All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  John Hay and John George Nicolay were almost through as well. They had shared a room together in the White House for four years, except for their assignments outside Washington. Once the outcome of the war appeared certain, neither had a compelling desire to stay on for a second term. Nicolay turned thirty-three in February 1865 and had delayed his marriage to Therena Bates for long enough. He had in mind returning to the newspaper business; one idea was to buy an interest in the Baltimore Sun. Hay, now twenty-six, was likewise keen to broaden his horizons, and there was little holding him back. His status as a bachelor was well burnished, like the buttons on his military tunic. And yet he had no idea in which direction he might point himself. Returning to Warsaw or Springfield was a last resort, and Florida was even more remote. Shortly after the election, he quit writing in his diary altogether, another sign of his growing detachment.

  Even if he and Nicolay had wanted to stay on, they might not have been able to do so. Mrs. Lincoln was determined to replace Nicolay with Noah Brooks, the journalist who had curried favor with her for years. In the meantime, every encounter with the first lady was a test of will. “About three days of the week have been taken up with a row with my particular feminine friend,” Nicolay wrote before Christmas. As went Nicolay, soon would follow Hay. With Lincoln’s second inauguration near, there were no bridges left to burn with the Hellcat.

  HAY AND NICOLAY WERE in the audience on March 4, 1865, to witness Lincoln’s inauguration and hear his Second Inaugural Address. As at Gettysburg, neither had much to say at the time about the president’s now immortal speech. For one thing, they had read it beforehand; unlike the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural was typeset and printed, likely with the assistance of the secretaries.

  The day began with rain, but by noon the clouds surrendered to sunshine as Lincoln stepped to the podium on the east portico of the Capitol, with the statue of Freedom now at her post atop the completed dome. A crowd of perhaps fifty thousand pressed around the platform, cheering and waving flags at first, then quieting as the president put on his spectacles and began to read. Many of the faces in the audience were black, though not all listeners were friendly, such as John Wilkes Booth, who stood near the front with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

  Lincoln’s speech was short, seven hundred words, and over in six or seven minutes—as succinct as it was solemn. The message throughout was one of shared blame and assumed responsibility: “God . . . gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense [of slavery] came.” Together, North and South must “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Those who listened for the slightest undertone of vainglory were disappointed, for Lincoln was, if anything, contrite that the war had been waged at such a magnitude for so long. The true measure of accomplishment would be the “just and lasting peace” yet to be forged. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he said.

  The Lincoln who took the oath of office that afternoon and then bowed to kiss the Bible had not been hardened by war but made more conciliatory, more penitent. In this he endeavored to set an example for the nation. “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them,” he wrote a few days after the inauguration. “To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.”

  John Hay discerned the effect of the war upon Lincoln more clearly than almost anyone. “He bore the sorrows of the nation in his own heart; he suffered deeply, not only from disappointments, from treachery, from hope deferred, from the open assaults of enemies and from the sincere anger of discontented friends,” Hay was to write. “One of the most tender and compassionate of men, he was forced to give orders which cost thousands of lives; by nature a man of order and thrift, he saw the daily spectacle of unutterable waste and destruction which he could not prevent. The cry of the widow and the orphan was always in his ears. . . . [H]e was in mind, body and nerves a very different man at the second inauguration from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects. . . . He aged with great rapidity.”

  ONE WEEK AFTER THE inauguration, Nicolay had a new job. With the help of Secretary of State William Seward, he had been confirmed as consul to Paris. A few days later, Seward was able to offer Hay a job in Paris, too, as secretary of legation, serving the new minister, John Bigelow. The two positions were not closely related, but Nicolay and Hay would be able to see a great deal of each other, and doubtless they would have time to discuss their plans to write a book on Lincoln. Nicolay and Therena would marry and sail to Europe together.

  For Hay, the post abroad was “entirely unsolicited and unexpected,” he told his brother Charles. Perhaps so, but he had hardly needed to sell himself to Seward. During the previous four years, Hay had spent hundreds of hours with the secretary of state, in the White House and as a guest, whether for a meal or a game of whist, at the Seward house on Lafayette Square. Hay’s gift for languages, his polish as a secretary, and, above all, his profession of Republican principles more than qualified him for the Paris position. What was more, he had made no secret of his admiration for Seward and his appreciation of Seward’s own service to Lincoln. The secretary of state and president had started out as rivals for the presidential nomination but set aside their differences to form a dynamic team, shrewd and dedicated, balancing the shifting factions of conservatism and radicalism within their party and within the cabinet itself. “Mr. Seward, while doing everything possible to serve the national cause,” Hay would later testify, “was, so far as can be discerned, absolutely free of any ambition or afterthought personal to himself.”

  In later years, Hay would come to appreciate Seward’s deft handling of foreign affairs that much more. Seward favored American expansion, but not through force. “The sword is not the most winning messenger that can be sent abroad,” Seward averred. When time came for Hay to serve first as an ambassador and then as secretary of state, he would not find a better role model to draw upon.

