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

by Joshua Zeitz

  Unlike their boss, who rarely left Washington and never once traveled for pleasure during his presidential term, the secretaries began alternating vacations in search of health and recreation. Both men took frequent trips back to Illinois—Nicolay to visit Therena in Pittsfield, and Hay to visit his parents in Warsaw. They also made occasional journeys to New York, the Jersey shore, and even, in Nicolay’s case, to the Rocky Mountains. Late summer of 1861 found George in Newport, Rhode Island—“a very quaint and old place,” he told Therena, where “the streets are narrow and irregular, but the cottages and grounds very pretty and inviting.” He had “left Washington because of the overpowering heat” and found Newport a cool and pleasant seventy-five degrees during the day and sixty degrees at night. “I have hardly yet learned the fashionable routine,” he admitted. “It is substantially, to go and bathe in the surf at any time before 12 o’clock (fashionable people do not get up a great while before that). Then the ladies do their calling until dinner which occurs at 3. Then there is music and promenading at the hotels until 4 to 5, at which time everybody goes driving (in carriages and vehicles of all sorts) along Bellevue Avenue . . . When the tide is out, people ride and drive on the beach, which is then as smooth and hard as the floor, making the most agreeable and splendid road in the world.”

  From early in his tenure as presidential secretary, Nicolay also traveled at Lincoln’s behest on government and political business. In August 1862, an undeclared war broke out in southern Minnesota between white settlers and Sioux (Dakota) Indians. Upon surrendering their land several years earlier, the Sioux had been promised annuities from the federal government. The government had not delivered on its pledge, and now the Sioux faced the very real prospect of starvation. In August, several young Sioux men broke into a local farm in search of food; in the ensuing fight, five people were killed, triggering a wave of violence that ultimately claimed the lives of 350 white settlers. The president, who could scarcely afford to lose the allegiance of Minnesotans, ordered General John Pope to the state to break the back of the Sioux rebellion. It so happened that earlier Lincoln had dispatched Nicolay to join the federal Indian commissioner in St. Paul to observe negotiations for a land-cession treaty with Chippewa (Ojibwe) Indian bands living far to the northwest. After visiting with Therena and friends in Pittsfield, Nicolay embarked on a two-day steamboat ride up the Mississippi. “The trip is truly delightful,” he told Hay, “and the Mississippi scenery magnificent.” Upon arriving in St. Paul, he installed himself in the International Hotel, a “primitive . . . building of considerable size [that] smells strongly of pine and kerosene.” There, he spent several pleasant days fishing, horseback riding, and picnicking, before heading north to St. Cloud. The official party forged a path along the Mississippi River bank, passing through “fine rolling prairies, with very sandy soil.” “Our point of destination is the junction of the river which runs into Red Lake with the Red River of the North,” he explained to his fiancée. “We cannot tell certainly, but think it will take twelve or fifteen days to go there. I think we will strike another Post Office or two above this. If we do I will write again.”

  But before Nicolay could leave St. Cloud, trouble erupted with a much nearer band of Chippewa in ominous coincidence with the outbreak of Sioux hostilities in the south. Nicolay’s party had to change plans, and he was soon involved in a different kind of negotiation. He wrote that “the mess with Hole-in-the-Day, the Chippewa Chief, is a complicated affair—involving official frauds on the one hand, and Indian depredations on the other. The Indians are in bad temper and the young braves want to fight; but they are poorly armed and have but little ammunition . . . Hole-in-the-day is a shrewd and intelligent and able diplomatist, and has the counsel and assistance of interested whites.” From their garrison at Fort Ripley, Nicolay and his associates alternated between peace talks, which seemed to lead nowhere, and recreation. “Since I wrote you last there has been the usual dilly-dallying by the Indians,” he told Therena in early September. “I am getting tired of staying here and doing nothing, but must stay and go down with the crowd. We had a fine ride to the lake on our fishing excursion and good sport spearing pickerel at night with boat and torch. The lake is the most beautiful one I have yet seen here or elsewhere.”

  While Nicolay and the official Indian commissioners worked to maintain the peace with the Chippewa, Hay reported from Washington that “there is positively nothing of the slightest interest since you left. The abomination of desolation has fallen upon this town.” Envious of his companion, who was hunting and fishing in the cool woods of Minnesota, Hay complained that it was “horribly hot—all but me who have gone to shaking again. Your infernal South windows always give me the chills . . . If in the wild woods, you scrounge an Indian damsel, steal her moccasins while she sleeps and bring them to me. The Tycoon has just received a pair, gorgeously quilled, from an Indian Agent who is accused of stealing. He put them on & grinned.”

  “Where is your scalp?” Hay joked toward summer’s end. “If anybody believes you don’t wish you were at home, he can get a pretty lovely bet out of me. I write this letter firing into the air. If it hits you, well. It will not hurt as much as a Yancton’s rifle. If in God’s good Providence your long locks adorn the lodge of an aboriginal warrior and the festive tomtom is made of your stretched hide, I will not grudge the time thus spent, for auld lang syne.”

