All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  FOR HAY, THE RENEWAL of his acquaintance with Adams was as fortuitous as it was enjoyable. He too was embarking on his magnum opus, and doubtless Adams bolstered his belief that Americans were capable of writing history on the scale of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which both he and Adams revered. After their February dinner together, Hay returned to Cleveland, eager to bear down on Lincoln “with some force.” He had a new desk made, “so big that it will not go upstairs,” he told Nicolay.

  He was not able to work for long. Once more his eyes acted up; the complaint this time was double vision. He was nearly forty and soon would wear glasses, but this latest problem was not so simply solved. Reluctantly, he alerted Nicolay that he intended to lay off until at least the end of the summer. In early May he went to Philadelphia to consult with Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the unrivaled authority on “nervous exhaustion.”

  Mitchell had earned a reputation for his study of gunshot wounds in Civil War soldiers. His expertise in neurology led him to write a series of popular books—Wear and Tear, Fat and Blood, Nurse and Patient—which described for the layman the nervous disabilities brought on by the unnatural strain of the age. “Our city life has become perplexing and trying by its intricacy,” Mitchell pronounced. “[S]o many wheels must be kept moving in order to [carry out] social, domestic, civil and professional duties that in the hurry of well-filled lives we are hardly at rest.” Symptoms included anxiety, dizziness, depression, and dyspepsia. Bundled together, they were often called neurasthenia. Common treatments included massage and mild electric shock. Dr. Mitchell went further, prescribing the Rest Cure, which for women called for several weeks of absolute bed rest and for men the opposite: robust diet, moderate exercise, and time out of doors. Regardless of the patient’s gender, Mitchell advised altering the “moral atmosphere” created by the smothering attentions of “the self-sacrificing love and over-careful sympathy of a mother, a sister, or some other devoted relative.”

  In Philadelphia, Mitchell put Hay through a battery of tests and had him examined by an oculist. Patient and physician got along famously, for Mitchell, besides possessing impressive medical acumen, was also a man of letters and philosophy. His circle of friends included the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, the historian George Bancroft, and the minister Phillips Brooks. An author in his spare time, he would eventually become as well known for his historical novels as for his scientific prowess.

  Mitchell did not put a name to Hay’s affliction—no mention of neurasthenia, for instance, nor, for that matter, of hypochondria. Nevertheless, he prescribed a version of the Rest Cure, tailored to Hay’s cosmopolitan appetites: he and his brother Leonard would spend the summer touring Europe. “I have been under the weather a good while & hope this may pick me up,” Hay wrote Robert Lincoln. “I expect to be back in October & shall probably see you on my way to Warsaw if we are both still extant.” For the first time since his wedding, he would be apart from the “self-sacrificing love” of Clara.

  Hay and Leonard enjoyed several leisurely weeks at the Hessian spas of Schlangenbad and Schwalbach, amid “[s]erene and tranquil dullness, the finest air and the loveliest scenery.” He assured Clara that the vacation was worthwhile. “I am feeling very well, and looking better, I believe, than you ever saw me,” he reported, adding, however, that he had “not got rid of that little buzz yet.”

  The trip entailed immersion of another sort as well. He and Leonard spent the first month in England, dining in London with Henry James and shopping for art—“scarcely anything tolerably good for less than one hundred guineas,” Hay grumbled. They next wended their way through Belgium and Holland. They stopped in Frankfurt, Munich, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Milan, and Turin, finishing up with a swing through Scotland and the Lake District—a lively march that surely stretched the limits of Dr. Mitchell’s definition of rest. To Flora Stone, Hay wrote: “I think a man needs about ten lives to get through all he would like to do—one to pass in great cities, and to learn them thoroughly, with their art, their history, and their social life . . . one for country and provincial life . . . one for public life and for doing good . . . one for literature etc. etc. Because we have only one we go blundering along in nervous haste.”

  The cure seemed to take; by the time he arrived in Cleveland, his double vision and whatever other woes were nagging him had disappeared. Throughout the fall and early part of the winter, he applied himself to writing. By agreement with Nicolay, he would tackle the first forty years of Lincoln’s life, up through his term in Congress. Nicolay, working simultaneously and chronologically, would carry on as far as Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the opening of the Civil War. They would decide the remainder of the schedule later.

