All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Hay, once he was done chasing petticoats around New York, could ask for nothing more in a mate. When the time came to tell John George Nicolay about her, he chose words that were less than exuberant but, in a nobler context, more flattering: “She is a very estimable young person,” he said, “large, handsome and good.”

  He admired her, then, before he loved her. They saw each other once or twice more after the introduction on 37th Street. They discovered how close they had come to meeting four years earlier, when Clara and her parents were in Vienna. (“Would the music of Strauss’s orchestra have introduced our souls to each other at the Volksgarten?” he asked her once they were engaged.) He was also pleased to learn that Clara had a healthy appetite for literature, and when time came for her to return to Cleveland, he gave her a present to read on the train. “Dear Miss Stone,” he wrote. “As you are going West, I know of no more charming book for you to take with you than that of my friend Mr. Clarence King.” Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada had been published in February. “Its descriptions of our mountain life and scenery are to me so satisfying and so evidently truthful that it consoles me for my ignorance of them.” He closed: “Yours faithfully, John Hay.”

  THREE BUSY MONTHS WENT by before he saw her again. In May, just before Clara left New York, the newly formed Liberal Republican Party had convened in Cincinnati and nominated Horace Greeley as its candidate for president. Hay climbed aboard the bandwagon, although in many respects it was an awkward fit for him, especially after the Democratic Party met in July and gave Greeley its nomination as well.

  Simply put, the Liberal Republicans had had enough of Grant and Reconstruction. They were convinced that the administration was rotten at the core and that the South had been punished enough under federal misrule. But for Hay, Greeley was not someone he could embrace wholeheartedly. Eight years earlier, Greeley had disappointed Lincoln and embarrassed Hay at Niagara Falls. Though the editor had rallied behind Lincoln against McClellan in the 1864 election, after the war he turned around and posted the bond that freed Jefferson Davis. It was hard to love Lincoln to the degree that Hay loved him and still swear fealty to Greeley.

  In the pages of the Tribune, Hay mostly ignored his employer and took aim at Grant. All the qualities that had made Grant an effective general—his snap decisions, his willingness to ride roughshod over his enemy—now made him a dangerous executive, or so Hay charged. Emboldened by anonymity, he got on Grant for backing legislation to suspend habeas corpus and deploy federal troops in areas of the South in which the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing freedmen. Overlooking the fact that Lincoln had also been criticized for suspending habeas corpus, Hay objected to the Ku Klux Klan law as overbearing, warning that Grant was aggravating old wounds while establishing himself as a “soldier Dictator.” Grant “makes no effort to conciliate,” Hay complained, “but uses all means to crush the other faction.” To hear the Tribune tell it, Grant was snuffing out the very beacon of democracy: “The world’s history furnishes no parallel for the absolute power of one man and the abject humiliation of a whole people as exhibited to-day in this country.”

  The opposition was every bit as fierce. Greeley’s high-principled independence made him a bundle of contradictions in the eyes of voters and a subject of ridicule to rival newspapers and the Republican establishment he rebuked. He had striven mightily to end slavery but then preached reconciliation just as fervidly. Southern Democrats remembered the kindness he had shown Jefferson Davis, but they also remembered it was Greeley who had quipped that, while not all Democrats were horse thieves, all horse thieves were Democrats. African-Americans knew him as an abolitionist; but Greeley, the Tribune, and most Liberal Republicans were against the recent Ku Klux Klan law. Greeley, who had raised himself from the humblest roots, was now cast as a moralizing, meddlesome demagogue, removed from the farmers and workingmen whose interests he had so steadfastly championed in the pages of the Tribune. While it was difficult to question his honesty, many tried, accusing him and “Whitelie” Reid of secret ties to the Tweed Ring. His vows to end “Grantism,” to right the wrongs of Republicanism, and to reunite the country were viewed as traitorous. Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew him leaning across Lincoln’s grave to grip the hand of John Wilkes Booth.

  Throughout the mud-slinging, Greeley campaigned relentlessly, whistle-stopping across the country in his wattle of whiskers and white linen coat, like the one he wore when he boarded the train carrying Lincoln from Springfield to Washington in 1861.

