The private secretaries often operated in the public eye. As chief of protocol, John Nicolay faced rare challenges. White House social events—public receptions and levees, more intimate “at homes,” and formal state dinners—were frequent and sometimes elaborate. Nicolay, Hay, and Stoddard were expected to assist in making introductions at these functions. The cooperation of the executive departments, the military, and the diplomats during wartime all depended upon a high degree of social success in the Executive Mansion—and so did popular support.
A book of this scope cannot begin to chronicle those grand soirees catered by Chef Gautier, where thousands sipped champagne punch ladled from crystal bowls the size of washtubs, when rare varieties of flowers were shipped down from Bucat’s in Philadelphia to adorn the tall porcelain vases, and the Marine Band played instrumentals from Verdi. The secretaries worked together with the Lincolns to make the White House a social haven in a crucial era of the Republic. They faced daunting crosscurrents, one of which was the novelty of a house of Republicans entertaining violently opposed Democratic factions in a southern city.
Then there was the difficulty of the president’s wife—her moods, prejudices, and jealousies, which the three young men cleverly managed. She was essential to the social enterprise, and could be splendid and effective; but, desperate for control, she was often stubborn, sometimes impulsive, and occasionally perverse. She may have courted scandal in her ways of refurbishing the White House, but now it was magnificent, and visiting dignitaries took note. She had incurred deep debts to New York clothiers that would embarrass her husband later, but now she dressed in the height of fashion, so that at least in this respect no society journalists would call her “provincial.”
Early in 1862, Mrs. Lincoln made up her mind that she had had enough of the stuffy “state dinners” that had been the principal means of entertaining cabinet members, generals, heads of state, ambassadors, and leaders of Congress for a half century. She explained, first to her black dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, and then to Mr. Lincoln, that the dinners were too costly; it would be more economical to scratch them from the program and instead give three large parties by invitation only. The real reason she disliked state dinners is that she had little control over the guest lists, and sometimes found herself out of her depth socially. She had cultivated a circle of admirers and sycophants who were not welcome at state dinners. For an entertainment that filled the East Room, she would have an allowance to invite whomever she pleased.
“Mother, I am afraid your plan will not work,” said Mr. Lincoln.
“But it will work, if you will only determine that it shall work.”
He explained to his wife that it was a violation of an old custom, to which she replied that this was wartime, and old customs might be put aside for the sake of economy, and moreover, “public receptions are more democratic than stupid state dinners. . . . There are a great many strangers in the city, foreigners and others . . . whom we cannot invite to our dinners.” Against his better judgment, Lincoln let Mary have her way.
Nicolay knew immediately that this was a recipe for social turmoil, and wrote to Therena on February 2, 1862, that “Mrs. Lincoln has determined to make an innovation in the social customs of the White House,” and had ordered seven hundred tickets for a party to be held on February 5. In the past, the only private entertainments that called for invitations were state dinners. Large receptions, such as the New Year’s levee, were open to the public. “How it will work,” Nicolay confided, skeptically, “remains yet to be seen. Half of the city is jubilant at being invited, while the other half is furious at being left out in the cold.” He controlled the tickets and soon found himself at loggerheads with Mrs. Lincoln over the guest list.
Mrs. Lincoln abhorred Nicolay, who, gritting his teeth, struggled to conceal that the feeling was mutual. But the lady was too shrewd to be fooled. Even John Hay, with his boyish charm, could not get on with her or hide his dislike. Only the square-jawed, courtly Stoddard, who genuinely liked Mary Lincoln, got along with her well enough to reason with her, and now and again he would be called upon to intervene when she had disturbed the peace. This party by invitation was just such an occasion.
Stoddard recalled that “My Lady President’s Ball” was quite formal, invitations having been “limited to certain species of men and women. Senators, Congressmen, Judges of the Supreme Court, members of the Cabinet.” Generals, legislators, and diplomats and their wives would take up most of the space available in the reception rooms. But prominent men in Washington were besieged with requests for tickets from all over the Northeast, as if they were “free tickets to the Greatest Show on Earth.” For every request granted by favoritism, there were dozens of people furious at being denied. “The first applicants to be disappointed and to get mad about it” were the journalists, who somehow imagined themselves to be sufficiently official or diplomatic to be entitled. Stoddard recalled that Hay and Nicolay mostly dealt with the newsmen, but insofar as he participated in the discussion, he “found all explanations in vain. A certain number, of course, could be admitted as ‘reporters,’ but when I mentioned that fact, the fat was all in the fire. In the language of one excited scribe, ‘If we cannot come as gentlemen, we will not come at all!’ ” a comment that Stoddard—being a journalist—said was hard upon a “fellow who ceased to be a gentleman when he became a reporter.”