  BY 1878, THIRTEEN YEARS after Lincoln’s death, the biographical landscape had filled in somewhat, although Hay and Nicolay regarded the recent crop of books as historical weeds—unnourishing or, worse, downright noxious. Their own commitment to tell the Lincoln story in full was now fanned by a resolve to set the record straight.

  The thorn that irritated them most was Ward Hill Lamon’s The Life of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1872. Following the election of 1860, Lamon had taken upon himself the role of bodyguard and had spirited Lincoln into Washington to avoid kidnap or assassination. After the inauguration, Lincoln found a job for his friend as marshal of the District of Columbia, and Lamon was a frequent visitor to the White House; it was Lamon who had slept on the floor outside Lincoln’s bedroom on election night in 1864.

  Several years after the assassination, Lamon undertook a biography of Lincoln, only to discover that another of Lincoln’s former law partners, William Herndon, had already interviewed scores of Lincoln’s neighbors and kin with the aim of writing a book of his own. But before he could complete his project, Herndon ran out of steam and, facing foreclosure on his farm, sold his material to Lamon (and Chauncy Black, a ghostwriter recruited by Lamon).

  Herndon’s, and then Lamon’s, intention was to humanize Lincoln before he was rendered unrecognizable by hagiographers. If this meant calling attention to Lincoln’s blemishes, then so be it. For instance, Lamon’s book was the first to question whether Lincoln’s parents were married at the time of his birth. It documented young Abe’s strength, popularity, honesty, and intellect, but also detailed his vulgarity and his denial of the Bible as “the authority of divine revelation.” It was also the first biography to chronicle Lincoln’s early love for Ann Rutledge, whose death sent him into such deep depression that he “lost all self-control, even the consciousness of identity, and every friend he had in New Salem pronounced him insane, mad, crazy.” When Lincoln broke off his engagement with Mary Todd (temporarily), again he went “crazy as a loon,” and his friends took the precaution of removing razors and knives from his rooms to keep him from attempting suicide.

  Having painted Lincoln as a bastard and infidel who had “walked that narrow line that divides sanity from insanity,” Lamon finished his portrait with a flurry of less than flattering brush strokes: “Mr. Lincoln was a man apart from the rest of his kind, unsocial, cold, impassive. . . . It was said that ‘he had no heart’; that is no personal attachments warm and strong. . . . It was seldom that he praised anybody. . . . His encomiums were most likely to be satirical than sincere. . . . No one knew better how to ‘damn with faint praise.’ . . . He had no reverence for great men. . . . He felt that he was as great as anybody. . . . Intensely secretive and cautious, he shared his secrets with no man. . . . Feeling himself perfectly competent to manage his own affairs, he listened with deceptive patience to the views of others, and then dismissed their advice with the adviser.”

  And one last swipe for good measure: “Notwithstanding his overweening ambition, and the breathless eagerness with which he pursued the objects of it, [Lincoln] had not a particle of sympathy with the great mass of his fellow-citizens.”

  The only person more offended than Hay and Nicolay by Lamon’s book—and the rummagings of Herndon on which i
t was based—was Robert Lincoln. Now more than ever, he was the guardian of his father’s, and his family’s, legacy. His third and last brother, Tad, had died in 1871; his mother’s mental state had deteriorated since the assassination, and in 1875 Robert undertook the painful steps of having her committed to a mental hospital. After her release, they remained estranged. (She would die in 1882.)

  Robert had done his best to dissuade Herndon from completing his book and was enormously displeased when Lamon brought the project to bittersweet fruition. “It is absolutely horrible to think of such men as Herndon and Lamon being considered in the light they claim,” Lincoln griped to Hay. He had confidence that Hay and Nicolay would write a “respectable book,” and, to be doubly sure, he renewed his pledge giving them exclusive access to his father’s papers—on the condition that he be able to review the manuscript before publication.

