All the Great Prizes Read online

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR ALL THE GREAT PRIZES

  “Utterly fantastic . . . the definitive portrait of a man whose life spanned a crucial era in American history—and whose work helped to define that era. A genius of animation works on every page. It’s the author’s best book.”

  —Open Letters Monthly

  “Given that John Hay’s public career was bookended by his service to Lincoln and Roosevelt, it seems surprising that this is the first biography written about him in 80 years. Thanks to Taliaferro’s skillful work, it seems unlikely that another will be needed for a while.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A valuable reassessment of an underestimated politician and diplomat.”

  —The Economist

  “Hay is lucky to have such an accomplished biographer. All the Great Prizes is a pleasure—well-written, well-researched, the worthy story of a worthy man who served two of the most interesting of U.S. presidents.”

  —The Concord Monitor

  “This is a great biography of a great American.”

  —Washington Independent Review of Books

  “This book . . . brings a fascinating historical figure to greater prominence. All the Great Prizes shows how central John Hay—often thought of as peripheral—was in preparing America for its 20th-century emergence as a great world power.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune

  “Taliaferro’s textured portrait exemplifies the better productions of the biographical craft.”

  —Booklist

  “Taliaferro’s skillful, admiring biography (the first since 1934) brings Hay vividly to life by setting him among family, friends (many of them well-known figures in their own right), and the well-heeled political circles in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, in which Hay moved with ease.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a career public servant”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Taliaferro takes the reader on an intimate historical journey through the public and personal lives of Hay. . . . Worthy as the most comprehensive biography of Hay to date.”

  —Library Journal

  “John Hay has long been one of those remarkable American figures who hide in plain historical sight—until now. With insight and eloquence, John Taliaferro has brought Hay into the foreground, telling a remarkable story remarkably well.”

  —Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

  “John Hay began his career as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, writing many of Lincoln’s letters, and ended it as secretary of state in the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, responsible for many of their foreign-policy achievements. He was at the bedside of Lincoln and of McKinley as each president lay dying of an assassin’s bullet. John Taliaferro’s absorbing biography of this notable author, diplomat, and bon vivant who knew most of the important people of his time fully measures up to the significance of its subject.”

  —James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

  “John Hay is one of the seminal statesmen in American history. All the Great Prizes is the grand book he so richly deserves.”

  —Douglas G. Brinkley, author of Cronkite

  “One of the most intriguing political figures of the Gilded Age, Hay emerges in this beautifully narrated book as an astute, if sometimes unwilling, eyewitness to history. Making deft use of Hay’s own letters, some only recently discovered, Taliaferro brings the man to life.”

  —Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

  “John Hay led more than one charmed life—yet endured more than his share of tragedy. John Taliaferro brings Lincoln’s gifted secretary and biographer—and Theodore Roosevelt’s accomplished secretary of state—back to vivid life in this page-turning account of an extraordinary eyewitness to, and maker of, American history. After generations of bewildering neglect, Hay needs a great biography no longer.”

  —Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln at Cooper Union

  “At long last, John Hay has gotten the biography he deserves. From his youthful service at Lincoln’s side to his late years as Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, this gifted writer, diplomat, and friend was a central figure in America’s exciting journey from near-death to world power. John Taliaferro tells this remarkable life in rich and flowing detail.”

  —David Von Drehle, author of Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Oughtnottobiography

  2. Spunky Point

  3. Potomac Fever

  4. Bolts of War

  5. Progress of Democracy

  6. Plain Language

  7. Millionaires’ Row

  8. Roses in a Glue-Factory

  9. Scorpions

  10. Everlasting Angels

  11. Two on the Terrace

  12. Tame Cats

  13. The English Mission

  14. Setting the Table

  15. Spheres of Influence

  16. Rope of Sand

  17. A Reasonable Time

  18. Fair Warning

  19. Color of Right

  20. Hayism

  21. All the Great Prizes

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About John Taliaferro

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  In Memory of

  John Christopher Taliaferro III (1916–2008)

  and

  Audrey Wilson Taliaferro (1920–2010)

  I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet—instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness & gained nearly all the great prizes.

  —JOHN MILTON HAY, 1905

  CHAPTER 1

  Oughtnottobiography

  The White House would never be the same.

  To those who worked there, it was an “ill-kept, inconvenient, and dirty old rickety concern,” made even shabbier by the heavy footfalls and hard use of civil war. But for all its disarray, it had been John Hay’s home. For four years he and his fellow private secretary, John George Nicolay, had shared a bedroom across the hall from the president’s office, and throughout the war no one had lived more intimately with the Lincolns; no one had witnessed more closely the toll of work and worry and death—of a son and of three quarters of a million of the nation’s sons—upon Abraham Lincoln.

