As the train pulled out of Springfield’s Great Western Depot on the rainy morning of February 11, 1861, with president-elect Abraham Lincoln and his entourage bound for Washington, D.C., there were three young men aboard with exceptional promise: John Milton Hay, John George Nicolay, and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth. Of the three friends, two would become the president’s private secretaries during the most tempestuous era the nation had ever known; the third, Ellsworth, would briefly serve as the president-elect’s head of security.
The twenty-three-year-old Ellsworth, an aspiring soldier, was so short that had it not been for his neat black mustache and whiskered underlip he might have been mistaken for one of the Lincolns’ little boys. Though he was scarcely five feet in height, what Ellsworth lacked in stature he more than made up for in dignity and authority, having made himself famous—a public emblem—by a means altogether unique.
The son of a bankrupt tailor in the New York village of Malta, too poor and obscure to attend West Point, Ellsworth, through self-education and exercise, had made himself a drillmaster without peer in America. A born leader, in the late 1850s he organized companies of militia in Chicago that he outfitted in the loose scarlet trousers, blue jackets with gold braid, and jaunty red caps of the French Foreign Legion, calling them Zouaves after the soldiers who fought in the Crimean War. The men paid for their own uniforms. He trained them to do intricate military drills and manuals of arms. He lectured them on patriotism. On parade grounds in the major cities, Ellsworth and his Zouaves drew crowds and newsmen who raved about “the little colonel” and his superbly trained militiamen. They were equally impressed with Ellsworth’s temperance, austerity, and code of honor. He refused to accept any pay for his services to his country, past or future.
Like many prodigies and early ripe composers and artists, Ellsworth was not long for this world. The nation was on the brink of war, folks sensed it, and Ellsworth was an avatar of courage and honor. He is a part of the history, essential to getting it under way, and also a victim of it, the first of many lives sacrificed to a cause at first only dimly understood. Lincoln met him during the winter of 1859–60 when Ellsworth came to study law in Springfield. After watching the Chicago Zouaves drill in a Springfield meadow in August 1860, the presidential candidate invited Ellsworth to remain in town and study law with him. Impressed with the soldier’s zeal and intelligence, Lincoln sent him out, with John Hay, to stump for him in the election. He had served the candidate so well that when Lincoln was elected, in November, he invited Ellsworth to attend him as a bodyguard on the train to Washington, with a further prospect of getting him a position in the war department.
TRAVELING ON THE TRAIN with Ellsworth was twenty-two-year-old John Hay. Hay was a poet, a smooth-faced, handsome fellow with a strong chin, long upper lip, and slightly protruding elfin ears that his wavy brown hair partly concealed. His dark eyes were deep-set, liquid, and his friends used to say you could see a mile into them. Only four inches taller than Ellsworth, Hay saw from his vantage point the soldier’s “form, though slight,—exactly the Napoleonic size,—was very compact and commanding”; Ellsworth’s sunny smile and deep, musical voice “instantly attracted attention; and his address . . . was sincere and courteous.” Hay might as well have been describing his own winning smile and manner; it was not military skill or poetry that had won John Milton Hay his seat on the train to the capital—it was his eloquence and charm.
Hay also owed his place in Lincoln’s retinue to the insistence of his best friend, the twenty-nine-year-old journalist John Nicolay. Standing next to the poet Hay and the soldier Ellsworth in the train’s saloon car, Nicolay, at five feet ten inches and 120 pounds, looked like a gaunt giant, older than his years, with his receding hairline and dark goatee. He had served as Mr. Lincoln’s personal secretary—at a salary of $75 per month—since June 7, 1860, soon after the Republicans nominated the “rail-splitter” to be their standard-bearer. He was Lincoln’s doorkeeper, his amanuensis, and his confidant. Born in Bavaria, the secretary had a low voice that still showed traces of a German accent. Orphaned at age fourteen and thrown upon his own resources—a vigorous mind in a frail body—the former printer’s devil and editor had never wanted anything so much in his life as to serve the Republican nominee. Lincoln must have sensed this and, knowing Nicolay’s politics as well as his past, knew he could count on the young man’s loyalty and complete discretion.
Shortly after the election, on November 11, 1860, Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, Therena Bates, still living in Pittsfield, Illinois, where they had met as children.