He was at his desk one day raking mail when Hay rushed in from Nicolay’s office across the hall, looking troubled. He said that Mrs. Lincoln was downstairs in the Red Room with two of her friends, former congressmen Caleb Lyon and General Daniel Sickles, both of New York. They had tickets, of course, and influence, and so they had asked for two more, one for Mr. George Wilkes, editor of the abolitionist Spirit of the Times, the other for an editor of the New York Herald. Both papers had been highly critical of the president’s conservative approach to the slaves’ plight.
Hay led Stoddard across the hall to Nicolay’s office, where he found the senior secretary at his desk, his brow furrowed, in an advanced state of agitation.
“Stoddard!” he grumbled. “I can’t do anything. It will make all sorts of trouble. She is determined to have her own way. . . . She wouldn’t listen to me.”
Nodding in appreciation of the difficulty, Stoddard asked for the tickets, and tried to reassure his friend that it might be resolved. He smoothed his hair, turned, and went down to the Red Room, where he said hello to Mrs. Lincoln. Seeing Sickles, an old friend, the secretary shook hands with him, and then was introduced to Caleb Lyon. Stoddard handed the tickets to Mrs. Lincoln, “which she had sent for under pernicious beguilement,” he recalled. And his usually cheerful features could not, and would not, conceal his fury. “She could see that I was boiling over, wild mad about something,” and when he drew her aside and asked if he might have a word with her, she excused herself and followed him into the Blue Room.
Stoddard was naturally histrionic, a man with dramatic instincts, one who struck poses. Now he pretended to be outraged, indignant almost to the point of being speechless, stammering mad.
“What is it, Mr. Stoddard?”
He confessed that he was about to throttle the visitors.
“Why? What for? What have they done?”
“Mrs. Lincoln, I suppose you have the right to know. They have demanded of Mr. Nicolay invitations for those two fellows . . . that have been abusing you, personally, and Mr. Lincoln, like pickpockets.” He said it was better to give tickets to friends and not enemies, and that her inviting such enemies would offend her friends. Such logic appealed to Mrs. Lincoln, who tended to view the social world simply as a confrontation between her friends and foes.
“I wish you would put your foot down and stop it,” he exclaimed, and soon had her singing right along with him. “They can’t have the invitations—”
“Of course they can’t!” she cried, as if she had known it all along, “I’ll go right in and tell them so.”
And so Mrs. Lincoln went back into the Red Room and told the two astonished ex-congressmen off, while Stoddard went upstairs to inform the other secretaries that the matter had been settled. They patted him on the back, eager to know how he had worked the miracle.
DESPITE THE FLEETING SUCCESS of Mrs. Lincoln’s party on the fifth—which the president’s critics attacked as a frivolity in wartime—February 1862 was the saddest month of the saddest year in the White House. While the leaders of government and high society mingled under the chandeliers of the East Room listening to the band play the overture from Maniello, dined on pheasant and venison, and sipped claret, the Lincolns’ eleven-year-old son Willie lay deathly ill in a heavily draped bedroom upstairs. He had caught typhoid. After terrible fevers, dehydration, delirium, and pneumonia, he died on February 20. Cruel newsmen called this the judgment of a wrathful god upon Mrs. Lincoln’s pride and extravagance.
On the day the boy died, Nicolay recalled that the routine had been attended to as usual, but the president appeared exhausted from his night vigils over Willie. “At about 5 o’clock this afternoon, I was lying half asleep on the sofa in my office, when his [Lincoln’s] entrance aroused me. ‘Well, Nicolay,’ said he, choking with emotion, ‘my boy is gone—he is actually gone!’ and bursting into tears, turned and went into his own office.” The family was helpless with grief. It was Nicolay’s duty to arrange for the embalming, funeral, and burial of their favorite son. In this, he would have the assistance of Senator Orville Browning, the president’s friend from Illinois, as well as Mrs. Browning, who would spend weeks attending Mrs. Lincoln and her younger son, Tad, who was also ill.
