“Roscoe is finished,” Hay wrote to Reid. “That Olympian brow will never again garner up the thunders of yore.” Reid was thrilled by the turn of events and Hay’s role in them. “You’ve made a splendid paper of it—strong, wise, aggressive, a leader & an inspiration,” he wrote from Paris. “If Conk is ruined—as I firmly believe—it is largely your tomahawk that has let out the worthless life.”
The ax fell not in a way anyone expected, and Conkling’s head was not the first to fall. On June 30, a group of Platt’s more dastardly detractors followed him to an Albany hotel room and observed him having sex with a woman not his wife. The next day he officially withdrew his candidacy for the Senate.
MEANWHILE, A DIFFERENT SORT of stalker was afoot in Washington. Charles Guiteau, a thirty-nine-year-old former lawyer, debt collector, and peddler of religious tracts, had spent the past year hanging around Republican offices, first hoping to help out in the campaign, next angling for a place in the administration. He was a Grant Stalwart early on, but after Garfield won the nomination, he shifted his attention, if not his wholehearted allegiance, to the party’s new standard-bearer. As a calling card, Guiteau brandished a copy of a speech he had initially written (but never given) on behalf of Grant but then had edited to advocate Garfield. By incessant loitering and pestering, in New York and Washington, he managed to introduce himself to Conkling and Arthur and even achieved a brief interview with Garfield in the White House.
Guiteau followed the nasty fracas between Garfield and Conkling fanatically, and, ever a Stalwart, objected to many of Garfield’s choices, from Blaine as secretary of state to Robertson as customs collector. His disapproval, though, did not keep him from continuing to pursue a slice of patronage for himself. He would prefer a consulship in Vienna—better yet, Paris. Such was his obsession, such was his delusion, that he believed he was a presentable candidate, despite his shabby dress and even shabbier portfolio. He took to hounding Blaine, and it is quite possible that on one or more of his many visits to the State Department in March and April he encountered Assistant Secretary Hay, who remained on the job after the inauguration until his successor was approved.
Finally Blaine had stood enough, and on May 14 he snapped at Guiteau, “Never speak to me again on the subject of the Paris consulship!” This occurred two days before Conkling and Platt resigned, and shortly thereafter a bruised, vengeful, and clearly deranged Guiteau reached the conclusion that the only way he was ever going to right the party’s and the nation’s political wrongs and gain the attention he had been so desperately seeking would be to shoot the president.
On Saturday morning, July 2, Garfield and Blaine took a carriage from the White House to the Baltimore & Potomac Depot, from which the president was to embark on a two-week vacation. Waiting at the station were several of his cabinet members, including Secretary of War Robert Lincoln. None seemed to notice as Guiteau approached, raised a .44-caliber English Bulldog revolver, and shot the president from behind, hitting him once in the upper arm and once in the lower back. Garfield cried out and fell to the floor. Collared immediately, Guiteau blurted: “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”
THE NEXT DAY’S TRIBUNE gave a full account of the shooting and reported that the president was resting comfortably in the White House with a good chance of recovery. The lead editorial, perhaps not written by Hay but surely an accurate reflection of his thoughts, drew the obvious connections to Lincoln, by name, and to Conkling, by inference: “A second President lies stricken down by assassination. President Lincoln was murdered, not by the rebellion, but by the spirit which gave rebellion life and force. President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which political faction has begotten and nursed.”
Acknowledging that Guiteau might be considered insane, the Tribune asked, “Yet did not men call Booth a madman? Both were sane enough in all the ordinary walks of life . . . and both were sane enough to prepare . . . for a deed toward which they were moved by a spirit shared by many others.”
Now came the Tribune’s indictment: “Do the leaders of faction ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed and stimulate, week after week? Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or restless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? The assassin, it seems, was not ignorant that he was trying to kill one President and to make another. . . . As ‘a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,’ his passion was intense enough to do the thing which other reckless men had wished were done. So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels. His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion: So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.”
The newspaper’s vehemence was to be expected, although in this instance the Tribune stopped short of naming Roscoe Conkling and Chester Arthur outright. “It is almost impossible to keep from being savage,” Hay confessed to Reid. “I have put the muzzle on editorial writers [William] Grosvenor and [Joseph Bucklin] Bishop and myself and I think we are pretty decent. I know, and everybody thinks, that Conkling is fighting for time . . . solely in the hope that Garfield may die. . . . I know this, and yet it is too vile to print and I will not print it.”
On July 4, however, Hay wrote an editorial that gave little quarter. It began with a tribute to the fallen Garfield, “the people’s President,” whose “good-natured firmness” had won the respect of the public and stirred “the dread of what may come after him if the ‘Stalwart’ bullet proves to have done its work effectively.”
