Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image

by Joshua Zeitz

  Somewhere on the other side of the spectrum, many conservative Whigs and Democrats harbored intensely negrophobic sentiments but opposed slavery because they believed that the institution placed white yeomen farmers at a disadvantage. If Southerners could import slave labor into the territories, free white homesteaders could never compete on a level playing field. Typical of this perspective was David Wilmot, who denied any “squeamish . . . sensitiveness” or “morbid sympathy for the slave.” Rather, he complained that “the negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent . . . I would preserve for free white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”

  The ideological lines were not always crystal clear. Abraham Lincoln, who built a career out of locating the political center, argued strongly for the slave’s fundamental humanity, insisting that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without the other’s consent.” Nevertheless, he agreed that Manifest Destiny was a white man’s game. “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories,” he wrote. “We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them.”

  Most antislavery Northerners maintained that slavery was a local, rather than national, institution. By the tenets of natural law, all human beings were born free. States could enact “positive” laws establishing slavery, they conceded, but the institution enjoyed no force outside of its local boundaries. William Henry Seward, who served New York State as governor and in the U.S. Senate, gave voice to this idea when he denied that the “Constitution recognizes property in slaves.” The original, unamended document made no direct reference to slaves or slavery. Instead, it referenced persons held in bondage and even counted them for purposes of assessing taxes and apportioning congressional seats—a clear sign (Seward claimed) that the founders recognized bondsmen as human beings rather than chattel. When Northerners flouted the Fugitive Slave Act, or when they fought to prevent the extension of slavery into federal lands, they did so in the firm belief that slaves ceased to be slaves the minute they crossed into free territory. The peculiar institution had no standing where it was not otherwise established by local law.

  Aside from this emerging consensus that slaves were human beings, and not property, the common denominator of antislavery sentiment was opposition to the political and economic evils that the institution imposed on society. Perceiving deep social divisions between the North, with its thriving agricultural and industrial economy, nascent public school system, and impressive transportation network, and the South, which they saw as a depressed, backwater region, increasing numbers of Northerners viewed slavery as a drag on the nation’s economy and culture. Traveling through Virginia, Seward saw that “exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Such has been the effect of slavery.”

  Northerners like Seward believed that workers in a free-labor system were naturally industrious, inventive, and ambitious and that these virtues led inexorably to material and cultural progress. By contrast, in a slave system there was little incentive for work, industry, and development. Black slaves had little motivation to work hard or work smart (“Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, and his capacity,” Horace Greeley explained), while Southern whites often equated manual labor with “slave work” and therefore grew both complacent and idle. “Slavery always degrades labor,” Thaddeus Stevens argued. “The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers—the slaves . . . They feel that they are degraded and despised.” As a result, claimed Seward, “Go ask Virginia—go ask even noble Maryland . . . to show you her people, canals, railroads, universities, schools, charities, commerce cities, and cultivated areas.” More than sixty years after the fact, Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents, remembered traveling with his father along a rough, potholed strip of highway near Mount Vernon, Virginia. “To the New England mind,” Adams wrote, “roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals. The moral of this Virginia road was clear, and the boy fully learned it. Slavery was wicked, and slavery was the cause of this road’s badness which amounted to [a] social crime.”

  Southerners responded that slavery was integral to the preservation of white liberty and civilization. James Hammond, the South Carolina senator who declared that “Cotton is king,” argued that “in all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life . . . It constitutes the very mud sill of society . . . Such a class you must have, or you would not have the other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” Hammond noted that slaves performed that function in the South, whereas in the North a growing population of landless day laborers and factory workers—most of them white—were “essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated . . . [Y]ours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated.” George Fitzhugh, a Southern polemicist of wide repute, went a step further. “Free society!” he barked. “We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists . . . The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant.” Many Southerners believed that slavery placed all whites on a plane of social and political equality, while the North’s free-labor system essentially made slaves of white working-class men.

  For Southerners who set their eyes westward, the freedom to carry slavery into the territories was a prerequisite for maintaining their region’s peculiar understanding of equality. For those Northerners who harbored thoughts of picking up stakes and starting anew in the West, slavery posed a very tangible threat. A white farmer from New York or Ohio, relying only on his own sweat, and perhaps that of his sons, could not hope to compete materially with his slaveholding neighbor. That Northern farmer also hoped to see his community thrive and flourish, and slavery, according to prevailing regional wisdom, inhibited physical and cultural progress in any territory where it was permitted to sink roots.

  To the generation of Americans who came of age in the antebellum era, the western frontier represented more than just the promise of cheap land and economic opportunity. The West embodied the nation’s popular imagination of its collective future. Writing in 1839, John L. O’Sullivan, a New York newspaperman, announced that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” When Americans gazed toward the Pacific, they saw their country in thirty or forty years’ time. Would that country look like the free-labor North or the slaveholding South?

