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

by Joshua Zeitz

  To hear the wind of the Jording roll.

  I ax old Satan why follow me so?

  Satan aint got nothing to do with me.

  Hold yr. light (Bis) on Canaan’s shore.

  Oh Sister Ketchum dont you want to get religion

  Down in the lonesome valley, (my lord).

  And meet my Jesus there—

  By the end of his Southern travels, Hay had seen and heard enough to become an ardent convert to the cause of black enlistment in the army. His experience among white officers and black freedmen led him to understand that ex-slaves were strongly motivated to fight. “Why is not authority given to Genl. Hunter to organize Negro Regiments?” he asked Nicolay. “He very much needs it. He has written twice for it, and has gotten no answer. I wish you would, simply pro bono publico, have some resurrection made of the matter. Negroes are coming in, slowly as yet. But when our expeditions get on the Main he will be very much embarrassed for authority to do this.”

  Hay returned from his trip in early June, just as the war began to take a dramatic turn. On June 21, Nicolay informed Therena that “Pennsylvania and Maryland have had another ‘invasion’ fright, and not without some reason, though I believe it is turning out to be only a raid.” Nine days later, his assessment changed radically. “Stirring times seem to be upon us again,” he wrote. “It appears pretty evident that Lee has taken the most of his army into Maryland and Pennsylvania, with perhaps the design of taking Baltimore or Washington . . . At present the rebel army is scattered about over Pennsylvania gathering up forage and stealing supplies. The State is almost completely paralyzed by fear or entirely apathetic, and is moving in a very feeble way to help herself. Whether as the danger presses her she will arouse herself to more vigorous action is yet a problem.”

  • • •

  The events of July 1863 in many ways signaled a turning point in the Union’s fortunes, as well as Lincoln’s. The Northern victory at Gettysburg in early July, followed a day later by the Confederate surrender of Vicksburg, dealt a major blow to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and deprived the Confederacy of free navigation along the Mississippi. For Lincoln, the twin events supplied a much-needed jolt of enthusiasm to the Northern public. As was the case so often, hope turned to disappointment when the Union commander, George Meade, failed to give chase to Lee’s rebels. “The Prest was deeply grieved,” Hay privately noted on July 14. “‘We had them within our grasp,’ he said. ‘We had only to stretch forth our hands & they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the Army move.’” Neither in his letters nor in his diary did Hay make note of the fearsome riots then engulfing New York City, where angry working-class mobs lynched scores of black residents and menaced the lives and property of leading white Republicans, ostensibly to protest the government’s new military draft. The violence stemmed from multiple sources, the draft certainly among them, but also including the ruinous effects of wartime inflation on workingmen, popular working-class opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation, and ethnic resentments that had long been simmering in the cauldron of New York’s local politics. It would ultimately require thousands of federal troops, some fresh from the fields of Gettysburg, to put down the draft riots. The conflagration was evidence of the deep political divisions and social discord that the war had wrought. What should have been a crowning month for the administration ended inconclusively and with strong portents of future trouble.

  Late summer and early fall found Nicolay traveling in the Colorado Territory, where Lincoln sent him to carry out negotiations with local Indian tribes. A lifelong outdoorsman, Nicolay jumped at the chance to visit the Rocky Mountains. Upon reaching Denver, he fired off a note to Therena, relating the details of a seventy-eight-hour trip through the western desert (“in a coach with a load of six inside passengers and a nigger baby to say nothing of several tons of express matter”) and marveling at the scenery. “Off to the west the mountains lie wrapped up in a most alluring cool blue haze,” he reported, “and occasionally send down a whiff of cold air, pure and refreshing as the breezes of paradise. I am anxious for a closer acquaintance with them . . . as soon as I can get the soreness out of my bones.” Over the next several weeks, he shared the vivid imagery of his sojourn with Hay and Therena: The vibrant commercial spirit of Central City, a rough-hewn mining town forty miles west of Denver, “frailly built of knotty pinelumber, sawed here in the mountains . . . chock full with some kind or other of business . . . trade, banking, hotels, restaurants, grogshops, courts, schools—vending every imaginable thing from a hoop-skirt to a quartz mill.” The quartz mines and “cool clear” mountain air of the Rockies. The wildlife and unfamiliar vegetation. “I have not experienced the exhilaration that I felt at Newport and in Minnesota,” he admitted, “but I am in perfect health (so far as feeling goes) and have an enormous appetite which I am able to gratify with impunity.”

