Hay, though, was somewhat more brazen than his neighbor. Once, when Adams was still in Japan and Clara was in Cleveland, he was alone in Washington and thrilled to be asked to dinner by Lizzie. “Your invitation is seductive to a cookless wanderer,” he wrote her. “My trouble, however, is not so much one of food as of a sentimental wish to see you again and hear of your welfare.” This was all just playful posturing, but there were few women he would have addressed with such bravura.
AT THE SAME TIME that Adams—and now Hay—were falling under the spell of Lizzie Cameron, Clarence King was taking a much more dramatic, and secretive, plunge. Hay and Adams had long since grown accustomed to their friend’s long silences and unpredictable appearances. He seemed to have no fixed address, choosing to receive his mail at the Century, the Knickerbocker, or one of several other clubs to which he belonged. He was at best a sporadic correspondent, and on the occasions he did write, his letters gave only sketchy clues to his whereabouts. “I think he must have joined some oath bound order which pledged him, under fearful sanctions, never to tell anybody anything,” an exasperated Hay caviled to Adams. Describing a rare and unexpected King encounter, Hay again wrote Adams: “Yesterday morning I went to King’s office [in New York] and asked if they had any tidings of him. They said he was in [Nevada] and might be home in a week or a month. I went to the Hotel and there, in the midst of the shrimps, sat King.”
Trips to the Sierras or Mexico did not fully explain King’s chronic disappearances. Nor did his desire to dodge the debt collectors, of whom there were many, as his mining ventures collapsed one after the other and he continued his princely lifestyle. What none of his friends realized was that King was living a double life.
Over the years, King had disarmed his share of women with his mountaineer’s physique, sweet smile, and gift for conversation. But, he confided to Adams, his sexual appetites were particular: “To kiss a woman and feel teeth through her thin lips paralizes me for a week.” By thin lips, he meant those belonging to white women. “If he had a choice,” Adams revealed, “it was in favor of Indians and negroes.”
Ever the scientist, King had collected a bounty of data on women of diverse race and physiognomy. On his geological expeditions in the West and to Mexico, most of his encounters were with women of darker skin or shadier conduct. On a voyage to Hawaii, he admired the “old-gold” natives, and in London his companions blushed at King’s enthusiasm for conducting “studies of the lower strata.” During the summer of 1887, King told Hay, “Man in the process of transit from his Archaic state to his very best forms of culture tires me. I like him at the start and at the finish. Woman, I am ashamed to say, I like in the primitive state.”
Sometime that year or the next, King met Ada Copeland, a thirty-seven-year-old African-American born into slavery, who was working as a domestic servant in New York. Despite his fair complexion and what William Dean Howells described as his “blithe blue eyes,” King convinced her that he too was black—light-skinned, but black. He gave his name as James Todd and told her he was a Pullman porter from Baltimore. And she believed him.
They were secretly married in September 1888. Their first child was born the following year. “Miscegenation is the hope of the white race,” King once told a friend. For the rest of his days, his own experiment in interracial living would require long absences and a great deal of lying. When his gentrified friends assumed he was off mining minerals or investors, he may have been no farther away than a working-class precinct of Manhattan in the arms of Ada; and his fictive job as railroad porter put him out of her reach for long stretches, which he apparently regretted as much as she. In one of the only letters between them that survives, he wrote: “I thank God that even if I am forced to travel and labor far away from you [I] have the daily comfort of remembering that far away in the east there is a dear brown woman who loves me and whom I love beyond the power of words to describe.”
As Ada’s dependency on King increased, so too did King’s dependency on Hay, Adams, and others. Beginning in 1888, when King (or James Todd) took Ada as his wife, he began borrowing money from them: first $6,000, then $11,000; no one knows how much more. “[N]ow in middle age I am poor,” he lamented to Adams, “and what is worse so absorbed in the hand to mouth struggle for income that I see the effective literary and scientific years drifting by empty and blank.”
