John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s two private secretaries, spent the evening of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, at the White House, drinking whiskey and talking with the president’s 21-year-old son, Robert, an officer attached to General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff. Shortly before 11 p.m., Tad Lincoln burst through the front door of the mansion, crying “They’ve killed Papa dead!” Hay and Robert rushed by carriage to Tenth Street, where the mortally wounded president had been transferred to the Petersen House, a boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre. Upon their arrival, a doctor informed them that the president would not survive his wounds.
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With John Hay at his side, Robert Todd Lincoln walked into the room where his father lay stretched out on a narrow bed. Unconscious from the moment of his shooting, the president “breathed with slow and regular respiration throughout the night,” Hay later recalled. Family friends and government officials filed in and out of the chamber. “As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale,” Hay recalled, the president’s “pulse began to fail.” Hay and Robert were at the president’s side when he passed.
The next day, 33-year-old John Nicolay, who served as the president’s other private secretary, was aboard a Navy warship, returning from a brief excursion to Cuba, where he had traveled to take the ocean air. As his party entered Chesapeake Bay, Nicolay reported, they “took a pilot on board [and] heard from him the first news of the terrible loss the country had sufferedIt was so unexpected, so sudden and so horrible even to think of, much less to realize that we couldn’t believe it, and therefore remained in hope that it would prove one of the thousand groundless exaggerations which the war has brought forth during the past four years. Alas, when we reached Point Lookout at daylight this morning, the mournful reports of the minute guns that were being fired, and the flags at half-mast left us no ground for further hope.”
It is little wonder that historians consult Hay’s and Nicolay’s writing frequently—their letters and journals provide eyewitness accounts of their White House years. But their major life’s work after the Civil War is a largely forgotten story.
After an 1863 portrait session (Nicolay, left), Hay wrote in his diary: “Nico & I immortalised ourselves by having ourselves done in a group with the Prest.” (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
“The boys,” as the president affectionately called them, became Lincoln’s official biographers. Enjoying exclusive access to his papers—which the Lincoln family closed to the public until 1947 (the 21st anniversary of the death of Robert Todd Lincoln)— they undertook a 25-year mission to create a definitive and enduring historical image of their slain leader. The culmination of these efforts—their exhaustive, ten-volume biography, serialized between 1886 and 1890—constituted one of the most successful exercises in revisionism in American history. Writing against the rising currents of Southern apologia, Hay and Nicolay pioneered the “Northern” interpretation of the Civil War—a standard against which every other historian and polemicist had to stake out a position.
Hay and Nicolay helped invent the Lincoln we know today—the sage father figure; the military genius; the greatest American orator; the brilliant political tactician; the master of a fractious cabinet who forged a “team of rivals” out of erstwhile challengers for the throne; the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln .
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