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

by Joshua Zeitz

  Writing as the unnamed author of The Bread-Winners, Hay defended his novel’s premise. His critics insisted “on the right of the workingman to sell his labor at the best price,” but “trade-unionism is the very negation of that right. The inner circle of petty tyrants who govern the trade-unions expressly forbid the working-man to make his own bargain with his employer; his boys may become thieves and vagabonds, his girls may take to the streets, but they shall not learn his trade, or any other honest trade, without the consent of the union.” Hay deplored the “murder, arson and rapine” that befell midwestern cities during the 1877 strike wave and, more recently, the “foolish” decision of several thousand telegraph operators to “give up their means of livelihood at the dictation of a few conspirators, whose vanity and arrogance had blinded them to the plainest considerations of common sense.” The author of The Bread-Winners was no “aristocrat, or snob.” He was himself a “working man, with a lineage of decent working men.” He had “been accustomed to earning my own living all my life with rare and brief holidays. I have always been in intimate personal relations with artisans and with men engaged in trade.” Viewing his own success as the epitome of free labor—never mind that his father-in-law’s industry enjoyed heavy public subsidies and favors—Hay bitterly resented the censure of opponents who would introduce into the political economy artificial controls and barriers to natural progress.

  As he grew into middle age and wealth, Hay settled comfortably into a social and political conservatism that may seem at first blush inconsistent with his earlier politics. But for many men of his generation, the road from antislavery conviction to anti-union, pro-business principles was linear and natural. He still spoke passionately in favor of the social and political revolution wrought by the Civil War. Stumping for the Republican state ticket in Royalton, Ohio, in 1879, he excoriated Southern Democrats for trampling on the civil rights of black freedmen. “We think we have done all that men could be asked to do in the way of reconciliation,” he intoned. “With not a traitor hanged or punished for his treason; with no restraints even upon the most persistent slack-jaw in the land . . . And now in addition they ask us to consent to sit by in silence and smile approval while they tear from the statute book every vestige of those righteous laws, by which we tried to secure the fruits of freedom and nationality after the terrible civil war into which the rebellion of Democrats had forced us.” Almost fifteen years after the war ended, Republicans still perennially waved the bloody flag to rally their voters to their cause. But Hay’s perorations were rooted in sincere belief. “Which party elected Abraham Lincoln?” he asked the Republican faithful. “Which party opposed, vilified and killed him? Which party freed the slaves? Which built the Pacific Railroad? Which saved the Union and the honor of the flag? Which sustained the financial integrity of the nation, and made its credit the best in the world?” Democrats were the party of Vallandigham and Buchanan. Theirs was a “discredited and soiled record.” Republicans kept faith with the “patriots and martyrs of the great war.” Their past was “luminous with the story of beneficent achievements,” their “future . . . as bright with promise as the radiance of the morning stars.” They had saved the country from slavery and disunion and built the framework for a century of prosperity. All of which they did in the name of free labor. Over the next decade, Hay would celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s common origins and mystical bond with millions of ordinary Northern farmers, soldiers, and citizens. He remained, in theory, a committed republican. For John Hay, as for so many men of his generation, the path from radicalism to conservatism was purely semantic. The world had changed; they had not.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 14

