All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  During the winter of 1879–80, no two men were in greater demand in Washington society. “[H]e and I are such belles that they can’t have a dinner party without us,” Hay joked to Clara about his ad hoc partnership with King. Each was charming, but in tandem they were a performance. Their New York friend Henry Holt described a typical volley of Hay-King repartee. “I had a rather large dinner party one night,” Holt recalled, “when I sat at the middle of one side of the table and put those two fellows . . . at the ends, thinking that each of them would keep his end going. All the evening they fired at each other, the whole length of the table, and hardly anybody else said a word.”

  FROM JANUARY ONWARD, THE season was a whirl of balls and diplomatic receptions. Hay made the rounds and continued to attend smaller gatherings, such as the two dinner parties he attended at the house of Pennsylvania senator Donald Cameron and his wife, Elizabeth. Donald Cameron’s father, Simon, had made a fortune in railroads and banking before taking a seat in the Senate. Lincoln had made Cameron père his first secretary of war, but soon dismissed him for corruption and incompetence. After the war and a stint as minister to Russia, Cameron reclaimed his Senate seat, from which he controlled the patronage and politics of his state. When Rutherford Hayes declined to retain Cameron’s son Donald as his secretary of war—a job he had held for the last year of Grant’s presidency—Simon Cameron relinquished his Senate seat and directed the Pennsylvania legislature to give it to Donald.

  Cameron was forty-three when he came to the Senate, a millionaire, an alcoholic, and a widower with five daughters and a son. Like his father, he was more powerful than clever, strong of will but lacking in imagination. “The iron crown which Don Cameron inherited from his old Highland father seem[s] too heavy for his tender temple and weaker brain,” observed one capital columnist. He owned a mansion in Harrisburg; a fifty-room summer estate on the Susquehanna River; and a large tobacco farm in Lancaster County. In Washington, he had a house on K Street. What he lacked was a wife.

  Lizzie Sherman was from one of Ohio’s most illustrious families. Her father, Charles Taylor Sherman, was a judge in Cleveland; General William Tecumseh Sherman and former senator, now Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman were her uncles. She was just turning twenty in 1878, when she came to Washington to stay with her uncle John and aunt Cecilia. She was tall and slim, with bright blue eyes and a luxuriant head of light brown hair. She was delicate without being frail, thoroughly feminine but not in the least demure. She was better read than most women. She kept up with the affairs of the day as well as most men. She loved art and music; she danced well; and she put her good manners to good use. All of these qualities—her beauty and her vivacity—made her extraordinarily irresistible to men, and she played them as a coachman would drive a four-in-hand. “With perfection of grace and manner,” recalled one of Lizzie’s friends, “she seemed to me a picture of accomplished seductiveness, of which her able and ambitious mind was in no way unconscious.” After one particularly successful evening in Washington, Lizzie merrily mimicked the solicitude of one of her pursuers, an Austrian count: “ ‘Mein Gott! One must walk over corpses to see you!’ ”

  With men, she was always in charge, and it was she who chose Don Cameron from the long parade of suitors who fell over themselves to win her favor. Love apparently had nothing to do with her decision. Of four sisters, she was the last to wed. Her father, whom she adored, was elderly and failing; her mother was eager to launch her. In the end, her marriage to Cameron was said to be arranged, but Lizzie was the one who arranged it. She appraised the pluses and minuses and assured herself that she could make the terms work to her advantage.

  He was twenty-four years older than she. His children were old enough—the eldest was Lizzie’s age—and well enough off that she would not be responsible for their upbringing. Don Cameron was, on one hand, so obviously smitten by her and, on the other, so consumed by politics and his backroom habits of bourbon and poker that he was not likely to be an overbearing husband. In place of affection, and not necessarily in exchange for it, she would enjoy the benefits of great wealth and a commanding place in a society where being a Sherman and a Cameron was tantamount to royalty. For a canny twenty-year-old, this seemed a fair bargain. In breaking the news of her engagement to her mother, she wrote rather tellingly, “He is very nice about it all and keeps away from me except when I tell him he can come.”

