All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  He was thrilled to be abroad for the first time. “In my boyhood & early youth,” he told his father, “I regarded this place [Paris] as the brightest object of legitimate ambition.” He had learned French at Brown and kept it up afterward by reading French literature. The Paris of 1865, however, opened his eyes in an unexpected way. Fourteen years earlier, Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had staged a coup, crowning himself Emperor Napoleon III and supplanting the Second Republic with a despotic regime known as the Second Empire. As emperor he saw himself as a visionary; to his detractors he was “the Sphinx,” for his adamant and enigmatic nature.

  Hay was predisposed not to like the parvenu French crown. Coming from a country that had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to remain a functioning, unified republic, he had little tolerance for a dictator who would usurp one. That Napoleon had wanted to recognize the Confederacy—deterred only by dogged American diplomacy and the reluctance of England to join the alliance—was another mark against the Second Empire. Then, too, France’s opportunistic invasion of Mexico in 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, insulted the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention the Mexicans under French hegemony.

  To his credit, Napoleon III modernized France, especially Paris, building new railroads, sewers, parks, and monuments. By the time Hay and the Nicolays arrived, the emperor’s master planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, had razed many of Paris’s medieval neighborhoods to make way for a disciplined geometry of broad, shaded boulevards and clean, homogenous facades, which upgraded the quality of life for the city’s nearly 2 million residents—a grand transformation, to be sure, but one that also consolidated Napoleonic authority.

  Hay was taken aback at first. Instead of the farrago of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie Bohème, he was greeted by a “bright new spick and span city with stretches a mile long of drab-colored stone palaces, all new and glistening, with avenues and boulevards with pavements like a bathroom floor,” as he remarked to one of his brothers. “I wish you could be here to see the old city before the rest of it is gone. There is still enough to deeply interest you in the Faubourg St. Antoine, where they grow revolutions, and in the Latin Quarter, where the students live & young France dreams of things it must not talk about. But demolition has its teeth fastened there, and the great Boulevard St. Germain is steadily marching on, ripping, and crushing, and grinding to powder the oldest and most storied quarter, and evicting the wild and uncombed savagery of the Old City. . . . There is the deepest interest in its squalor and blackness to me. I leave to English snobs and American tourists the beauty of the new dispensation and pay my homage to the town that has seen better days.”

  Homage was one thing, housing another for the debonair young colonel. Instead of living among the “swarming hives of humanity that toil and fight and breed in the Paris of history and romance,” he took more genteel rooms in the “new West End,” on a quiet street near the Arc de Triomphe. From there it was a pleasant walk to the American legation on rue de Chaillot.

  Compared to the White House, work at the legation was not demanding. During the first summer in Paris, Bigelow took his family on vacation to the seashore, leaving Hay in charge. He was just busy enough to “keep from stagnating,” he reported cavalierly. He saw Nicolay on occasion—the consulate was several blocks from the legation. But they seldom socialized after hours. Nicolay and Therena were homebodies, and soon after their arrival in Paris, they announced that they were expecting a child.

  Hay, meanwhile, did not hesitate to partake of the pleasures of Paris, often in the company of Americans bearing letters of introduction from home. After a succession of evenings at the opera and theater with a Miss Wright, he confessed to her that “[Paris] is so tyrannical in its seductive powers that it is less fatiguing to surrender at discretion than to keep up the hopeless fight against temptation.” Hay’s reputation as a ladies’ man was soon well enough established that he was called upon to deliver a toast to “Our Countrywomen” at a dinner for three hundred Americans at the Grand Hotel.

  One of the many American visitors to Paris was Andros Stone, president of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company, accompanied by his wife and daughters, “in pursuit of health and pleasure.” Hay recorded nothing in his diary of the Stones’ visit, but later that summer he submitted a short story to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine about a young American diplomat who falls in love with the daughter of “what the newspapers call a Merchant Prince”—a man “enriched by sagacious trade” whom “no country on earth but America could send out.” The fictional love affair ends most grimly, with the young diplomat hurling himself off the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

  Not that Hay gave even the remotest indication of being suicidal or even downcast while in Paris; on the contrary, his letters are uniformly cheerful. Yet merchant princes and their daughters did leave a lasting impression. Six years later in New York, Andros Stone would introduce Hay to his niece, Clara Stone, daughter of Amasa Stone, also of Cleveland and a merchant prince in his own right.

