All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  FOR NICOLAY, HOWEVER, THE path darkened abruptly. On November 25, eleven days before Clover Adams’s suicide, Therena Nicolay—the sweetheart from Illinois who had waited out the war to get married, then accompanied her husband to Paris, where their daughter was born, and afterward worked as his assistant during all the years of research and writing—died at home on B Street after a short illness. “Now I am sundered from the past by a chasm which can never be bridged,” Nicolay wrote Hay on the day of Therena’s death. “How I may walk in the twin shadows of conscious age and loneliness is more than my oppressed heart can now divine.”

  Yet even in his misery, Nicolay’s mind did not drift far from the Lincoln biography. “[A]n additional and immediate loss will be the absence of her cheer and help in our work,” he reflected. “If our volumes ever reach the full dignity of the binder’s art, they will be in some degree a monument to her zeal and labor as well as our own.”

  Early in the new year, Hay decided he had better send a letter to Robert Lincoln to assure him that all suggestions on revision had been heeded and, beyond that, to let their patron know that his and Nicolay’s resolve had not flagged. “I do not know that Nicolay has told you what Gilder of the Century Co. thinks of the work,” he wrote. “He is enormously struck with the whole thing—says Lincoln was a veiled statue before this and . . . that ‘even if we died now, and left the book as it is, it would still be the most historical book of the time,’ and etc., etc. I say this not to blow our own trumpet, but I hope it will please you to think the long toil has not been thrown away. We have been making great progress for the last year or two. . . . If we live two years more, we shall get through.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Two on the Terrace

  When Henry Adams returned from Europe after the Civil War, he had described Washington as nothing more than a “happy village . . . a mere political camp.” Within a few hundred yards of the Jackson monument on Lafayette Square, one could find “all one’s acquaintances,” and, “in four-and-twenty hours,” one could “know everybody.” Twenty years on, as Adams and the Hays settled into their handsome new houses, the city possessed considerably greater sophistication and boasted two hundred thousand residents; yet the same sense of intimacy prevailed. Nearly everyone with whom Adams and the Hays mixed lived either on the square or in the surrounding blocks.

  History haunted the Federal-style row houses that framed the six-acre park. Dolley Madison, Daniel Webster, sundry Supreme Court justices, various vice presidents, and several of Lincoln’s cabinet members had lived on Lafayette Square. Charles Guiteau had stalked President Garfield here. A house once occupied by Henry Clay and then Martin Van Buren became the home of Edward F. Beale, whose daughter, Emily, bore a striking resemblance to one of the characters in Democracy. General McClellan had rudely kept President Lincoln waiting in his Lafayette Square parlor. A few doors away had lived Colonel Henry Rathbone, who was stabbed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre; on that same night, on the east side of the square, in a house that would eventually be occupied by James Blaine, one of Booth’s accomplices tried to murder William Seward. And none of the residents of the square, whether old or recent, would ever forget their notorious neighbor, Daniel Sickles, who in 1859 strode from his house and shot Philip Barton Key for trysting with his wife; mortally wounded, Key was carried into the house of Benjamin Tayloe, and he is said to haunt it still. In 1886, the Tayloe House at 21 Madison Place became the home of Senator Don Cameron, his wife Lizzie, and their new baby.

  Just as Lafayette Square was the hub of Washington culture, it also reflected its social hierarchy. Hardly anyone who lived on the square was from Washington, and while many made their money in Washington, few made a fortune. Henry James, who had been a guest of Henry and Clover Adams in 1882, observed that “Washington is the place in the world where money—or the absence of it—matters least.”

  Which was not to say that the city lacked wealth. Hay and Adams’s neighbor William Corcoran was as flush as any robber baron. Money meant power in Washington; it always had and always would. It bought legislation, contracts, commissions, and the very souls of public servants. Yet, at the same time, the rungs of Washington society were not automatically measured by rich-versus-richer or old money–versus–new, as they were in, say, New York or Adams’s Boston. In Washington, the venerable were often vulnerable; the pecking order was reconfigured with every election. Hay and Adams needed only to look out of their windows to watch this sometimes subtle, often brazen game of succession and survival being played out. The difference between the two friends was that Hay regarded himself as a participant, while Adams insisted, with his customary hauteur, that he wished only to be a spectator.