  While Hay knew and respected the Sherman family, he cared little for the Cameron clan, beginning with Simon Cameron, whose sins he had observed firsthand in the Lincoln White House. Don Cameron was a hard-shelled Republican, but he was also a Grant man, one of the leaders of a growing movement to reelect the general to a third term in 1880. Still, Hay could not avoid the senator, who frequently prevailed upon the State Department with requests for patronage. And Cameron and his new wife were very much at the center of the social life of the capital.

  Hay called at the Cameron house shortly after arriving in Washington and reported to Flora Stone that Lizzie “was looking far more beautiful than ever.” This was the first mention of her in his letters—nothing more than an observation to a mutual friend. To be charmed by Lizzie was not surprising. Just the same, he had made a point of noting her beauty—a beauty that would grow on him each time he saw her.

  His first dinner at the Camerons’ did not go so well; he found himself monopolized by his host, whose “boundless ambition and passion for intrigue” tested his table manners. But the next party, in mid-February, was different. “The table was absolutely covered with roses and violets. I should think there were a thousand,” he reported to Clara so that she would not feel left out of his Washington activities. On this occasion, he talked very little to his host, who was seated at the far end of the table. Instead, he enjoyed the company of Lizzie, who honored him with a seat next to hers. The evening was “most exquisite,” he wrote Clara, innocently enough.

  He did not pass along any of their dinner conversation and indeed made a point of assuring his wife that he was not so caught up in the gossip and gaiety of Washington that he had lost his bearings. The day after their sixth wedding anniversary, he reminded her how much she meant to him: “[E]very year my darling I have loved you with a deeper and happier and more peaceful love. More than ever you fill my life with joy. You are the home of my heart.”

  But in light of his growing infatuation with Lizzie Cameron, another of his observations proved to be far more telling. He was writing to Clara not about Lizzie but about Kate Sprague, daughter of Salmon Chase and wife of the governor of Rhode Island, who, as all the world had come to learn, was having an affair with Senator Roscoe Conkling, the rascal boss of New York’s political machine. “I cannot believe the foul stories,” Hay remarked with evident sympathy for a woman of great charm and (formerly) good station whom he had known and on occasion courted during his days in the Lincoln White House, “but the fact is that married people cannot have an intimate friendship outside of their own families without danger of trouble and suffering.”

  THE DAY-TO-DAY WORK AT the State Department provided its share of satisfactions. For instance, Hay was able to help out Bret Harte, who, after his rapid ascent in the literary universe, had squandered most of his money and was now making ends meet as U.S. consul in the German city of Crefeld. The State Department had a long tradition of honoring authors with overseas assignments—Washington Irving to Madrid, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Liverpool, William Dean Howells to Venice—and Harte believed he deserved something more commensurate with his reputation than a damp factory town on the Rhine. He complained to Hay of neuralgia; what he feared was obscurity. Hay succeeded in transferring Harte to Glasgow, hardly more temperate but at least a city where a facsimile of English was spoken. Hay was also gratified to renew his acquaintance with James Angell, his favorite professor from Brown, whom President Hayes was sending off as the new minister to China. How far Hay had come: both Harte and Dr. Angell now worked for him.

  Those who worke
d for, or with, Hay—whether in the Lincoln White House, at the New York Tribune, or at the State Department—invariably found him genial and reliable. “He was loyal to his associates and subordinates,” the journalist Walter Wellman remembered. “His was one of those rare natures that win, without conscious effort, the deep and abiding affection of all who draw near.” And if at first there were skeptics who assumed that Hay was yet another “favorite of fortune” who had won appointment more through cronyism than merit, he quickly proved them wrong. His only mistake was that he did his job so well that it appeared effortless. “Hay seemed to me to possess in a high degree a silent power of work, doing a great deal and saying little about it,” recalled another newspaperman. After his death The Nation would remark, “Everything he undertook was done with a kind of divine ease.”

