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

by Joshua Zeitz

  Much had changed in the year and a half since Hay’s departure for Europe. American politics had descended into a blood feud between the Republican-controlled Congress and the Tennessee Democrat who succeeded Lincoln as president. Though a committed wartime unionist, Johnson preferred a swift and lenient approach to Reconstruction that would invariably deprive freed slaves of full citizenship and protection. Early in his tenure, he summarily readmitted Southern states to the Union and issued a general amnesty proclamation that applied to all but a small number of former Confederate civilian and military officials and large landholders. (Soon thereafter, he issued personal pardons to many of these powerful Southern elites.) The president turned a blind eye when multiple Southern legislatures passed “black codes”—restrictive legislation that denied freedmen the right to free assembly, movement, and speech and that pressed African Americans, including children, into long terms of compulsory servitude if they refused to enter into coercive labor contracts with plantation owners. When Congress assembled in December 1865, the Republican majority defied Johnson by refusing to seat newly elected members from Southern states, many of whom had doffed their gray uniforms only six months earlier. The House and the Senate then passed expansive civil rights legislation over the president’s veto, negating the effects of the black codes, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing full citizenship to all Americans, regardless of race. With the relationship between Congress and the president at a nadir, in March 1867 the Republican supermajority enacted new legislation dividing the South into military districts and placing most of it under military rule.

  Though most Republican congressmen opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policy and voted in favor of both civil rights and military occupation, wartime divisions between radical, moderate, and conservative Republicans had grown more pronounced by the time Hay returned to the United States. Radicals believed that the rebel states had effectively committed “state suicide,” leaving them outside the Union; the citizens of these “conquered territories” enjoyed no claim to the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Some radicals, like Charles Sumner, pushed for restoration on terms of full enfranchisement for ex-slaves, while others, like Thaddeus Stevens, proposed seizing the plantations of wealthy white landowners and dividing them into small plots for freedmen and loyal white yeomen farmers. Moderates tended to recoil at the notion that Southern whites be stripped of their citizenship or suffer wholesale expropriation, but they supported the notion of equal rights, including universal male enfranchisement. Competing with the radicals and moderates were a small but influential number of conservative Republicans who rejected plans for a wholesale reconstruction of Southern society.

  These intra-party divisions were very much on display when Hay returned from Europe. During his brief stay in Washington, he determined that the “Copperheads and Democrats who now form almost the entire support of the President, are continually boring him for offices and accusing Mr. Seward of wickedly keeping in their places the old radical Lincoln appointees.” When he stopped to take a meal at Willard’s, a number of radicals stepped up to shake his hand. They assumed that he had been made a “martyr”—displaced in favor of a conservative Johnson loyalist—and were “a little disappointed when they found I was none.” Hay remained a great personal admirer of Seward, who occupied a lonely ideological space somewhere between the president and his erstwhile Republican allies. At the same time, he agreed with a radical friend who was “disgusted with Johnson. His first words to me were, ‘Everything has changed—You find us all Copperheads . . . You will find the home of virtue has become the haunt of vice.’ [Henry] Adams said, ‘A man asked me the other day if I had been at the White House lately, and I told him no. I want to remember that house as Lincoln left it.’ Everyone I met uttered some such expression. It is startling to see how utterly without friends the President is.” Privately, Hay lamented that Johnson “would ruin the best cause a man ever fought for.”

  Like the vast majority of Republicans, Hay found himself in accordance with ideas that only five years earlier would have been unthinkable: black suffrage, equality under the law, and the subordination of states’ rights to a strong central state. Visiting the Capitol as the House of Representatives debated the military Reconstruction bill, Hay spoke with a conservative congressman who “was really despondent about the course things were taking—deprecating most earnestly the abdication of civil power in favor of the irresponsible military. I thought the case was not hopeless—bad as it was—as Congress could at any time resume the powers it now delegates for a temporary purpose.” Hay acknowledged that it was “un-Anglo-Saxon to perpetuate” martial law on a civilian population and acknowledged the “miserable situation of the South,” but he concluded that military Reconstruction was a “necessary” instrument to secure the hard-fought gains of the Civil War.

  If Hay had learned anything during his tenure as a presidential aide, it was the virtue of cultivating friends in all camps. During his stopover in Washington he accepted two invitations to the White House, finding it “more richly and carefully furnished than in my time.” “The President was very cordial to me,” he noted, but the “crowd not choice . . . scarcely any distinguished people and none squalid. We used to have plenty of both.”