  A Model for All the Good Little Boys to Follow

  Hours after his father’s death on April 15, 1865, Robert Todd Lincoln sent an urgent telegram to David Davis, a longtime family friend whom the president had appointed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time of the assassination, Davis was in Chicago, presiding over a federal circuit court. “Please come to Washington at once to take charge of my father’s affairs,” Robert brusquely instructed. “Answer.” Davis made haste for the capital, where he immediately began placing the slain president’s financial and personal matters in order. Pausing only to accompany the funeral train to Baltimore, he circled back to Washington, where he was “busy getting [Lincoln’s] papers ready to take to Illinois. They will be ready today, I hope, and I will return direct to Chicago tomorrow. I am tired, very tired and worn out with excitement, and I want to get with my loved ones for a day. I shall accompany the remains from Chicago to Springfield.” Davis was too optimistic. Lincoln’s official White House correspondence comprised more than eighteen thousand documents, sprawled across roughly forty-two thousand individual pieces of paper. Most of these items were letters and telegrams written by other people to the president, but dispersed among the dozens of boxes were copies of thousands of Lincoln’s outgoing letters and telegrams, memorandums, congressional reports, and speeches. Organizing and transporting the papers proved a herculean task. Following the burial in Springfield, Nicolay and Hay returned to Washington, where they spent several weeks arranging the papers for shipment to Illinois. The task delayed their arrival in Paris by well over a month. In Bloomington, Davis deposited the Lincoln archives in a bank vault. “At some time within the next three or four years,” Robert informed a correspondent, “I propose, in conjunction with the secretaries and one or two friends of my Father on whose judgment I rely, to open the boxes and glean out what is useless and to classify the remainder in some sort. No one will have access to them before that time.”

  In the half dozen years that followed, the Lincoln papers remained sealed behind closed doors. When Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the prestigious North American Review, inquired through an intermediary whether he might have use of the archive to write a definitive biography of Lincoln, Robert politely demurred. William Herndon, who was planning his own Lincoln biography, also asked for access. Robert insisted that he had “not any letters which could be of any interest whatever to you or anyone.” With the son now single-mindedly devoted to his fledgling law practice in Chicago, and the secretaries away in Europe, the task of remembering Lincoln fell by default to individuals without access to the official recordings of his administration.

  The first substantive attempt at memorializing Lincoln fell to George Bancroft, the unofficial dean of the American historical enterprise, whom Congress invited to deliver a commemorative tribute in early 1866. A Democrat who had served in James Polk’s cabinet, Bancroft was an unusual choice to eulogize the first Republican president. The two men were not well acquainted, and though a unionist, Bancroft cast a critical eye on Lincoln’s abilities. Speaking from the well of the House for more than two and a half hours, the gray-haired relic delivered a stem-winder packed with dense and often tangential references to American and British history. He offered little background beyond a stock biographical sketch of the sixteenth president, though he managed to issue a cool, outwardly polite rebuke of Lincoln’s administrative skills and intellectual capacity for high office. The speech was well received by Bancroft’s circle of literary friends, but most of Lincoln’s close acquaintances, and a great many Republicans, were appalled. From Paris, John Hay fumed that “Bancroft’s address was a disgraceful exhibition of ignorance and prejudice. His effeminate nature shrinks instinctively from the contact of a great reality like Lincoln’s character.” The former secretary was particularly offended that Bancroft, who as a young man had followed up his Harvard degree with course work at the great German universities at Berlin, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, seemed fundamentally to underestimate Lincoln’s native genius. It was an error he had seen committed time and again during the war, by better-educated but lesser men who remained stubbornly ignorant of the president’s inner reserve of intelligence and strength. That same intellectual elite that he once aspired to join, Hay now scorned as unmanly and unknowing. “I b
elieve Lincoln is well understood by the people,” he told Herndon. “Miss Nancy Bancroft and the rest of that patent-leather kid-glove set know no more of him than an owl does of a comet blazing into his blinking eyes.” A fervent partisan, he considered Lincoln to be “Republicanism incarnate, with all its faults and its virtues. As, in spite of some evidences, Republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.”

  Herndon likely shared Hay’s contempt for George Bancroft, though for reasons of his own. Lincoln’s friend and law partner of sixteen years, Herndon was a man of stark contradictions. Swept up by the reform wave that cut a path through much of the antebellum North, he was a committed abolitionist and temperance man, though also a lifelong alcoholic who fell off the wagon repeatedly and to great personal detriment. Better educated and more widely read than his famous partner, he prided himself on being Lincoln’s intellectual mentor but deferred to the elder man on almost every matter concerning business and politics. Less distracted and more workmanlike than the slain president, he kept their partnership afloat during Lincoln’s long absences on the campaign trail but proved inept at earning a living after his death. Yet for all of his faults and inconsistencies, Herndon understood Lincoln intimately and frowned upon the popular impulse to apotheosize the man whom he had known in the flesh and blood. He may have agreed with Hay that the “patent-leather kid-glove” crowd fundamentally misunderstood Lincoln, but he was equally unforgiving of those who sought to make Lincoln larger in death than he was in life. “The age of blind hero worship, thank God, has gone,” he told the Illinois congressman Isaac Arnold, “and the worship of truth is coming. My duty is to truth, man, and God. My mind is made up, and nothing but facts, experiences run and purified through reason, shall ever change my course.”