  In Paris, Hay also composed poetry. The bard of Providence was now a belletrist, and his muse was Paris itself. One August morning he was moved to write:

  I stand at the break of day

  In the Champs Élysées

  The tremulous shafts of dawning

  As they shoot o’er the Tuileries early

  It truly was a gay life, and he found the openness of the French charming and infectious. “It never seems to occur to these people that there is any objection to eating, drinking, sleeping and even courting in public,” he wrote to his family in Warsaw. “Wherever you go, in the splendid public gardens, in the great picture galleries, which are free to all the world, you see them, singly, or in pairs, or in whole families, amusing themselves in their quiet, simple way, without any modesty, or bashfulness or false pride.”

  But if everyday living was refreshingly uninhibited, Old World diplomacy was a study in pomp and fustiness. The “season” began on New Year’s Day with a reception for the diplomatic corps at the Palace of the Tuileries. Hay attended with Bigelow, wearing a dress uniform that was “more gold than broadcloth.” Here he was introduced to Napoleon III for the first time, and his assessment was not favorable. “He is a short stubby looking man, not nearly so tall as I,” Hay told his family. “His face is just as you see it in the pictures, only older and more lifeless.”

  Hay bowed and smiled, expecting no recognition from the emperor. “But he stopped, took a good look, and said, in English, ‘Are you arrived from Washington?’ ‘Have you been previously engaged in Diplomacy?’ ‘Were you present at the death of President Lincoln?’ . . . I answered his questions, everybody looking with all their eyes to see what the great potentate had to occupy him talking to a light-weight Republican.”

  Several weeks later he attended a ball at the palace, dressed in “small clothes with knee-buckles and silk stockings, with coat and waistcoat, all black and cocked hat.” On this occasion he met the empress Eugénie, who was adorned with “a blaze of diamonds.” “She is still very handsome,” he noted, but her “full face is not as fine as her profile.”

  Familiarity bred further contempt, and for Hay the contrast between the French emperor and Lincoln—physically and with respect to the ideals they embodied—was all too stark. “I consider Lincoln Republicanism incarnate—with all its faults and all its virtues,” he declared after sizing up the Second Empire. “[I]n spite of some rudenesses, Republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world.” Lincoln’s straightforwardness and high-mindedness, his humility and humanity shone ever more brightly the nearer Hay got to the court of the French emperor. “[L]et us look at him,” Hay wrote in his diary after another audience with Napoleon III. “Short and stocky, he moves with a queer sidelong gait like a gouty crab: a man so wooden looking that you would expect his voice to come rasping out like a watchman’s rattle. A complexion like crude tallow. . . . Eyes sleepily watchful—furtive, stea
lthy, rather ignoble: like servants looking out of dirty windows & saying ‘nobody at home’ and lying, as they said it.”

  AFTER A YEAR IN Paris, Hay began to think about going home, and the home he yearned for was Warsaw. With his Florida land purchases unresolved, he sent whatever money he could to his father to invest in vineyards in Illinois. “[One] of these days my history will belong to the past,” he wrote to his brother Leonard. “I don’t mean that I am going to heaven immediately but I am going to Warsaw, if I can make sure of the means of living without too much work.”

  The resignation of John Bigelow in the summer of 1866 made Hay’s decision to leave much easier. As Bigelow’s replacement, Andrew Johnson chose General John Adams Dix as a reward for Dix’s support of the president’s policies on Reconstruction, which were decidedly lenient toward the South. Johnson’s—and Dix’s—opposition to the Freedmen’s Bureau and the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, providing equal rights for blacks, had enraged the hard-liners of the Republican Party, and Hay, too. Unlike many Radicals, Hay stopped short of advocating impeachment of Johnson (a Democrat), but he regarded the president’s “obstinate and angry partisanship” as an insult to the legacy of Lincoln. Accordingly, he wanted as little as possible to do with Johnson’s man Dix (although a Republican), and the antipathy was evidently mutual. Hay left Paris at the end of January 1867.