  In Nicolay’s absence, Hay managed affairs in Washington. “It would do you good to see how daily I hold the Tycoon’s nose to the Court Martial grindstone,” he told Nicolay, in knowing reference to the hundreds of military criminal judgments that Lincoln personally reviewed each week. (“Today we spent 6 hours deciding on Courtmartials, the President Judge Holt & I,” he noted in his diary. “I was amused at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier. He was only merciless in cases when meanness or cruelty were shown. Cases of cowardice he was specially averse to punishing with death. He said it would frighten the poor devils too terrible, to shoot them.”) Though Washington in summertime was “dull . . . as an obsolete almanac,” Hay found a steady companion in Robert Todd Lincoln—“le dauphin Bob,” who had returned from Harvard to visit his parents. “Bob & I had a fearful orgy here last night on whiskey and cheese,” he reported in mid-July. “The house is gradually going to the bad since you left.” By early August, with Bob and his mother departed for a vacation in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Hay was left alone with the president. “The newspapers say the Tycoon will join them after a while,” he noted with amusement. “If so, he does not know it.”

  Unlike Nicolay, Hay had not chosen politics as a career. Politics chose him. Those who knew him three years earlier, when he was an aspiring poet with a diffident outlook on affairs of state, might have been surprised by his swift professional conversion. To all outward appearances, he never took himself too seriously. “You are a fortunate man,” John Forney, a longtime Washington insider, told him. “You have kept yourself aloof from your office. I know an old fellow now seventy who was Private Secretary to Madison. He has lived ever since on its recollection. He thought there was something solemn and memorable in it. [But] Hay has laughed through his term.” Yet by 1863, Hay had developed a deep reverence for the president and a newfound appreciation of the transformational power of politics. “The Tycoon is in fine whack,” he told Nicolay, who was still in Colorado. “I have rarely seen him more serene & busy. He is managing the war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides & there is no cavil. I am growing more and more firmly convinced that the good of our country absolutely demands that he should be kept where he is till this thing is over. There is no man in the country, so wise so gentle and so firm. I believe that God placed him where he is.” Weeks later, he marveled at the president’s equanimity and control under pressure. “The old man sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady & equally firm,” he wrote to Nicolay. “I do not know whether the nation is worthy of him for another term. I know the people want him. There is no mistaking that fact. But politicians are strong yet & he is not their ‘kind of cat.’ I hope God wont see fit to scourge us for our sins by any one of the two or three prominent candidates on the ground.”

  No president had won a seco
nd term since Andrew Jackson in 1832. Now in his third year in office, presiding over a war that many Northerners believed should have been won a year before, and still regarded by many leaders of his own party as unequal to the task at hand, Lincoln set his sights on renomination. “I hope you are getting well and hearty,” Hay wrote to Nicolay, who was then finishing his stay out west. “Next winter will be the most exciting and laborious of all our lives. It will be worth any other ten.”

