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

  • • •

  A brief note about what this book is not—namely, a comprehensive biography of John Hay or John Nicolay, let alone Abraham Lincoln. Much has been written about Hay’s literary career, his friendship with Henry Adams, and his service as secretary of state under McKinley and Roosevelt. In many ways, he was one of the most extraordinary men of his generation. He was seemingly everywhere at every turn. I touch on these topics insofar as they help to inform a discussion of his ideological progression and his enduring allegiance to a martyred president, but this is not a work of diplomatic or literary history. Little has been written about Nicolay’s postwar career, as so much of it was devoted to preserving the memory of Lincoln. These pages fill in some of the gaps in his story.

  • • •

  Nicolay and Hay believed that writing good history required telling a good story. Ours begins some fifty years before John Hay’s final passage across the sea, in Providence, Rhode Island, where a young poet has just completed a long journey from his boyhood home in Illinois.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Exile in the West

  September 30, 1855. “As I am now all completely settled and arranged for the term,” John Hay reported breathlessly to his family, “I proceed to give you notice of this important fact and to let you know that I still am an inhabitant of the earth.”

  For some, the journey is more important than the destination. Not for Hay. Just shy of his seventeenth birthday, the midwestern native had never spent any meaningful stretch of time in a city larger than Springfield, Illinois—then a town of roughly nine thousand people, where it was not altogether uncommon for hogs, chickens, and other farm animals to slog through streets perpetually caked in mud alongside the human beings who made their homes and earned their livelihoods in the capital’s modest wood-frame houses and three-story brick office buildings. Providence, Rhode Island, where he would spend the next three years earning his bachelor’s degree, was an intellectual mecca. With a heritage stretching back to the early colonial era and a population five times that of Springfield, it was home to Brown University, one of the premier colleges in the land. It was an eastern city, with eastern ideas and eastern sensibilities—a fitting place for a poet. And John Hay wanted quite badly to be a poet.

  “I had a whirling, hustling time on the way here,” the young man reported home, “but at last arrived without any accident on Tuesday evening, safe and sound in everything, except my eyes, mouth and ears were full of cinders and dust.” At Brown, Hay lived on the second floor of University Hall, an early Federal-style redbrick building perched on a hill overlooking the city. The rent was $50 per year. He found his room, with a window facing the grass-covered quadrangle, “comfortable and conveniently furnished . . . My chum is a young man from the State of New York, steady, studious, and good scholar, so I stand a chance of doing a good deal of hard study this winter. It is not here as in Springfield. Here I am acquainted with no one in the city and have no inducements to leave the college, while in Springfield my circle of acquaintance was far from limited, and entirely too agreeable for my own good.”

  Sending his love to “Grandpa, aunts, uncles, cousins, and cats and all inquiring friends,” Hay bade his family to “write soon—soon—do you hear? SOON” and began making his way in the wider world.

  • • •

  John Hay was born in Salem, Indiana, in 1838, in a one-story, four-room brick house, the son of Charles Hay, a medical doctor, and his wife, Helen Leonard. A close family of six children (one of whom, Edward, died at age eight), the Hays were comfortable but far from wealthy. When John was three years old, the family relocated to Warsaw, Illinois, a small town tucked along the banks of the Mississippi River, near the westernmost part of the state. “The days of my boyhood were passed on the banks of the Mississippi, and the great river was the scene of my early dreams,” he later said. “The boys of my day led an amphibian life in and near its waters in the summertime, and in the winter its dazzling ice bridge, of incomparable beauty and purity, was our favorite playground . . . We built forts and called them the Alamo; we sang rude songs of the cane-brake and cornfield; and the happiest days of the year to us who dwelt on the northern bluff of the river were those that brought us, in the loud puffing and whistling steamers of olden time, to the mecca of our rural fancies, the bright and busy metropolis of St. Louis.”

  It was clear from the start that John was an unusually bright boy, though given to daydreaming and flights of fancy. His sister remembered that he developed the “habit of stringing words together into rhymes,” and his younger brother, Charles, recalled that when John “was a small boy, a German of education called on my father to ask assistance in forming a class for the study of German[;] John listened with a great deal of interest and whispered to my father, ‘I would like very much to study German.’” Always proud of his children and encouraging of their ambitions, Dr. Hay agreed. Though a mere child among a class of men, John surprised everyone by demonstrating an aptitude for the language.

  In 1849, Hay’s parents packed him off to Pittsfield, the seat of nearby Pike County. As Warsaw had no schools worth attending, his uncle Milton Hay had suggested that John live with him and attend a local academy managed by John D. Thomson, an Irishman who had graduated from Dublin University and somehow made his way as far as the Illinois prairie. There, Hay formed a fast friendship with John George Nicolay, a Bavarian immigrant six years his senior. No record exists of their earliest times together, but their association would soon evolve into the most important and enduring relationship in both men’s lives.