  Meanwhile, the veteran of the bloody Wilderness neither budged nor flinched. Grant, not Greeley, was the man of the soil, the soldier who had ended the war and now ensured that order would prevail. If he was surrounded by a “discreditable throng of flatterers,” as Hay asserted, he appeared above flattery. Hay himself acknowledged that Grant was unaware of the corruption all about him—an immunity that was dramatically challenged in September when a number of Grant Republicans, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House James G. Blaine, and Congressman James Garfield, were entangled in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, an octopus of bribes and railroad stock sufficiently monstrous to upset every voter in America if only they could decipher what exactly was supposed to have transpired. The story broke in the New York Sun and was vigorously amplified in the Tribune. In the upshot, “Smiler” Colfax was obliged to resign, but Grant once again was untarred. He remained a hero still, while Greeley, the patriotic oracle of the Great Moral Organ, was marginalized as a blackguard, a heretic, a buffoon.

  The stakes were high not only for Greeley and the Tribune but also for its leading editorial writer. So far, Hay’s credentials as a Republican had been immaculate; his Lincoln connection had opened every door. He seems to have given little thought to what recriminations might be in store for him if Greeley were to lose. His confidence politically and professionally was such that, no matter what happened, he believed he would come out all right.

  ROMANTICALLY, HE WAS NOT so sure. At the first of August he made a trip to Warsaw, and on the way back he stopped off in Cleveland to “present my homage” to the Stone sisters. He found Flora at home, but, to his dismay, Clara was away. He stayed only a night, then continued east. At Painesville, Ohio, one of the stations between Cleveland and Buffalo, he stepped off the train for a moment and saw Clara—whether by prearrangement or purely by kismet he did not specify in the letters that followed. “Has Miss Clara told you of the fleeting glimpse of her that was granted me at Painesville?” he wrote Flora, who was now his co-conspirator. “I thought I had never seen any finer picture of fresh and beautiful life.” Looking back a year later, in the same letter in which he confessed to Clara that he had not loved her at first sight, he described the next stage of his heart’s awakening: “I saw you for that short interval at Painesville. I could not help asking myself, ‘What is the young lady to me that I should be so delighted to see her?’ and then I thought she is very lovely and I like lovely girls—voilà tout.”

  He carried away other strong impressions. On his stopover in Cleveland he had visited the Stone residence on Euclid Avenue and met Clara and Flora’s parents, Amasa and Julia Stone. Further enhancing the picture, he had arrived at Cleveland’s Union Depot, built by Stone, and when he departed, he rode on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway, the newly consolidated line between Buffalo and Chicago, of which Stone was a major stockholder.

  Like many of the tycoons of his generation, Amasa Stone started out in skilled but lowly jobs. Andrew Carnegie of Pittsburgh, for example, had been a telegraph operator. Two of Stone’s fellow Clevelanders—John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and Jeptha Wade, founder of Western Union—had worked as bookkeeper and portrait painter, respectively. Stone had apprenticed as a carpenter in Massachusetts, and by the time he was a teenager, he was building houses and churches. At the age of twenty-one, he and a brother-in-law, William Howe, contracted to build a railroad bridge across the Connecticut River, using a truss system patented by Howe and
improved by Stone. Afterward, Stone, with new partners, bought the patent and commenced building not just bridges but entire railroads. In 1848, at the age of thirty, his firm contracted to complete the line between Cleveland and Columbus.

  In 1850, he moved to Cleveland with his wife, six-year-old son Adelbert, and one-year-old daughter Clara, and became superintendent of the Cleveland, Cincinnati & Columbus Railroad. Stone and his partners next took on the more challenging task of linking Cleveland to the Pennsylvania state line at Erie—a railroad that became the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula and later consolidated with the Cleveland & Toledo as the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, with Stone as president. The Lake Shore soon connected to the Jamestown & Franklin, reaching deep into the heart of the booming oil regions.

