All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  His sincerity, good intentions, and the sheer volume of his adoration finally prevailed. One evening after attending a concert of Mendelssohn music, the dam burst, and she consented to marry him, although they agreed not to announce their engagement for several months.

  In April, when Clara returned to Cleveland, they promised to write each other every other Sunday. But by May his letters to her were so frequent, so lengthy, and so passionate, that it is no wonder that his contributions to the Tribune occasionally fell on the perfunctory side of diligent. (Clara’s letters to Hay from this period have never surfaced.)

  He now addressed her as Clärchen, his pet, coded translation of “dear wife,” uttering it repeatedly as if too good to be true. He was the dashing, brilliant, insouciant one; she was taciturn, sensible, less than prepossessing. But once he was sure he had won her and had convinced her of his absolute devotion, he humbled himself before her. By his estimation, he was getting everything and she nothing. “Ah, think what you give,” he wrote her. “Beauty and goodness and youth, a rich and noble nature, candor and honor and affection, and in return you get only the worship of a soul which has no existence but in you.”

  Setting aside his past, his career, and his public persona, he made it clear that, within their relationship, she was the guiding force and the ideal to which he would defer and adhere. He wanted her to believe, because he believed it himself, that he loved her so deeply that she could not possibly love him as much. By this inequality an equilibrium was struck, although by setting the terms, even without saying so, Hay retained the upper hand. Which, by all evidences, was fine by Clara.

  On May 8, Hay wrote to her submissively: “I love you Clärchen—but I worship you also; you have come so strongly and bountifully to me that I can scarcely yet be at ease and contented in my happiness. How could it ever have happened? I continually ask myself. It cannot be merely because I loved you, for others have loved you before. You have always been petted and courted, and still retained your sweet and serene self-control. But all at once you come down to the least worthy of all your lovers, and give him your heart and lips and now your hand. . . . I would not care if all my interests and affections were submitted this moment to your will. You have captured me. I am the spoil of your bow and spear, and I am at your mercy.”

  He was the ancient mariner, she the safe harbor: “You are much younger than I am, darling, and have lived in an atmosphere of love and confidence. If, like me, you had passed many years in the troubled current of the world, and met everywhere deceit and folly and sin, treachery and malice, then you would know how infinitely comforting it would be to meet one heart which is true and noble and kind, one which you could trust for time and for eternity. You lovely girl, if you had not cared for me, I should still have been grateful that I had known you. But to think that you love me, that you are to be mine forever! how can I be anything but humbly grateful?”

  The formality of asking Amasa Stone for his daughter’s hand went more smoothly than Hay anticipated. The letter he received from Stone in return was of the “kindest and nicest character,” he told Clara. “[I]t seems too good to be true.” They set a date in February 1874, and once the wedding was fixed and sanctioned, his elation took a more solemn tone. “I do devote and consecrate my life to you,” he wrote her. “I give thanks to God for you and I pray that He will make me worthy of you.” He swore to her that he was a new man. “I was never a happy character,” he admitted. “It has been a rough and somewhat cheerless life I have led, notwithstanding its variety and interest and apparent pleasure. I never had known real happiness before. But you have given me happiness. . . . It was knowing you and loving you that changed the world for me.”

  His world changed in other ways, too. With Reid now in control, the Tribune moved to temporary quarters to make way for construction of a new, grander headquarters designed by Richard Morris Hunt.

  Two months later, Hay received a telegram that his sister Helen had died during childbirth in Warsaw. He hurried home to console his parents. As he mourned “the dear young saint,” the tragedy only reinforced his conviction to begin a family of his own.

  In his letters to Clara that summer, he pledged that he would take responsibility for her welfare but again confessed that he looked forward to putting himself in her care. “I do need somebody to look after me,” he wrote in early August, “and when she comes to assume that office, I shall exaggerate every little flicker of a headache, to be petty and spoiled by her.”