  The Compromise of 1850 effectively contained this simmering conflict until 1854. That year, Congress passed a new law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories in preparation for the construction of a midwestern link to a planned transcontinental railroad. At the insistence of Southern senators who initially balked at supporting the bill, Stephen Douglas, the chairman of the Committee on Territories and chief author of the bill, inserted a “popular sovereignty” provision allowing the residents of the two territories to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. Douglas privately admitted that this one detail would “raise a hell of a storm,” but he underestimated just how quickly that storm would gather force. Kansas and Nebraska were part of the Louisiana Purchase, and as such they fell under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery above the 36˚30´ parall
el. In one quick motion, Douglas and his Democratic colleagues obliterated a long-standing arrangement between the North and the South and reintroduced the slavery question into American politics. William Pitt Fessenden, a Whig senator from Maine, spoke for many Northerners when he called the Kansas-Nebraska Act “a terrible outrage . . . The more I look at it the more enraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.”

  In one fell swoop, the Kansas-Nebraska Act snapped the cords that bound many Northern voters to the two political parties and introduced a period of extreme volatility and excitement. At hundreds of political meetings around the country, antislavery activists abandoned their political bases for new “fusion” tickets. These activists cut a wide swath across the American political spectrum. Some were members of the moribund Free-Soil Party, which formed in 1848 to oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories. Others were “Conscience” Whigs who were committed to the Whig Party’s economic platform but shared the Free-Soilers’ distaste for slavery. Still others were “anti-Nebraska” Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most policy questions but thought slavery was a dangerous social and political system. In some states, these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican, or Free-Soil. In Ripon, Wisconsin, on February 28, 1854, several dozen residents of the surrounding county converged on the town’s simple one-room wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party. They called themselves Republicans, and the name soon stuck.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act created “a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred” of slavery, observed the editor of the New York Times. In its wake, “the North had got its back up,” added Robert Winthrop, a prominent Cotton Whig from Massachusetts, “and I am pretty afraid that it will stay up, even after the question is settled.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It Was My Privilege to Witness

  Years later, John George Nicolay still remembered in vivid detail his passage to America. The youngest of four children born to John Jacob and Helena Nicolay, George—as he was known to family and friends—spent the first several years of his life in Essingen, “a hamlet too small to be found on even a large map of Bavaria,” his daughter later remarked. There, his earliest days were spent wandering the cobblestoned streets that wound past rows of small, drab houses and led to the lush vineyards and farms that circled the town. Like millions of central Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, the Nicolays made the decision to emigrate “primarily, but not solely, in the hope of bettering the family fortune.” In 1837, “having disposed of their house and plot of land,” they “set off on the long dusty road to Le Havre and took passage on a sailing ship bound for New Orleans. The stay [there] was short, yet long enough to afford my father, who was then five, a poignant sensation. He found himself the center of a group of chattering urchins, of whose talk he could not understand a syllable. He never forgot his feelings at the moment our American speech burst upon his consciousness.”

  Settling first in Cincinnati, which was already home to a sizable German immigrant population, the Nicolays moved successively to Indiana and Missouri and finally to Pike County, Illinois, where George’s father bought and repaired a run-down gristmill and scratched out a living by helping local farmers grind their corn and wheat into meal and flour. A small and sickly boy, George “found little companionship at home,” his daughter later explained, “and being physically frail and of different mental caliber from the other lads at the log schoolhouse, he had few friends his own age. But he was quite happy. With the green woods for a playground, he made friends with the birds and animals there.” Young Nicolay also found solace in the written word, though his family’s financial straits made books a scarce luxury. “When I first felt the impulse to read,” he said many years later, the “family Bible was my only resource. Like any other healthy child, I did not search it for doctrines of theology, precepts of moral philosophy, or beauties of poetry, but for its stirring, active, realistic pictures of life—its history, which to me had all the charms of romance.” The boy who would later visit great battlefields at the side of a wartime president was transfixed by “the Books of the Kings with their record of war, siege, battle, conquest, captivity,” the book of the Maccabees, and the stories of Samson, David, and Goliath. “Afterward, among the few books which fell into my hands were two of Shakespeare’s plays, each bound in a single small volume—the first, the Comedy of Errors, the second, the tragedy of Macbeth. I must confess that I liked the Dromios better than the ghosts and witches. In both dramas I was deeply absorbed in the movement, but still too young to appreciate their literary beauty and power.”