  To be sure, not every day had been dark, and Lincoln’s spirit had not always been so somber. On the occasions, spontaneous and evanescent, when Lincoln’s native humor had shown forth, it radiated most directly on the two secretaries—Nicolay an earnest twenty-nine and Hay a callow twenty-two when they first accompanied the president from Springfield in 1861. With unconditional devotion and respect, Hay and Nicolay had taken to calling their Zeus-like employer “the Tycoon” or “the Ancient.”

  But now in May of 1865 they too were a good deal more ancient. And Lincoln was dead. A month after the assassination, the White House seemed like a corpse itself, laid out in the clothes of a stranger.

  Of the two
secretaries, Hay had been struck more bluntly by the murder. Nicolay was away from Washington on April 14, when the president and Mrs. Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre. Hay had remained at the White House with Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son. Over the past five years, Robert had spent little time with his father—off at boarding school in 1859 as Lincoln prepared to run for the presidency; away at college in 1860 when Lincoln won his party’s nomination and then the national election; gone for nearly the entire Civil War. After Robert’s graduation in 1864, his father found him a place, out of harm’s way, on the staff of Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert had been with Grant at Appomattox when Robert E. Lee gave up his sword. Robert and John Hay had known each other for quite a while, and there could easily have been cause for awkwardness between them. Hay in many respects was closer to the president, knew him better than did the twenty-one-year-old captain home from the war. But to the credit of both, there was no uneasiness at all.

  On that fateful Good Friday, the two young men were upstairs in the White House, catching up, when a doorman burst in with the news, “[S]omething happened to the President.” Robert and Hay hurried by carriage to the boardinghouse where Lincoln lay unconscious with a bullet through his brain. There they remained throughout the night, as doctors probed and Mrs. Lincoln sobbed. They were at the president’s bedside at seven the following morning, when he stopped breathing. Indelibly, Hay remembered Secretary of War Edwin Stanton uttering, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  The corpse was taken to the White House, where, in an upstairs bedroom, embalmers drained its blood and doctors autopsied the skull. In the hours that followed, Stanton and the other cabinet members (except Secretary of State William Seward, who had been quite nearly slain by one of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices) rallied to take charge of the federal government and to arrange for Lincoln’s funeral. The job of handling the president’s personal affairs fell jointly to Robert Lincoln and John Hay. Hay suggested to newly sworn President Andrew Johnson that, under the circumstances, Mrs. Lincoln and the family ought to be allowed to remain in the White House for as long as they wished, and when Johnson’s emissary appeared later in the morning, he found Robert in the presidential office, standing amid his father’s papers. Abraham Lincoln might belong to the ages, but much of the contents of his office now belonged to his family.

  Hay stood beside Robert in those first numbed days after the assassination, and when Nicolay at last arrived, he pitched in as well. Hay and Nicolay had been in charge of most aspects of Lincoln’s workday. They had handled nearly every military order, every letter and telegram, every request for appointment, promotion, and pardon that crossed Lincoln’s desk. They had transcribed his letters and speeches. Nicolay, German-born, was the more organized of the two private secretaries and much stiffer in manner and expression. Hay was the stylish one, dapper and erudite, with the pen of a poet. Mastering Lincoln’s signature had been easy for him; what now seems likely is that he also wrote a good many of the letters that went out above Lincoln’s signature, including at least one letter regarded today as a gem of Lincolniana.

  Indeed, Hay and Nicolay had a vested interest in the papers of Abraham Lincoln, for, with the consent of the president, they had filed away Lincoln’s correspondence and other writings with the aim of eventually writing a book about him. Though the assassination had been jarring in the extreme, they never lost sight of their objective. While undertakers dressed Lincoln’s body for public viewing in the East Room of the White House, Hay and Nicolay made a careful appraisal of the president’s effects. Once Lincoln’s widow and sons left the White House, Robert Lincoln would become the new custodian of the presidential papers, with the understanding that he would make them available to the two secretaries—to them and nobody else. They signed no agreement; Hay’s friendship with Robert was assurance enough.

  Hay and Nicolay’s own eviction from the White House was scarcely a surprise. They were both leaving anyway. As strong as the bond had been between Lincoln and his private secretaries, Mary Lincoln, vengeful and devious, had made life difficult for them from the start, and she had made it quite obvious that she did not want them around for her husband’s second term of office. Hay and Nicolay did not protest. They were thoroughly drained from four years of relentless, at times crushing, toil and stress, and only too ready to move on. The week after the inauguration, Nicolay had been appointed consul to Paris. Hay, too, was going to Paris, as secretary of legation. The jobs had been promised before Lincoln’s death.

  Yet neither bright prospects abroad nor an understanding with Robert Lincoln on the presidential papers made the final days in Washington any less dreary. On April 24, five days after Lincoln’s funeral, Nicolay wrote to his fiancée: “Words seem so inadequate to express my own personal sorrow. . . . I think that I do not yet, and probably shall not yet for a long while, realize what a change his death has wrought in . . . the personal relations of almost every one connected with the government in this city who stood near to him.” Nicolay added, “Hay and I are still here arranging the papers of the office, which has kept us very busy.”