  It would take Hay and Nicolay fifteen years to rebut Lamon, and even then they could not entirely dismiss him. Because Hay had not known Lincoln until 1860, he found, reluctantly, that he was obliged to draw upon Lamon’s account of Lincoln’s early life. Only when it came to summarizing Lincoln’s character, a task that naturally fell to Hay, the more lyrical of the co-authors, was he able to counter Lamon’s blasphemy with his own personal insight. “His heart was so tender,” Hay eventually was to write of Lincoln, “that he would dismount from his horse in a forest to replace the young birds which had fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night if he knew a soldier-boy was under sentence of death. . . . Children instinctively loved him; they never found his rugged features ugly. . . . He was absolutely without prejudice of class or condition. . . . He was tolerant even of evil: though no man can ever have lived with a loftier scorn of meanness and selfishness.”

  This was the truer Lincoln, the Lincoln whom Hay and Nicolay knew and loved, and they put their credentials above Lamon’s and everyone else’s. “We knew Mr. Lincoln intimately,” Hay asserted in the first pages of the biography, which he began in earnest in 1878. “We were the daily and nightly witnesses of the incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and the hopes which pervaded the Executive Mansion.”

  By March 1879, he was able to report to Nicolay that he had written 50,000 words. “If I could get three months of good quiet work without worry I would be up to where you began.”

  THE QUIET DID NOT last. Hay spent three weeks in Warsaw at the bedside of his seventy-five-year-old mother, who had broken her hip. Then in midsummer, he allowed himself to be drawn into local politics. One of the Republican planks that year was “sound money,” a movement to stabilize the economy by backing paper currency—“greenbacks”—with gold. Hay joined the Honest Money League and stumped for his local candidates.

  Mostly he enjoyed being back in the hustings. “We are having a red hot canvass here . . . I am invited to make four speeches a week,” he enthused to Whitelaw Reid. At the end of August, he spoke to a crowd of ten thousand at the annual picnic of the Western Reserve Pioneer Association, saluting the heritage of Ohio’s founding fathers: “They believed in order, decency, sobriety; in reverence for all things reverend, for religion, for law,” he said of the pioneers. “[T]hey claimed their own, while they allowed each man his own.”

  In October, he gave a speech to five thousand in Cleveland’s Public Square. Upon reading a transcript of yet another of Hay’s addresses that fall, Reid complimented his former editorial star: “I wish you would do more such things, so that the general public may come by and by to think of you as the national spokesman for Cleveland.”

  Hay was thinking along the same lines. His hard work for the ticket had won him the favor of incoming Governor Charles Foster, Ohio congressman James Garfield, and President Hayes; the latter two men were guests at Hay’s house that fall. They and other Republican friends were suggesting he run for the U.S. House in 1880.

  He gave it some consideration, if only to get away from Cleveland, which—as was now quite apparent—tended to make him uneasy or, worse, unwell. His recent visit to Washington had him yearning to spend more time there. He had sworn he would never run for office, but even in his adamance, he gave hints that he was wavering. “The Congress matter is not so simple as my high-toned friends think,” he told Reid. “All Euclid Avenue says with one accord that I am the man, but E.A. with all its millions and its tone does not influence a single primary.”

  In the end, he did not have to decide. In late October, Frederick Seward submitted his resignation as assistant secretary of state, and Secretary of State William Evarts asked Hay to take the job.

  Evarts was a brilliant and well-traveled attorney from New York. He had managed William Seward’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. During the war, Seward had sent him abroad to halt the construction and supplying of Confederate ships in England and France. Afterward he represented America in the Alabama indemnity tribunal. He served briefly as attorney general under Andrew Johnson and as Johnson’s private counsel in the president’s impeachment trial, winning acquittal. He grew disgusted with Grant, supported the reform ticket of Rutherford Hayes, and, during the disputed election of 1876, served as lead counsel for the Republicans, helping gain the White House for his party.

  Hay did not know Evarts personally but had many reasons to respect him. Evarts was a link to Seward and an exemplar of the better sort of Republican. He openly bucked the power-hoarding party bosses in New York and backed sound money and civil service reform. Quick-humored and debonair, he possessed all the social graces required of a diplomat. “He had the rare faculty,” Hay told Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “of saying at the dinner-table the best things that were said there, invariably something that was quoted everywhere for days and even years afterward—and giving the impression while saying it that he had better things in reserve if he really cared to produce them.” Very much the same would eventually be remarked about Hay.

