Review by Bradley S. Le Boeuf, Attorney at Law

“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. Fortune 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” writes Joshua Zeitz in his fourth book, Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image.

John Hay was reading law in his uncle’s law office in Springfield in 1859 when he first met Abraham Lincoln, who occupied the adjoining office with his law partner, William Herndon. Nicolay, a journalist, initially met Lincoln in 1856 when Lincoln was hustling around Illinois, building the Republican party, and aiming for the 1858 Senate race against Stephen Douglas.

Both Hay and Nicolay, while still in their twenties, accompanied Lincoln to the White House after the 1860 election as the president’s personal assistants. Zeitz recounts Hays’ recollection of Inauguration Day, when out-going president James Buchanan advised Lincoln, " 'I think you will find the water on the right-hand well at the White House better than the left,’ and went on with many intimate details of the kitchen and pantry.’ ” Hay recalled that when he spoke with the awe-struck Lincoln the next day about Buchanan’s conversation, Lincoln “admitted that he had not heard a word of it.”

Zeitz’s description of the details of Lincoln's trip to 1863 Gettysburg offers a fascinating, behind the scenes portrait of the cemetery’s dedication. Zeitz bluntly remarks that the White House secretaries, who travelled to Pennsylvania with the idea of cultivating votes for the upcoming 1864 election, “They were tasked with handling the president's politics, and in that service they were drunk.”

By the end of Lincoln's first-term, both secretaries were burnt-out from the grueling hours, enduring the relentless parade of patronage seekers, and had grown weary of the unpleasant living conditions at the White House. During the summer, the unscreened windows at the White House let in hordes of bugs, and Hay, who lived in the mansion with Nicolay, complained of the stench seeping from the nearby Potomac River, where “The ghosts of twenty thousand drowned cats come in nightly through the South Windows.”

Lincoln’s assassination threw his secretaries into a variety of subsequent jobs, but they remained life-long friends, forever bound by their association with Lincoln. Hay became stupendously wealthy after marrying the rich daughter of an Ohio industrialist, moved to Cleveland, and remained active in politics, serving as Secretary of State under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. After Lincoln’s death, Nicolay travelled as counsel to Paris, returned to the newspaper business, and found work again in the government sector as Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court for several years until his retirement.

Biographies of Nicolay and Hay, as well as their massive correspondence, have been previously published in various forms.  Zeitz’s twist on the Lincoln story is how, after Lincoln’s death, Nicolay and Hay tried to cultivate Lincoln’s legacy and put their own stamp on how the public would regard Lincoln. The authors labored nearly two decades on their posterity project, giving lectures, writing newspaper and magazine articles, and ultimately producing the sprawling 10-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History. 

Belittled by some critics as overtly biased, one reviewer of Abraham Lincoln: A History, noted that “no one will suspect the writers of being lukewarm Republicans.” Their meandering prose even fails to mention Lincoln in one volume. Another critic lamented, “The historical narrative that Messrs. Hay and Nicolay are giving us is a great success as a picture of days gone by, and it is a great pity that it should be marred by those personal details of an obscure Illinois lawyer which we notice have crept into the story from time to time.” Even Hay opined their collaboration was a “ponderous Republican history.”

After the president’s death, access to Lincoln’s personal papers was tightly controlled by the president’s oldest son, Robert Lincoln. Zeitz notes that Robert Lincoln’s editorial pen caused the following passage about the president's father to be deleted from the Hay/Nicolay biography: “When we consider that a week’s work was all that was required to make a cabin habitable and that Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter by trade, we can form some idea of the hopeless indolence which allowed him to live two years in a house without a door and without a floor.” Not until 1947, 21 years after the death of Robert Lincoln, were the president’s papers unsealed for access by scholars.

Zeitz also credits the authors with spurring the cottage industry of Lincolniana. “Collectors scoured the countryside for rails that Lincoln might or might not have split; furniture that once resided in his law office and Springfield residence; his family Bible; the rocking chair he sat in a Ford’s Theatre on the night of his murder; his autograph book; his checkbook; his stovepipe hat.”

Large sections of Lincoln's Boy's: John Hay, John Nicolay and the War for Lincoln’s Image read as an extended book review of the Hay/Nicolay 10-volume biography. The challenges that contemporary authors encountered trying to uncover the details of Lincoln’s life when stymied by Robert’s control over access his father’s papers is a book by itself. Zeitz’s analysis of how the Gettysburg Address rose from a brief and obscure memorial into the pantheon of classic English speeches, is a compelling story within a story. The prairie boys hoed the long row to become Lincoln’s men.