Mary Lincoln was inconsolable, hysterical, and would require opiates to subdue her. It is likely that she never recovered from this blow. Her mental balance, which had been precarious for several years, began an inexorable decline into madness. Although Lincoln tried to comfort her, and her sisters and close friends undertook to ease her grief, her instability and irascibility would be an increasing challenge to the president and his aides.
It is curious to see how little the secretaries had to say about the pathetic death of the Lincolns’ son and the ensuing effects on the household. Perhaps, being bachelors, they had no personal gauges by which to measure the calamity. Mr. Lincoln resumed a deceptive composure that invited their admiration as much as their pity. Mrs. Lincoln immured herself in her dark bedroom. She had so alienated Nicolay and Hay, they probably thought of her as little as possible.
The day after Willie died, Nicolay briefly reported the event in his letter to Therena, saying that “his death was not altogether unexpected”; then he went on to say that “I have the gratification to inform you that I have got your brother Major and Robert Torrey appointed Second Lieutenants in the 13th Regiment of Infantry in the Regular Army.” He needed to know the brother’s full name for the senate confirmation, and offered to recommend him for a place in the cavalry if he desired to ride.
Some of Nicolay’s letters to Therena after Willie’s death are quite pensive, introspective, as if his feelings about the misfortune were sublimated. When his fiancée wrote to ask him his opinion about her religious direction, he responded thoughtfully. “It is in my opinion, entirely an independent and individual responsibility . . . You should permit, for example, neither myself, nor the Pope, nor [the Reverend] Mr. Carter to be your religious director.” He urged her to guard her faith from “the magnetism or sympathetic impulse of personal surroundings . . . ,” and rather to hear all instruction “merely as so much argument: let nothing but your own mind and heart make up and render the final judgment.”
Clearly he has been influenced by Lincoln’s extraordinary example, the attitude of his boss and his mentor, a man of faith who subscribes to no creed, and belongs to no church. Lincoln does not look to the denominations of Christianity for his salvation or his solace. He has even paid a political price for his iconoclasm. Nicolay tells Therena to prepare herself to be disenchanted by the Church, for it cannot provide the support she might hope for. “Bitter as the conviction may prove, you will find that the boundary of the church, as well as the world outside, encircles all of human folly and weakness.” With rare eloquence, he defines the true success of the faithful: “The Christian army never wins victories by battalions. It is individual strength, courage, heroism, that achieves its successes. . . . it is only those who like Moses, climb alone up the mount of sacrifice, through the clouds of Creed, the thunders of Bigotry and the lightnings of Doubt, who shall see Divinity face to face with spiritual eye, and receive the true commandments.”
There were few men of Nicolay’s acquaintance who answered to that description, but one of them was in the office next door, grieving for his dead son.
Although John Hay wrote lengthy obituaries for other White House friends and Lincoln relatives, including Ellsworth and Baker, and years later, upon the death of Tad Lincoln, Hay makes no mention of Willie’s death in his letters or journals. This brings to mind an unfortunate and tantalizing hole in the fabric of this history. Hay’s diary, in many ways the most perceptive portrait of Lincoln and of the White House from April 1861 until December 1864, sputters to a halt in early December 1861; then—excepting a half-dozen undated jottings—it does not resume until April 1863. Close examination of the blue-lined notebooks reveals that at least one signature (eight pages) was razored out of the diary after November 13, 1861, and the nonsequential jumble of volumes strongly suggests that one or more have been altogether lost or destroyed.
That Hay’s diary was censored for the sake of propriety, either by the writer himself or by his wife, Clara, has never been in doubt. In the 1960s, the scholar John Ettlinger masterfully rescued and transcribed many sections of the manuscript that had been inked out; other passages remain obscured, beyond salvation even by ultraviolet light; and if volumes are missing no one alive seems to know what has become of them.
It is a mystery that—evidence suggests—leads to the door of Mrs. Lander’s “cottage,” to which she had allowed John Hay access while her husband was gone to the wars, and after he died from his wound. Hay was, said one woman who visited the White House, the most attractive man she had seen in the city. And Jean Margaret Lander was one of the most captivating women in the world. That they were immediately drawn to each other even Hay’s expurgated diary cannot conceal.