  Tragedy cut short Nicolay’s childhood. His mother died before the family left Cincinnati, and when he was just fourteen years old, his father passed away. Left to fend for himself, George became a clerk in Aaron Reno’s general store in White Hall, where for a salary of $4 a month he worked the counter, stocked shelves, cleaned the floors, and kept the books for his employer. After two years, Reno informed George that although he was a good clerk, his nephew had recently been orphaned, and he felt obliged to offer the position to his own kin. “I fancy my father was not sorry to leave,” Helen Nicolay wrote. “His duties did not particularly interest him, and some of them were too heavy for his strength.” Writing to his former Sunday school teacher, Joel Pennington, Nicolay asked how one might go about seeking employment in the newspaper field. As luck would have it, Pennington knew of a position. With little ceremony and few people to bid farewell, Nicolay threw his meager belongings into a bag, walked thirty-five miles to Pittsfield, and spent his first night sleeping on wool sacks in the town carding mill. The next day, he took up work as a “printer’s devil” at the Pike County Free Press, a weekly paper with Whig leanings and a countywide circulation.

  Part errand boy, part janitor, Nicolay was principally responsible for setting the paper’s type in preparation for its weekly run. Many decades later, he delivered a lecture titled “Franklin the Printer,” in which he traced Benjamin Franklin’s “liberal and tolerant philosophy” to the “time when, slowly setting the type for his own pamphlet on the doctrine of Fate, his active thought, playing lightning-like around, over, and under his own arguments . . . showed him that he could construct as good or even a better argument on the other side.” He might just as well have been reflecting on his own education as a newspaperman. Privately, he guessed that “next to typesetting, I derived more benefit from the effort to write (which in a newspaper office becomes irresistible) than from reading even the best books . . . [T]o learn to write is like learning to swim; everyone must teach himself. And, as in swimming, perhaps the most important thing to learn is when to stop.”

  The early years in Pittsfield were hardscrabble. Living in a half-story room above the newspaper office, Nicolay bought bread from the local bakery and counted on the proprietor’s wife to bring him freshly brewed coffee. He worked long hours and knew few physical comforts. But Pittsfield adopted him as one of its own. Within two years, he began writing and editing for the paper. By 1852, his name appeared on the masthead. In 1854, at age twenty-two, he became the sole proprietor, editor, and publisher of the Pike County Free Press. In his spare time, George worked through a rude course of study with the local schoolmaster, John Thomson, and in that way came to befriend John Hay, who arrived in town only a few months after Nicolay.

  For young men of Nicolay’s generation, politics and journalism offered a well-trod path from poverty to middle-class respectability. The nation’s mail system, which Alexis de Tocqueville called the “great link between minds,” underwent a massive expansion between 1815 and 1830, with the number of rural and small-town post offices more than doubling. Because Congress set postage rates for periodicals at one cent per hundred-mile radius, newspapers enjoyed an invisible subsidy and soon came to constitute 90 percent of all mail. Farmers on the distant frontier, who were increasingly being drawn into market relationships with people in other parts of the country, cou
ld now subscribe to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. Alongside the development of new printing techniques like the cylinder press, which made it possible to churn out more copy in less time, and the steady expansion of railroads, canals, and macadamized roads, which sped the transmission of news, the growth of the postal system inspired a boom in periodical circulation. In 1835 there were 1,200 newspapers in America, most of them local weeklies. A decade and a half later, that number had risen to 2,526, of which 10 percent were dailies. The invention of the telegraph in the late 1840s further catalyzed this trend. By the 1850s the nation had laid over ten thousand miles of wire. People increasingly expected their news to arrive in real time.

  At least since the early Federalist era, when supporters of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson founded dueling national newspapers, American periodicals tended to assume avowedly partisan positions, drawing little distinction between news and editorials. The rise of America’s modern, two-party system in the 1830s inspired Democrats and Whigs to establish local organs, which in turn derived a significant portion of their revenue from lucrative government advertising and printing contracts. By midcentury, 95 percent of daily and weekly newspapers were affiliated with one party or another, leading a contemporary to claim that “no political paper in the United States can be independent and live. It may, in some cases, be independent of persons, but never of party principles and party fealty.” Beman Brockway, a journalist who apprenticed under Horace Greeley, later remarked that a typical newspaper in this period “was not a newspaper at all. It contained little news of a general character, and almost no local intelligence. It was simply the organ of a party.”

  For reasons both ideological and pecuniary, editors increasingly played leading roles in partisan politics. They served on their local and state party committees, gave speeches, organized rallies, and often held office. Stepping into this growing profession required mastery of language, keen political sensibility, thick skin, and sharp elbows. But it did not require much in the way of family pedigree or formal education. It was the perfect career choice for Nicolay.