IN MAY 1888, THE Hays made a hurried trip to New Hampshire and at last bought the farm on Lake Sunapee, the first of several parcels of rocky pasture and woodland they were to acquire. King described it to Adams as “a rough fell land full [of] admirable trees & rough strewn boulders.” The geologist knew his terminology: a fell is a high, barren field. And so the farm was named “the Fells.”
After New Hampshire, Hay went on to Chicago for the Republican Convention. He and Whitelaw Reid once again joined forces, this time behind Senator John Sherman. Instead, the nomination went to Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a well-spoken, if uncharismatic Civil War veteran and grandson of President William Henry (“Tippecanoe”) Harrison.
Hay would have preferred to be in London that summer, but instead he decided to take the family to Colorado. There was no suitable house on the property he and Nicolay had purchased at the foot of Pike’s Peak, so the Hays lodged in a hotel in nearby Manitou Springs. The children had a splendid time. Thirteen-year-old Helen and twelve-year-old Del galloped horses at “Buffalo Bill speed,” and the younger two—eight-year-old Alice and three-year-old Clarence—rode about in a donkey cart. Hay, however, felt “under par,” whether from “air, or water, or age, or total depravity” he could not say. He told Nicolay he would “never again have the courage” to return to Colorado and offered to sell him his share at a bargain rate.
Adding to his discontent that summer was a series of annoying letters from the editors of the Century. As the chapters chronicling the battles of the war—the majority written by Hay—were serialized in the magazine, the editors who had overseen the immensely popular series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” complained that Hay and Nicolay were plowing old ground “after the wheat had been threshed so exhaustively.” They also pronounced Hay and Nicolay’s expertise as military historians “inadequate.” “I assure you that they are extremely anxious about the matter,” Richard Watson Gilder wrote Nicolay. “They feel that it would never do to let [these chapters] go out as now written.” He then issued an ultimatum: “cut the military portion down to a smaller scale,” or it would be done for them.
Hay offered no resistance. “Leave out anything you like in the Magazine. . . . [C]huck it all over board,” he replied to Gilder. To Nicolay he griped, “I am perfectly willing to have him cut out every military chapter I have written. I am sick of the subject.” The chapters were trimmed for the magazine but reinstated in the book.
Following the customary stopover in Cleveland and a week of duck shooting, Hay returned to Washington. He arrived just after the election, in which Harrison unseated Grover Cleveland. Hay did not know Harrison well, though he had sent a $1,000 check to the campaign, and on a whim he had invited Harrison to join him at the duck club. (Harrison declined.) Hay disavowed rumors that he was in the running to be minister to England; instead, he met with Harrison and touted Whitelaw Reid for the job. Harrison had his own ideas and dispatched Hay to New York to persuade Reid to accept France instead. Reid said yes, chewing on his disappointment as the London mission went to Robert Lincoln. James Blaine was named secretary of state, for the second time.
For all his disdain for the groveling and pandering that went with office-seeking, Hay loved observing the game and enjoyed even more playing the role of broker. After doing what he could on Reid’s behalf, he urged Robert Lincoln to retain his friend Henry White as secretary of the London legation. He also advocated on behalf of William McKinley as the next Speaker of the House. McKinley, a sober, forty-seven-year-old congressman from Canton, Ohio, was the party’s leading spokesman for protective tariffs, the wedge issue th
at had toppled Cleveland. Although Thomas Reed of Maine ultimately beat out McKinley for the speakership, McKinley was now a force to be reckoned with. So, too, was Mark Hanna, the savvy fund-raiser and strategist whose labors on behalf of McKinley would eventually make the latter president and himself successor to John Sherman in the Senate. By lending these two Ohioans his support in 1888, Hay laid the groundwork for his own resurgence as a statesman. In the coming years, the careers of Hay, Hanna, and McKinley would become increasingly intertwined. Hay would outlive them both, but without them he would never have gone as far as he did.
AS THE HARRISON ADMINISTRATION took shape, Hay became acquainted with two other up-and-comers: Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.
