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

by Joshua Zeitz

  The Lincoln whom Hay and Nicolay introduced to the reading public was a deft operator. He exerted control “daily and hourly” over “the vast machinery of command and coordination in Cabinet, Congress, army, navy, and the hosts of national politics. To still the quarrels of factions, to allay the jealousies of statesmen, to compose the rivalries of generals, to soothe the vanity of officials, to prompt the laggard, to curb the ardent, to sustain the faltering, was a substratum of daily routine underlying the great events of campaigns, battles, and high questions of state.” When the military high command failed to deliver victory, the president schooled himself in the art of battle, and “it is safe to say that no general in the army studied his maps and scanned his telegrams with half the industry—and, it may be added, with half the intelligence—which Mr. Lincoln gave to his.” Unlike many of his generals, the president displayed a “larger comprehension of popular forces” and understood that “a free people . . . can stand reverses and disappointments; they are capable of making great exertions and great sacrifices. The one thing that they cannot endure is inaction on the part of their rulers.” Yet Lincoln was no mere compass of public sentiment, nor a temporizing moderate. Unlike his conservative and radical critics, he “sagaciously” directed and “control[led] the average public sentiment of the country.” He was, in the eyes of his secretaries, the most skilled executive ever to have lived in the White House.

  Shortly before his death, John Hay, then secretary of state, urged Congress to construct a national monument to Lincoln on the still-undeveloped Potomac Flats site at the western edge of the Mall. Perched on high land, in direct view of the Capitol, the memorial would occupy a space unto itself. “Lincoln of all Americans next to Washington deserves this space of honor,” he argued. “He was of the Immortals. You must not approach too close to the Immortals. His monument should stand alone, remote from the common habitations of man, apart from the business and turmoil of the city; isolated, distinguished, and serene. Of all the sites, this one near the Potomac is most suited to the purpose.” The Lincoln Memorial Lincoln whose creation owed so much to Nicolay and Hay would seem a plainly intuitive rendering to later generations. But at the time of his first introduction, he was an altogether new and novel invention. In his own time, Lincoln had been a tremendously popular, though also controversial, figure, loved by a comfortable majority of the electorate, scorned by a solid minority, and consistently underestimated by the political chattering class up to the day of his murder. After his death, friend and foe alike tried to humanize the man, in ways that often vulgarized his legacy. Others, like Charles Francis Adams and the comte de Paris, continued to see his political ascent as a mistake of fortune and his success as president the result of good counsel from a strong cabinet. Nicolay and Hay blasted the foundations of this narrative and in its place created a lasting image. The man on the $5 bill later became the abridgment of ten volumes and fifteen years of labor.

  CHAPTER 17

  Lincolniana

  By and large, John Hay was pleased with the reception of the Lincoln biography. “They send me an occasional column of abuse from some friend of McClellan or Chase and I can only wonder at the merciful Providence which keeps my critics away from the weak joints in my armor,” he told Henry Adams in 1889, toward the end of the serial run. “Laws-a-mercy! If I had the criticizing of that book, what a skinning I could give it!” To Robert Lincoln, Hay reported with relief that “we are nearly at the end of our life-long task and I hope you will think your father’s fame has not suffered any wrong at our hands.” “There will be ten volumes,” he explained. “It will be dedicated to you. Now, in very fact, the fifteen-year-long task was drawing to a close.” Hay was certain that in the end analysis, he and Nicolay had placed “the truth before the country . . . Year after year of study has shown me more clearly than ever how infinitely greater your father was than anybody about him, greater than ever we imagined while he lived. There is nothing to explain or apologize for from beginning to end. He is the one unapproachably great figure of a great epoch.”

  Reviews of the massive Nicolay-Hay work were mixed. Some reviewers were baffled by its length and scope, complaining that Lincoln ultimately played but a small part in his own biography. A critic for Life humorously assured readers that “the picture of the Pharaohs in the last Century must not be mistaken for illustrations in the ‘Life of Lincoln.’ The authors of that exhaustive biography passed the Pharaohs several numbers back, and are understood to be well along in their retrospective summary of the Middle Ages.” Others groused that the volumes were too “damn partisan,” as the Irish American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens complained to Richard Gilder over a meal at New York’s Century Club. There was too much “pitching in, calling names, etc.” for his taste. Even a friendly newspaper remarked that “no one will suspect the writers of being lukewarm Republicans.” Such criticism might have stung Nicolay, but Hay showed little compunction in private about confessing to his political bias. The book, he conceded, was a “ponderous Republican history.” Some critics disputed particular details or interpretations in the work. Alexander McClure, an aging Pennsylvania editor, claimed that Lincoln had told him of his intention to substitute Andrew Johnson for the incumbent vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, just prior to the 1864 convention. Relying on their diaries, memorandums, and letters, the secretaries insisted that, on the contrary, the president had maintained absolute neutrality in the matter, though he quietly made it known that he had no objections to another four-year term for Hamlin. “The whole thing is growing very ridiculous,” Hay moaned. “Every old deadbeat politician in the country is coming forward to protest that he was the depository of Lincoln’s inmost secrets and the engineer of his campaigns.” (In 1903, toward the twilight of his life, Hay told Charles Francis Adams Jr.—Henry’s older brother—that McClure “never had two hours’ conversation in his life” with Lincoln.)