  After completing his course at Thomson’s academy, Hay moved to Springfield in 1852, where he lived with his paternal grandfather and enrolled at Illinois State University, a new institution that, despite its name, was little more than a preparatory school meant to feed bright young men to more prominent colleges. Few traces survive of his time there, though by 1854 Hay had clearly discovered his métier. Writing to his sister, he offered that poetry was “one of the noblest faculties of our nature, and should be cultivated to its fullest extent. The true poet will cultivate this gift. One who is so highly gifted, can no more keep silent, and withhold from pouring out a flood of song, than can the songsters of the grove, refrain from warbling their notes of praise, or the rivulet refuse to flow.”

  Hay’s course of study at Illinois State involved a healthy dose of Latin, Greek, algebra, and rhetoric, but his heart was never in it more than when he read “Milton, Byron, Moore & Burns . . . These I almost worship,” or “the odes of Horace, which are beautiful.” He professed to work every night except for Fridays and Sundays (on Friday evenings, he participated in salons, “for the purpose of debating, reading original essays, and criticizing”). But he would just as soon enjoy the “exquisite happiness [of] contemplating the grandeur of the hoary mountain, the calm solicitude of the forest, the roar of the boundless ocean, the headlong career of the torrent, and the merry laugh of the dancing rill.” This was John Hay at age fifteen.

  Aside from his lofty aspirations to poetic glory, it was also clear that Hay shared with many teenagers then and since a burning desire to see more of the world. “In my opinion,” he told his sister, “all the sentimental talk we hear from the poet and the novelist, about the simplicity & quiet ease of village life, is all humbug. The city is the only place to gain a knowledge of the world.” By 1855, Springfield was no longer big enough to satisfy his ambitions. With backing from his uncle Milton, who agreed to pay the bill, John set off for Brown University, where he took his place as a sophomore.

  • • •

  One of his friends from around this time remembered Hay as a “red-cheeked, black-eyed, sunshiny boy, chock-full of fun and devilment that hurt nobody.” Except for the description of his eyes (which were hazel), the sketch lined up well against the recollections of other contemporaries. Clark Carr, a friend from Brown, described Hay as “bright, rosy-faced, boyish-looking” and reflected that he
had never before met “a young man or boy who charmed me as he did when he looked at me with his mischievous hazel eyes from under a wealth of dark brown hair. He was, for those days, elegantly dressed—better than any of us; so neatly, indeed, that he would . . . have been set down as a ‘dude’ at first sight.” With his boyish features and small frame, Hay looked younger than his seventeen years, and it took some time before he cultivated enough savvy to replace his “western” garb with clothes more befitting the style preferred by the eastern college crowd. But it did not take him long to become tremendously popular, as would be the case almost everywhere he went in life. His classmate William Leete Stone credited him with “a singularly modest and retiring disposition,” but “so winning a manner that no one could be in his presence, even for a few moments, without falling under the spell which his conversation and companionship invariably cast upon all who came within his influence.”

  Like most American colleges in the antebellum era, Brown University was a small institution, numbering only 225 students and nine faculty members. The curriculum favored Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and the pedagogy was heavy on recitation and repetition. “In those days, all text was memorized,” explained one of Hay’s classmates, “and it was the general opinion that Hay put his book under his pillow and had the contents thereof absorbed and digested by morning, for he was never seen ‘digging,’ or doing any other act or thing that could be construed as hard study. His quick perception, ready grasp of an idea and wonderfully retentive memory, made a mere pastime of study.” Hay’s senior-year roommate remembered that “often, after returning from a party late at night, when it was ‘odds with morning which was which,’ I . . . found him sitting up writing out a Latin or a French exercise for some classmate whose intellectual furnishment was not of the highest order.” It was also during these years that Hay became a voracious consumer of books and ideas. College library records indicate that he was a faithful reader of British literary periodicals and that he devoured the works of Spenser, Beaumont, Fletcher, Percy, Wordsworth, and Goethe.

  Hay’s native intelligence was rivaled only by his outsized personality and charm. Years later, classmates still recalled with a smile the night that he delivered an impromptu toast at the freshman class dinner. “We don’t want anything dry!” someone taunted from the rafters. “Hay that is green is never dry,” he quickly retorted. Long remembered, too, was “the night that Johnny Hay took hasheesh.” Inspired by Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s book The Hasheesh Eater (1857), in which the author chronicled his frequent use of cannabis, Hay joined the legions of undergraduates before and since who experimented with artificial stimulants. Matters got sufficiently out of hand to warrant a visit by one of Brown’s younger (and apparently more liberal) faculty members.