Hay’s journalistic columns from this period have survived, but they contain no mention of Willie Lincoln’s death or the grief in the White House. He writes of the war, and political intrigue. He praises the heroes of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, General Grant and General McClernand, who forced the unconditional surrender of the Confederate stronghold and twelve thousand rebel soldiers on the Cumberland River. He condemns the shameless opportunism of radical senator James Henry Lane of Kansas, who “used his position as a senator to have himself appointed a Brigadier General,” only for political gain and prestige as an abolitionist. On February 21, Hay uses his column to praise the commander in chief for the recent military successes. “The welfare of the nation is in safe hands, when the Chief Magistrate has at once a genius in conception and a talent in execution that renders him at once independent of Generals and of politicians.” He had begun as a humorous skeptic of the Illinois lawyer’s executive gifts. Watching Lincoln for a year in office had made Hay a confirmed believer in his genius.
In Stoddard’s column for the New York Examiner, we find only this comment on the president for March 3: “The President is looking somewhat better, the all-absorbing interest of this hour of action serving to draw his thoughts away from his bereavement.” Every Thursday afternoon, at the hour of his child’s death, Mr. Lincoln would shut himself up in the Prince of Wales room, and think of Willie, and indulge his sorrow. He would emerge daubing his red eyes with his handkerchief, and return to work at his desk.
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1862, Nicolay celebrated his thirtieth birthday. He wrote to Therena on a rainy Wednesday: “Ten years ago, I was a printer’s devil in Pittsfield, as you and I will long remember. Twenty years ago I was a school boy in St. Louis . . . thirty years ago I was born in the Flemish Palatinate of Bavaria.” He laments the fact that much of the second decade of his life was wasted—through no fault of his own. Orphaned, unschooled, the boy that fortune spurned “might have gained much skill, knowledge and experience in that time, which I now sorely need.” Now he was learning on the job in the most rigorous of classrooms—where men’s fates hung upon his decisions—under the tutelage of incomparable masters. Mr. Lincoln knew, as we do, that the thirty-year-old former printer’s devil had skill and knowledge equal to the challenges he faced in the White House. Yet John George Nicolay somehow tempered his confidence with a touching humility.
But by the spring of 1862, Nicolay was burned out. He missed Therena and wanted to breathe the air of the prairie and mountains.
The president gave him leave to go west on March 28, with specific orders. Nicolay would be gone for the entire month of April, but he would spend only a week in Pittsfield with his fiancée. First, he must go to Nashville on business for the Treasury Department. He went as a personal envoy to communicate instructions to the assistant treasurer, Allen A. Hall, concerning changes “made to facilitate commerce.” Nicolay’s duties in Nashville included intelligence gathering concerning the quantities of cotton and tobacco in the region, and when these would enter the markets. He must also assess the secessionist sentiment in Tennessee. “Still strongly predominant,” he wrote, “and manifests itself continually in taunts and insults to federal soldiers and officials. . . . The rebels still hope that our army will have reverses and that the confederate troops will return and occupy and control not only this city but the State.” Tennessee’s allegiance was precarious, but Nicolay had the “decided impression, that if we win another important battle in the neighborhood . . . active secessionism in Tennessee will wilt and die out.”
It was no coincidence that Lincoln sent Nicolay to Tennessee on the eve of what came to be known as the Battle of Shiloh. General Ulysses S. Grant and General Don Carlos Buell had more than fifty thousand Federal troops in western Tennessee, poised to invade Mississippi and take control of the Mississippi River. Forty thousand Confederate troops under General Albert Sidney Johnston assembled across the border in Corinth, to block the invaders. Their surprise attack on Grant’s army at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, at dawn on April 6 resulted in the bloodiest battle of the war to date.
Nicolay had come up from Louisville via St. Louis to Springfield on April 7. He meant to board the train to Pittsfield—where Therena patiently waited—on April 9, when word of the great battle on the Tennessee River reached him. “As the governor and State officers are going down there, I have concluded to go with them,” he wrote her. Leaving Springfield, he suspected that the rumors of casualties were exaggerated. But four days later, close to the battleground, he saw that the “battle reports support a dearly bought victory at Pittsburg Landing.” He was Lincoln’s scout in that remote corner of Tennessee, observing not only the horrible cost of the campaign to both sides but the stubbornness of the southern survivors, who “live in the Micawber-like hope that ‘Secesh’ will yet turn up triumphant, somewhere and somehow, when their political millennium will come,” and they might “light their cigars with $5 Treasury notes and feast on jerked Yankee liver.”
