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, EDITORS INTRODUCTION THE DIARY OF ASSISTANT PRESIDENTIAL SECRETARY JOHN HAY has been aptly described as "the most intimate record we have or ever can have ofAbraham Lincoln in the White House." It is one the richest deposits of high-grade ore for the smelters of Lincoln biographers and Civil War historians, especially for the years 1863 and 1864, when Hay was a more conscientious diarist than he had been earlier. The diaries of cabinet members and other political associates ofthe president-like 1reasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, Attorney General Edward Bates, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, and Senator Orville Hickman Browning-also shed much light on Lincoln's presidency, but none ofthose has the literary flair of Hay's journal, which is, as Lincoln's friend Horace White noted, as "breezy and sparkling as champagne." An aspiring poet, Hay recorded events in a scintillating style that the lawyer-politician diarists conspicuously lacked.! Living in the White I-louse, Hay enjoyed easy access to Lincoln, who, according to one observer, "loved him as a son:' Galusha Grow, the Speaker of the House during the first half of the Civil War, recalled that "Lincoln was very much attached" to Hay"and often spoke to me in high terms of his ability and trustworthiness." Grow knew "of no person in whom the great President reposed more confidence and to whom he confided secrets of State as well as his own personal affairs with such great freedom." Hay and the chief presidential secretary, John G. Nicolay, were (as they later put it) "dailyand nightly witnesses ofthe incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and the hopes, which pervaded the Executive Mansion and the National Capital:' Lincoln, they claimed, "gave them his unlimited confidence:'2 Born in Salem, Indiana, in 1838, Hay was raised in Warsaw, Illinois, where his father practiced medicine. A precocious boy, Hay had mastered much Latin by the age oftwelve, when he was shipped off to live with his uncle, Milton Hay, in Pittsfield, where the schools were superior to those in Warsaw. There the youngster befriended an older lad, John G. Nicolay. Hay attended Brown University, from which he graduated in 1858. Leaving Providence, he returned to Illinois and once again stayed with his xi EDITORS' INTRODUCTION uncle, who was then practicing law in Springfield, which he called "a city combining the meanness of the North with the barbarism of the South." Shakespeare's Dogberry, he quipped, "ought to have been an Illinoisan;'3 After Lincoln's nomination in May1860, the candidate needed help answering mail. He knew Nicolay, who had been serving as an assistant to the Illinois secretary of state, Ozias M. Hatch, since 1857. Lincoln spent much time in Hatch's office, which was "practically the Republican campaign headquarters for both city and State;' and thus got to know Nicolay well and decided to hire him.4 To cover the expense, several friends contributed to a special fund. At the suggestion ofMilton Hay, his nephew John, who was then desultorily studying law with him in Springfield, was chosen to assist Nicolay. Following his electoral victory in November, Lincoln wished to retain both Nicolay and Hay as secretaries, but federal law provided money enough for only one. Milton Hay, who said that his nephew "had much enjoyed working with Mr. Lincoln;' volunteered to pay John's expenses in Washington for half a year. The president-elect asked young Hay to assist Nicolay in the White House. There Lincoln insisted on paying Hay out of his own pocket, but that proved unnecessarywhen the young man was named clerk in the Interior Department, then detailed to duty in the White House. In 1864 he was appointed a major in the army.s The relationship between Lincoln and Hay resembled that between earlier wartime father-and-son surrogates George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. As the journalist John Russell Youngnoted, Hay"knew the social graces and amenities, and did mu.ch to make the atmosphere ofthe war environedWhite House grateful, tempering unreasonable aspirations, giving to disappointed ambitions the soft answer which turneth away wrath, showing, as Hamilton did in similar offices, the tact and common sense which were to serve him as they served Hamilton in wider spheres of public duty;'6 Young, who regularly visited the White House during the war, described Hay as "exceedingly handsome-a slight, graceful, boyish figure--'girl in boy's clothes,' as I heard in a snifffrom some angry politidan."Young observed that Hay was "brilliant" and "chivalrous;' quite...

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