  Here was yet another of his sweet surrenders, but it was more prophetic than either of them realized. After their marriage, Hay’s health would become chronically fickle. In another of the letters he wrote at the time of their engagement, he told Clara about his other sister, Mary, who had given her whole life to taking care of a husband who was “not very strong.” On one hand, Hay found this inequity exasperating; on the other hand, he said, “I must admit that those are the happiest families where the husband is all selfishness and the wife all devotion. Shall we try to cultivate those talents, you and I?”

  Rumors of their engagement spread widely. The end of bachelorhood for John Hay was too delicious not to be broadcast in the newsrooms and clubs where his reputation was the object of envy and reverence. That he was betrothed to one of Amasa Stone’s daughters only made the story richer, literally. When Robert Lincoln heard the news, he wrote jocularly to John George Nicolay, “I have a letter from New York today which says that J. Hay is about to marry a Miss Stone of Cleveland, whose [father] will one day [be] obliged to leave to . . . J.H. and one other fellow [Flora’s eventual husband] from $6000000 to $8000000—which will make John to write with a first class gold pen.”

  Suddenly, however, the numbers were not so big. At the end of September 1873, Jay Cooke, a banker who had grown immensely wealthy financing the Civil War, was unable to sell millions of dollars in Northern Pacific Railroad bonds, triggering a run on his bank and a panic on Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days, and in the weeks and months that followed, more banks, dozens of railroads, and thousands of businesses failed; tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs.

  Hay, who earlier might have treated the grim news with a certain detachment, now had a personal reason to be alarmed. Financial speculation and consolidation depended on the total being stronger than the sum of its parts, when in fact the latticework of investment in banks and railroads was mostly flimsy, with only a few stout pillars holding up the whole. One of those pillars was Amasa Stone. Through conversation with the wife of Stone’s brother, Andros, Hay learned that Stone had lost many hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps well over a million, in honoring his obligations and propping up those of others. And these losses did not take into account the immense amount of stock in Western Union and Lake Shore he was forced to sell at panic prices to keep up his margins at various banks.

  As the markets sank, Hay could only watch and hope. “He is a man of great courage and energy and may be able still to retrieve himself,” Hay wrote of Stone in late October. “He will not do any whining in the mean time.” So stolid was Amasa Stone that Clara apparently had no idea how dangerously close her dowry was to disappearing. Hay, who had not imagined he would have to support Clara solely on his Tribune salary, tried not to dwell on the downside either. “I am making an active campaign to have my marriage earlier,” he wrote bluffly to Reid. “If the Herr Papa is really dead-broke my chances ought to improve.”

  NEWSPAPERS IN THE 1870S were not in the habit of splashing wedding announcements across their pages, and the marriage of John Hay to Clara Stone was no exception. The ceremony took place in Cleveland on February 4, 1874, after which the newlyweds returned to New York and settled into the apartment Hay had been renting on East 25th Street. “We have more room and more comforts here than we could have at any hotel for three times the expense,” he wrote contentedly to Flora.

  Amasa Stone was pleased that the couple had chosen to “begin life without pret
ensions.” He had not gone under in the Panic of 1873 after all, but the scare had served to remind the sensible New Englander that there were no substitutes for hard work and self-sufficiency. His goal had always been simple: to be better off at the end of the year than at the beginning. One bad year had made him grateful for so many good ones.

  In many ways, he was the opposite of Hay’s father. As a small-town doctor and small-time speculator, Charles Hay was a man of lofty principles, content simply with making ends meet. By these measurements, John Hay had already exceeded his father’s expectations, although he had yet to prove himself fully to Amasa Stone. Hay’s accomplishments and renown were impressive, to be sure, but his career thus far had been more whimsical than deliberate. He was now thirty-five; by the time Amasa Stone was that age, he was running entire railroads.