While Nicolay was gone, Hay and Stoddard struggled to keep the mail and the visitors moving efficiently through an Executive Mansion draped in mourning and continually embarrassed by Mary Lincoln’s outbursts and demands. In Nicolay’s absence, Hay bore the brunt of her animosity. For more than a month after Willie’s death, she had remained secluded, attended by relatives from Springfield. Now she had begun to stir.
Lincoln was so consumed with military matters that he had tried to ignore the gossip and signs of trouble over Mrs. Lincoln’s conduct during the past year. Only a week before Willie’s death, the Senate Judiciary Committee had considered indicting Mrs. Lincoln on charges of sedition—supplying notes of the president’s State of the Union address to a sycophantic journalist from the New York Herald. A week after the funeral, Senator Orville Browning informed Lincoln that his wife had colluded with the gardener John Watt to defraud the Treasury by submitting false invoices. Gossip over these affairs swirled around the White House even as Mrs. Lincoln lay grief stricken.
Whatever difficulty she caused, Hay tried to keep from the president. “The ‘enemy’ [Mrs. Lincoln] is still planning [a] Campaign in quiet,” he wrote to Nicolay on March 31. “She is rapidly being reinforced from Springfield. A dozen Todds of the Edwards Breed [are] in the house.” She had become such an impediment to their work, and so unpleasant, Hay and Nicolay began to refer to her and her hostility in military terms. She felt wronged in every way, slandered, cursed, and maligned. The culture of “sharp practices” by which she had survived her first year as mistress of the White House could not quickly be reformed. On April 4, Hay wrote Nicolay that Mrs. Lincoln had pressured him “to pay her the Steward’s salary.” This is one of a few scattered indications that Nicolay—and Hay in Nicolay’s absence—held the purse strings for certain White House and family expenses. (“What did you do with the safe key?” he begs Nicolay. “I can’t find it anywhere.”)
One of Mrs. Lincoln’s schemes for getting extra cash was to fire a steward or a maid and then expropriate his or her salary. They were short a steward, and Hay refused her. “I told her to kiss mine. Was I right?” Of course, he said no such vulgar thing to the president’s wife, but Hay made it clear he would not be a party to any such double-dealing; and she would not forgive him for it. “The devil is abroad, having great wrath,” Hay wrote the next day. “His daughter, the Hell-Cat [Mrs. Lincoln] sent Stackpole in to blackguard me about the feed of her horses.” Thomas Stackpole was a night watchman who—after the dismissal of John Watt—carried on as Mrs. Lincoln’s coconspirator in defrauding the Treasury. Stackpole was pressuring Hay to release funds for stable supplies so that he and Mrs. Lincoln might line their pockets with it. “She thinks there is cheating round the board and with that candor so charming in the young does not hesitate to say so. I declined opening communications on the subject,” Hay explained. Mrs. Lincoln continued to badger him over the steward’s salary. “There is no steward,” Hay affirmed. “She thinks she will blackguard your angelic representative into giving it to her ‘which I don’t think she’ll do it, Hallelujah!’ ”
The secretaries tried to protect the president from knowledge of this larceny while he was defending the capital, holding the cabinet together, and motivating the sluggish General George McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln did write John Hay a check for $1,002.19 on April 4, strengthening the hypothesis that the secretaries had a “slush fund” at their disposal, and that at the moment it was running low.
Five days later, Hay reported to Nicolay that “the little Napoleon [McClellan] sits trembling before the handful of men at Yorktown [Virginia] afraid either to fight or run. Stanton feels devilish about it.” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had replaced the controversial Simon Cameron in January, had visited the White House that morning to complain of McClellan’s idleness. The general kept grumbling that his army was smaller than Stanton knew it to be. At last Lincoln, exasperated, told McClellan, “But you must act.”
“Things go on here about as usual,” Hay went on. “There is no fun at all. The Hellcat is getting more Hellcatical day by day. . . . I am getting along pretty well. I only work about 20 hours a day. I do all of your work & half of my own now you are away. Don’t hurry yourself. We are getting on very well.”