I can myself hardly realize that after having fought this slavery question for six years past and suffered so many defeats, I am at last rejoicing in a triumph which two years ago we hardly dared dream about. I remember very distinctly, how in 1854, soon after I had bought the Free Press Office [in Pittsfield], I went to Perry, with others, and heard Mr. Atkinson (the preacher) make the first anti-Nebraska speech which was made in Pike County in that campaign. Though I was fighting as something more than a private then, I should have thought it a wild dream to imagine that in six years after I should find the victory so near the Commander in Chief.
It was “Nebraska,” the bitter conflict over Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act—which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the new territories to the extension of slavery—that brought Nicolay and Lincoln together. Nicolay, as a crusading editor of the free press, and Lincoln, as an ambitious politician, denounced Douglas’s idea of “popular sovereignty,” the very idea that settlers in the territories might choose to allow slavery if they pleased.
On October 27, 1856, Lincoln had showed up at a free-soil meeting in Pittsfield. Nicolay, as a member of the Republican committee there that invited speakers, had hoped that Senator Lyman Trumbull, a Democrat, or the Honorable Abraham Lincoln would attend. He could hardly believe his good fortune when he watched, from a crowded shop, as the Democrat Trumbull welcomed the newly arrived Republican, Lincoln, and the two politicians warmly embraced on the street. Men of conflicting parties, they were united by the cause of freedom. Somewhat later in the day, Lincoln ran into a friend, the educator John Shastid, and asked him where he might find “an honest printer.” Shastid led Mr. Lincoln to the east side of the square, where he found John Nicolay in the offices of the Free Press.
Charmed by the “kindly smile, the earnest eyes, the hearty grip” of the forty-seven-year-old lawyer, Nicolay was eager to hear Lincoln’s speech that evening. And he reported the enormous success and turnout at the free-soil rally, “at least twice as large as the late [Stephen] Douglas demonstration.” from then on, he would never neglect an opportunity to write about Lincoln’s progress. As Nicolay recalled years later, the orator “held him spellbound and cemented his devotion.”
And Lincoln—for his part—was impressed with the idealistic journalist. Nicolay was growing restless in the village. In July of 1857, Lincoln helped raise $500 to subsidize Nicolay as an agent for the Missouri Democrat, a staunchly free-soil newspaper published in St. Louis, with orders for him to increase the newspaper’s circulation in Illinois. Preferring journalism to sales, Nicolay wrote more columns than the paper desired while selling too few subscriptions. The financial panic of 1857, touched off by the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, discouraged all business ventures, publishing included. By the end of the year, the publishers relieved him of his duties. He returned, wistfully, to Pittsfield.
John Nicolay was in love with the dark-eyed, raven-haired, petite Therena Bates, daughter of “Squire” Dorus Bates, a farmer and justice of the peace. As the publisher of a small-town weekly, Nicolay would never make enough money to support a family in style. So he decided to become a lawyer, both for the financial security the profession promised, and because the law would better prepare him to take part in the momentous political drama of his time.
Because no attorney in Pittsfield was eager to take on the gruff, uncompromising journalist as a student, Nicolay accepted an invitation to visit with a friend of Lincoln’s in Springfield, Ozias M. Hatch, secretary of state for Illinois, who also happened to be related by marriage to the Bates family.
A few weeks later, Hatch offered the young man a clerkship in his office, with the understanding that he could study his law books there when he was not otherwise engaged.
So, after Christmas, Nicolay bid his fiancée farewell for the time being and moved to Springfield, about seventy miles east, across the Illinois River. There, while studying law in the state library at the capitol—of which Mr. Hatch was the custodian—Nicolay had a ringside seat at the State Conventions, meetings of the legislature, courts, and party caucuses taking place so near the secretary’s statehouse office.
Fascinated by Lincoln, Nicolay took every opportunity to converse with the celebrated lawyer-politician. The man was “an assiduous student of election tables,” Nicolay observed. These records were kept on a shelf in the office where he clerked, so he was called upon time and again to show Lincoln the latest returns or the record of past elections, which he clucked and chuckled over, or frowned upon as if they had released some unpleasant odor. If business was slow on a snowy winter afternoon, Nicolay and Lincoln would sit down to a game of chess. Lincoln played the game distractedly, while singing snatches of ballads, and providing much extraneous and droll commentary: You hear about that man up in Tazewell has got up a patent on a milking machine? Now. The best milking machine is a calf. You inventors ought to turn your attention to a patent for getting the milk out of the calf.