  In the weeks following Lincoln’s death, Herndon found himself inundated by “enquires & interrogations by thousands of visitors as to Lincoln.” True to his partner’s memory, he attempted to answer them all and was soon compelled to “write dozens of letters weekly.” He had been reduced to being “simply a talker—a babbler.” As he patiently supplied the facts of Lincoln’s life to all those who sought out his counsel, Herndon detected a common tendency to turn Lincoln into a divine figure.

  No biographer was more guilty of this historical mischief than Josiah Holland, the deeply pious editor of the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, who paid Herndon a visit in May 1865. Though Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln was not published until the following year, Herndon may have detected strains of revisionism in his conversations with the author. Holland ultimately portrayed Lincoln as an “eminently Christian president”—the “basis of an ideal man.” Relying on the stilted memories of Newton Bateman, a state official who occupied the office next door to Lincoln and Nicolay during the fall campaign in 1860, the author introduced Lincoln as a Bible-quoting evangelical whose hatred of slavery flowed from an eschatological belief that “the day of wrath was at hand.” “I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it and Christ is God,” he imaginatively quoted the future president. Here was the model of a righteous man. Repudiating the late president’s reputation for unlearned, rustic charm, Holland deemed it a “great misfortune . . . that he was introduced to the nation as pre-eminently a rail-splitter.” “It took years for the country to learn that Mr. Lincoln was not a boor.” The book reinvented Lincoln from whole cloth, but the reading public eagerly bought up 100,000 copies, making it an overnight bestseller.

  Joining Holland in the larger endeavor to apotheosize the late president were a number of early biographers. The New York Times editor Henry Raymond (The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln), the portrait artist Francis Carpenter (Six Months at the White House), the congressman Isaac Arnold (The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery)—all sought to enshrine Lincoln in the pantheon of the gods.

  Herndon determined to strike a preemptive blow against the purveyors of fiction and religious fantasy. He complained that “the stories we hear floating around are more or less untrue in part or as a whole.” Lincoln “was not God—was man,” he insisted. “He was not perfect—had some defects & a few positive faults: [but] he was a good man—an honest man.” In the late spring of 1865, just weeks after the assassination, Herndon traveled to Petersburg, Illinois, the county seat of Menard that housed many former residents of New Salem, the now-defunct river town where Abraham Lincoln first struck out on his own in the early 1830s. There, Herndon was amazed to encounter dozens of gray-haired old-timers who had known the future president when he was but an awkward, gangly young man dressed in pants that barely reached his ankles and crude, homespun shirt and shoes. Uncle Jimmie Short. Hardin Bale. N. W. Branson. Elizabeth Abell. Mentor Graham. All were still alive and eager to share their reminiscences of young Abraham Lincoln. “I have been with the people,” Herndon reported excitedly, “ate with them—slept with them, & thought with them—cried with them too. From such an investigation—from records—from friends—old deeds & surveys &c. &c. I am satisfied, in Connection with my own knowled[ge] of Mr. L . . . that Mr. L’s whole early life remains to be written.”