  In Paris, Hay had kept a happy distance from the political wars consuming his native country. In Washington, he found them impossible to escape. Back in Warsaw, he welcomed the opportunity to drop out of the world and took simple delight in “digging some, planting, pruning . . . I find a singular love for that kind of work in myself. It is the sense of justification it gives me for now doing nothing.” To Nicolay, he confided that he was once again “a little at sea about what I shall do. The law has been a magnificent business for the past two years—a little duller now . . . I may go at law after I have rested a while. Everybody, without exception, tells me I am looking very ill. It has discouraged me a little.” There was “poverty everywhere,” he warned. Perhaps regretting his premature abandonment of a well-paid government post, Hay advised Nicolay to “stay where you are for the present . . . You had better not come home till you are kicked out, and our crazy friends in the Senate have legislated all the dead-beats now in office into an eternity of bread and butter.”

  By late summer, Hay was short on money and out of options. When Seward offered him the post of chargé d’affaires in Vienna, at a princely sum of $6,000 per year, he readily snapped up the opportunity. September found him in the seat of the Hapsburg Empire, where he installed himself in “an apartment of three good rooms, kitchen & servants’ room for which I pay 500 florins [approximately $200 per month]” and set immediately upon exploring the city’s music and café scene. “You ought to come see this town,” he told Nicolay. “The asses say, as the asses say everywhere, that it is only unpleasant in summer . . . But if a man be not an ass he knows there never was a town north of the tropics that was not [more] pleasant in summer than in winter.”

  Hay used his central European sinecure as a platform for travel. He traveled west to visit the Nicolays in Paris, then back east, where he “poked around Poland lonesomely enough, but fully compensated by the unusual and peculiar towns I passed through.” In Warsaw, he attended the Polish opera. In Cracow, “the quaintest and most entirely satisfactory little town I ever saw,” he toured the local cathedral and walked through “a regular medieval Jews’ quarter.” In November he was bound for Constantinople, stopping along the way to tour small towns on the Danube, where the weather was “perfect . . . June at its prettiest in Illinois.” “I hate the water worse than any cat,” he reminded Nicolay. “It will be hard to get me on the Mediterranean again. But I feel very anxious to make that Nile trip with you. When do you think of starting? I shall try to take a flight into Italy this winter—I shall never have time to do it thoroughly & then, if I can, next spring, after I leave here, take a rapid run through Spain.” Returning to Vienna, Hay attended an imperial wedding whe
re he “had a small confab with the Kaiser.” With bemusement he reported to John Bigelow that the “Emperor is a great admirer of President Johnson! Or else he thought it would be flattering to tell me so. I grinned horribly a ghastly smile.” Hay remained unimpressed by the trappings and excesses of empire and encouraged by the stirrings of democratic reform that he observed in Austria. “It is curious & instructive to see this people starting off on the awkward walk of political babyhood,” he told Bigelow. “The aristocracy are furious and the Kaiser a little bewildered at every new triumph of the democratic and liberal principle. But I don’t think they can stop the machine now—though they may get their fingers mashed in the cogs . . . If ever, in my green and salad days, I sometimes vaguely doubted, I am safe now. I am a Republican till I die. When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps.”

  In the coming months there was more travel. Nicolay paid Hay a visit in September 1867, then returned the following January with Therena and Helen on a circuitous route back from their family holiday in Italy. Vienna made for a pleasant sojourn, but by mid-1868 Hay once again found himself drifting. He feared that he would become just another civil servant “of prime talents and ambition, sinking year after year into the baleful quicksand of routine.”

  In theory, Hay could easily have remained in his post until the new administration took office the following year. Nicolay also expected his tenure to end at that time. Both men thought poorly of the president, but their fortunes were hitched to Seward, who was due to retire from public life at the close of Johnson’s term. “I have been hoping all along that the status quo would be maintained a while longer,” Nicolay wrote to Hay that summer, “so that we might take that boat ride up the Nile next winter. Now I suppose we shall have to rub off the slate.” By late summer, Hay had resigned his post, stopping only to take a last whirl through Paris and London, where he attended a public reading by Charles Dickens, before sailing home. Once again, he set his sights on a lucrative career in law or business.

  Matters did not go as well as planned. By December he was back in Washington, in “peaceful pursuit of a fat office.” Seward, now a lame duck, agreed to keep an eye out for another suitable post and “will wrestle with Andy for anything that turns up.” Hay advised Nicolay to “stick it out at Paris as late as possible . . . [D]on’t you come home before the 1st of March or so. It takes a month to do anything here and you can’t afford to get stale before the inauguration.” President-elect Ulysses S. Grant, though a Republican, was “as close-mouthed as ever,” and it was impossible to say whether their friends would be in a position to help them attain meaningful and remunerative government posts, if they opted to remain in public service. To pick up extra money, Hay began selling poems and sketches to mass-market magazines. He also tried his hand on the lecture circuit, giving a paid talk in Buffalo titled “The Progress of Democracy in Europe.” Reviewing the slow but steady march of anti-imperial politics, from the French Revolution through the Austro-Prussian War, he was “severe upon Louis Napoleon,” according to a reviewer. “He doesn’t like Bismarck.” But he was, on balance, “hopeful for Democracy in Europe.”