  His affability and unflappability were ideal qualities for a diplomat. So too was his facility with languages. Hay’s fluency in French was put to valuable use in early March 1880 with the arrival in Washington of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the celebrated builder of the Suez Canal. In 1879, de Lesseps had formed a new company to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and he had come to the United States in search of investors and the blessing of the government. Secretary Evarts asked Hay to serve as translator during the delicate discussions with the administration, an experience that gave him a thorough grounding in American policy on the isthmian canal.

  Thus far the State Department had maintained a stance of cautious indifference toward French ambitions in Panama. Like most Americans, Evarts believed that Nicaragua offered the only sensible route for a canal; he doubted that a Panama canal was feasible or that de Lesseps could raise the necessary capital. Still, the graying French visionary was hard to resist. “He is a very agreeable old gentleman,” Hay told Clara after a morning in the White House, translating for President Hayes and de Lesseps. He stuck by de Lesseps’s side at receptions and dinners throughout his stay, which, while an enjoyable assignment for the assistant secretary, was less than a triumph for de Lesseps. The president allowed de Lesseps to make his case and then issued a message to Congress on March 8, objecting to the Panama enterprise. “The policy of this country is a canal under American control,” Hayes declared, emphatically invoking the Monroe Doctrine. “Our merely commercial interest in it is greater than that of all other countries, while its relation to our power and prosperity as a nation, to our means of defense, our unity, peace, and safety are matters of paramount concern to the people of the United States.”

  De Lesseps did not let Hayes’s admonishment deter him. Returning home, he raised 300 million francs, asserting that he could complete a canal across Panama in eight years. Construction would begin in 1882. “I work not for selfish motives, but for the interests of humanity,” the Frenchman insisted, in translation, of course.

  THROUGHOUT THE SPRING, AS the campaign season began to heat up, influential friends continued to press Hay to run for Congress. When Mark Twain heard that Hay might get in the race, he quipped to William Dean Howells, “The presence of such a man in politics is like a vase of attar of roses in a glue-factory—it can’t extinguish the stink, but it modifies it.”

  Hay was reasonably confident that he could win his party’s nomination, but he shared Twain’s opinion on the pungency of politics; politely he told his Republican allies that he was not interested. As much as he enjoyed life in the capital, he disliked being away from his family and recognized how impractical it would be to uproot a wife and three small children from Cleveland. As a compromise, he suggested to Clara that she bring the children to Washington for the remaining months of the Hayes administration. There was ample room for the entire family in the house he leased on Massachusetts Avenue.

  Yet his decision not to seek a job for himself in the glue works of Congress did not mean that he lacked the stomach for the larger, only slightly less acrid, chore of getting good Republicans on the ticket and into higher office. President Hayes had declared early on that he did not wish a second term. At the top of the Republican field to succeed him were Treasury Secretary John Sherman, Senator James Blaine, and the man they all wanted to beat, former President Grant, who had recently returned from a two-year world tour and was ambling toward the White House under the escort of party spoilsmen calling themselves “Stalwarts.” Hay and Whitelaw Reid were violently opposed to another Grant presidency and bore comparable disdain for the Stalwart ringleaders, Senators Roscoe Conkling and Don Cameron. Hay at first backed Blaine over Sherman, his fellow Ohioan. Awkwardly, his friend James Garfield headed the Sherman movement at the convention in Chicago.

  To the shock and chagrin of nearly everyone, the nomination went to none of the three front-runners but to the darkest of horses, Sherman’s canny understudy, Garfield, on the thirty-sixth ballot. As a sop to the stunned and bitter Stalwarts, the convention awarded the vice-presidential nomination to one of Conkling’s protégés, the former collector of customs for the port of New York, Chester Arthur. As soon as the news reached Washington, Hay hurried a letter of congratulations to Garfield and promised his cooperation for the rest of the campaign. When the Republican Central Committee of Ohio asked him to give a speech in Cleveland, he readily assented. “I am doing this because I did not run for Congress & want to help a little,” he confided to Clara.

