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

by Joshua Zeitz

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  If Nicolay and Hay prevailed in their effort to define the meaning of Abraham Lincoln’s public career, and particularly his presidency, their contribution to the historiography of the Civil War fared less consistently. Initially, Abraham Lincoln: A History met with approval from most scholars of American life. Their tone of “aggressive Northernism” ran against the popular current of sectional reunion, but professional historians and political scientists largely concurred with Nicolay and Hay’s argument that slavery was the driving cause of the war. James Ford Rhodes, the unofficial dean of the American historical profession, was a Bourbon Democrat who held African Americans and radical Republicans in low regard; he nevertheless asserted that “the question may be isolated by the incontrovertible statement that if the negro had never been brought to America, our Civil War could not have occurred.” The clash between “opposing moral and social forces” created an “inevitable” war between slave states and free states. Edward Channing, a Harvard professor who held one of the first doctorates in American history, similarly determined that while the “war was not begun to secure the destruction of slavery,” fundamentally, “slavery was at the bottom of the social and material distinctions which separated the country into two irreconcilable sections.” The very notion that slavery rendered the North and the South “irreconcilable” traced its roots to William Seward’s famous remark in 1858 that there was an “irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,” to wit, the slave South and the free-labor North. This assumption informed almost all serious writing on the Civil War through the early twentieth century, including the Nicolay-Hay volumes.

  In the early twentieth century, a new generation of scholars began to question the idea that the war had been an inevitable clash between two irreconcilable civilizations. Instead, slavery became an aggravating factor but not a central cause of intersectional conflict. This shift in interpretation owed partly to the success of Southern writers in enshrining the romance of reunion in the popular consciousness, partly to the hardening of racial sensibilities in the decades following the Civil War, and partly to the advent of new scientific approaches to historical inquiry. As historians learned to sift through new types of evidence and plucked emerging theoretical frameworks from other fields in the social sciences, they began to search out interpretive patterns that may have eluded their predecessors. Charles Beard, the intellectual father of the “progressive” school of American history, viewed the war as a result of “inherent antagonisms” between an urban and industrializing North and an agrarian South. Inasmuch as the Southern economy was deeply reliant on slavery, the institution was a cause of the great conflict, but more central to the war were competing legal and economic interests that led to a “transfer of the issues from the forum to the field.” The Civil War and Reconstruction were the “Second American Revolution,” Beard claimed, not because they obliterated slavery, but because they saw the forces of industrial capitalism vanquish and effectively colonize the agrarian South. In his thinking, Beard was deeply influenced by social scientists who applied a Marxist lens to the examination of past events, though by no means did Beard or his fellow progressives regard themselves as Marxists. Rather, they searched for discontinuities associated with economic development and change, whereas previous scholars, including Nicolay and Hay, tended to emphasize the slow and evolutionary nature of history. Products of their own social context, progressive historians viewed the past through the lens of conflict between urban and rural—industrial and agrarian—interests.

  Progressive historiography dominated university life in the opening decades of the new century and subjected almost every major phenomenon in American history—from colonial-era politics and the framing of the Constitution to Jacksonian-era politics and the Civil War itself—to an analysis that favored economic motivation as a driver of cause and action. Although they relegated slavery to a supporting role in provoking the Civil War, progressive historians did not completely overturn prevailing interpretations of the conflict. Slavery was still at the heart of the problem, but the problem was now economic rather than moral in nature.