Banter of this sort was not lost on Nicolay. He had a good sense of humor. He also held a government patent on a printing machine so ingenious that the lawyers in Pittsfield said it was a waste of time for him to be studying law when he ought to pursue his vocation as an inventor. He had studied the law all the same, while keeping his hand in as a journalist, writing columns for the Chicago Tribune and Springfield’s own Illinois Journal. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Nicolay prepared a circular that he titled The Political Record of Stephen Douglas, a partisan pamphlet exposing the inconsistencies and treacheries of the Little Giant’s approach to slavery and the Constitution.
When time came to publish the record of the debates, in 1859, Lincoln asked Nicolay to deliver his own carefully assembled scrapbook to the publishers, Follett, Foster & Co., in Columbus, Ohio. And in February 1860, on a trip home to visit Therena Bates, Nicolay dropped by the office of the Pittsfield Pike County Journal to chat with the editor, Dan Bush, and sing the praises of Abraham Lincoln. Bush put a pen in his friend’s hand and asked him to write down what he had said. On February 9, that paper published one of the first presidential endorsements of Lincoln, and the validation was in Nicolay’s enthusiastic words.
Nicolay greatly desired to write Lincoln’s official campaign biography. He was disappointed when he discovered that the job had been promised to a twenty-three-year-old Ohio poet with powerful connections—William Dean Howells, who was already publishing in the Atlantic Monthly. Turning to Ozias Hatch for comfort, he could hardly believe his ears when Hatch said, “Never mind. You are to be private secretary.”
LINCOLN WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT on November 6, 1860; after that, the current of his Springfield mail began to rise to a torrent that Nicolay could not handle alone. So, on a Sunday morning in late November, he invited John Hay to Lincoln’s office (rooms on loan from the governor) in the statehouse to help out. Hay was reading law, with little enthusiasm, in Stephen Logan’s office nearby on the square, and writing poetry. He was only too happy to oblige John Nicolay. The friendship of these two men was a felicity blessed by a rare and perfect complement of temperaments and favored by geography. For fifty years, these busy fellows—both of whom would eventually serve in the diplomatic corps—were rarely separated for longer than a few months.
John Hay grew up in Warsaw, Illinois, a hamlet on the Mississippi, the fourth of six children born to Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard. Dr. Hay, a prosperous physician, was schooled first as a classical scholar. He taught his son Greek and Latin, so that by the age of twelve John had read six books of Virgil. Wanting the best education for the boy, the doctor accepted his brother Milton’s invitation to board John at his residence in Pittsfield, Illinois, while he attended a private classical school there.
At the age of thirteen, in 1851, Hay went to Pittsfield to study at John D. Thompson’s school. it was there that the Irish headmaster introduced the precocious scholar to John Nicolay. Hay happened to be fluent in German, Nicolay’s native language. In German and English, the boy and the nineteen-year-old printer commenced a conversation that would continue for a half a century, despite the disparity in their ages, education, and social class.
In less than a year, having learned all there was to be learned at Mr. Thompson’s (neither John’s classmates nor his teachers could keep up with him), Hay moved on to a prep school in Springfield, where he prepared to enter Brown University in the autumn of 1855. Nicolay longed to go to Brown with his friend, but he had neither the funds nor the academic foundation to attend such a college. The office of the Free Press, a paper that Nicolay now owned, would be his classroom, and the politically storm-tossed state of Illinois his university.
While Hay was translating Racine and Goethe, and mastering the art of versification, Nicolay was learning how to balance the books in a small business with a narrow profit margin. While the romantic poet was following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe, smoking hashish and frequenting the literary salons of Providence, Rhode Island—including the candlelit parlor of Poe’s former fiancée, the poet Sarah Helen Whitman—Nicolay was covering the Anti-Nebraska Convention in Bloomington, Illinois. There, before that fractious crowd of free-soilers, he heard Abraham Lincoln defend the cause of freedom with such dramatic fervor that no stenographer could look down to record it. This was the legendary speech that put Lincoln on the track for the presidency.
On the evening of October 27, 1856, when Nicolay met Lincoln and heard him address the Republican meeting in Pittsfield, John Hay was sitting in the dress circle of Forbes Theatre in Providence. Like other stargazers and theater fanatics of that time and place, he would not have given up his theater tickets for all the harpoons in Bedford. He had been haunting the playhouse for a week, neglecting his studies, for what was to be seen there was a precious embodiment of poetry and art in one small person.