Hay no longer resisted pinning a proper name to this dread: “Arthur is a gentleman of many accomplishments and many amiable and engaging qualities. He is represented to us by those who know him well as one of the most upright of citizens, one of the most loyal and devoted friends. It is precisely here that the public mind finds its cause of doubt and apprehension. It is feared that he is more devoted to his friends than to the public welfare; that he can see nothing but good in them, and nothing but evil in their opponents. If this be true, and if the grief of misfortune is in store for us of losing the noble, enlightened, placable and generous ruler whom we chose in joy and hope last year, then the bitterness of the present sorrow and the weight of the present anxiety will be as nothing to what we shall have to endure in the four troubled years which are to come.”
Nor did the Tribune spare Conkling, who, after the assassination, sequestered himself in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The New York legislature had yet to elect new senators, and the thought of Conkling returning to Washington, with or without Arthur as president, was unthinkable to those who had toiled so doggedly to keep him at bay. “It can do no good, but will do great harm, to represent that nobody has been to blame, and that one fanatical Stalwart is the only person in all this land who has done anything wrong,” the Tribune advised. “[T]he world knows that Mr. Conkling has done everything in his power to destroy the character of the brave and true statesman who lies at the door of death . . . and has spared no pains to make the people believe that the Republican party was being ruined, and the Republic itself was being endangered, solely by the bad conduct and bad faith of the President.”
Sympathy for Garfield and the merciless excoriation of Conkling by the Tribune and numerous other papers, including the New York Times, had their effect on New York legislators, who, on July 22, on the fifty-sixth ballot, awarded Conkling’s former seat to a mild-mannered congressman from Canandaigua, Elbridge Lapham. Conkling at last had been routed. Three weeks later, Hay wrote to Reid, “It is perfectly amazing to see how utterly Conkling is forgotten for the moment. Of course he will come up again, but for the present, he simply is not.”
President Garfield, meanwhile, hung on, and each day’s Tribune reported faithfully on his condition, which was alternately hopeful and grievous throughout
the summer.
During the vigil, Hay’s thoughts naturally turned to Robert Lincoln, with whom he had shared the long evening of April 14, 1865. Two days after the attack on Garfield, he had wired his friend: “Please send me what you can. We are living on telegrams.” Hay was playing the diligent newspaperman, but he was also acting on a more intimate impulse: the shooting of a president in Washington had struck a common nerve. In the weeks that followed, he and Lincoln kept in touch, as Garfield gained and then worsened. “I wish I felt better about the President,” Lincoln wrote Hay in late July. “He is an awfully wounded man.”
Doctors never succeeded in finding the bullet in Garfield’s back, and their unsanitary probing of the wound assured only lethal infection. On September 5, Garfield was moved from the White House to a cottage on the New Jersey shore, where it was believed the sea air might be more salubrious. On the nineteenth, exhausted by a long season on the ramparts of the Tribune, Hay set out for Cleveland to spend a few days with Clara and the children. “I go West tonight,” he wrote Garfield’s private secretary. “I hope and pray good news will follow me.”
It did not: shortly after ten o’clock, as Hay’s train rolled across New York State, joining the Lake Shore line west of Buffalo, Garfield fell back on his pillow and died, eighty days after Charles Guiteau had kept him from boarding the train that would have taken him on his own justly deserved vacation.
Upon learning of Garfield’s death, Hay hurried back to New York, then returned to Cleveland a week later to join the assembly of dignitaries at Garfield’s burial in Lake View Cemetery. Secretary of State Blaine and his wife stayed with Hay and Clara, while Robert Lincoln and his wife were next door with the Stones.
When the last guest had left, Hay took to his bed, physically and emotionally drained. On Garfield he had already said his piece in a letter to Reid: “[S]o brave and good and generous—how much eloquence, good cheer, poetry and kindness, how much capacity for work and enjoyment, extinguished by a hound too vile for anger to regard. . . . [T]he dismal prospect of Garfield’s death and Arthur’s accession takes all the heart for political work out of me.”
For the rest of the fall Hay kept watch over the Tribune, counting the days of his “interim-ity,” until Reid’s homecoming, now anticipated for November.
CLARENCE KING WAS IN New York that fall, and he and Hay dined together regularly at the Union League Club. After leaving the Geological Survey, King had thrust himself into a series of mining ventures in Mexico, Arizona, and California, vouching for their potential, managing their erratic production, and drumming up investors; Hay invested in at least one. King’s proven expertise and contagious energy left little doubt that he would soon be a very wealthy man. For the time being, at least, he was able to pay most of his bills.
Clara came to New York at the end of October, coinciding with Henry and Clover Adams, who were en route to Washington after a summer at Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. The reunion was all very gay. The Adamses stayed four days at the Brevoort House, which was also King’s hotel. Two nights in a row they all dined at Delmonico’s, the ephemerally flush King picking up the tab for one of the meals. Afterward, they went to the theater, an opéra bouffe, Les noces d’Olivette, and Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s latest.
At some point, perhaps at one of the bibulous dinners at Delmonico’s, Hay and King pressed Adams on his authorship of Democracy. By now they were already fairly sure that he had written it, although Adams continued to wink his denial. After holding his feet to the fire, the others knew for certain. To seal the conspiracy and to toast their incomparable friendship, they made up a name for their merry band: “the Five of Hearts.”