  The excursion reached its high point on September 10, when Nicolay and his colleagues “went to Crow Wing to hold a council with the red chief. Before we knew it, he had over a hundred Indians in front of us and nearly a hundred behind us. We were surrounded. We put a bold face on the matter and went into council, spent perhaps an hour in preliminary talk after which ye gentle savage proposed to adjourn the council till next morning.” Ultimately, peace prevailed in northern Minnesota, while the army put down the insurrection in the south. Of the 303 Sioux men whom a military commission condemned to death, all but 38 were pardoned after the president carefully reviewed their records. The uprising hurt Lincoln in Minnesota. When a Republican senator suggested that the administration could have bolstered its support by executing more Sioux, the president replied, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”

  Nicolay assured Hay that his “scalp was yet safe . . . I shall make but a short stay in Springfield and Pittsfield and then hasten to Washington to relieve you—that is Stonewall Jackson willing.”

  • • •

  In April 1863, Hay embarked on a two-month sojourn in South Carolina and Florida, ostensibly to carry presidential dispatches to naval officers who were then preparing an offensive campaign in Charleston Harbor. At the president’s arrangement, he would spend several weeks as a volunteer adjunct to General David Hunter, whose broader campaign in the coastal South was key to Union victory. Though Hay was to function as Lincoln’s eyes and ears on the ground, the voyage south would also allow him a respite from the punishing demands of his White House duties, as well as a visit with his brother Charlie, then serving as an officer on Hunter’s general staff.

  On April 2, with the president and first lady bound for Virginia to review the troops, he began his journey, leaving Nicolay alone to manage affairs at the White House. (“The President and Mrs. L. went to Falmouth last Saturday, and are there yet,” Nicolay wrote in jest. “I guess the Tycoon has concluded to follow your example and go on [General] Hooker’s staff.”) Still recovering from his illness and unaccustomed to ocean journeys, Hay suffered in “solitary agony” through several days of seasickness. He arrived in South Carolina a day after the Union navy’s failure to take Charleston Harbor. Following a forty-minute pitched battle, Rear Admiral Samuel Du Pont had determined that his ironclad fleet faced destruction or capture by the well-positioned Confederate artillery. Rather than risk the loss of so valuable a resource, he pulled his ships back, enraging Hunter, who criticized the decision as yet another example of Union trepidation and overcaution. Hay interviewed Du Pont and wrote sympathetic reports
to Nicolay and the president. From his exchange with Nicolay, Hay learned that the White House was largely in disagreement with Du Pont’s version of events, and after several weeks at Hunter’s side Hay too came around to this position. Despite the initial divergence of firsthand accounts, his dispatches were valuable to the president, who ordered Du Pont to devise another attack.

  Over the next seven weeks, Hay traveled with Hunter’s army as it snaked its way up and down the South Carolina and Florida coastline. Though he was not yet formally commissioned an army officer (that would come the following year), he received an honorary rank that seemed both to please and to embarrass him. “I am a Colonel s’il vous plait,” he told Nicolay. “Col. John Hay Vol. A.D.C. &c.” “Write to me when you have nothing else to do & be good enough to remember that I have a pretty extensive handle to my name.”

  Having escaped a late spring snowstorm in Washington, he was “getting browned by equitation” and could now manage to “digest an enormous quantity of beef and sleep.” He assured his mother that he “never felt better in my life than I do now. I ride a good deal, eat in proportion, and sleep enormously. I hope to weigh about a ton when I return.” To his grandfather, Hay sent an enthusiastic hello from “the land of the rebels” and gave a glowing report of the natural beauty of the Southern landscape, a theme he revisited in his frequent letters to the White House. “I wish you could be down here,” he told Nicolay. “You would enjoy it beyond measure. The air is like June at noon & like May at morning and evening. The scenery is tropical. The sunset unlike anything I ever saw before. They are not gorgeous like ours but singularly quiet and solemn. The sun goes down over the pines through a sky like ashes-of-roses and hangs for an instant on the horizon like a bubble of blood. Then there is a twilight, such as you dream about.” Florida seemed to Hay “the Original Eden on the Continent,” its unsculpted beauty unlike anything he had ever before seen. “As we sat in the shade of St. Augustine & watched the picanninnies catching crabs in the lazy sunshine on the seawall, the quaint old town lying sleepy and still before us & the orange groves filling the background with the vivid green of the tropics, while a sky without blemish of cloud hung like a visible benediction over all, I felt as useless and irresponsible as the lizards in the grass or the porpoises that leaped in the liquid basin of the bay.”