Her name was Jean Margaret Davenport. At twenty-seven, she was already a legend on both sides of the Atlantic—the greatest actress of her generation and one of the most beautiful. Born in England, the child of a provincial actress and a theater manager, at the age of eight, Jean Davenport made her debut as Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child. Months later, she appeared, in false whiskers, in the title role of Shakespeare’s King Richard III, scoring an enormous financial and critical success. In these roles, she toured the principal cities of England and Ireland before coming to the United States. Heralded as “the little Dramatic Prodigy,” she was satirized as the real-life model for Ninetta Crummles, “the Infant Phenomenon” of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.
Unlike other child stars, Jean Davenport defied the odds, flouting the judgment that such prodigies cannot grow into mature artists. At thirteen, she took three years of literary and dramatic study in France and Italy, and at sixteen she returned to the stage transformed, a brilliant classical actress whose performances as Shakespeare’s Juliet ravished audiences with their deep emotion and subtlety.
Miss Davenport had come to Providence on October 21 to play Julia in J. S. Knowles’s The Hunchback. For nine days she was held over by popular demand. As the climax of her spectacular run, she was appearing as the tragic “Coquette” in the scandalous Camille, which she herself had first adapted from the French of Dumas and introduced to New York audiences in 1853. Only the pathos evoked by sublime acting could have rescued the play from police raids and censorship. According to the winds of public opinion, Miss Davenport had either corrupted or refined the morals of the decade. John Hay had never seen anything like it. She was blinding. He was only eighteen, of course, but no one else had seen anything like this performance in Forbes Theatre, a woman stripped of artifice and much of her clothing, her deepest passions shamelessly on display. He was “starstruck,” he admitted, smitten by the image the young actress projected, “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Would he ever find such a woman in real life?
WHILE JOHN HAY DREAMED of literary fame and the love of fair women, John George Nicolay cranked his press for the cause of free men, free soil, and the principles of the newly formed Republican Party. He studied law in Springfield, where he observed, with keen interest, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln within the new party. When Nicolay found time, he visited his fiancée in Pittsfield, keeping the romance alive.
Hay was a sensational student. At Brown, at last he was in his element. His classmates elected him class poet; he was popular within the college community, and embraced by the high society of Providence. He pledged the fraternity Theta Delta Chi (motto: Our Hearts Are United) in 1857. It is hardly surprising that upon graduating in 1858, his eastern idyll ended, he did not want to go home.
Life in Warsaw, Illinois, plunged the young poet into a gothic mood of despondency worthy of the author of “The Raven.” He wrote to Nora Perry, a fellow poet friend in Providence:
If you loved Providence as I do, you would congratulate yourself hourly upon your lot. The city . . . is shrined in my memory as a far-off, mystical Eden, where the women were lovely and spirituelle, and the men were jolly and brave; where I used to haunt the rooms of the Athenaeum, made holy by the presence of the royal dead; where I used to pay furtive visits to Forbes’ forbidden mysteries; where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams. My life will not be utterly desolate while memory is left me . . .
In the spring, he wrote to Miss Perry, “I have wandered this winter in the valley of the shadow of death. All the universe, God, earth and heaven have been to me but vague and gloomy phantasms. I have conversed with wild imaginings in the gloom of the forests. . . . into every parlor my Daemon has pursued me.”
Part of Hay’s problem was that he was madly in love with his cousin, Annie Johnston, with whom he had been on terms of intense intimacy throughout his adolescence. Now, for reasons that he could not quite comprehend, she was beginning to distance herself from him. Equally distressing was the fact that he could not imagine a future for himself in the West, “a dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities . . . bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of existence inevitably droop and wither.” He was writing poetry and giving lectures now and then, but he had to admit that these occupations would not enable him to pull his weight in the large family that had done so much for him. His parents were affectionate and forbearing, but they would not permit him to go on moping in Warsaw and pining for Annie, at their expense, much longer. They thought him too skeptical to go into the ministry and they did not want him to be a schoolteacher. Worried, Dr. Hay wrote again to his brother Milton. At last, yielding to the inevitable, the twenty-year-old graduate accepted his uncle Milton’s invitation to read the law under his supervision. “They would spoil a first-class preacher to make a third-class lawyer of me,” he quipped.