  He owned a piece and usually was a director of everything he built. With his brother Andros and several others, he formed the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company. He invested in more iron mills, a woolen mill, a bridge-manufacturing company, and still more railroads. He designed and built railroad cars and Cleveland’s much-admired Union Depot. He held an interest in several banks. As the wealthiest man in Cleveland, he was assured a look at nearly every deal in town. When Jeptha Wade bundled together several smaller telegraph companies, Stone took a flier and bought a hefty chunk of Western Union. When John D. Rockefeller executed a similar consolidation of refineries, creating Standard Oil, Stone acquired five hundred shares—5 percent of the stock—and became a director. Standard’s refined oil soon flowed eastward on the Lake Shore railroad at sweetheart rates. Even as the millions piled up, he continued to work like the carpenter he had once been. A stern, abstemious Presbyterian, his only personal indulgence was his wife and children—and them he indulged lavishly.

  The Cleveland Leader described the house he built on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland’s “Millionaires’ Row,” as the “finest, most complete and convenient residence west of the Hudson.” The architecture of the two-story mansion was “nearly, although not strictly, that of the ‘Italian Villa.’ ” Gothic windows, gargoylish rooftop corbels, and a crownlike clerestory lent the exterior the look of an ornate chess piece. Inside, the mantels were of the finest statuary marble, the woodwork of rosewood, the balustrades of carved mahogany—all solidly constructed under Stone’s gimlet eye. Seven hundred thousand bricks and 8,000 square feet assured the comfort of the Stone family and testified immodestly to the worth of its owner.

  This was the house that Hay visited in the summer of 1872, and surely he had never been in anything quite like it. Nowhere else in the United States was there a street comparable to Euclid Avenue. Robber barons had yet to erect their palaces in New York. Chicago was just beginning to boom when the great fire struck. Even the most prosperous Bostonians lived rather puritanically, cheek-by-jowl on Beacon Hill. Buffalo, thanks to the Erie Canal’s umbilical to the Great Lakes, was Cleveland’s closest rival for ostentation; but Cleveland, its population approaching one hundred thousand, was the showplace of the moment, with Euclid Avenue the new Champs-Elysées. It ran extravagantly eastward from the Public Square beneath a bower of elms, lined with sandstone curbs, flagstone sidewalks, and filigreed fencework. The lawns were groomed and bedded, and the houses, “which wealth [had] spared no pains in perfecting,” rose from deep in their lots. The Stones’ neighbors were Cleveland’s wealthiest: the Rockefellers, Wades, and the rest of the nouveaux riches of rail, steel, oil, and banking. Most of them had been raised austerely. Few had made the Grand Tour. Now all lived like royalty. If proof of this were needed, the previous winter Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, passing through Cleveland, had danced a quadrille in the Stones’ drawing room.

  GRANT BEAT GREELEY BADLY in November, taking every northern state and eight of the eleven states of the former Confederacy. It was the widest margin of victory since Andrew Jackson’s in 1828. Republicans surged in the Senate and House and now controlled both chambers by comfortable margins. For Greeley, the loss was compounded by the death of his wife four days before the election. “My house is desolate, my future dark, my heart a stone,” he grieved. He made a brief and brave attempt to resume the editorship of the Tribune, but the double blow had shattered him physically and mentally. Two weeks later he was taken, stooped and delirious, to an asylum near his farm in Chappaqua, New York, where he died on November 29.

  Hay was in Warsaw when Greeley collapsed and relieved to be removed from the tragedy. He lectured on Lincoln at the Warsaw public library, where he was received warmly by a “house crowded by the intellect, wealth and beauty of his home.” Besides a leisurely few days with his family, he also stopped in Cleveland on both his outbound trip and return. He made no mention of seeing Clara or any others of the Stone family, but he had. After giving his Lincoln lecture again at Case Hall, he reported to his mother, “I think I will stay here until tomorrow evening and then go through to New York.”

  Back at the Tribune, Reid was in trouble. During the presidential race, the paper had lost many of its Republican readers, and the stock was slumping. A play was afoot, led by the largest stockholder, Samuel Sinclair, to replace Reid with, of all people, Schuyler Colfax, Grant’s defrocked vice president. As a gesture of loyalty to his friend, Hay submitted a letter of resignation, effective upon Reid’s exit.