He had met Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, during the Civil War and came to know the rest of the Roosevelt family during his years in New York. Roosevelt’s son, Theodore Junior, puny and asthmatic as a lad, was now a fit and formidable thirty (exactly twenty years younger than Hay). He had served in the New York assembly; run (unsuccessfully) for mayor of New York; established his reputation as an author with his naval history of the War of 1812; and earned his spurs as a hunter and rancher in Dakota Territory. He had campaigned vigorously for Harrison with the hope of gaining a place in the new administration: he set his sights on assistant secretary of state, the job Hay had held ten years earlier. But the impatient, pugnacious “Teddy,” who had never outgrown the high-pitched voice and pince-nez squint of his youth, would have to bide his time. Secretary of State Blaine accurately appraised Roosevelt’s nature when he wrote: “My real trouble in regard to Mr. Roosevelt is that I fear he lacks the repose and patient endurance required in an Assistant Secretary. Mr. Roosevelt is amazingly quick in apprehension. Is there not danger that he might be too quick in execution?”
As a consolation, Harrison offered Roosevelt the office of civil service commissioner, where his righteous aggression might have some reformative effect on the spoils system. Roosevelt jumped at the invitation. On his modest salary of $3,500, he was able to rent a small house at Jefferson Place, a half-dozen blocks from Lafayette Square and only a few strides from the door of his closest friend in the capital, Henry Cabot Lodge, a second-term congressman from Massachusetts.
In many respects, Lodge was to Roosevelt what Hay was to Adams. Lodge and Roosevelt were ambitious young partisans, active ideologues committed to improving American government. Both were Harvard men, members of the same elite undergraduate clubs, Hasty Pudding and Porcellian. Each was the most trusted confidant of the other; their personal correspondence is as prolific and devoted as that of Hay and Adams.
Their most obvious contrast was in stature. Whereas Roosevelt was stocky and bull-necked, Lodge was long and wiry, almost frail-looking, his sharp chin accentuated by a goatee, much like Hay’s. But looks were deceiving; Lodge was athletic, every bit the horseman Roosevelt was. Intellectually he gave ground to no man. He had been Henry Adams’s star student at Harvard and earned both a law degree and a doctorate in history from that university. Eight years older than Roosevelt, he was the more accomplished historian, having published essays on Anglo-Saxon law and a biography of his great-grandfather Henry Cabot, a patrician friend of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.
Unlike Roosevelt—and Adams and Hay, for that matter—Lodge was not broad in his appetites and in fact tended to be reflexively, combatively close-minded. Brahmin to the core, he had never wanted for money, and his clipped speech and haughty manner were oft-used weapons. He had “a certain ready-to-fight element” without the offsetting charm that helped restore the comparably pushy Roosevelt to the good graces of his adversaries. Margaret Chanler, who was one of Lodge’s loyal friends, had to acknowledge that he was “one of those who care more for downing his adversary than for discovering some common ground for possible agreement.” Lodge had little concern for what anyone thought of him. “He considers himself so far superior to the ordinary run of people,” the Saturday Evening Post observed, “that the mere addition of another enemy to his long string means nothing to him one way or the other.”
In 1889, when Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated, neither Hay nor Adams wielded any direct political power, but they were the standard-bearers of Washington gentility, the ideological brain trust in which Lodge and Roosevelt sought membership. Further on, after Lodge ascended to the Senate and Roosevelt rose all the way to the presidency, the two younger men would, between themselves, fault Hay and Adams for being too reserved, indeed too prissy, and, in Hay’s case, too diplomatic. But at the outset, all four seemed genuinely pleased to be in one another’s company. They were not the new Hearts; their age differences prevented that. But they did play similar hands. For instance, each had a book coming out: Hay, with Nicolay, had turned in the final chapters of the Lincoln biography; Adams had finished his nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations; Lodge had written a biography of George Washington; and Roosevelt had dashed off The Winning of the West.