  In the 1920s, many of the nation’s best and brightest scholars began to embrace an alternative theory of Civil War causality. Rather than view the war as an inevitable conflict between two incompatible civilizations, they came to believe that it had been an entirely avoidable, repressible conflict. Slavery, according to Frank L. Owsley, a Southern-born scholar who spent most of his career at Vanderbilt, was a “red herring” that Northerners had long used to deflect attention from the aggressive expansionism of their region’s industrial capital complex. Owsley was more avowedly in sympathy with the Confederacy than most revisionists, but as a pathbreaking practitioner of emerging research methodologies, he cast wide influence in the field. Equally prominent was the Iowa-born Avery Craven, the most powerful proponent of this new tendency in Civil War–era historiography. Arguing that the dissimilarities between North and South were “not much greater than those existing between the East and West,” he concluded that “a generation of well-meaning Americans . . . permitted their short-sighted politicians, their over-zealous editors, and their pious reformers to emotionalize real and potential differences and to conjure up distorted impressions of those who dwelt in other parts of the nation.” In reality, he argued, there existed no “inherent difference great enough to make war ‘inevitable’ or ‘irrepressible’ . . . That was to be an artificial creation of inflamed minds.” Instead, the “conflict was the work of politicians and pious cranks!” In the 1850s, popular democracy had been almost as young as the country itself, and by Craven’s rendering, a generation of ambitious office seekers and newspaper editors stoked the fires of public opinion for private gain. In effect, they elected for war, when no war had been necessary. Craven was a committed Quaker who privately bemoaned that humans should ever “settle differences by shooting at each other.” The Civil War was no different. But he also embodied the racial insensitivities that pervaded the American academy—and most of American life—in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was most active as a historian. While Craven conceded that “the idea of holding men in bondage and buying and selling them as property” violated the tenets of “the democratic and Christian ideal of the modern world,” he argued that the system was more harmful in theory than in practice. Slaves, he believed, “went on with [their] tasks generally unconscious of the merits or lack of them in the system under which [they] toiled.” “Perhaps the idea [of slavery] was always worse than the fact itself.” It was inconceivable to him that men should kill each other over a benign, perhaps even dying, institution.

  Like Craven, James G. Randall, a professor at the University of Illinois and the leading Lincoln scholar of the mid-twentieth century, took a skeptical view of abolitionism. Slaves, he wrote, “adapted . . . to bondage with a minimum of resistance, doing cheerfully the manual work of the South.” If slaves were occasionally mistreated, “there was truth in the common declaration that Southern abuse of the slave was often a matter of mistreatment through leniency.” By Randall’s estimation, a “blundering generation” of politicians unwittingly provoked a “great American tragedy [that] could have been avoided, supposing of course that something more of statesmanship, moderation, and understanding, and something less of professional patrioteering, slogan making, face-saving, political clamoring, and propaganda had existed on both sides.” Ultimately, it was “fanaticism (on both sides), misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or perhaps politics” that caused the war, not, as Nicolay and Hay maintained, a fundamental clash between slavery and freedom.

  Randall exempted Lincoln from his broad censure of antebellum politicians, singling him out as “moderate, temperate, and far-seeing.” This notion was not new. Since the early twentieth century, popular Southern writers and their allies in the academy—particularly Columbia University’s William Dunning and his many intellectual followers—had drastically revised the history of Rec
onstruction, portraying the abolitionists and radical Republicans of the 1860s as singularly vicious individuals whose overriding agenda was revenge against the vanquished South. In the popular novels of Thomas Dixon, and in respectable academic histories of Reconstruction, flawed, profane men like Thaddeus Stevens were the sworn enemies of Abraham Lincoln, the “great heart” (in Dixon’s words) who, had he lived, would have welcomed the South back with open arms and charity. African Americans, in turn, were congenitally and culturally ill-prepared for freedom and plunged the postbellum South into a deep political and economic crisis. This interpretation held up through the early years of the modern civil rights era, when the racial egalitarianism of radicals and abolitionists, and the fervent self-assertion of the freedmen, began to look better in the light of day, especially when compared with the crude violence and political usurpation that Southern whites employed to overthrow the gains of the Civil War. In Randall’s time, it was still popular to think of Lincoln as a misfit in his own house, doing battle with radical Republicans even as he prosecuted the war with the Confederacy. In his influential Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University in 1945, Randall emphasized Lincoln’s Kentucky heritage and posited that he was at his core more sympathetic to the South than most of his Republican brethren.