  CHAPTER 9

  New Birth of Freedom

  By November 1863, the citizens of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, had succeeded in restoring a modicum of order and tranquillity to their small town. The great military battle that temporarily swelled the city’s population from 2,400 to over 150,000 left a terrible scar on the sleepy college town. The poisonous stench from the corpses of several thousand dead men and thousands more horses and mules, left lying in roads and cornfields under a burning midsummer sun. The flies and gnats. The tons of human and animal excrement left unburied. The bloodstained walls of private homes and businesses. The massive applications of lime, meant to ward off disease and pestilence, which dusted the streets in fine white powder. It was “a scene of horror and desolation which humanity, in all the centuries of its history has seldom witnessed,” claimed the U.S. Christian Commission. In the aftermath of the battle, farmers emerged from their homes to find their livestock stolen or destroyed, their orchards picked clean by fleeing rebels, their crops in tatters, and their trees shot full with bullets. Gettysburg stood as a stark testament to the physical ruin of modern war.

  For several weeks, local townspeople lightly buried as many bodies as they could manage, marking the dead with crude wooden posts. David Wills, a prominent businessman and civic leader, reported to Governor Andrew Curtin that a more permanent solution was needed. Heeding the advice, Curtin named Wills to head an interstate commission charged with creating a permanent resting place for the Union dead. States would contribute to the costs of exhuming and reburying the dead; the federal government would furnish the caskets. With single-minded purpose and dispatch, Wills hired a contractor to exhume and reinter the bodies (at $1.59 per grave) and secured the services of William Saunders, a noted horticulturalist and landscape architect, to design the cemetery. Saunders’s plan called for a semicircular arrangement of graves, organized by state, with officers and enlisted men commingled without regard for rank.

  Eventually, a date was selected in late November for the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. Curtin extended invitations to the governors of each state whose servicemen had fought at Gettysburg; six ultimately accepted. The former Massachusetts governor and U.S. senator Edward Everett was chosen to deliver the principal oration. Also expected were dozens of ranking military officers, mayors, congressmen, and political leaders, as well as journalists representing most of the major Northern newspapers. At the last minute, Lincoln accepted Wills’s invitation to offer “a few appropriate remarks.” He would travel by train the day before, along with Secretary of State William Seward, Nicolay, Hay, and a delegation consisting of leading congressmen, foreign diplomats, and Washington-based newspapermen. For Lincoln, the trip served political as well as official purposes. With an eye toward securing renomination the following summer, he would use his appearance at Gettysburg to lock down the support of key state delegations and broadcast his interpretation of the war to a national audience.

  On November 8, three days after Nicolay returned from his western trip and ten days before their departure for Pennsylvania, the secretaries joined Lincoln at Alexander Gardner’s studio in Washington, where, as Hay recorded, “we had a great many pictures taken. Some of the Presdt. the best I have seen. Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having done in group with the Presdt.” It was the only photograph in which Lincoln, Nicolay, and Hay appeared together. (The following year, the president posed for several pictures in his White House office. One surviving photograph shows Lincoln seated at his desk. Nicolay’s legs are visible to his left.)

  “Spent the evening at the theatre with the President Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Hunter, Cameron and Nicolay,” Hay recorded on November 9. “J. Wilkes Booth was doing the ‘Marble Heart.’ Rather tame than otherwise.” Two days later, Hay returned to “see Wilkes Booth in Romeo. Wheatly took all the honors away as Mercutio.” A week later, they left for Gettysburg.

  • • •

  Years later, Nicolay remembered that Wills’s invitation arrived only two weeks before the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg. “It was a time when [the president] was extremely busy, not alone with the important and complicated military affairs in the various armies, but also with the consideration of his annual message to Congress, which was to meet early in December. There was even great uncertainty whether he could take enough time from his pressing official duties to go to Gettysburg at all. Up to the 17th of November, only two days before the ceremonies, no definite arrangements for the journey had been made.” The plan originally called for the presidential party to depart Washington early on Thursday, November 19, but the president, appreciating the political importance of the trip and anticipating the usual train mishaps, insisted on arriving the evening before the dedication. “I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely,” he told the secretaries, “and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gantlet.” In later years, much speculation would surround the timing and location of Lincoln’s formulation of the Gettysburg Address. Nicolay, who helped transcribe the final copy on the morning of November 19, admitted that he had no idea when the president began preparing his remarks. “He probably followed his usual habit in such matters, using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts, and molding his phrases mentally, waiting to reduce them to writing until they had taken satisfactory form,” he speculated more than three decades after the fact. Based on his analysis of the different pieces of stationery on which the president composed his first draft, Nicolay agreed with James Speed, Lincoln’s future attorney general, who claimed “that the President told him that the day before he left Washington he found time to write about half of his speech.” Contrary to popular myth, Nicolay believed that Lincoln did not work on the draft during the train ride from Washington. Doing so would have been impossible “amid all the movement, the noise, the conversation, the greetings and the questionings which ordinary courtesy required him to undergo.” He completed his remarks later that evening in Gettysburg.