Bidding his darling Annie a sad farewell, in May of 1859, John Hay returned to Springfield, where Milton Hay had gone into business with Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s former law partner. The poet was lukewarm about practicing law; he simply did not know what else to do with his life. And at least, in Springfield, there was John Nicolay, and the spectacle of the state government, and some semblance of society. Nicolay’s intelligence, energy, and musical gifts—he played the piano and had “a sweet, true tenor voice”—had made him a welcome visitor in the best houses. And where Nicolay went, Hay soon followed. The friends spent delightful evenings in the Victorian mansion of Nicholas Ridgely, a banker with three pretty daughters.
Anna Ridgely was smitten with Hay. She described him as “a bright, handsome fellow . . . with good features, especially the eyes which were dark, lustrous brown; red cheeks and clear dark complexion; small, well-shaped hands which he had a habit of locking together interlacing the fingers, and carrying at arms length, which the girls thought particularly fetching.” (There is no accounting then or now for what people might find particularly fetching . . .) “He also dressed appealingly, wearing a long loose overcoat, flying open, his hands thrust into the pockets . . . graceful and attractive, as he swung himself along the street . . .”
Anna’s elegant parlor was the gathering place for young folks who loved music and literature, and dancing, and speaking French and German as well as they could, which—in the case of the two friends from the West—was very good indeed. Nicolay, tall and slender, was light on his feet, and a popular partner in the quadrille. Of the two men, Nicolay was happier, and no doubt a great comfort to his friend, who was still disappointed in love and frustrated in his career. Nicolay was doing what he wanted to do. He had been admitted to the Illinois bar in January 1859, wrote columns for several journals while clerking in the statehouse, and saw as much as he pleased of his fiancée. He relished his daily contact with the leading Republicans of Illinois, including the droll Mr. Lincoln.
Hay was still clinging to memories of cousin Annie, and mourning a paradise lost. On New Year’s Day, 1860, he wrote to her: “While all the world of Springfield is exchanging New Year greetings, partaking of New Year hospitality, eating New Year salads and drinking New Year’s coffee (nothing stronger) let me, secluding myself for a while from the world aforesaid, make my New Years call on you. Let me in the morning of the year remind you of my existence that I might not be forgotten . . .” His letter is given over to a catalog of his miseries, and hoping that she will avoid his sorry condition. He says he cannot make any more visits because “I am becoming dreadfully cross, ill-natured and morose.”
He blames his surroundings, saying that in Warsaw he is half-civilized, but “when I leave there I become an absolute heathen. Is it because I have no mother here to tell me to cultivate the humanities?” In Springfield he has no friend like Annie. He longs for her, yet urges her to take advantage of her beauty and charm. “Gather your rose-buds while you may, Annie, for the heavens may not be always cloudless.” Even if the means of gratification lie within reach, he counsels, one may lose the capacity for enjoyment. “Unhappy is the being,” he moans, “upon whom falls that everlasting cloud of discontent.” He begs her pardon for preaching a sermon, “But I am very discontented, and cannot help writing sadly and foolishly.”
His mood went from bad to worse that spring, as he wrote to Annie on a Sunday evening, April 15: “I should occupy the still sad hours of gathering twilight and falling shadows in trying to place my own soul in relation to yours which has always been with me an emblem of whatever of high and loveable that my life has seen.” He dreams of her nightly, but she has another beau. He admits that he does have friends, and good prospects, and that his misery may be his own doing. Yet “my lonesome hours are peopled with ghosts of dead possibilities,” and the “voice of desires and ambitions whose vanities I see, but whose cry I cannot stifle. . . . Would it not have been better never to have known the conquests of mind and the possibilities of existence? Then we never could catch the fearful contagion . . . of ambition.”
Hay’s spiritual crisis was soon to be resolved by a lanky, disheveled lawyer-politician who spoke in ironic aphorisms and barnyard metaphors, who had scarcely attended school, but somehow had managed to reconcile ambition and idealism. He had written poems and served in the U.S. Congress; he had provided very well for his wife and children. Few would realize how ambitious he was until his idealism came to the fore; no one would have known the extent of his idealism, his reverence for Virtue and Truth, if he had never given free rein to his ambition.