Lacking Nicolay’s fluency in French—the language of diplomacy in those days—Hay and Stoddard hired a tutor, “a Professor Marix, a Russian Jew whose pronunciation had the St. Petersburg improvement upon the Parisian dialect,” Stoddard recalled. “We really did pretty well with that matter.” They also hired a dancing master that spring. He came to the office at odd hours to teach them the latest dance steps, “a kind of queer partnership,” Stoddard called it, as they took turns leading and following, whirling around the echoing hallway as Professor Marini clapped time. “Hay may have afterwards become a good dancer but I never did, although I mastered shottisches, and broke down at waltzing.” Sometimes they went out riding on two large bay horses on loan from the War Department; in this exercise, Stoddard was very accomplished and Hay was just learning.
AFTER SPENDING THE WEEK of April 15 in Pittsfield with Therena, Nicolay returned to the capital on the last day of the month.
As busy as they were, the three men who managed the executive office found time at night for barhopping, dance parties, and other entertainments. Nicolay’s correspondence is full of descriptions of lively parties, particularly at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eames. He was counsel of the Department of the Navy, and his wife, Fanny—a witty, well-educated lady—was “at home” between eight and eleven on Sunday evenings, and some Tuesdays, at their house on the corner of Fourteenth and H streets. There, Hay and Nicolay could be sure to meet the most attractive women and fascinating men in the city. “Their parlor is really a sort of focal point in Washington society, where one meets the best people that come here . . . the brains of society—politicians, diplomats, authors and artists . . . titled foreigners, pretty women & c.” The polyglot crowd spoke English, French, Spanish, and German. At one Tuesday gathering, the guest of honor was Lady Georgina Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and the guests included Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, Mrs. Elizabeth Grimsley, and Senator Henry Wilson. He also mentions the poet and editor N. P. Willis and Hay’s friend Emmanuel Leutze, the painter—both close friends of Jean Margaret Lander, who was, in all likelihood, a frequent visitor in this house. The Eameses’ and the Chases’ were the most distinguished of several salons where Nicolay and Hay passed their time between working and sleeping.
Stoddard traveled in different circles. He had a taste for the rakish, the high rollers, the demimonde. Some of his best writing of the period describes the smoke-filled gambling dens along Pennsylvania Avenue, which he claimed to visit only as an observer; but his interest in the sporting life and high stakes was not merely clinical.
He was fascinated by economics, particularly that branch of it concerned with the monetary system, gold and silver coins and the way various paper currencies represent—or misrepresent—the hard money. He found that this dynamic resembled the operation of the faro tables and the roulette wheel. As he walked out on a cold winter evening, he studied the staggered columns of the unfinished Treasury Building, which “reminds one of the paper promises to pay which are flowing from it in a river.” Some men were betting that those promises would not be kept, that bonds and banknotes would be devalued and become “as worthless as so much continental currency.” When that occurred, the investors who were long on gold, or shorting the greenbacks, would be the richer for it. Those who had gambled on the paper stood to lose.
On the corner of Fifteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Stoddard noticed a group of men he identified as bitterly antagonistic “to anything or anybody coming from the White House,” including himself, and so he crossed the muddy street to avoid them. He regarded in particular a tall man in a loose overcoat, wearing spectacles. While calling himself a Union man from Kentucky, he was, Stoddard knew, a spy with a commission in the Confederate army; but even Lafayette Baker, the head of the Washington detective service, could not get enough proof to arrest him. There was a “dark-haired, eagle nosed, brilliant-eyed, strikingly handsome man,” who was a copperhead congressman, a well-known northerner who sympathized with the rebels, and another two dandies Stoddard identified only as “sporting men.” All were beautifully turned out. He notes that “the entire sporting fraternity here leans toward secession. Its best patrons and victims, heretofore, have been the reckless spendthrifts whose money was earned for them by the unpaid toil of other men.”
Why were they gathered on the corner under the streetlamp? The men were either leaving, or about to enter a dark, windowless brick building, “the famous gambling establishment known as Joe Hall’s.” Like a mining town, Washington had long been a favorite resort of gamblers because of the transient population of lawmakers, lobbyists, and government workers—men loose from their families. There were many legends concerning the gambling habits and card-playing predilections of bygone statesmen, and now “all the vice and profligacy of all the North and West and part of the South seem to be sewering into this great frontier post and pay-station of the army.”