  His hankering for home was always of the mistiest sort. Anticipating a new and languid life on the banks of the Mississippi, he wrote to his brother Charles, now a grocer in Springfield: “I will be comfortable and brown, sleeping sound at night, & hoeing my vines by day. . . . We have been so separated that we need about a century together on the hills of Warsaw.” Yet his vision of bucolic contentment was never very realistic. “I have money enough to buy bread & cheese for a year or two & old clothes enough for the rest of an ordinary life time,” he insisted to his father.

  At the same time, a greater ambition spoke more volubly. First, he wanted a comfortable and “unembarrassed” income. Second, he still yearned to be a man of letters. Before leaving Nicolay, who was staying on in Paris as consul, the two friends had renewed their commitment to write “the History of Lincoln.” More than ever the world needed to be reminded what Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party stood for.

  Upon docking in New York, Hay took an overnight train to Washington and went to see Secretary of State Seward. He was impressed by Seward’s calm in the midst of the escalating fractiousness between Radical Republicans and President Johnson’s coterie of Copperhead Democrats. The Copperheads accused Republicans of vindictiveness toward the South; the Radicals charged Democrats with squandering the Union victory; each side was determined to remove the other’s allies from office. Hay commended Seward’s capacity for holding the middle ground—“the same placid philosophic optimist as ever.”

  There was more to the meeting than simply catching up, however. Hay was angling for another job. But because he had witnessed with disgust the endless parade of patronage-seekers through the Lincoln White House, he was hesitant to broach the subject—and relieved when Seward brought it up first.

  Seward promised to do what he could for Hay, though he emphasized just how fierce the infighting had become over all appointments. Radical Republicans were already calling for the withdrawal of General Dix from Paris. Democrats, meanwhile, had pressed for dismissal of the historian John Lothrop Motley as minister to the Austrian Empire for his alleged disloyalty to President Johnson. Motley resigned indignantly, and Dix’s fate awaited judgment by the Senate. Even Nicolay, conscientious in the extreme, had been accused of “habitual disrespect” toward the administration.

  Seward also lectured Hay on the dangers of “dessication and fossilizing” that resulted from holding public office for too long. Having said all this, the next evening over dinner, he offered Hay the job of minister to Sweden. Hay hesitated.

  For the next three weeks, he knocked about Washington, renewing old acquaintances. He had cordial talks with Navy Secretary Welles, who had remained in the Johnson administration, and Salmon Chase, who was now chief justice of the Supreme Court. He visited the Senate and House of Representatives, and dropped by the Eames house. This being the season, he attended several balls. He went twice to the White House, which he found “more richly and carefully furnished than in my time.”

  Two more things kept him in the capital. Because he still had hopes that he might yet gain possession of his Florida real estate, he spent some time working connections in the Interior Department. There also remained the possibility that, if General Dix were recalled from Paris, Seward might submit Hay’s name as chargé d’affaires, the number two position, which would make him the acting minister until Dix’s replacement was chosen.

  While these matters hung fire, Seward offered him a temporary job as his private secretary. Hay was honored but remained reluctant, reasoning in his diary, “[I]f he had done this out of his usual kindness for me, [then] I ought best to decline [and] go home & see my parents for the present.” On March 3, he learned that Dix was to stay after all. Three days later, he left Washington. “I bid farewell to diplomacy,” he wrote Nicolay.

  By way of adieu, he wrote an obsequious letter to Seward, expressing his gratitude for the secretary’s years of mentorship and steadfast service to the Republican cause. “To own the knowledge that I have been thought worthy of high trust by you is worth more than any office,” Hay fawned. “I shall go into private life prouder that you proposed my name for a mission than if I had received it by the direction of any other man. . . . I have come to regard you as . . . the Ideal of the Republican workingman—calm without apathy, bold without rashness, firm without obstinacy, & with a patriotism permeated with religious faith.”