  Like his contemporaries, Randall wrote in an era when racial sentiments had hardened and few Americans any longer appreciated the moral strains of the war and its aftermath. As an academic historian, he also labored to create a counterintuitive model. So much had been said about Lincoln, he observed, that “the historian must turn revisionist.” Thus, Randall’s Lincoln was “essentially a Douglas Democrat” who “did not fundamentally differ” from his Democratic archrival on matters pertaining to race and slavery. As president, Lincoln repeatedly (and to his country’s detriment) caved to radical pressure and interfered in military matters that he scarcely understood. His dismissal of George McClellan, Randall wrote, was “the act of a buffeted President.” As for the “stock image” of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, Randall held that the president’s true “blueprint for freedom” never envisioned the sweeping program of political and economic equality forced on the South by the radical Republicans who survived him.

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  These revisionist strains in Civil War historiography cannot be understood outside the context of Jim Crow culture and politics. The brief window in time when many Americans reappraised their thinking on race relations had closed by the late 1880s. In its place arose a new and elaborate system of enforced racial hierarchy that pervaded nearly every facet of American life until the mid-twentieth century.

  Jim Crow, in all of its unprecedented intricacy, sprang from multiple sources. In part, it was a political phenomenon and reflected popular disillusionment with Reconstruction, but it was also an intellectual movement that drew strength from the academy. As American universities matured into modern centers of social and scientific inquiry, scholars grew interested in using emerging methodologies to categorize difference. This trend gained force from the arrival of millions of new immigrants, many of whom originated from southern and eastern Europe. They seemed darker skinned than earlier arrivals and practiced religions that had gained little foothold in America before this time. They were different, and their ambiguous racial designation fed the country’s renewed obsession with blood and origins—not only on the part of older Americans, but also on the part of new Americans who struggled to assert their whiteness, and thus their fitness for citizenship. As well, for many Americans, Jim Crow provided a way to reorder life amid bewildering change. In the antebellum South, it had been largely unnecessary to separate white and black Americans. Inequality had been sufficiently interwoven with slavery. But the same wave of economic growth that the Civil War helped catalyze now introduced confusion in the ranks. In a new world of railway and street cars, public amusements and thoroughfares, department stores and shared urban spaces, it was less clear who was on top and who was on the bottom. White Americans, both North and South, devised a complicated and brutal system to reassert dominion. They advertised it on rice boxes (Uncle Ben) and syrup bottles (Aunt Jemima). They enshrined it in laws governing the physical separation of black and white citizens. They built it into the electoral system by disenfranchising millions of black voters. They enforced it through thousands of gruesome spectacle lynchings.

  There was never a single, solitary white America. Different people claimed different levels of complicity in the system and enjoyed widely divergent levels of wealth and power. But very few nonblack Americans operated entirely outside the cultural and intellectual assumptions of Jim Crow. Writing in the context of their own time, historians in the first decades of the twentieth century looked for alternative theories to explain the Civil War, because it no longer seemed intuitive to assume that slavery was its central and inexorable cause. From The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gone with the Wind (1939), American culture reinforced many of the core tenets of the Southern revisionism that Nicolay and Hay had written against. In a climate so inhospitable to African Americans, it was little wonder that scholars moved far afield from the true roots of the conflict.

  After World War II, the dawn of the modern civil rights movement prompted historians to rediscover the moral struggle that lay at the heart of the Civil War and Reconstruction. New and successive generations of scholars now placed black slaves and freedmen at the heart of a more complicated narrative that emphasized the agency of ordinary African Americans in forcing the Union to embrace emancipation as a tool, and later an aim, of war. Whereas mid-century scholars largely viewed the sectional conflict as “repressible,” historians working in the shadow of Birmingham and Selma rediscovered the inescapable clash between two civilizations built on oppositional theories of political economy. Unlike Nicolay and Hay, modern scholars of the Civil War era readily acknowledged the economic symbiosis between the slaveholding South and the free-labor North. They also documented the deeply seated racism that pervaded Northern culture and politics and explored the halting and unsteady progression of the conflict as it evolved from a war for union into a war against slavery. Contemporary Civil War scholarship in many ways bears only dim resemblance to the “Northern” or “Republican” interpretation that Nicolay and Hay helped pioneer, but the seeds of their argument—a now-commonsense assertion that secession and states’ rights always operated in the service of slavery and that slavery was “somehow” (in Lincoln’s word) the primary cause of the war—have for several decades underpinned most historical analyses of the Civil War. In some fashion, Nicolay and Hay enjoyed the final word.