  Yet in the spring of 1865, Hay had yet to map out a career as a diplomat. “I think [Paris] will be a pleasant place for study and observation,” he wrote to a cousin. “I shall no doubt enjoy it for a year or so—not very long, as I do not wish to exile myself in these important and interesting times. . . . I go away only to fit myself for more serious work when I return.”

  THE NIGHT AFTER WRITING this letter, Hay was in the White House with Robert Lincoln while the president and first lady attended Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. In the five weeks since the inauguration, the news had been nothing but good, culminating with the federal occupation of Richmond on April 3, the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox on the ninth, and the surrender of Mobile on the twelfth. Nicolay was even now on his way to Fort Sumter to attend the raising of the Union flag, four years to the day after its rude removal. Robert Lincoln had come to the capital with Grant and had spent part of the morning regaling his father with his eyewitness account of Appomattox.

  Of the events of that evening and the next few days Hay wrote nothing at all in his diary, and no letters from that period have turned up, either. His memory, however, was stamped profoundly, and eventually it would serve his pen reliably in the last volume of the Lincoln biography, which concludes abruptly and necessarily on April 15, 1865.

  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln has been chronicled any number of times. Most Americans know that the actor John Wilkes Booth entered the Lincolns’ theater box after ten o’clock on Good Friday, April 14, and shot the president in the back of the head with a derringer. Hay’s account, written
twenty years afterward, is a thorough rendering of the long night, reconstructed from testimony of eyewitnesses and the statements of the doctors who attended the stricken president. Yet his narrative is more literary than most. For him, first and last, the context of life was classical. Upon his arrival in Washington four years earlier, he had written frivolously, “Caesar will be slain in the capitol, and Brutus harangue the roughs from the terrace.” Not surprisingly, when the time came to present his version of Lincoln’s murder, he chose to tell it as a play within a play, comedy exploding into tragedy, Brutus played by a fiend who knew the part by heart.

  “No one, not even the comedian on the stage, could ever remember the last words of the piece that were uttered that night—the last Abraham Lincoln heard upon earth,” Hay wrote. “The whole performance remains in the memory of those who heard it a vague phantasmagoria. . . . Here were five human beings [Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln, and their guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, plus Booth] in a narrow space—the greatest man of his time, in the glory of the most stupendous success of our history, the idolized chief of a nation already mighty, with illimitable vistas of grandeur to come; his beloved wife, proud and happy; a pair of betrothed lovers, with all the promise of felicity that youth, social position, and wealth could give them; and this young actor, handsome as Endymion upon Latmos, the pet of his little world. The glitter of fame, happiness, and ease was upon the entire group, but in an instant everything was to be changed with the blinding swiftness of enchantment. Quick death was to come on the central figure of that company—the central figure, we believe, of the great and good men of the century.”

  Hay’s theatrical reportage continues: “The murderer seemed to himself to be taking part in a play. Partisan hate and the fumes of brandy had for weeks kept his brain in a morbid state. He felt as if he were playing Brutus off the boards; he posed, expecting applause. Holding a pistol in one hand and knife in the other, he opened the box door, put the pistol to the President’s head, and fired; dropping the weapon, he took the knife in his right hand, and when Major Rathbone sprang to seize him he struck savagely at him. Major Rathbone received the blow on his left arm, suffering a wide and deep wound. Booth, rushing forward, then placed his left hand on the railing of the box and vaulted lightly over to the stage. It was a high leap, but nothing to such a trained athlete. He was in the habit of introducing what actors call sensational leaps in his plays. In ‘Macbeth,’ where he met the weird sisters, he leaped from a rock twelve feet high. He would have got safely away but for his spur catching in the folds of the Union flag with which the front of the box was draped. He fell on the stage, the torn flag trailing on his spur, but instantly rose as if he had received no hurt, though in fact the fall had broken his leg; he turned to the audience, brandishing his dripping knife, and shouting the State motto of Virginia, ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis,’ fled rapidly across the stage and out of sight. Major Rathbone had shouted, ‘Stop him!’ The cry went out, ‘He has shot the President.’ From the audience, at first stupid with surprise, and afterwards wild with excitement and horror, two or three men jumped upon the stage in pursuit of the flying assassin; but he ran through the familiar passages, leaped upon his horse, which was in waiting in the alley behind, rewarded with a kick and a curse the call-boy who had held him, and rode rapidly away in the light of the just risen moon.”

  The rest of the tragedy Hay was able to recount firsthand. While the president was removed from the theater to a boardinghouse across the street, a messenger hurried to the White House. As Hay and Robert Lincoln sprang into a waiting carriage, they were informed that Seward and the rest of the cabinet had been murdered. In fact, only Seward had been attacked. One of Booth’s accomplices had assaulted the secretary of state as he lay in bed, slashing him several times with a knife, but not fatally. Hay and Robert knew none of this as they raced to Tenth Street, where the president was dying.