They had yet another connection, beyond literature or politics. Each of these four had made a study of greatness in American life—although they diverged in their interpretations. If there was one essential difference between the older men and the younger, it was that Hay and Adams gained wisdom and strength—and a measure of humility—as witnesses and heirs to greatness, while Roosevelt and Lodge, who had come of age after the Civil War, aspired to an ideal of greatness and heroism they knew only secondhand.
Still, their distinctions were of style more so than of substance, and socially the group gelled right away. Adams was the only one without children, and he became the uncle to the brood of Hay, Roosevelt, and Lodge offspring. The Camerons, too, were part of the circle; Senator Cameron was older than all of them, but Lizzie fit right in.
Except for Adams, they all dispersed in the summer of 1889, according to the Washington custom: the Lodges to Nahant, on the Massachusetts shore; the Roosevelts to Oyster Bay, Long Island; and the Hays to Europe for their usual rounds, this time with the added entree provided by newly installed ministers Robert Lincoln in London and Whitelaw Reid in Paris. The Camerons also went abroad that summer and saw a good deal of the Hays in London and Scotland, until the death of the senator’s father summoned them home prematurely.
Back in Washington in the fall, they picked up where they had left off. Adams, who had never been very outgoing even when Clover was alive, preferred to entertain friends at home, and his “breakfasts”—brunches they would be called today—became an institution, especially among his many women friends, including, it goes without saying, Lizzie Cameron. As the social season came to a close in the spring, Adams wrote a family friend, “Our little set of Hays, Camerons, Lodges, and Roosevelts never was so intimate or friendly as now, and for the first time in my life I find myself among a set of friends so closely connected as to see each other every day, and even two or three times a day, yet surrounded by so many outside influences and pressures that they are never stagnant or dull.”
HAY HAD HIS OWN reasons to feel fulfilled. The last installment of Lincoln appeared in the February 1890 issue of the Century, and he and Nicolay were already proofing the pages of the ten-volume edition. At a million and a half words, it was 25 percent longer than Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Because of its sheer bulk, the publisher decided to offer the set not in shops but through door-to-door canvassers—as Mark Twain and others did with their books. Five thousand sets sold quickly, a good response, given the cost, $50, and the fact that a million or more people had already read excerpts in the magazine.
Hay and Nicolay were by now fairly well inured to the fault-finders: New York Sun editor Charles Dana insisted that Hay was not with Lincoln on the night of his reelection (Hay’s diary said otherwise); General Fitz-John Porter, who was court-martialed (and later exonerated) for his conduct at Second Bull Run, was incensed by Hay and Nicolay’s characterization of his collusion with McClellan. “We shall not have a friend left on earth by next Fall,” Hay joked to
Nicolay. He admonished Nicolay, but only weakly, to soften his treatment of Jefferson Davis. “Let the facts make him as despicable as he is—we do not want to appear to hate and despise him. But we do, and I suppose we can’t keep it from sticking out.”
Meanwhile, the judgments of the critics who most mattered to them were extremely gratifying. “The labor of a generation and the affection of a lifetime have, indeed, joined in raising to the memory of the greatest American of our days a monument worthy of his fame,” William Dean Howells applauded in an unattributed review in the New York Tribune. Defending the decision to write a “history” of Lincoln, as opposed to a “life,” Howells reasoned that the subject required “elbow-room.” Richard Watson Gilder, whose commitment to the book had been steadfast, though stern, was perhaps even more satisfied with the final result than were its authors. “There is no doubt in my mind, and I trust there is none in yours,” he wrote Hay and Nicolay, “that the principal desire of our hearts has been gratified:—namely, that not only Lincoln’s fame, for all time, has been firmly established by your labors, but that the people now living, so many of whom were also living during his lifetime, have had an opportunity of knowing the man.”
Gilder dismissed charges of bias in the biography’s condemnation of Lincoln’s opponents. “It may be that future historians or critics . . . may be called upon to take into view the ‘personal equation’;—but when all is said that can possibly be said in criticism, the fact will remain that you have followed your convictions, and by your devotion and industry have presented a picture of the man, and of the times, which will have an indistinguishable value.”
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