  Meanwhile, Lincoln’s body wended its way, first northward, then westward, taking more than two weeks to reach Springfield, giving millions of Americans a chance to view the darkening face of the martyr. Hay and Nicolay traveled on their own to Springfield, arriving in time for one last memorial service in the Illinois State House. On May 4, the coffin was closed and the president was placed in a receiving vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery, awaiting the erection of a permanent monument to his greatness.

  Hay and Nicolay returned to Washington to finish crating the contents of Lincoln’s office. By the end of the month, they were through and able to make more leisurely visits back to Illinois—Nicolay to be married in Pittsfield, with Hay as his best man; and Hay to see his family in the Mississippi River town of Warsaw.

  Once more Hay returned to Washington, this time to receive his instructions for Paris. Throughout the war years, he had become accustomed to the capital’s mood careening from one quarter of the emotional compass to another, depending on the latest news from the war’s many fronts: military, civil, political, and diplomatic. Nevertheless, he was not ready for the scene that greeted him in Washington after an absence of only a few weeks.

  Andrew Johnson had begun his dubious tenure by setting up temporary shop in the Treasury Building until Mary Lincoln was ready to decamp, which she finally did on May 22, accompanied by some twenty trunks filled with a great many White House furnishings. When Hay paid a visit to the mansion in June, it felt at once haunted and unfamiliar. “I found the shadow of recent experiences resting on everything,” he wrote Robert Lincoln later. “The White House was full of new faces, a swarm of orderlies at doors and windows—the offices filled with new clerks, the anterooms crowded with hungry visitors. It was worse than a nightmare. I got away as soon as I could from the place. I think it will never be again anything less than the evil days in which we left it.” He sailed for Europe on June 24, along with Nicolay and his bride.

  Over the next four decades, John Hay would cross the threshold of the White House hundreds more times, as a friend of presidents, as assistant secretary of state, as ambassador, and finally as secretary of state. But there would always be a before and an after: before the assassination and all that came next. Lincoln was the line of demarcation, by far the deepest tree ring, of Hay’s sixty-six years of personal history and public service. He had lived with Lincoln; he had witnessed the infancy of the Republican Party; he had served and survived the republic’s trial by fire; and while many of his contemporaries would proudly wave the bloody shirt of Republicanism into the next century, Hay bore the distinction of having been bathed, or nearly enough, in the Great Emancipator’s actual blood, not to mention his intelligence, humor, and love.

  For the rest of America, Lincoln would represent a bundle of ideals: patience, perseverance, wisdom, humility, kindness, charity—a full panoply of biblical virtues. T
o Hay, he was the sum of all these, “the greatest man of his time.” Yet to Hay, Lincoln was also corporeal. Hay knew firsthand how Lincoln ate his breakfast, sat a horse, cracked a joke. He had been with Lincoln at Gettysburg. On summer evenings he had rocked with him on the veranda of the Soldiers’ Home. Lincoln would wake Hay in the middle of the night and read aloud to him. When he finished, Hay recalled, “the tall gaunt figure would rise from the edge of my bed and start for the door and on down the dark corridor. The candle carried high in his hand would light the disheveled hair as the President in flapping night-shirt, his feet padding along in carpet slippers, would disappear into the darkness.”

  Lincoln had four sons: one died very young; Willie died in the White House at age eleven; Tad, though his father’s pet, was unruly and learning-disabled. Robert was bright, but he and his father for some reason never hit it off. More than with anyone else in the immediate family, Lincoln had a rapport with John Hay. Neither of them ever acknowledged that Hay was the son Lincoln wished he’d had, not in so many words. But by default, Hay became Lincoln’s fair-haired boy. Lincoln sanctioned Hay (and Nicolay) to write his biography. Beyond that, he awarded Hay the most precious gift of his patrimony: the spark to forge ahead, first as writer, next as statesman, then both together.

  Lincoln did not give his young protégé a specific target so much as the sheer confidence to take aim and fire, and to make his life count for something. The underlying purpose was manifest, the same one Lincoln himself had striven to achieve as president and commander in chief—namely, the protection, preservation, and prosperity of the Union.

  Hay was not nearly as single-minded as Lincoln; he was not a man of far-encompassing vision but more a man of successive vantage points, one guiding him toward the next, sometimes by leaps and bounds, at other times rather fitfully, but forward and upward always. He insisted humbly that the opportunities and accomplishments in his life were little more than a series of fortunate accidents, discounting what others recognized as his unfailing perspicacity and sound judgment. Whichever the case, he consistently did his best to repay Lincoln’s largesse—by championing Lincoln personally and by furthering the Republican cause in whatever ways he could. These loyalties in turn brought credit and glory to his own name.