  Hay’s published description of the final scene is accompanied by a floor plan of the boardinghouse, detailing who was present and where they positioned themselves in the cramped bedroom. He lists more than twenty people, including four doctors, two generals, one minister, and six cabinet members. Hay stood at the head of the bed, just behind Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Senator Charles Sumner, and Robert Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln passed most of the night in the adjacent parlor, attended by friends.

  “[The president] was, of course, unconscious from the first moment; but he breathed with slow and regular respiration throughout the night,” Hay recalled. “As the dawn came, and the lamplight grew pale in the fresher beams, his pulse began to fail; but his face even then was scarcely more haggard than those of the sorrowing group of statesmen and generals around him. His automatic moaning, which had continued throughout the night, ceased; a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features. At twenty-two minutes after seven he died. [Secretary of War] Stanton broke the silence by saying, ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ Dr. Gurley [of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church] kneeled by the bedside and prayed fervently. The widow came in from the adjoining room supported by her son and cast herself with loud outcry on the dead body.”

  In the years to come, this scene would be sanctified as a latter-day Calvary. One of Lincoln’s cuff buttons, retrieved from the theater box, would be cherished as a splinter from the true Cross. Locks of hair, removed immediately after Lincoln’s death and during the postmortem examination, were even more sacred. And despite Hay’s published diagram, bickering inevitably broke out over the roster of disciples who were actually at the bedside at the moment the Martyr died.

  Hay would spend the rest of his life mourning Lincoln. In eulogizing the man who had been a second father, he would devote most of his words to extolling the president’s greatness as a leader of the “common people.” But beneath Hay’s characterizations of Lincoln as “a great and powerful lover of mankind” and “the greatest character since Christ,” there lay an implicit acknowledgment of his tenderness toward Hay personally. “He never asked perfection of any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the high standards he set up for himself,” Hay wrote, speaking as a primary beneficiary. “[He possessed] a charity which embraced in its deep bosom all the good and the bad, all the virtues and infirmities of men, and a patience like that of nature, which in its vast and fruitful activity knows neither haste nor rest.”

  Lincoln belonged to the nation, to the people, and to the ages. But always there would be a part of Lincoln that belonged to John Hay alone. A year after the assassination, on February 12, 1866, Lincoln’s birthday, one of the country’s most venerated historians, George Bancroft, would deliver a memorial to Lincoln before the House of Representatives. Hay was in Paris when he read a transcript of the speech. “Bancroft’s address was a disgraceful exhibition of ignorance,” he wrote scornfully and possessively to William Herndon, who, like Hay and Nicolay, was contemplating a book on Lincoln. “Bancroft & the rest of that patent leather kid glove set know no more of him than an owl does of a comet, blazing into his blinking eyes.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Progress of Democracy

  John Hay sailed for Europe at the end of June, accompanied by newly wedded John George and Therena Nicolay. No longer was he the dreamy college boy who had arrived in Washington four years earlier. Tempered by the war and matured by the example of Lincoln, he had become a confident man of affairs. He now wore the uniform of a colonel, the rank brevetted him by Secretary of War Stanton a month earlier.

  On one hand, it was a relief to get away—from Springfield, where he had gone to bid his final respects to the president, and from Washington, where a pall lingered over the White House and a government at odds over Reconstruction. On the other hand, he missed his familiar vantage point, inside looking out. “I envy you that you are at home,” he wrote Robert Lincoln, “preparing to do your part manfully in the work that will rest seriously on every American of our age.”

  His life was very much his own, but now it ha
d more gravity, and perhaps even a compass. “While most of the men I meet are throwing up their hats and getting drunk to the glory & long life of the American Eagle,” he continued to Lincoln, “the thinking man [realizes] that the times before us are more serious than the times behind. We shall be fortunate if all our honest industry and courage can supply, in the moral fight that is to come, the place of the high heart and unfailing wisdom of him who is now watching us from heaven.” From now on, wherever Hay went and whatever he did, Lincoln would always be watching.

  On his way to France, he passed through London, where he introduced himself to Charles Francis Adams, the distinguished American minister who had been so instrumental in stemming British interference in the Civil War. It was in London also that he met the minister’s son Henry, a Harvard graduate Hay’s own age, who was serving as his father’s personal secretary.

  When Charles Adams’s counterpart in Paris during the war, William Dayton, had died the previous December, Seward had promoted Consul John Bigelow, a former editor of the New York Evening Post, to minister, opening Bigelow’s job to Nicolay and then appointing Hay as Bigelow’s secretary. He had come well recommended by both Seward and Seward’s friend Thurlow Weed, the New York political boss who had recently aligned himself with President Andrew Johnson. “Hay is a bright, gifted young man, with agreeable manners and refined tastes,” Weed vouched to Bigelow. “I don’t believe that he has been spoiled, though he has been exposed. If he remains the modest young man he was, I am sure you will like him.” Hay in turn found Bigelow a “genial gentleman.”