  Hay attempted to allay any paternal anxieties Stone might have by assuring him that he was fully capable of providing for Clara. Stone applauded Hay’s independence and resolve, but knowing something of Hay’s history, he also felt it his duty to remind his son-in-law to stick to the strait and narrow. “Your life and habits have been such,” Stone offered with Presbyterian firmness, “that it would have been quite easy for you to have fallen into idle habits. I presume experience has taught you that such habits would only lead you to ruin. I doubt whether any one can enjoy true happiness who is not reasonably industrious and feels that he is doing something for himself and his fellow beings.”

  Stone’s interest in Hay’s character and well-being was not merely that of a future father-in-law. He had never gotten over the death of his only son, Adelbert, who had drowned in the Connecticut River on a geology field trip from Yale in 1865, and he sincerely wished for Hay all that had been taken so cruelly from his own boy. As a token of “affection and esteem” for the newest member of the family, and as a way to reel him into the fold, Stone presented Hay with two Lake Shore Railway bonds valued at $10,000.

  Which was not to say that Hay’s devotion to Clara required any external encouragement. “[T]he best of all good luck that could possibly happen to a man I have found,” he told his friend Alvey Adee, who was still in Madrid. “We were not much known to each other when we were married. But I know her now and I never could have imagined so desirable a wife.”

  All indications were that marriage suited Clara, too. “O you two are the greatest pair of spoons I ever saw,” Flora chirped to Hay from Cleveland. “I don’t believe she will get homesick, & what is more, I don’t believe she will be spoiled; it will only bring out her best qualities. As a little girl she was always (Don’t show this letter to her) shy and diffident, never thought she could be or do anything, & the general public, not having as much faith as we, did not encourage her much. Now, however, I can fairly see her blossom out in the sunshine of her happy life.”

  The spoons were inseparable for the first four months, and when Clara went to Cleveland for a visit in June, her absence stirred Hay’s ardor to new heights. As the day of her return neared, he gushed: “It does not seem to me that I shall ever want to let you a minute out of my arms again . . . I would give a good deal to have you here. . . . I would kiss your sweet face till nothing was left unkissed. You grow dearer to me and more precious day by day. . . . The only thing that reconciles me to my youth and early years, passed away from you, is that I was learning the world, forming my own character, and getting such knowledge of life as fitted me to appreciate you. . . . You satisfy my whole heart and mind and soul because I have learned enough to know what a perfectly lovely and dear woman you are. It is that which makes me afraid. I am like a miser in a hovel with a chest full of treasure.”

  Hay changed his schedule at the Tribune so that he could be home with Clara in the evening. By midsummer, she knew she was pregnant. Perhaps it was coincidental, but just then Hay’s health faltered. He complained of an intermittent “dazzling of the eyes,” which brought on dizziness and prevented him from reading. As with so many of the maladies that were to come over him during the next thirty years, the cause, other than stress, was difficult to determine. In August, he and Clara took their respective conditions to the curative springs at Saratoga. “I am living a merely vegetable life,” Hay wrote Reid. “We listen to music, drink water, and in the afternoon my wife reads Dickens to me.”

  That fall, in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, they took a house on 42nd Street, just off Fifth Avenue. There Helen Julia Hay, named for Hay and Clara’s mothers, and also for Hay’s deceased sister, was born on March 11, 1875. A week later, an elated Hay reported to Flora: “She looked like me for a day or two but rapidly recovered from it and now she is not at all ugly. . . . Clara is prettier than you ever saw. Here I know what I am talking about and can speak impartially.”

  HAD HE NOT MARRIED and started a family, Hay might have remained a journalist the rest of his working life. Few editorial writers made more than he. The Tribune’s magnificent new office building, with its distinctive Italianate campanile, was nearing completion. Hay’s reputation and circle of friends were all any man could wish for.

  Yet he had many reasons to leave New York. He had burned the candle at both ends until his health began to sputter. While he and Clara were comfortable enough at their new address and had nurses to help out, she missed Cleveland. And there was one more incentive for moving, Hay explained to Alvey Adee: “[M]y father-in-law wishes me to go into another line of business, which will bring me immediate wealth.”