  In the fall of 1869, Hay set sail for Madrid, where his friends managed to secure his appointment as secretary of the legation. The timing was near perfect. A year earlier, Queen Isabella II had been deposed in Spain’s Glorious Revolution, an event soon followed by the establishment of a new constitution granting universal male suffrage and broader civil liberties. “I have determined, malgré my better judgment, to go to Spain for a little while,” he informed Bigelow. “I have read and thought a good deal about revolutions, and I cannot resist an opportunity so favorable of lifting the very pot lid and seeing the ‘hellbroth seethe and bubble.’” From his perch in Madrid, Hay contributed a series of articles to the Atlantic Monthly, chronicling the folkways and habits of Spanish society. Later bundled into a book titled Castilian Days, his essays also ruminated on the many structural challenges to Spanish democracy, including the “twin despotism of the Church and the king” and, more generally, the country’s “blind reverence for things that have been.” Despite these historical obstacles, Hay detected a “new and beneficent spirit” in Spanish politics. “The day that is coming is not to be tranquil and cloudless. The transformations of systems are not accomplished like those of the pantomimes. There will be bloodshed and treasons and failures enough to discourage and appall the faint-hearted. But the current cannot be turned backward.” In a final chapter titled “Necessity of the Republic,” Hay concluded that “the condition of the world has changed greatly. We are nearing the close of the nineteenth century. The whole world, bound together . . . by telegraphs and railways, is moving forward along the line of nations to larger and ampler liberty. No junta of prominent gentlemen can come together and amiably arrange a programme for a nation, in opposition to this universal tendency.” Democratic republics would ebb and flow, but their general progress “cannot well be checked. The people have the right to govern themselves, even if they do it ill.”

  Helen Nicolay later claimed that “every month that my father and John Hay spent in Europe increased their belief that, whatever its faults, the American system of government was the best yet devised.” Their intense chauvinism was a product of experience. Years earlier, as he peered out his office window, gazing through a spyglass at the navy ships steaming up the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln told them that the “central idea pervading” the Civil War was “the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity.” In 1863 they stood near his side in Gettysburg when he promised a grieving nation that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” They saw young men willingly lay down their lives and fortunes in defense of that same proposition, and former slaves don army uniforms to achieve their right to personhood and citizenship. The contrast between America and Europe was too sharp to go unobserved. Ever more the pessimist, Nicolay did not share Hay’s faith in the steady, forward progress of European democracy. “The heap will smoulder for perhaps a quarter of a century longer,” he predicted, “and allied King-craft and Priestcraft is still the ‘worm that dieth not.’” Upon returning to the United States, he went so far as to secure proof of his American citizenship from a federal court in Illinois. “After four years in Paris,” Helen later explained, “he had reached the conclusion that American citizenship was something very precious, to be surrounded by every possible safeguard.”

  Hay remained in Spain for less than a year. “I am glad I committed the folly of coming,” he admitted to Nicolay. “I have seen a great deal and learned something. I speak the language well enough to be understood and not well enough to be taken for a . . . Spaniard—a Dieu ne plaise.” Three plum assignments in the diplomatic corps in five years had afforded Hay opportunities that few Americans of his generation could claim. He had mastered three languages, traveled widely throughout Europe, and established relationships with leading men on the Continent. His grasp of foreign affairs was first-class. But he felt at sea. “I was never so thoroughly out of the world before,” he told John Bigelow.

  That fall, John Hay came home. He was thirty-two years old, with more than half a lifetime still ahead of him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Pike County Balladeer

  The Nicolays understood that their tenure in Paris would likely draw to a close with William Seward’s departure from the State Department. Though George made lukewarm overtures to friends in the Senate, it became clear in the months between Ulysses S. Grant’s election and his inauguration that the new administration intended to redistribute plum jobs to a growing list of friends and petitioners. The Paris consulate was one such prize. Shortly before Lincoln’s death, George had bought a small farm in Kansas; his brother Jacob had tended the land in his absence. “Should the worse come to the worst,” he told Hay, “and my caput officium (Is that good Latin?) roll in the dust, I would retire with dignity to Dragoon Creek, and inscribe myself for the
horticultural prize at the State Fair.” George never did settle there, though his daughter was convinced that “during the years the deed remained in my father’s name, its ownership gave him a comfortable assurance that if all other plans went awry, he could settle down on Dragoon Creek and live in comfort, if not in luxury.”

  Returning to the United States in the spring of 1869, George and Therena lived a peripatetic existence for the next three years. They passed their winters at a rickety old mansion in Florida, where both husband and wife could hope to restore their chronically unsteady health. Most summers they sojourned in New Hampshire, riding horses, visiting the seashore with their daughter, and hiking through the White Mountains. Missing home, in 1871 they bought a small farm outside Springfield, where they passed the autumn and spring months. George let the productive parts of the land to a neighbor and focused on restoring and landscaping the gardens.