A few days later, Hay ordered stationery printed with a simple monogram of a five-of-hearts playing card in the upper left corner. He sent several sheets to Adams for use as “the official correspondence of The Club.” King later had a tea service made with a five-of-hearts motif; on the pot was painted a clockface with the hands set at five, the hour that Clover served tea. The service was seldom used, never so much as the stationery, and rarely were all the cups filled at once. Indeed, their collective correspondence indicates that, after their rendezvous in New York, all five Hearts were assembled in the same room perhaps no more than a half-dozen times—a poverty of attendance that did nothing to diminish the value of their relationship.
In some ways, actually, it was easier for them to be apart. As the friendship between Hay and Adams grew, a little distance allowed them to express feelings that were only implied when they were in each other’s company; and for the peripatetic King, his absences allowed him to indulge his exotic appetites, not just for wild places but, as Hay and Adams only remotely understood, for women whom King was not anxious to introduce to his fellow Hearts. Their correspondence became a tender, slightly lopsided triangle of reinforcement and empathy: in their letters, Hay and Adams talked about King; when they wrote to King, they talked to him about each other. It was an oblique form of intimacy, but it was honest and unequivocal, and it worked.
Of the three, King was the most magnetic, although he was in no way the charge that fused the Hearts. He did precious little to bring them together and for months at a time was lost to them entirely. Yet he was not the odd man out, either. It was his desire for closeness and unity, separate from his ability to achieve it, which bound the five together. The other four were forever urging him to marry, settle down, and live more as they did. But he bridled always. For him, the point was for the others to be as they were so that he didn’t have to. Through the Hays and Adamses, he achieved a vicarious, intermittent, unclaustrophobic normalcy. Meanwhile, the two married men found something between escape and fulfillment in their appreciation of their elusive Proteus. “[T]he men worshipped not so much their friend,” Adams explained, “as the ideal American they all wanted to be.”
Adams had first met King a decade earlier in Colorado and had been instantly taken with his virtuosity. “He knew more than Adams did,” Adams wrote in his quirky autobiography, in which he always referred to himself in the third person. “[King] knew more . . . of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than anyone; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much.”
Hay was similarly dazzled. “It was hard to remember,” he was to write after King’s death, “that this polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.”
No one recognized the effect that King had on Adams and Hay better than Clover. In one of her frequent letters to her father, she observed, “I never knew such fanatic adoration could exist in this practical age.”
HAY DID NOT NEGLECT his other friends during his final weeks at the Tribune. In September, William Dean Howells volunteered to review Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, a novel Howells had edited. Twain’s history with the paper was checkered at best. After Roughing It and The Gilded Age had received less than worshipful attention, he damned Whitelaw Reid as a “contemptible cur” and threatened to write a vengeful, “dynamitic” biography of him. Twain and Howells decided to take advantage of Reid’s absence when they proposed the review to Hay, three months before the book’s publication. Hay didn’t mind obliging two authors he greatly admired, but he was politic enough to alert Reid of his intention. “I took into account your disapproval of Mark in general and your friendship for Howells—and decided for the benefit of The Tribune,” he advised the honeymooning editor. “If it does not please you—wait for his next book and get Bret Harte to review it. That will be a masterpiece of the skinner’s art.”
Reid was grouchily acquiescent. “As to Twain,” he wrote Hay from Vienna, “it isn’t good journalism to let a warm personal friend [Howells] . . . write a critical review of him in a paper wh[
ich] has good reason to think little of his delicacy & highly of his greed. So, if you haven’t printed it yet, I w[ou]ld think of this point before doing so. If you have, there’s no harm done.”
The review, which ran on October 25, was long, laudatory, and unsigned. Howells praised Twain’s “Cervantean” humor and “poetic delicacy.” The Prince and the Pauper was both a “satire on monarchy” and “a manual of republicanism . . . airy and flawless . . . so solidly good and wholesome in effect that one wishes it might have happened.” In return for the Tribune’s kindness, Twain abandoned the biographical bomb he had intended for Reid.
HAY USED THE TRIBUNE to help out one more writer that fall. Thirty-eight-year-old Henry James was by then thoroughly established; his previous novels, The Bostonians, The Europeans, Washington Square, and especially the short story “Daisy Miller,” had won widespread public favor, if not yet resounding critical or financial success. He had high hopes for his new novel, The Portrait of a Lady, the story of Isabel Archer, an American woman who moves to Europe to establish her independence, only to be tricked into a loveless marriage. To James’s consternation, however, the early reviews, particularly those from England, were lukewarm. The Portrait of a Lady, they averred, had no faith, “no heart,” no proper ending.
The book was published in the United States on November 16, a week before Hay was to be released from a “summer” of stewardship that had lasted more than seven months. He was back in Cleveland by the first of December, but he did not forsake Henry James. Ignoring Whitelaw Reid’s admonishment against reviewing the work of friends, he composed a thorough and thoughtful defense of Portrait. “It is a remarkable book . . . perfectly done,” he wrote Reid, enclosing his review.
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