  Perhaps because of the capital’s inherent volatility, Hay and Adams chose to live there without actually putting down roots. Now a widower, Adams yearned to take his sorrow abroad as soon as he finished the last volume of his Madison and Jefferson histories. Hay, once he and Nicolay were done with Lincoln, would fall into a migratory pattern that continued for the next eleven years. Until he became secretary of state in 1898, he never spent more than seven months of any given year on Lafayette Square, which was better than he could say for Cleveland. Although he and Clara would own and maintain the house on Euclid Avenue for the rest of his life, he never again spent more than a few weeks a year there.

  He and Nicolay worked diligently throughout the winter, spring, and early summer of 1886, and then in July, he and Clara, with Clarence King in tow, went to New Hampshire to look more closely at farms surrounding Lake Sunapee, a landscape that had charmed Hay so thoroughly the year before. He knew all too well from his years in the White House just how muggy and malarial Washington could be in the summer; government slowed to a crawl, and those who could escape the capital did so with determination. At Nicolay’s instigation, Hay had considered Colorado as a possible retreat, and, though his enthusiasm had waned, he had gone in with Nicolay and purchased several acres near Pike’s Peak anyway. The deal had come up just as Nicolay’s wife was dying, and Hay hadn’t the heart to back out.

  Sunapee was much closer and, to Hay’s eye, every bit as gorgeous as the Rockies. He already had in mind a colony of sorts. The Five of Hearts, who, since their whimsical consecration in New York in 1881 had never again been together in one place at one time, were now four, and Hay, with King’s enthusiastic if impecunious encouragement, envisioned sharing summers together in the regenerative air and maple-cloaked hills of New Hampshire. A rail line had recently been completed to the town of Newbury, and the hardscrabble farms along the lake could now be reached from Boston in a morning and from New York in a single day.

  Hay, Clara, and King “fell daft over the Lake,” Hay wrote Adams. “This time we seriously concluded to buy a farm.” He suggested to Adams that he sell his house in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, and throw in with the remaining Hearts. King pictured three writers’ studios, side by side. Hay was so sanguine that he wrote also to William Dean Howells, urging him to join their conclave. “[W]e will give you an acre or two for nothing for the pleasure of your wit and wisdom,” he tempted. King, it went without saying, was unable to follow through, and Adams and Howells never committed, either. Hay and Clara would take two more years to settle upon just the right farm, but at Lake Sunapee they knew they had found their sanctuary.

  OF MORE IMMEDIATE FOCUS was the start-up of the Lincoln serial in the Century. To alert the magazine’s quarter-million readers to the cavalcade of chapters that was about to dominate the pages of the magazine for the next three years and more, Gilder prevailed upon Clarence King to write a profile of the co-authors for the October 1886 issue. “As to Lincoln, what the world thirsts for is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” King ballyhooed. “From the hands of John George Nicolay and John Hay we shall have all that.”

  Expectations ran high for the first and only authorized biography of the Martyred President, and early reaction was immensely positive. “There
is every sign in the first installment [written by Hay] of a noble chapter of American history told man-fashion,” The Nation complimented. Old and loyal friends were quick to send their salutations. “Lincoln lives again,” John Bigelow wrote to Hay, “and, as in prior times, you & Nicolay live with him, never again, however, to be separated in history.” Howells thought the early pages “easy, dignified, without solemnity, and extremely interesting; the frankness is just what it should be.”

  Yet as the serial continued, the nitpickers and sour grape eaters came forward. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, who had provided the grist for Ward Hill Lamon’s revelatory biography, was “astonished at the length and dullness” of the second installment in the Century. “If that article is a sample of what is to come, I make a prediction that the whole thing will fall still born,” he belittled. He was flabbergasted that Hay and Nicolay had suppressed many of the most important episodes of Lincoln’s life—“the Ann Rutledge story—L’s religion—L’s insanity—the facts of L’s misery with Mary Todd—L’s break down on the night that he & Mary Todd were to be married &c &c.” To Herndon’s biased eye, “N & H handle things with silken gloves & ‘a camel hair pencil’: they do not write with an iron pen.”