  “We started from Washington to go to the Consecration of the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Gettysburg,” Hay scribbled in his diary on Wednesday evening. “We had a pleasant sort of trip.” Arriving just after sunset under a damp, overcast sky, Lincoln and Seward proceeded directly to David Wills’s house for a large welcome dinner in the president’s honor. Curtin and his fellow governors were expected to attend, but train troubles delayed them until almost midnight. Lincoln nevertheless had an opportunity to confer that evening with dozens of leading politicians whose support would prove critical to his renomination efforts. As Nicolay later recalled, “Except during its days of battle, the little town of Gettysburg had never been so full of people . . . [T]he streets literally swarmed with visitors, and the stirring music of regimental bands and patriotic glee-clubs sounded in many directions.” A journalist on hand remembered that the presidential party appeared “a straggled, hungry set. Lincoln, with that weary smile, which a poet might have read as a forecast of destiny; Seward, with an essentially bad hat; John Hay, in attendance upon the president, and much to be troubled by the correspondents, handsome as a peach, the countenance of extreme youth.” While the president dined with the reception committee and honored guests, Hay “foraged around for a while—walked out to the College got a chafing dish of oysters then some supper,” and strolled over to the courthouse, where he found John Forney, the influential Republican newspaperman, who “had been drinking a good deal during the day and was getting to feel a little ugly and dangerous.”

  A vete
ran of Pennsylvania’s internecine political wars, Forney was critical to the president’s renomination efforts; accordingly, Hay suffered his drunken ramblings with sportsmanlike demeanor. “We went out after a while following the music to hear the serenades,” he continued in his diary. From inside the Wills house, “the President appeared at the door and said half a dozen words meaning nothing & went in. Seward who was staying around the corner at Harper’s was called out and spoke so indistinctly that I did not hear a word of what he was saying . . . We went back to Forney’s room having picked up Nicolay and drank more whiskey. Nicolay sung his little song of the ‘Three Thieves’ and we then sung John Brown. At last we proposed that Forney should make a speech and two or three started out . . . to get a band to serenade him.”

  The secretaries cannot be faulted for missing the full weight of the moment. Living events in real time, they had little way of knowing that they were witnessing history. They were also drinking copious amounts of whiskey. Back at the Wills house, Lincoln was quietly at work in his upstairs guest room, completing his speech. A block away, Seward delivered impromptu remarks to the serenaders that John Hay strained to hear and that presaged the president’s speech. The war, Seward proclaimed, would invariably result in the destruction of slavery, and “when that cause is removed, simply by the operation of abolishing it, as the origin and agent of the treason that is without justification and without parallel, we shall henceforth be reunited, be only one country, having only one hope, one ambition, and one destiny.” A Detroit newspaper described Seward as “taking more decided anti-slavery grounds, more bold than in any previous utterance of his since the war commenced.” Days later the Chicago Tribune pointed out the symmetry between the two speeches when it noted that the president “means that this nation shall have ‘a new birth of freedom,’” while Seward “is still more emphatic. He denounces slavery.” Both men identified the destruction of slavery as a turning point in the nation’s destiny, a point that was not lost on contemporary observers.