  Some readers were also uncertain how to classify the Nicolay-Hay volumes. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, maintained that “these gentlemen did not write history. They were actors in many of the scenes they described, and therefore, could not be historians. They have prepared invaluable materials for the subsequent historian, and done an admirable piece of literary work: but I submit that they have not written history.”

  Others were generous in their praise. Writing from France, the American historian James Ford Rhodes sent a heartfelt “word of congratulation . . . I expect that your book will demolish the modern day theory that an author cannot write modern history impartially.” William Dean Howells, the dean of American literature who, as a young man, had written Lincoln’s campaign biography in 1860, called it “not only . . . the most important work yet accomplished in American history” but also “one of the noblest achievements of literary art.” By far, the critic whose opinion held the greatest sway with the authors was Bob Lincoln, and he was “much pleased . . . with the results of your long work,” he told Hay. “It is what I hoped it would be.” “Many people speak to me & confirm my own opinion of it as a work in every way excellent—not only sustaining but elevating my father’s place in History,” he assured his friend of three decades. “I shall never cease to be glad that the places you & Nicolay held near him & in his confidence were filled by you & not by others.”

  Hefty and expensive, Abraham Lincoln: A History sold only seven thousand copies, but for every person who bought the ten-volume collection, fifty others read extensive excerpts in its serial run. In 1902, the Century published a one-volume abridgment of the work; it quickly sold thirty-five thousand copies, a robust number in its day. But more important than sales was the book’s intellectual reach. For at least half a century, the Nicolay-Hay volumes formed the basis of all major scholarship on Lincoln.

  Roughly around the time that the Nicolay-Hay volumes appeared in book form, William Herndon and a co-author, Jesse Weik, tried to shop around their long-delayed edition of Herndon’s Lincoln, the culmination of a quarter centu
ry of research and meditation. The response was not encouraging. Charles L. Webster & Co., Mark Twain’s publishing house, turned them down, explaining that “Life of Lincoln, by General Hay and Mr. Nicolay, will give the public all that they wish to know of Lincoln, just at the present.” Initially, Elder Publishing, a little-known entity, expressed interest, though its executives worried about the “risk we run in going into competition with the Century.” In the end, they opted not to take the manuscript, as most of its important content had been revealed years before in Ward Hill Lamon’s work.

  Horace White, a journalist who covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a young man and who later developed a close relationship with the president, remarked that the “most striking fact of our time, of a psychological kind, is the growth of Lincoln’s fame since the earth closed over his remains.” In the decades following the publication of Abraham Lincoln: A History, this fascination morphed into the growing field of Lincolniana. Collectors scoured the countryside for rails that Lincoln might or might not have split; furniture that once resided in his law office and Springfield residence; his family Bible; the rocking chair he sat in at Ford’s Theatre on the night of his murder; his autograph book; his checkbook; his stovepipe hat. Under pressure to indulge the public interest, and increasingly disconnected from his birthplace, Robert donated the house at Eighth and Jackson to the state of Illinois, where Osborn Oldroyd, one of the premier collectors of Lincolniana, had established an exhaustive and not altogether tasteful display of the slain president’s personal effects. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of visitors gazed at a special installation of Lincolniana. No item was too small to mesmerize. Or too sacred. In 1890, enthusiasts raised money to have Ann Rutledge’s body exhumed and reinterred in a nearby cemetery overlooking the Sangamon River. In place of a simple stone marker, they raised an imposing granite monument, later inscribed with the poet Edgar Lee Masters’s verse in her honor.