  Even Gilder, whose praise for the biography had once been unqualified, now saw room for improvement and concision. One day at the Century Association in New York he ran into the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a fellow Lincoln worshipper who had carved one of the nation’s most superb Lincoln monuments—relying, as it happened, on a cast of Lincoln’s face that had been loaned to him by Hay. It stung Gilder to hear Saint-Gaudens, of all people, complain “how damn partisan” the Lincoln biography was getting. Gilder took the criticism to heart and urged the authors to condense or omit passages in forthcoming installments that might rankle any “actors” still alive and, in general, he begged them “to err on the side of calmness of tone & generosity” as they readied the proofs for publication.

  At this point, Hay was too frazzled to care. As far as he was concerned, Gilder could cut any parts or entire chapters he wished, “provided we were to do nothing in the way of re-writing.” He estimated that he had sufficient energy to finish ten more chapters, taking the narrative up through Sherman’s March to the Sea and Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah—the end of what would be the ninth volume of the ten-volume biography. In early June, he, Clara, and the children were to sail to England for the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The rest of the book would have to wait till his return.

  HAY AND CLARA LOVED England more with each visit. They took a room along the parade route and watched the queen roll past in her gilded landau, accompanied by fifty foreign heads of state and a panoply of princes in their finest plumage. By now the Hays were fluent in the peerage and protocol of the British Empire. They knew which gloves and hat to wear on which occasions, and Clara no longer wrote to her mother, describing how the toast was served at breakfast. They received invitations to Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons, and a series of teas at Wimbledon. They dined with Henry James and visited the studios of Edwin Abbey and another American painter, Francis Millet. Leaving the children with their nurse at Folkestone, on the Channel, they made their customary rounds of the Cunliffes in Wales and the Clarks in Scotland. They also spent two days with the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who was renting a castle in the Scottish Highlands while he looked for one to buy. Hay told Nicolay, “I have been passing the idlest summer of my life,” although it scarcely seemed that way.

  They sailed for home the first week in September, well refreshed by another amiable tour of the country they enjoyed every bit as much as their own.

  Upon landing, they went directly to Cleveland, an autumn routine that Clara insisted upon. Hay established another seasonal tradition, joining the Winous Point Shooting Club, west of Cleveland. The membership comprised two or three dozen of Cleveland’s ruling class, who each fall traded the comfort of Euclid Avenue for an austere (though amply staffed) barracks and the infamous inclemency of Lake Erie. Each day local marsh men poled them into the reeds along Sandusky Bay to hunt ducks seduced by their decoys. Hay readily admitted that his aim was erratic, but he tried never to miss a year at Winous Point. When the shooting was good, he proudly sent the harvest of his marksmanship to the kitchens of his friends in Washington and New York.

  By mid-November, he was back in Washington. The season did not officially commence until January, but Congress opened its session in December, filling the capital and energizing the table talk. The presidential election was less than a year away, and already the handicappers were speculating on who would be given the chance to unseat Grover Cleveland. Hay had at last given up on Blaine and was poised to back Senator John Sherman of Ohio, whom he regarded as “thoroughly fit for power,” despite his “lack of magnetism.” Sherman, of course, was Lizzie Cameron’s uncle.

  IF THE ELECTION WAS the main event, a much smaller but no less absorbing side show was taking shape on Lafayette Square: Henry Adams had fallen for Lizzie.

  After Clover’s death, while Lizzie was pregnant, Adams had put his wife’s affairs in order and then gone off to Japan with John La Farge for several months. He was in the middle of the Pacific on June 25, when Lizzie’s baby girl was born. She had wanted to name her Marian—Clover’s Christian name—but dared not do so without Adams’s permission. Instead, she chose Martha.