  Reid, however, was not ready to relinquish control of the paper, and perhaps if he had had more time to find a financial knight, he might have settled for one less dark. Jay Gould was precisely the sort of scoundrel Horace Greeley had devoted his life to demonizing. With the help of President Grant’s brother-in-law, Gould had schemed to corner the gold market, and with his partner, Jim Fisk, he had made a killing in a series of wickedly brazen manipulations of Erie Railroad stock. In that caper, one of their accomplices was New York’s king crook, Boss Tweed. In October 1871, while Greeley, Reid, and the rest of the Tribune were celebrating the arrest of Tweed, it was Gould who stepped forward to post Tweed’s million-dollar bail.

  Not surprisingly, Reid went to great lengths to conceal the identity of the man who put up the money to buy or otherwise tie up a majority of Tribune stock, vanquish Colfax, and secure the editor’s desk for himself. Precisely what sympathies Gould expected from Reid in return seems never to have been spelled out, but those with unkind suspicions could not resist referring to Reid as Gould’s hireling.

  Hay’s correspondence sheds almost no light on the events of December 1872, and his role in Reid’s triumph seems to have been peripheral at best, although he did write to his mother that “Reid has managed the paper so admirably during the last month that no reasonable objection can be made to him. If there is any attempt made to oust him I shall oppose it with all the means in my power.”

  This endorsement was made before he learned of Reid’s pact with Gould. Whether or not he regarded it as Faustian, and whether or not he spoke his mind to Reid, their friendship bore up. On Christmas Eve, Reid took a moment to thank Hay: “I didn’t try to answer your letter of resignation for I couldn’t. Neither can I try to pay you for the admirable work you have done. . . . But it is at any rate a great pleasure to me to be able to connect with the Christmas time an advance of your salary to $100 per week. It is inadequate & late; but it may serve at least to mark the admiration every editor and owner feels for your writing and for you.” Along about this time, Hay also came into possession of one of the Tribune’s hundred shares of stock.

  WITH THE DEATH OF Greeley and the ascendance of Reid, Hay continued to anchor the editorial pages with his able commentary on foreign affairs. He spoke out against the brutalities of hanging as a form of execution—recalling no doubt the horrid scene he had witnessed in the South during the war. When it was his turn to jab at Tweed and Tammany Hall, he pulled no punches. His tone with the Grant administration remained cynical, if somewhat less sharp. He deemed Grant’s inaugural address “the utterance of a man of the best intentions profoundly desirous to govern wisely and justly. . . . He promises little but what we heartily approve. . . . But what warrant
have we that the President can do anything more for the accomplishment of these beneficent ends during the coming term than during the last?”

  Nevertheless, these posturings were starting to seem old hat, as if he had worn them once too often. Hay had been at the Tribune two years, longer than he had lasted at any of his diplomatic posts. He was not thinking of resigning, but his thoughts were drifting. After the election, he had written to John George Nicolay, suggesting that at long last they turn their attention to the Lincoln biography. He was glad to learn that Nicolay was moving to Washington to accept an appointment as marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court, a sinecure that provided a comfortable salary of $3,500 and would allow Nicolay time and opportunity to begin gathering the materials and interviews they would need to flesh out their narrative.

  Then, too, Hay was preoccupied with Clara Stone. Something had happened on his stopovers in Cleveland, and after the New Year, Clara came to New York to stay with her uncle and aunt for the winter.

  For three months, she and Hay saw each other nearly every day, and Hay’s coyness gave way to romantic abandon. “I have sometimes gazed at you until your eyes and mouth seemed radiant and glorified with some divine beauty and promise,” he told her, “until it seems to me that I could not live without falling at your feet and pouring out my full heart in worship.” For all his ardor, he hastened to assure her that his suit was built upon proper premise. “If there is any one reason why I loved you at first, it is because I respected you more than any other woman,” he pledged. He complimented her on her “firm and inflexible Christian character.”