  He made one more stop before heading west. On February 23, he went back to New York to meet with Alfred Guernsey, editor of Harper’s, who had published “Shelby Cabell,” Hay’s short story set in Paris. Guernsey told him he would welcome other stories, although he and the other editors whom Hay saw expressed no enthusiasm for a Lincoln biography.

  Hay and Nicolay had been beaten to the punch. The previous year, Isaac Newton Arnold, one of Lincoln’s ardent congressional supporters, had come out with The History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery, hasty and hagiographic but substantial enough that “[n]obody is keen for our book,” Hay told Nicolay after knocking on doors in New York. Worse still, he had heard a rumor that Robert Lincoln had given Arnold permission to publish the papers of Lincoln previously promised to Hay and Nicolay.

  Leaving New York, Hay hastened to Chicago and met with Lincoln, who had opened a law practice there and was looking after his mother and brother. Lincoln reassured Hay that he would not give Arnold “the key to the boxes” and that “he still hopes for our assistance in classifying them,” Hay told Nicolay. Even so, “We will have to write [our book] on our own hook some day, when we can afford.” He advised Nicolay to “stay where you are. . . . You had better not come home till you are kicked out.”

  Finally he reached Warsaw on March 12 and was pleased to find his mother “better than usual and full of her good spirits” and his father “at 66 with not a gray hair, with the ruddy cheek and ravenous appetite of a growing boy.” He passed the next three months tending his vineyard and orchards. “I am doing work,” he declared in his diary, “substantial real work which will have its result doubtless some day & so I plod on & watch the sun, glad after all when my day is done & I can ramble home through the magnificent hills and valleys that surround this town.” To John Bigelow he wrote, “I suspect I am at last in my place. If not, if I grow discontented, the world is just around the corner & I can try my luck again. But I think I can endure a good deal of starving before I go on another tour of asking for employment.”

  If he was trying to convince himself, he did not succeed. As summer approached, he grew predictably restive. Throughout John Hay’s life, the world had a way of opening itself to him just as he was ready t
o take the next step. For the moment, though, he was having difficulty seeing beyond Warsaw. “I have scarcely any plans,” he admitted in his diary.

  In April, he was officially mustered out of the army. Offers he had explored when he was last in the East—to join a business venture in New York, a law practice in Washington—all were withdrawn “as if they had suddenly discovered I was a leper.” And, he confessed, “I long ago made up my mind not to lose any sleep over my ill-starred Florida speculation.” (He never did take possession.) With no other immediate prospects, he estimated that with a few pieces for magazines, a lecture or two, and the income from his Illinois land, he possibly could make $1,000 a year. He told himself that it would suffice, that life in Warsaw had its own reward of “a more tranquil mind than anywhere else.”

  Thanks to William Seward, he did not have to find out. In early June, he received word that he had been commissioned as secretary of legation in Vienna, to act as chargé d’affaires. Although Dix had managed to keep his job as minister to Paris, John Lothrop Motley was coming home from Austria. Hay would take charge of the legation until Motley’s replacement was chosen and then approved by the Senate. The salary was $6,000. He steamed for Europe on June 29, six months after leaving Paris.

  He landed in Liverpool ten days later. His first visit to England in 1865, en route to Paris, had been all too brief. Now with no apparent urgency to get to Vienna, he gave the country his full attention. He dined with Minister Charles Francis Adams. In the House of Commons, he was impressed by the “directness and simplicity” of Disraeli’s and Gladstone’s oratory. After a visit to the House of Lords, he could recite from memory a roll call of lords and earls and marquises and viscounts and dukes, with colorful descriptions of each. “It is hard to imagine anything finer,” he said of Westminster Abbey. Taking a river omnibus on the Thames, he was smitten by the “exquisite harmony” of mist and sunlight. When he beheld J.M.W. Turner’s Luminist paintings of the same river scenes in the National Gallery, he wrote in his diary: “I would go to him very often if I lived in London.” During a trip to Stonehenge at the end of his two-week stay, he happened upon an agricultural fair, where “I could not help remarking what a different crowd that would have been in America. Here they were clean, decent, stolid fellows.” By the time he left England, he was a thorough Anglophile.