  At first he turned down the State Department offer. “Interests which I cannot disregard make it impossible for me to be away from Cleveland this winter,” he wrote Evarts. What he was too discreet to mention was that Clara was seven months pregnant. Evarts would not give up, however, and pressured their mutual friend Whitelaw Reid to lobby Hay. The tactic worked; Hay informed Evarts on November 11 that he would report for duty in ten days. But even then he had his doubts. “I stand like a hydrophobical on the edge of a bathtub,” he told William Dean Howells.

  Leaving Clara and the children behind in Cleveland, he moved to Washington and took a room at Wormley’s Hotel on H Street, one block off Lafayette Square. The State Department was located in the south wing of the still unfinished State, War, and Navy Building, immediately west of the White House. Its architecture borrowed heavily—rather too heavily—from the ornamental extravagance of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Told that the exaggerated edifice was fireproof, General William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who had torched the South, supposedly remarked, “What a pity.”

  In 1879, the department had only eighty employees in Washington and fewer than a thousand serving in diplomatic legations and as trade consuls worldwide. (The term “ambassador” would not come into usage until 1893.) When Hay arrived for work on November 22, the first to greet him was his old friend Alvey Adee, who had transferred from Madrid two years earlier and was now chief of the Diplomatic Bureau, overseeing departmental clerks and correspondence.

  One of the principal responsibilities of the assistant secretary was to stand in for the secretary during the latter’s absences from Washington. Hay was on the job only four days when Evarts went to New York. “Today was an important one in our history,” he wrote soberly to Clara. “I sat for the first time in Cabinet meeting, and took the place of highest rank in the room, at the President’s right.” The last time he had attended such a meeting had been fourteen years earlier, as a lowly, silent presidential secretary. Now, taking the chair once occupied by William Seward, he experienced a confusion of emotions. “I felt very odd and very modest, s
itting there among the grey-haired elders of the land, entitled to speak first on matters of national importance,” he told Clara. “You may imagine I did not avail myself of the privilege. . . . It seems a much more important matter to me now, to be so near the source of authority than it did when I was younger. I did not appreciate it in Lincoln’s time.”

  Evarts ran a low-key department. Explaining his executive philosophy to Rutherford Hayes, he quipped, “You don’t sufficiently realize, Mr. President, the great truth that almost any question will settle itself if you only let it alone long enough.” Most of the issues before the State Department involved matters affecting commerce—fisheries, foreign markets, tariffs. Hay had little to say about his duties, except that he found them “more exacting in the matter of time, and less exacting in the matter of brains.” He clearly liked the honor and authority that came with his position but seemed not to have contemplated making a career out of it. “I can hold on until the end of Hayes’ administration and then quit public life without a sigh or a tear,” he assured Clara, who remained in Cleveland. “I do not want or need any office in the world.”

  He did not make it home for Christmas, and his correspondence does not mention whether he was present for the birth of Alice Evelyn Hay on January 6. Perhaps he was able to dash to Cleveland at New Year’s, or perhaps not. Train travel that time of year, particularly along the Lake Shore route, could be unreliable, as everyone in the Hay-Stone households knew far too well. Quite possibly he did not see his new daughter until the end of March, when the weather improved enough for Clara, Flora, three-month-old Alice, and the baby’s nurse to visit Washington for a few days. (Helen and Adelbert stayed behind with their own nurse.)

  In the meantime, he found plenty of diversion in Washington. He was a welcome guest in the homes of Alvey Adee, who lived with a married niece, and the Nicolays, who lived on Capitol Hill, conveniently close to the Library of Congress. The Adamses had left for Europe before Hay arrived, but Clarence King was in Washington. Through a combination of scientific expertise, influential contacts, and scintillating personality, he had been appointed the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey. He was staying at Wormley’s, too, and he and Hay resumed their kinetic friendship. Later on, they briefly shared a house together.