Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image; A timely and intimate look into Abraham Lincoln’s White House through the lives of his two closest aides and confidants

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

by Joshua Zeitz  (Author)

A timely and intimate look into Abraham Lincoln’s White House through the lives of his two closest aides and confidants

Lincoln’s official secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president’s immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attendeded the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy. They were present at every seminal event, from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address—and they wrote about it after his death.

In their biography of Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay fought to establish Lincoln’s heroic legacy and to preserve a narrative that saw slavery—not states’ rights—as the sole cause of the Civil War. As Joshua Zeitz shows, the image of a humble man with uncommon intellect who rose from obscurity to become a storied wartime leader and emancipator is very much their creation.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Lincoln’s Boys is part political drama and part coming-of-age tale—a fascinating story of friendship, politics, war, and the contest over history and remembrance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“What a wonderful, welcome book.  Zeitz has pulled off a difficult task — revealing how the myth of Lincoln came to be without distorting the true greatness of our extraordinary 16th President.”
— Ken Burns (filmmaker)

“Joshua Zeitz’s delightful study of John Hay and John Nicolay interweaves intimate biography, political drama, and the shaping of historical memory to produce an arresting and original narrative. Above all, it reminds us that, thanks to Lincoln’s secretaries, the moral dimensions of the emancipationist Civil War could not be bleached from the historical record by an increasingly fashionable understanding of the struggle as a romantic ‘brothers’ conflict’.”
–Richard Carwardine, author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

“Abraham Lincoln was blessed with truly first-rate biographers in John Nicolay and John Hay, so it is ‘altogether fitting and proper’ that Nicolay and Hay have now attracted a terrific chronicler of their own life and times in Joshua Zeitz.  This fine book traces the extraordinary evolution of Lincoln’s two private secretaries from clerks into tireless historians and rabid keepers of the flame. Historians have long remembered their roles as canny observers of the White House during the Civil War, but this study adds much fascinating new material about their peerless role in crafting and preserving the Lincoln image.”
—Harold Holzer, author of  The Civil War in 50 Objects

From the Back Cover

More praise for Lincoln’s Boys:

“A century before Harry Hopkins, Clark Clifford, or Ted Sorensen, John Hay and John Nicolay performed the duties of presidential aides, advisers, political operatives, and confidants. Even the great Abraham Lincoln needed support, and Joshua Zeitz captures perfectly the intimate, interior world of the White House”

–David Plouffe, former White House senior advisor

“Lincoln’s Boys puts flesh and bones on the story of the two young men at the center of Abraham Lincoln’s world — and, by extension, at the center of everything. Beautifully researched and written, it restores to their full stature two figures who may have been young but left a deep mark upon history. Highly recommended.”

–Ted Widmer, former presidential speechwriter; author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City

About the Author

Joshua Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University, Harvard University, and Princeton University.  He is the author of several books on American political and social history and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic,  Dissent, and American Heritage.  A former congressional campaign aide and gubernatorial policy advisor and speechwriter, Zeitz lives with his wife and two daughters in Hoboken and Ocean Grove, NJ.

Prologue

June 13, 1905

Less than three weeks before his death, John Milton Hay awoke in his cabin room on the RMS Baltic as the great ocean liner, still the jewel of the White Star Line, steamed a course from Liverpool to New York. He reached for his diary and composed one of its final entries.

It was June 1905. Electric lights and streetcars lined hundreds of American towns. Phonographs and telephones were quickly becom- ing common fixtures in middle-class living rooms, and for a nickel city folk could gaze into large wood and steel boxes and marvel at moving picture images of prizefighters, ballplayers, and ballerinas. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie represented the extremes of Amer- ican wealth and power. It had already been two years since the Wright brothers conducted the first manned test flight of an airplane. In Ger- many, the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein had recently published a paper on the “photoelectric effect” and was fast at work developing his theory of relativity. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud published his path- breaking volume Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

In his youth, John Hay could scarcely have imagined this world. A child of the western prairie, he was raised in the age of iron and grew to manhood in the age of steel. A noted poet and historian, former newspaper editor and railroad executive, Hay had served as U.S. ambassador to Britain and, since 1898, secretary of state—first under President William McK inley and then, after 1901, under President Theodore Roosevelt. He was one of the most powerful men in the world. But his bright spirit was fast burning out a frail body. In his final weeks, his mind wandered back to the simpler world of his youth.

“I dreamed last night that I was in Washington,” Hay confided to his diary, “and that I went to the White House to report to the President, who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln. He was very k ind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised at Lincoln’s presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.”

This is the story of John Hay and John Nicolay, prairie boys who met in

1851 and forged a close friendship that endured over a half century. For- tune placed them in the right place (Springfield, Illinois) at the right time (1860) and offered them a front-row seat to one of the most tumultuous political and military upheavals in American history, then or since.

As Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries, they became, both liter- ally and figuratively, closer to the president than anyone outside his immediate family. Still young men in their twenties, they lived and worked on the second floor of the White House, performing the roles and functions of a modern-day chief of staff, press secretary, political director, and presidential body man. Above all, they guarded the “last door which opens into the awful presence” of the commander in chief, in the words of Noah Brooks, a journalist and one of many Washing- ton insiders who coveted their jobs, resented their influence, and thought them a little too big for their britches (“a fault for which it seems to me either Nature or our tailors are to blame,” Hay once quipped). “These . . . Secretaries are young men,” Brooks grumbled, “and the least said of them the better, perhaps.”

In demeanor and temperament, they could not have been more different. Short-tempered and dyspeptic, Nicolay cut a brooding figure to those seeking the president’s time or favor. William Stoddard, an

assistant secretary under their supervision, later remarked that Nicolay was “decidedly German in his manner of telling men what he thought of them . . . People who do not like him—because they can- not use him, perhaps—say he is sour and crusty, and it is a grand good thing, then, that he is.”

Hay cultivated a softer image. He was, in the words of his contemporaries, a “comely young man with peach-blossom face,” “very witty—boyish in his manner, yet deep enough— bubbling over with some brilliant speech.” An instant fixture in Washington social circles, fast friend of Robert Todd Lincoln’s, and favorite among Republican congressmen who haunted the White House halls, he projected a youthful dash that balanced out Nicolay’s more grim bearing.

Hay and Nicolay were party to the president’s greatest official acts and most private moments. They were in the room when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and they were by his side at Gettysburg, when he first spoke to the nation of a “new birth of freedom.” When he could not sleep, which, as the war progressed, was often, Lincoln walked down the corridor to their private quarters and passed the time reciting Shakespeare or mulling over the day’s political and military developments. When his son Willie passed away in 1862, the first per- son to whom Lincoln turned was John Nicolay. When the president drew his last breath in April 1865, John Hay was by his bedside.

For the rest of their lives, even as they built their own families and careers, Hay and Nicolay inspired a certain measure of wonder and awe. The greater Lincoln grew in death, the greater they grew for having known him so well, and so intimately, in life. Everyone wanted to know them, if only to ask what it had been like—what he had been like. It was a tough question to answer. Abraham Lincoln worked hard at being inscrutable. “The tones, the gestures, the kindling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter’s skill,” wrote Brooks. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, could fairly claim to have known him as well as any man during the Springfield days. But to Herndon, the future president was the most “shut-mouthed man who ever lived.” He “always told only enough of his plans and purpose to induce the belief that he had communicated all,” observed another friend, “yet he reserved enough to have communicated nothing.” Even Lincoln acknowledged as much. “I am rather inclined to silence,” he admitted, “and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual now-a-days to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.” If anyone knew the inner mind of the president, it was the two secretaries. Witty and prolific letter writers, observant and incisive diarists, Hay and Nicolay left a remarkable record of Lincoln’s evolution as chief executive. By their later account, they “came from Illinois to Washington with him, and remained at his side and in his service— separately or together—until the day of his death. We were the daily and nightly witnesses of the incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and the hopes which pervaded the Executive Mansion and the National Capital during the war.” Better than anyone else, they knew where the president was, what he was doing, and what he was thinking at almost every turn. It is little wonder that historians of the era consult Hay’s and Nicolay’s writings freely and frequently. But their life’s work after

the Civil War is a largely forgotten story.

“The boys,” as the president affectionately called them, became Lincoln’s official biographers. Enjoying exclusive access to his papers, which the Lincoln family closed to the public until 1947, they under- took a twenty-five-year mission to create a definitive and enduring historical image of their slain leader. It became the great undertaking of their lives. The culmination of these efforts—their exhaustive, ten- volume biography, which was widely serialized between 1886 and

1890—constituted one of the most successful exercises in historical revisionism in American history. Writing against the rising currents of Southern apologia and a popular vogue for reunion and reconciliation, Hay and Nicolay pioneered the “Northern” interpretation of the Civil War—an interpretation whose influence waxed and waned but that created a standard against which every other historian and polemicist had to stake out his or her position.

Hay and Nicolay helped invent the Lincoln we know today:

the Great Emancipator the sage father figure

the military genius

the greatest American orator the brilliant political tactician

the master of a fractious cabinet who forged a “team of rivals” out of erstwhile challengers for the throne

the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln

That Abraham Lincoln was all of these things, in some measure, there can be no doubt. But it is easy to forget how widely underrated Lincoln the president and Lincoln the man were on the eve of his death and how successful Hay and Nicolay were in elevating his place in the nation’s collective historical memory. While Lincoln prided himself on his deep connection to “the people”—that nebulous body politic in whose collective wisdom he developed an almost mystic faith—he never succeeded in translating his immense popularity with the Northern public into similar regard among the nation’s political and intellectual elites. The profound emotional bond that he shared with Union soldiers and their families, and his stunning electoral suc- cess in two successive presidential elections, never fully inspired an equivalent level of esteem by the influential men who governed the country and guarded its official history. To many of these men, he re- mained in death what he was in life: the rail-splitter and country la…