  In their description of the sixteenth president, the secretaries left an even more lasting impression. Over the past half century scholars have expanded the study of Lincoln into its own field. The modern civil rights movement inspired historians to reconsider the Great Emancipator’s lasting image as the man who freed the slaves. A new focus on the agency of the slaves themselves cast doubt on the centrality of white politicians in effecting the abolition of slavery. Likewise, some historians have found Lincoln to be too moderate, too temporizing, and too much an ordinary politician. Before the civil rights era, the question “What would Lincoln do?” assumed that the sixteenth president, and he alone, was the repository of all political and moral wisdom. In recent decades, scholars have tended more often to turn the question on its head. What would Lincoln have done in the face of massive resistance—George Wallace’s stand at the schoolhouse door or the massacre of black children in a Birmingham church? It is hard to escape the conclusion that Lincoln felt a kinship, but was not at one, with the radical Republicans of his own time—those who drove what Charles Sumner once called the “antislavery enterprise.” Would he have been on the side of the angels in our time?

  From these debates has emerged a nuanced, and now predominant, historical portrait of a master politician who evolved personally over the years in his capacity to envision a biracial democracy and who used his maste
ry of politics to build and then use popular opinion against an institution that he had always despised on a gut level. He was not a passenger on the train, but neither was he the conductor. From the vantage point of today, it is as impossible to imagine the destruction of slavery without Lincoln as it is to imagine it without the tireless agitation of slaves and freedmen, or abolitionists and radicals.

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  In the final chapter of their ten-volume biography, Hay remarked on the coincidental timing of Lincoln’s murder. “If he had died in the days of doubt and gloom which preceded his reelection,” he wrote, “he would have been sincerely mourned and praised by friends of the Union, but its enemies would have curtly dismissed him as one of the necessary and misguided victims of sectional hate . . . But as he had fallen in the moment of a stupendous victory, the halo of a radiant success enveloped his memory and dazzled the eyes of even his most hostile critics.” At home and abroad, those who had “persistently vilified” Lincoln now raised a “universal chorus of elegiac praise.”

  In the darkest hours of the Civil War, Hay had been struck by Lincoln’s deep connection to the ordinary farmers and soldiers of the North. “I know the people want him,” he told Nicolay in 1863. “There is no mistaking that fact. But politicians are strong yet & he is not their ‘kind of cat.’” Almost a quarter century later, he continued to believe that it was “among the common people of the entire civilized world that the most genuine and spontaneous manifestations of sorrow and appreciation were produced, and to this fact we attribute the sudden and solid foundation of Lincoln’s fame.”

  “There are two classes of men whose names are more enduring than any monument,” Hay claimed, “—the great writers; and the men of great achievement, the founders of states, the conquerors.” Lincoln was both. “Nothing would have more amazed him while he lived than to hear himself called a man of letters; but this age has produced few greater writers.” His prose ran “from the wit, the gay humor, the florid eloquence of his stump speeches to the marvelous sententiousness and brevity of the letter to Greeley and the address at Gettysburg, and the sustained and lofty grandeur of the Second Inaugural.” Yet it was “principally as a man of action that the world at large will regard him.” Master politician, he was “bitterly denounced and maligned” throughout his term but “bore himself with such extraordinary discretion and skill, that he obtained for the Government all the legislation it required.” He outgeneraled his generals and outmaneuvered his foes. “After times will wonder, not at the few and unimportant mistakes he may have committed, but at the intuitive knowledge of his business that he displayed.”