  THE SPEECH HE GAVE on July 31 helped more than a little. The committee had wanted him to speak on the Public Square, but after his previous experience there he worried that his voice had not been big enough to command such a large space. Instead, he addressed his audience in the exquisite Euclid Avenue Opera House, a centerpiece of Cleveland opulence owned by one of the Republicans’ up-and-comers, the coal and iron merchant Mark Hanna. As Hay stepped to the stage, he was greeted by the applause of a standing-room crowd of more than two thousand, including a good many women. He had written out his speech in advance, both to calm his stage nerves and to ensure that his words would attain the widest possible circulation. Summoning all of his experience on the lyceum circuit and as an editorial writer, he waited till the audience settled, then delivered a tour de force.

  “The Balance Sheet of the Two Parties,” as he titled his address, presented a stark and strident audit of the differences between North and South, Republicans and Democrats. “ ‘By their fruits you shall know them,’ ” he began. “[T]he fruits of the one”—Republicans—“are freedom, peace, and prosperity; of the other”—Democrats—“the Dead Sea apples of dust and ashes, of partisan rage and bitterness.”

  He had dipped his pen in sulfur and donned his bloodiest shirt. “Which party elected Abraham Lincoln? Which party opposed, vilified and finally killed him?” he asked his listeners. “On the one side is a record of glory and good repute which sheds something of lustre on the declining days of every man who fought that desperate battle against slavery and treason. On the other it is a shameful story of half-hearted loyalty or open rebellion, of ignorant and malicious opposition to light and knowledge, of blind and futile defiance to the stars in their courses.”

  Hay’s balance sheet took no account of the deep rifts or chronic corruption within his own party. James Garfield, who had been implicated but never quite incriminated in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, was, in Hay’s view, “an able, patriotic and honest man, of great capacity, unsullied character and blameless life.” The Democratic candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock, who had been a hero at Gettysburg but humdrum ever since, was merely “a mask behind which the treasons, defeats and hostilities” of his party were hiding. He was, in short, another McClellan.

  Hay’s speech was widely reviewed. “The Bombardment Has Opened Up, and the Battle Has Begun,” bruited the following morning’s Cleveland Leader. Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune also invoked military metaphor, asserting that Hay had “made havoc of the Democratic ranks.” Yet another paper called it “The Great Speech of the Campaign.” Published as a pamphlet, it was distributed throughout the country and drew congratulations from rank-and-file Re
publicans and party leaders alike. Even Hay allowed himself to brag just the slightest bit to Reid: “We had an excellent meeting at Cleveland. . . . My speech was lengthened to an hour and three quarters by the kind participation of the audience.”

  Not everyone in Cleveland was so adoring, however. The Democratic Plain Dealer could not resist calling the darling of the Opera House “ ‘Little Breeches’ Hay.”

  He gave several more speeches after that, though none so grand as “The Balance Sheet.” In September, he returned to Cleveland and spoke at a few ward meetings and smaller assemblies. Continuing on to Illinois, he took great pleasure in addressing the townspeople of Warsaw, with his father alongside him on the platform and his brittle-boned mother listening from a nearby window. “There was a slight breeze against me,” he told Howells, whom he knew would appreciate the emotion of such a homecoming, “but I spoke nearly two hours, with no distress . . . and was fresh as paint at the end.”

  AS HAY BEGAN TO look ahead to the end of his stint at the State Department, his and Clara’s life in Washington took an agreeable turn. The Adamses had returned after a year and a half in Europe, and the two couples became a foursome, anchored by the bond between the men but with the wives holding up their ends, each in her own way.

  When Adams had first met Clover, he threw himself “head over heels” in her pursuit. “I found her so far superior to any woman I had ever met,” he confessed to a friend, “that I did not think it worth while to resist.” She knew German, Latin, and was studying Greek. She read Middlemarch on their honeymoon and breezed through the twenty-volume autobiography of George Sand in French. The daughter of a doctor raised in a proper Boston household, she commanded excellent etiquette and an independent income. She was not a beauty, but she was trim and active and loved morning rides through Rock Creek Park every bit as much as her husband did. Her powers of observation and the piquancy of her humor were, if anything, sharper. Henry James, whom the Adamses had come to know in England, called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats.” In sum, her husband declared with frank tenderness, “I should say that we two were a perfectly matched pair.” If there was any deficiency in their marriage, it was the inability to have children.