bill would not have passed if eight Democrats had not been absent.
When the vote was announced, the floor and gallery of the House erupted in unison. The cheering lasted a good ten minutes. Men clapped one another on the back and threw their hats in the air; women waved handkerchiefs. There were many blacks in the crowd that day whose tears of joy were unstanchable.
Hay and Nicolay were in the White House with the president when the vote was taken. Where once they had listened to the batteries firing from Bull Run and Fort Stevens, now they felt the very walls of the White House shudder as artillery on Capitol Hill bruited the end of slavery with a hundred-gun salute. On the following night, a raucous crowd of serenaders drew Lincoln again to the upstairs window. This time it was Nicolay who scribbled down the gist of the president’s remarks as he spoke. The Thirteenth Amendment was “a king’s cure-all” for the shortcomings of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said, and it was “the fitting, if not indispensable, adjunct to the consummation of the great game we are playing.” Before stepping away from the window, Lincoln congratulated all present—“himself, the country, and the whole world.”
Yet the Thirteenth Amendment was not yet law, for it still had to be ratified by the states. By mid-April, only twenty had voted in its favor; the necessary vote of three quarters of the states would not be accomplished until December. Nonetheless, Lincoln knew that he had already achieved a “great moral victory.” He had come a long way since his days in Illinois when he had suggested that simply limiting the growth of slavery in western territories would cause the institution to wither and die; and only two and a half years earlier he had told Horace Greeley that he would be willing to keep slavery if he could save the Union by doing so. Now, having expanded and stiffened the Emancipation Proclamation into the permanency of the Thirteenth Amendment, he had abolished slavery and saved the Union. Perhaps it was also true that he had saved the Union by abolishing slavery. “The great job is ended,” he was heard to say. Not quite, but nearly so.
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