Stoddard’s desire—as well as his innate curiosity—to observe the living legends led him through the door of Joe Hall’s. Only gentlemen were admitted there, those who could afford to gamble. While protesting that he was not really a sporting man, the secretary went directly to the roulette table, where in a matter of minutes he lost $5. A day’s wages. That was the price of admission, his tuition fee. Too discreet to identify the sporting men by name, he describes the gamblers by class and profession. A rich Maryland planter, bent by his years, was betting large sums at the faro table. He should have known better than to squander money. But as he said to the congressman at his side, his slaves were deserting him, and there was no power that would bring them back. Maybe Lady Luck would be kind. Also at the faro table sat a political leader and former friend of Daniel Webster who, only an hour earlier, had sat for a long interview with Mr. Lincoln. Stoddard noted a number of judges, well-known lawyers, and financiers. He saw almost a dozen congressmen mingling with well-heeled lobbyists and contractors, northern businessmen, and some sightseers from the West. There were also a few army officers on furlough.
In the smoke-filled room there were, according to the secretary, “curious Washington traditions concerning the luck at cards, good and bad, of the old-time party idols.” One political leader Stoddard describes as “keen-visaged . . . near to Henry Clay,” suggesting that Webster and Clay—the great men themselves—were not above a hand of high-stakes whist or euchre. This was part of the high life of the capital, in the old society as well as the new. If anything, gambling mania had increased since February 25, 1862, when the legal tender clause passed, and as greenbacks became more plentiful.
The lesson Stoddard brought home from Joe Hall’s casino was that gambling is natural. The finest gentlemen have been known to enjoy it. He felt he could much better understand the problems that harass the president if he bore in mind “that he is dealing with an untellable mass of defective human nature.” Stoddard wrote similar reports on the dance halls and drinking life of the city. He stops short of describing the bordellos.
Unlike the fastidious Hay and the virtuous Nicolay, William Stoddard is a worldly-wise, unabashed chronicler of the “untellable” human foibles—his own included. While not altogether corrupt, Stoddard was a man, like most, with weaknesses. He acknowledged them and labored mightily to overcome them without ever losing his sense of humor. We have little of Stoddard’s correspondence, but a few revealing letters to his mentor, Martin Brewer Anderson, the president of the University of Rochester, have survived. In one letter dated March 11, 1862, Stoddard proudly informs Anderson that he is finally digging himself out of debt. “My property is small, to be sure, but I shall soon be able to look all men in the face and say that I owe nothing but kindness to any on earth.” In several previous letters, he acknowledges his debt of gratitude to Anderson for his patience and moral guidance. “I know that on this I am sure of your sympathy, for you cannot have forgotten my old besetting sins of careless extravagance and rash speculation.”
In 1862, Stoddard was twenty-seven years old. The specifics of the “sins of careless extravagance and rash speculation” that led him into debt while he was a wayward student of Professor Anderson’s are unknown. But we do know from Stoddard’s memoirs, and from a public scandal that caught up with him many years later, that the “old besetting sins” were not so old that they didn’t have life in them still. He is quick to connect the games of chance in Joe Hall’s, and the roulette wheels of the gambling dens along Pennsylvania Avenue, with the speculation in gold and greenbacks going forward in banking offices, counting rooms, and brokerages from Washington to New York to Chicago.
Stoddard was high-spirited, and—he would have us believe— no better or worse than other distinguished men of his time and place. Men like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, congressmen, judges, and wealthy planters spent hours and greenbacks under the clattering whirl of the roulette wheel. And “almost every man who can discover means for doing so is gambling in stocks and gold.” This game is fascinating, he says, because of “the sudden and unaccountable jumps and falls of what are called its prices, meaning the price of greenbacks. They are rather the pulsations of the public hope and fear concerning the national credit.”
To put the case as simply as possible, the new greenbacks the government issued in 1862 were not backed by gold, but they were placed on a par value with bonds that were. The Union had not coin enough to pay its bills, so it issued the greenbacks to pay contractors and employers who took it upon faith that greenbacks would be redeemable or “as good as gold” sooner or later. It was patriotic to hold greenbacks. But even the truest patriot had himself and his family to feed. So rumors of a distant battle, another Union defeat or embarrassment, would set many citizens scrambling for gold and speculators selling the paper money short—or buying it in the belief a Union victory would send it soaring again.
The speculation that year was “running insanely wild in New York and other financial centers, and I formed an idea that it was almost true patriotism to be what was called a ‘bear’ in gold. I therefore went in, a little at first and then deeper . . . I had not the least idea that there was anything wrong in it for a fellow in my position . . .”
Stoddard had yet to learn some very important lessons about his position.