  Amasa Stone’s offer was generous but also vague. He proposed that Hay come to Cleveland and become familiar with his myriad investments and enterprises and eventually take on greater responsibility for their management. For a while he would be Stone’s protégé, a job that he expected would allow him to continue submitting occasional editorials to the Tribune. And at last he could bear down on the Lincoln biography.

  With a few pangs for his days as a boulevardier, Hay made one last round of his clubs and bid farewell to his colleagues at the paper. By the first week of June, he had installed his family in the capacious house of his in-laws. Next door, construction began on a comparably grand house of their own.

  In designing the house, the architect, Joseph Ireland, borrowed from the angular, late-Victorian style known as Eastlake, turning a cottage into a castle of finely carved sandstone. The house was not as huge as the Stone mansion, but it was every bit as sumptuous. Much of the woodwork, including the staircase, was carved by the gifted German craftsman John Herkomer. The furnishings were chosen by the Herter Brothers, the New York decorators who redid the Red Room of the White House and soon would take on the Fifth Avenue mansions of William Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. Although Hay pretended to be annoyed by the noise and dust of “some half hundred workmen,” he took great interest in the construction. The house was a wedding present from his father-in-law, but he made sure he got just what he wanted.

  AS EXPECTED, THE DEMANDS that Amasa Stone made on him were not great. “I do nothing but read and yawn,” he told Adee. “My work is merely the care of investments which are so safe that they require no care.” He had ample time to go to Springfield and meet with Nicolay, who had begun interviewing friends and associates of Lincoln. Upon his return, he took an office on Cleveland’s Public Square and pronounced himself ready to begin the biography. He wrote little, if at all, for the Tribune, but he made up for his absence by arranging for one of America’s most brilliant writers to contribute to the paper.

  If it is true that Hay knew every important figure of his day, then it was only a matter of time before he and Henry James made each other’s acquaintance. In the fall of 1874, James was back in the United States after two years abroad. His travel writings had been appearing in The Nation, and William Dean Howells was about to begin serializing James’s first important novel, Roderick Hudson, in the Atlantic Monthly. Howells deserves credit for introducing James to Hay, but there were many others who would have gladly done the honor. James was four years younger than Hay, and in 1875 he was we
ll respected in literary circles, although not yet a major literary light—certainly not as well known as the author of “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso.”

  Having lived in Europe, James was never quite at home anywhere else. His visits to America were precisely that—visits—and after a few months he was always restless to get away. Though the Jameses came from money, Henry’s father was a prodigal dreamer; in order to make ends meet, Henry wrote for magazines and newspapers while pursuing his primary passion, which was, as the world soon would recognize, fiction.

  At the end of July 1875, James wrote to Hay with a proposal that was not so different from one Hay had made to Whitelaw Reid five years earlier. “There is apparently in the American public an essential appetite, & a standing demand, for information about all Parisian things,” James suggested. “It is a general thing flimsily and vulgarly supplied, & my notion would be to undertake to supply it in a more intelligent and cultivated fashion—to write in other words for the American (or it doesn’t seem presumptuous to say so, as far as might be from the cosmopolitan) point of view a sort of chronique of the events and interests of the day.” The Tribune was the only paper he considered worthy of “these brilliant gifts.”

  He was wise to choose Hay as his broker. For years the Tribune had been publishing regular letters from Paris by the author and critic Arsène Houssaye, with Hay serving as translator. With Hay gone, Reid was eager to replace Houssaye. Hay vouched for James’s “wonderful style and keen observation of life and character.” Reid acquiesced, Hay offered James $20 a letter, and James accepted.

  The letters, which commenced in November, would not be what immortalized Henry James, but the friendship he formed with John Hay in 1875 was everlasting. “I feel as if my sails had caught a very liberal capful of wind . . . from your good wishes,” James wrote after the Tribune arrangement was assured. They would meet again many more times, mostly in Europe, two cosmopolitans of a similar point of view.