  Hay’s roommate remembered a young man with “boundless” enthusiasm and a “love for and appreciation of the beautiful in nature and in art . . . If he was smitten by the charms of a pretty girl he raved and walked the room, pouring out his sentiment in a flood of furious eloquence. He would apostrophize a beautiful sunset till the last glow had expired. I remember being called out of bed by him one night to witness a beautiful display of Northern Lights. The display was gorgeous, but the night was cold, and after stating my view of the situation, I retired to my room leaving him with chattering teeth and eloquent language addressing Aurora B.”

  Northern lights were a rarity in Providence. Pretty girls were not. Hay was often smitten with them, and they were equally smitten with him. Anna Ridgely, who knew him a few years later in Springfield, remembered that John had “small, well-shaped hands which he had a habit of locking together interlacing the fingers, and carrying at arm’s length, which the girls thought particularly fetching.” Other times, “he wore a long, loose overcoat, flying open, his hands thrust into the pockets, which was also thought very graceful and attractive as he swung himself along the street, for he had a rocking walk in those days.”

  During his first year at Brown, Hay caught the eye of James Angell, then a young professor of modern languages. In and out of class, mentor and protégé worked through the canon of French and German classics, and by his senior year Hay had become a regular visitor at Angell’s house. There, he met the professor’s younger sister Hannah, who lived with her parents in nearby Scituate but frequently visited her brother in Providence. The attraction was instantaneous and mutual. Over fifty years later, Hannah could still vividly describe Hay’s eyes, “which you could look into for a mile, and they looked through and through yours.”

  Hay’s preferred method of flirtation involved excessive doses of purple prose and romantic verse. “I have no news to write you,” he confessed in a typical letter, “and it would be utterly ridiculous to think of writing anything original on a day when the birds are too lazy to do more than to sleepily twitter in the shade, when the sky is like brass & the air sleeps in a sultry hush, & even the thunder lying in wait in the north utters ever & anon a drowsy growl and dies lazily in the hot silence. My only object is to get a letter from you.” He visited Hannah on more than one occasion in Scituate, where her family’s house looked out on a winding road shaded by tall maples and elms. As they walked together by the Ponaganset River, he took a penknife from his pocket and carved the letters HAY (an amalgam of his surname and Hannah’s initials) on the rail of a small footbridge. “I need not tell you how happy a day was yesterday,” he wrote after one of their afternoon excursions. “As we rode home in silence the vanished hours passed before me in joyous review, lacking indeed, the warm and vivid beauty of the day but with a tender halo gathered of the starlight.”

  Hay’s letters to Hannah frequently included lines of original verse. In them, he expressed a dread of his graduation and return to Illinois and got good mileage off a repertoire of self-effacing references to his western “barbarism.” After three successful years in Providence, he still felt like a fish out of water. He knew the full extent of his talents. He was functionally fluent in German, Latin, Greek, and French, and he had mastered course work in chemistry, mathematics, physics, political economy, philosophy, rhetoric, modern history, and declamation—all by the age of nineteen. But he was still deeply self-conscious of his provincial roots. In later years, as Lincoln’s secretary and as a journalist and poet of national renown, he was known for the clever simplicity of his prose and his free use of regional vernacular. That was an older, more confident man. At Brown, Hay was still imitating the romantic poets, writing long, flowery love letters, and apologizing just a little too frequently for his prairie origins. A typical effort began:

  In heathen wilds I soon shall pine

  Doomed to an exile worse than thine.

  When Mississippi madly roars

  In fury o’er his golden bars,

  And on the sleeping prairies pours

  The light of western stars;

  Day never gilded with his smile

  A land so fair, a race so vile.

  As diet horseshoe nails they use,

  And aqua fortis drink with glee;

  In milder moments they infuse

  Corn whiskey in their tea.

  On Sundays sally forth with dogs

  To taunt their children in the bogs . . .

  . . . The “Western District” may not boast

  Men of a form and soul like those

  (As soon on its clam haunted coast

  You’ll find the prairie rose.)

  There country life & Yankee rum

  Have wrought a milder heathendom.

  Hannah surely knew that John was spending a great deal of his spare time in the company of several poets and prose writers who lived near College Hill. Chief among his new friends were Nora Perry, a young woman just seven years his senior who later served a long tenure as Boston correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and Sarah Helen Whitman, an older writer who, ten years earlier, had been Edgar Allan Poe’s romantic muse. With the encouragement of his literary mentors, Hay secured the honor of composing and deliv
ering the class poem at the conclusion of his senior year. Writing to Hannah of his progress, he reported to be “in a remarkably good humor at present. I have freed myself from that fearful incubus which has been inflicting for the last month such acute Iambic torture.”

  The result won wide praise from Brown’s faculty and student body. With his gaze fixed on a literary life, Hay extolled the virtues of the path that he wanted more badly than even before to pursue:

  Oft let the poet leave his toil and care

  To greet the spirits of the sky and air;

  Let him go forth to learn of love and truth,