  One reason the field so quickly devolved into a collector’s game was that there was little else scholars could hope to accomplish for the immediate time. Nicolay and Hay published Lincoln’s Complete Works in 1894, comprising 1,736 of the president’s speeches, state papers, and letters. But they had already analyzed and discussed the most important of these documents in their larger biographical work. The great body of Lincoln’s manuscript collection, including tens of thousands of letters and communications sent to him—many containing valuable margin notes that the president scribbled in his own hand—remained off-limits, depriving Civil War historians of the same context and wide-angle view that Nicolay and Hay had enjoyed. In 1894, Nicolay opened his home at 212 B Street SE to a reporter for the New York World, who described the former secretary’s “workroom, with its great desk and many bookcases,” as “a place in which the present is not known. There are gathered practically all the Lincoln manuscripts in existence. Some of them are owned by Mr. Nicolay, most of them are the property of the Lincoln family.” Nicolay had moved the papers to the row house in 1887, shortly after relinquishing the marshal’s post at the Supreme Court. There they remained until his death in 1901, when John Hay arranged for their temporary storage at the State Department. From there, they reverted to Robert’s custody. Increasingly reclusive, the presidential son kept them near his person at all times, arranging for their movement between his mansion in Washington and his vacation home in Vermont whenever he relocated for a season. Many scholars appealed for access, but none succeeded in prying open the iron door.

  Not everyone was willing to concede the last word to Nicolay and Hay. In 1895, Ida Tarbell, a young writer for McClure’s Magazine, accepted an assignment to hunt down additional Lincoln materials and photographs and to edit them for a prospective documentary series. Noah Brooks assumed that “the stories were all told,” as the number of men and women who knew the late president was fast diminishing with the passage of time. Tarbell set out to prove him wrong. At first, it was hard going. Nicolay rebuffed her request for assistance; according to Tarbell, he huffed, “You are invading my field. You write a popular Life of Lincoln, and you do so much to decrease the value of my property.” (The language does not sound like him, but the tone does.) Robert was more polite but equally unhelpful. “Impossible,” he told her, when she requested access to his father’s papers. “I won’t allow anybody to see them. There is nothing of my father’s there, that is of value—Nicolay and Hay have published everything; but there are many letters to him which if published now would pain, possibly discredit able and useful men still living.” As a peace offering, Robert gave her a previously unpublished daguerreotype taken sometime around his father’s term in Congress. Its publication sparked enormous interest in the larger series. Though the aging experts scoffed at her labors—Henry Whitney, a Lincoln confidant, claimed that she “sponged more or less Lincoln afflatus,” while Richard Gilder said with a laugh that S. S. McClure had “got a girl to write a Life of Lincoln”—Tarbell proved a deft investigator. She hired a team of researchers, placed advertisements soliciting new documents in newspapers throughout the country, and rummaged through courthouses, attics, and family collections. The result was a steady stream of speeches, legal documents, telegrams, and letters—roughly 275 in number—that Nicolay and Hay never knew existed. Initially a skeptic, Robert Todd Lincoln readily acknowledged that Tarbell’s series, ultimately aggregated in a two-volume book, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, was “an indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”

  “Adjunct” was the operative word. While Tarbell contributed new material on Lincoln’s childhood and early adult years, disproving or qualifying many of William Herndon’s most controversial claims, she offered little original insight into his public career in the 1850s and 1860s. Without access to Lincoln’s manuscript collection, neither she nor those who followed in her footsteps could hope to break much new ground. Still, for several decades, others tried. Carl Sandburg, the famed poet, earned wide acclaim and financial success for his two-pronged work: Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939). The first volume drew liberally on earlier writers, including Herndon, Lamon, and Tarbell, and offered a predictably earthy rendering of the sixteenth president. Claiming no formal historical training, Sandburg used his sources uncritically, giving credence to many anecdotes and remembrances that scholars then and since dismissed as non-credible. This shortcoming was particularly evident in his first volume. But his lyricism gripped the imagination of readers. “Out of the pages of this book emerges no heroic figure, no epic character, no titan towering above puny men,” wrote the critic Harry Hansen. “This is the book of the railsplitter, of the country storekeeper, the young lawyer, the frontier advocate, the practical backwoods politician.” In The War Years, a four-volume affair that Stephen Vincent Benét called “a mountain range of a book,” Sandburg was more attentive to scholarly accuracy, even submitting portions of the manuscript to academic historians so he could vet his work for inaccuracies. But the much-acclaimed war volumes suffered the same credulous approach to sourcing. James G. Randall, who reviewed The War Years for the American Historical Review, admitted privately to a friend, “I really deal too leniently with [Sandburg]. There seems to be a tendency, almost a conspiracy, among reviewers to do this.”

  By the time Sandburg completed his study, the body of known Lincoln documents had grown by roughly one-third since the Complete Works appeared in 1894. But most of the new discoveries only refocused popular attention on the president’s formative years. By World War II, Nicolay and Hay, who had focused almost singularly on fashioning an image of Lincoln’s public career from the 1850s onward, continued to dominate the field.