John Hay, as his love letters to Annie Johnston reveal, was primed to appreciate Lincoln from the moment of their first encounter. That was in September of 1859. Hay was studying at a desk upstairs from the general store at Fifth and Washington streets, facing the windows on the square, in the law office of his uncle Milton and Stephen Logan. Lincoln “came in the law office where I was reading, which adjoined his own, with a copy of Harper’s Magazine in his hand, containing Senator Douglas’s famous article on Popular Sovereignty. Entering in his pale linen coat, without salutation, he said: ‘This will never do. He puts the moral element out of the question. It won’t stay out.’ ” He meant, of course, that Douglas spoke of slavery in the new territories as if it had been a mere economic necessity or property right, putting aside any question of the “peculiar institution” as being right or wrong. Hay may have seen a glimmer of hope: a balance of practical ambition and virtue was at hand.
Honest Abe, with his stories, jokes, and passion for freedom, was a magnetic personality. Hay found him irresistible and endlessly fascinating. Skeptical of all persons and things that were not either highborn or sophisticated, Hay was nonetheless curious about this idealistic backwoods lawyer. Hay and one of the Ridgely girls heard Lincoln lecture in Cook’s Hall. By May 5, 1860, he wrote to a college friend: “I am as yet innocent of politics. I occupy myself very pleasantly in thoroughly hating both sides, and abusing the peculiar tenets of the company I happen to be in, and when the company is divided, say, with Mercutio, ‘a plague on both your Houses.’ This position I expect to hold for a very long time unless Lincoln is nominated in Chicago.”
Hay did not have long to wait. Two weeks later, Lincoln was nominated to be the Republican standard-bearer, and in that time of national crisis no man with a conscience could remain neutral. John Hay, whose best friend was Nicolay, and whose Uncle Milton was one of Lincoln’s advisers, would align himself with the Republican Party, with the cause of freedom and the Union, and against secession and slavery. In the fog of his own transition from adolescence to adulthood, yielding up the untenable purity of his poetic ideal for a real life that might accommodate both poetry and practical affairs, he could not have known how much one man, Abraham Lincoln, would contribute to his blossoming. Lincoln would become Hay’s most inspiring muse.
True to his word, after Lincoln’s nomination, John Hay dropped the mask of neutrality. Caught up in the tide of enthusiasm for the Republican cause, he began writing articles endorsing Lincoln. With Elmer Ellsworth, he gave stump speeches for the candidate; and when Nicolay called for help with the mail, Hay put aside his law books and hurried to Lincoln’s rooms in the statehouse. Despite the gloom we have seen in his letters, Hay was known for his “sunny disposition”; he actually radiated good spirits and sanguine humor. Lincoln soon took to him, with more warmth perhaps than he had taken to his older friend Nicolay, who had assumed, under the severe conditions of an orphaned youth, an attitude of premature seriousness.
AFTER LINCOLN’S ELECTION IN November 1860, Hay found himself in the inner circle of the president-elect’s supporters and advisers. Working side by side with John Nicolay and Elmer Ellsworth; Jesse Dubois, the state auditor; Norman Judd, chairman of the Illinois Republican central committee; factotum Ward Hill Lamon; and Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s campaign manager, he must have known that he was in the right place at the right time. Having served Lincoln, as had Nicolay and Ellsworth, he hoped that the president-elect would find a place for him in the new administration.
Hay was admitted to the bar on February 4, 1861. While Nicolay’s paid employment on Lincoln’s staff had been formalized in June 1860, Hay’s position was still voluntary. Sometime during the winter of 1860–61, Nicolay recommended that Hay be hired as his assistant. Lincoln gave Nicolay a quizzical look and said, “We can’t take all Illinois with us down to Washington,” but then, relenting, he added cheerfully: “Well, let Hay come.”
Like his friends Nicolay and Ellsworth, Hay had made himself indispensable to the president-elect in the months before the election. His salary was still a problem, for there was money in the federal budget for only one secretary. Lincoln offered to pay him something out of his own pocket until after the inauguration, when he might have some sort of government appointment. But the devoted uncle, Milton Hay, guaranteed to pay his nephew’s expenses for six months, just as many parents of the time subsidized their sons’ apprenticeships to blacksmiths and shipwrights. Lincoln had gathered the core of his team.