  Herndon was right. Most of the familiar personalities and episodes that make up the full body of early “Lincolniana” were still wholly unknown to most Americans. The pioneer boy who learned to write and cipher on the back of a shovel. The teenager who first encountered the barbarism of slavery while driving a barge full of goods down the Mississippi River. The New Salem postmaster who franked his neighbors’ letters. The assistant Sangamon County surveyor who mapped out their farms. The storekeeper who walked miles to deliver money to a customer whom he accidentally shortchanged. The wrestling match with the Clary’s Grove boys. The Black Hawk War. The first run for political office. The more that Herndon learned, the hungrier he grew for new stories and new leads. Over the following two years, he all but gave up his law practice, devoting himself entirely to the Lincoln enterprise. He scoured county courthouses for records of cases that Lincoln tried both before and during their partnership. He tracked down Lincoln’s cousins and interviewed them. He placed newspaper ads throughout Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois and initiated correspondence with dozens of informants who responded to his requests for intelligence on the slain president’s formative years. He even visited Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, and recorded her teary-eyed reminiscences of Abe, “the best boy I ever saw.” “I did not want Abe . . . elected,” she mournfully told Herndon, “—felt in my heart that something would happen [to] him.” At the end of their emotional talk, Sarah gripped Herndon’s hands and, sobbing lightly, predicted that “I shall never see you again—and if you see Mrs. Abm Lincoln & family tell them I send them my best & tenderest love—Goodby my good son’s friend—farewell.” The entire enterprise demanded patience and diligence. Some informants, like George Spears, honestly conceded that “at that time I had no idea of his ever being President therefore I did not notice his course as close as I should have.” Others remembered all too well—so much so that Herndon discounted their recollections as tall tales. The historical profession was still young in 1865, and Herndon had no formal training in the nascent practice of oral history. But he was a skilled attorney with years of experience in deposing and cross-examining witnesses. With time, he believed that he could separate the wheat from the chaff to uncover the real story of Abraham Lincoln.

  The Lincoln family took a cautious view of Herndon’s efforts but initially thought it safer to engage rather than ignore him. Robert, who had never been especially close to his father, thought little of Herndon and coolly but politely refused his requests for information, insisting that “even when I differ with anyone in his views of my father’s character, &c. unless it were something flagrantly wrong, I would not discuss the subject.” Mary’s relationship with her husband’s former partner was toxic, and had been for many years. The two antagonists first met in 1837, when Mary was a youn
g Southern belle, recently moved from Kentucky to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Springfield. At a fete thrown by Colonel Robert Allen, Herndon—then a young man just back from college—asked Mary to dance. As they locked arms, he offered the somewhat awkward compliment that she “seemed to glide through the waltz with the ease of a serpent.” Thin-skinned in the extreme, Mary took umbrage at being likened to a snake, and so began a mutual enmity that lasted until her death. Never in the sixteen years that he worked alongside his partner did Herndon or his wife receive a dinner invitation to the Lincoln household. When Mary visited the law office, she and Herndon politely ignored each other. Predictably, during his one and only visit to the White House, the first lady snubbed him.

  Though their relationship had long been a poisoned well, Mary understood that Herndon could not easily be ignored. Between the fall of 1865 and the winter of 1866, he had delivered several well-received lectures on Lincoln that garnered admiring reviews in the national press. Papers as far and wide as the Chicago Tribune, the Missouri Democrat, the New York Times, and the Washington Chronicle reprinted excerpts of his addresses and singled out Herndon as the nation’s greatest authority on Lincoln. He alone seemed capable of locating the slain president’s central humanity, without investing him with divine qualities. Some of what he revealed to his audience and readership must have rankled the family’s nerves. Lincoln, he proposed, “was an exceedingly ambitious man—a man totally swallowed up in his ambitions.” He had “general greed for office . . . then Mr. Lincoln preferred Abm Lincoln to any body else.” He also revealed that “Mr. Lincoln read less . . . than any man in America.” Yet Herndon also insisted that “Mr. Lincoln thought more than any man in America.” He “led mankind by a profound policy,” “used no tricks—no base arts—committed no frauds to accomplish his ends,” though he “was not always—to all persons & at all times absolutely Honest.” His mother’s hostility notwithstanding, Robert privately acknowledged that he “saw nothing . . . at which to take umbrage” after skimming the first lecture.