  Hay’s diary entries for April and May 1863 reveal an outsider’s fascination with the dying remnants of the antebellum South. All around him were foreign landscapes, strange vegetation and wildlife, abandoned plantations, and a bewildering dissipation of racial and social boundaries. In a series of brief, highly impressionistic entries, he captured the first eerie aftershocks of civil war: “The sunset scene. The wild tropical splendor of the dying day. The weirdlike mist that hangs over the woods. The gathering shadows of water, & the lights glimmering up one by one from the black bulks of the fleet. A splendid harbor going to waste. A great country aroused & filling it with hostile power.” He remarked on the “weird effect of the uninhabited village” and the “picturesque scenery of the circling shores. White cottages nestling by the shores. Village to be burned.” Once-opulent homes, now derelict and abandoned, placed in sharp relief the terrific wager that white slave owners had been willing to place on disunion. Wandering one evening through an empty plantation house—“the finest place I have ever seen”—he was awestruck by the sprawling “grounds well kept. The wharf with steps for boats. The boat house. The Sea entrance. The business office. The Aloe about to bloom. The conservatory. The summer houses.” It all made him shake his head in wonder at “what this man wanted & what he got.”

  The Union-occupied coastal landscape that Hay traveled in 1863 afforded him a first intimate gaze at American slavery. Though he had encountered African Americans, both free and slave, during boyhood sojourns in St. Louis, in Springfield, and, more recently, in Washington, his time with Hunter’s army offered a stark introduction to the system of plantation slavery that most Northerners knew only through the prism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What’s more, that system was crumbling under the pressure of war and occupation. Hay had been present when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Now he was on hand to view its profound aftershocks. Everywhere he went, he took note of the unfamiliar surroundings, both animate and inanimate. The palm trees and “pomegranate at Major Dormans” were as foreign to him as “the darkey girls” who “delight in his return.” He encountered soldiers from the First South Carolina, one of the first all-black regiments in the Union army, and spoke with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the white Cambridge-born abolitionist who commanded their unit. He marveled at the lowly appearance of war-weary “Secesh women” and recorded, without commentary, seeing thirteen hundred contrabands—slaves who fled behind Union lines—working under the watchful eye of white Union soldiers.

  In Charleston, Hay conferred with Robert Smalls, a slave who earned wide acclaim when he commandeered a Confederate vessel and sailed himself to freedom and who was now a pilot for the Union navy. He also recorded details of a conversation with “Eugene, an intelligent contraband. His story. The condition of the rebels in Georgia. The secret understanding among the negroes. More wd come but they are afraid of being caught & sent back, and not until lately were they sure in reception.” In Beaufort, Hay noted with fascination the intense religious sentiment that the president inspired among former slaves. “Talk about Linkum!” he heard one man say. “Linkum walk as Jes. walk! no man see L.”

  Emancipation was technically in full effect, but no one yet understood how freedmen would fit into a post-slavery world. Later in the decade, Americans would fiercely contest the meaning of free labor. Would ex-slaves become self-sufficient yeoman farmers, working their own plots of land? Or would they be compelled to work the cotton fields for wages? As a direct observer of these first “rehearsals for Reconstruction,” Hay gained an early understanding of the terms of the debate. “The plantations neat and well tilled, people”—meaning Negroes—“apparently contented and happy,” he noted on a visit to Lady’s Island, near Hilton Head. “Williams says they work better on their own grain crops than on Govt cotton crops.”

  Hay also visited freedmen’s schools that were staffed principally by white abolitionists from the North. The students, young and old, burned a lasting impression in his mind. “Song by a Florida slavegirl,” he noted. “We will fight for liberty. The children join. Sergeant Proctor delighted. ‘Roll Jording [sic] Roll.’” With a poet’s ear for dialect, Hay recorded the unfamiliar accents and cadences of the young children whom he encountered. Though he left little commentary or analysis, the episodes and snippets he chose to preserve suggest a growing understanding, even approval, of the social revolution that the war had unleashed. “Went to the colored Schools,” he recorded on April 27. “Miss Harris and Miss Smith”—white abolitionists from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, respectively—“in charge of the Abcdarians . . . Light mulatto girls and white children. All singing together.”

  Say my brother aint you ready

  Get ready to go home

  For I hear de word of promise

  At de breaking of the day

  Ill take de wings of de morning

  & fly away to Jesus

  Ill take de wing of de morning

  & Sound de Jubilee.

  On Paris Island, Hay and his party “went to the Plantation house . . . to see darkies. Genl. Saxton made a little speech about their relatives in the Army. Revd. Moore followed and talked freedom & general politics & Littlefield was very characteristic in the same groove. I said ½ dozen words in behalf of the Tycoon. Then sang some strange & wild songs.”

  Like hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who confronted Southern slavery head-on, Hay left South Carolina and Florida less hardened in his thinking about African Americans. He did not walk away from the experience an out-and-out egalitarian. He still viewed African Americans as unequal to whites in many respects. But their hymns struck a resonant chord. More than most people, Hay app
reciated verse. He studied it and took it seriously. Speaking to him in the language of gospel, the ex-slaves of the South Carolina and Florida coastline forced the young man’s attention. “They swayed to & fro as they sang with great feeling,” he observed. “An old woman who came over fr. Africa. Says she was grown when she came.”

  Genl. Hunter sitting on the tree of life

  To hear the wind of the Jordan roll

  Roll J.R.R. J. Roll

  (Ch.)

  March de Angel March

  March de Angel March

  My soul is rising heavenward