And so, along with Mr. Lincoln, his family, and two railway carriages of guards, political advisers, friends, and physicians, they set out on the winding, tumultuous tour that newsmen called a “journey through ovations” from Springfield to Washington. As the train moved through the damp fields along the Sangamon River, Nicolay transcribed the “Farewell Address” that Lincoln had delivered extempore a few minutes earlier. Lincoln had begun the task, but, overcome with emotion after writing “Here my children have been born, and one is buried,” he tearfully handed the pencil to Nicolay to finish. Slowly the secretary took dictation. “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
Every man aboard that train was aware of the fearful task they were facing. A pamphlet of instructions went ahead to all the towns where stops were scheduled, with this paragraph foremost: “First: the President elect will under no circumstances attempt to pass through any crowd until such arrangements are made as will meet with the approval of Col. Ellsworth.” Ellsworth was the titular head of security. The passions over slavery and states’ rights that had animated Lincoln’s debates with the democrat Stephen Douglas in the senatorial election of 1858 had created what New York senator William Seward called an “irrepressible conflict” between North and South. Abolitionist John Brown’s attack on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859; his plan of fomenting a slave insurrection; his subsequent conviction for treason, and hanging—all these things made him a martyr in the eyes of abolitionists. While levelheaded Republicans such as Lincoln and Seward condemned the fanatic act of treason, southerners saw Brown as part of a Republican plot to create a long-dreaded slave revolt. Southern radicals—especially wealthy plantation owners—began urging secession of slave states as the only means of preserving their economy and way of life. Speaking in Kansas on December 3, 1859, Lincoln declared, “So, if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with. We shall try to do our duty.”
No sooner was Lincoln elected than South Carolina called a secession convention. On November 9, Lincoln was hanged in effigy at Pensacola, Florida. On December 20, South Carolina passed an ordinance dissolving the Union “now subsisting between South Carolina and other States.” On January 9, 1861, Mississippi passed a similar ordinance, and within three weeks Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit. James Buchanan, the lame-duck president, believing he lacked the power to coerce the rebellious states, did nothing. By this time, Fort Sumter, the federal installation in Charleston Harbor, had become an offense to the southern states. When “negotiators” from South Carolina demanded that the fort be evacuated, Buchanan refused. He had sent the troopship Star of the West to reinforce Fort Sumter, and when a rebel battery fired upon the vessel, striking the fore chains, the Star of the West was forced to return to New York. Many had felt that the “the Rubicon has been crossed,” that the first shots of the Civil War had been fired.
On February 18, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America at the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama. Lincoln’s train passed through crowds rioting in Albany, desperate for words of comfort in the crisis, or some comment on the rebellion. Lincoln, addressing the New York legislature, said, “I do not propose to enter into an explanation of any particular line of policy as to our present difficulties . . . I deem it just . . . that I should see everything, that I should hear everything, that I should have every light that can be brought within my reach, in order that when I do so speak, I shall have enjoyed every opportunity to take correct and true ground . . .”
As the presidential party arrived in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, the adventure grew perilous. John Hay wrote to Annie Johnston, saying how sorry he was that his last weeks in Springfield had been “so dreadfully hurried.” He had wanted so much to pay her “a final visit . . . nothing but necessity could have made me forgo it. I was too busy to grow very homesick. Work is the best recipe for fancies.” This was certainly true in Hay’s case. Gone from this note, and from most of his future letters, are the florid, looping, and self-pitying sentences of adolescence—they are replaced by a more straightforward, precise eloquence laced with irony.
I write you just this line tonight to let you know why I was so long silent, and to assure you that I still think of you . . . Tomorrow we enter slave territory. Saturday evening according to our arrangements, we will be in Washington.
There may be trouble in Baltimore. If so, we will not go to Washington, unless in long, narrow boxes. The telegraph will inform you of the result, long before this letter reaches you. If all is well, this letter will do no harm. If anything happens, you will remember that I was at the present date,
Very affectionately,
Your friend J.H.
Hay was not exaggerating. A plot had been discovered to derail the train outside of Baltimore and murder everyone aboard. That very night, detective Allan Pinkerton, the hulking Ward Hill Lamon—one of Lincoln’s former law partners, now his preferred bodyguard—and the president-elect boarded a secret train bound straight for the capital with no stop in Baltimore. Meanwhile, Hay, Nicolay, Ellsworth, Mrs. Lincoln, and the rest rode the decoy presidential special that would meet, head-on, the furious mob in Baltimore. According to newspaper accounts of the time, the danger was real, and the party considered themselves fortunate to arrive in Washington safely the next day.