  Before he sailed, Adams had invited Lizzie to spend the summer at his house in Beverly Farms. She accepted—without needing to explain, in writing at least, why she preferred the Adams homestead to one of the fully staffed, palatial Cameron estates in Pennsylvania. (Don Cameron’s other children, by his previous marriage, had grown and were living elsewhere.) “I little thought when I said goodbye to you in Washington,” Lizzie wrote Adams in August, “that my first letter would be written from your own home. . . . I felt in an hour’s time as if we had always been here. . . . The little baby—I present Martha to you, dear Mr. Adams—lives under the pine trees and is growing strong and big and I lie on the piazza and watch the sea.” She would return to Beverly Farms for many summers thereafter.

  Adams came back to Washington in November and found the three Camerons—Don, Lizzie, and Martha—settled in their newly refurbished house on Lafayette Square. Adams, who loved all children and spoiled his many nieces and nephews, became devoted to Martha. Through her, he found a way to channel his affections for Lizzie. Mother and daughter were often out and about in the square, and it was hardly unseemly for Adams, a balding, avuncular fifty-year-old, to invite them into his library. He began stocking a desk drawer with chocolate drops and ginger snaps and turned a closet into a trove of dolls and picture books. As Martha learned to talk, which she did precociously, she gave Adams the nickname “Dobbitt” and later “Dordy.” Soon he took to writing her directly, though she could not yet read—“Mr. Dobbitt has much pleasure in accepting Miss Martha Cameron’s very kind invitation for this afternoon, and begs to send flowers for her table”—his words and affections intended for more than one member of the Cameron household.

  His conduct was all very chivalrous. Martha was a great balm to his loneliness and childlessness, and his affection for her was genuine. While he was increasingly enchanted by Lizzie, she was, after all, a married woman who cared very much about appearances and the advantages that came with being the wife of a rich and powerful senator. Yet she found comfort in Adams’s benevolence and doubtless unloaded upon him the unhappy circumstances of her marriage. Over time, he grew more protective of her and occasionally allowed his jealousy to show. But never did he pry, never was he judgmental, and in this way he won her confidence and gratitude. Always he told her that it was she who lifted his spirits. And if truth be told, he was putty in her hands.

  Don Cameron was not exactly an attentive or observant husband; for the most part, he seems to have treated Lizzie as uxorial ornament and granted her extraordinary latitude, so long as she continued to
perform her public duties with poise and propriety. Out of indifference or ignorance, he noticed nothing untoward in the attachment of Adams to his wife and daughter. Privately, Adams regarded Cameron as an ineffectual philistine, despite his political rank and heritage. Even so, he was conscientiously respectful and indulgent toward the plodding Pennsylvanian and careful to honor the outward decorum of the marriage. He addressed Lizzie respectfully as “Mrs. Cameron,” or, when writing to Hay and other friends, as “Mrs. Don” or “La Dona.” She belonged to the senator, just as Adams was still attached to the memory of Clover.

  When the Camerons returned to Adams’s house at Beverly Farms in the summer of 1887, he did not disturb them, choosing to pass much of the summer at Quincy—which was south of Boston; Beverly was north—working on the last of his histories. The rules seemed awkward, but they prevented injury and embarrassment to all concerned. Still, Adams wrote Lizzie regularly and was not too timid to admit, “I am homesick to see you.” When Martha was barely two years old, Dobbitt confessed to her: “I love you very much, and think of you a great deal, and want you all the time. I should have run away from here, and looked for you all over the world, long ago, only I’ve grown too stout for the beautiful clothes I used to wear when I was a young prince in the fairy-stories, and I’ve lost the feathers out of my hat. . . . So I can’t come after you, and feel very sad about it. If you would only come and see me, as Princess Beauty came to see Prince Beast, we would go down to the beach and dig holes in the sand. . . . I am very dull and stupid without you; and have no one but old people to live with.”

  John Hay was aware of the growing intimacy between his two neighbors, and certainly Lizzie’s charms were not lost on him, either. He and Adams reported on Mrs. Don and her movements like worshippers at the same temple. Hay related to Adams after a dinner party that “Mrs. Cameron . . . was looking prettier than ever.” After he and Adams encountered Martha on the street, Adams wrote to Lizzie, “[We] bowed as meekly to her will as we do to that of her mother.”