Lincoln's Men: The President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein

From the Publisher

Lincoln's Men is the first narrative portrait of the three young men who served as Lincoln's secretaries during the Civil War. John Nicolay and John Hay lived in the White House, across the hall from the president's office, and they and William Stoddard spent more time with Lincoln than anyone else outside his immediate family.

Lincoln used these three intelligent, articulate young men as a sounding board; they were the first audience for much of his writing from the period. From their unique vantage point, they had a front-row seat on the drama of war, but they also had a good time. Washington under siege was a city of endless receptions and parties. Daniel Mark Epstein captures the drama in each life. We see Nicolay, balancing his obligations to Lincoln with a long-distance engagement to his childhood sweetheart; Hay, the poet/amanuensis, in love with a famous and married actress; and Stoddard, a little too obsessed with gambling in the gold market.

The secretaries left significant diaries, letters, and memoirs about Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay went on to distinguished careers in the Foreign Service after the war and later wrote the classic “authorized” biography of Lincoln, published in 1890 in ten volumes.

An intimate and moving portrait of the Civil War White House, Lincoln's Men gives a vivid sense of what it was like to work for America's most brilliant president at the pivotal moment in the country's history. It is essential reading for fans of American history.

Publishers Weekly

This meticulous triple biography looks at Lincoln's three private secretaries, John Nicolay, John Hay and William O. Stoddard. Closer to Lincoln than almost anyone else, these trusted confidantes and advisers handled all of the president's correspondence, acted occasionally as spies and, between Nicolay and Hay, penned the most famous "authorized" biography of Lincoln. Though their experiences in Lincoln's administration cast a poignant, personable light on the great president's working life, Epstein's work is far from accessible. The level of detail regarding the three secretaries is exhaustive beyond the interest of anyone but devoted American history scholars. Author and historian Epstein (Lincoln and Whitman, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage) has intimate knowledge of his subjects but little to drive the story beyond the chronological push of history; meandering from man to man, his narrative isn't cohesive enough to hook casual history readers. Though obsessive Lincoln enthusiasts in search of a new perspective may be fascinated, any number of Lincoln books will offer casual history buffs a more engaging examination.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Lincoln's Men
The President and His Private Secretaries

Chapter One

Illinois Prelude

As the train pulled out of Springfield's Great Western Depot on the rainy morning of February 11, 1861, with president-elect Abraham Lincoln and his entourage bound for Washington, D.C., there were three young men aboard with exceptional promise: John Milton Hay, John George Nicolay, and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth. Of the three friends, two would become the president's private secretaries during the most tempestuous era the nation had ever known; the third, Ellsworth, would briefly serve as the president-elect's head of security.

The twenty-three-year-old Ellsworth, an aspiring soldier, was so short that had it not been for his neat black mustache and -whiskered under-lip he might have been mistaken for one of the Lincolns' little boys. Though he was scarcely five feet in height, what Ellsworth lacked in stature he more than made up for in dignity and authority, having made himself famous—a public emblem—by a means altogether unique.

The son of a bankrupt tailor in the New York village of Malta, too poor and obscure to attend West Point, Ellsworth, through self-education and exercise, had made himself a drillmaster without peer in America. A born leader, in the late 1850s he organized companies of militia in Chicago that he outfitted in the loose scarlet trousers, blue jackets with gold braid, and jaunty red caps of the French Foreign Legion, calling them Zouaves after the soldiers who fought in the Crimean War. The men paid for their own uniforms. He trained them to do intricate military drills and manuals of arms. Helectured them on patriotism. On parade grounds in the major cities, Ellsworth and his Zouaves drew crowds and newsmen who raved about "the little colonel" and his superbly trained militiamen. They were equally impressed with Ellsworth's temperance, austerity, and code of honor. He refused to accept any pay for his services to his country, past or future.

Like many prodigies and early ripe composers and artists, Ellsworth was not long for this world. The nation was on the brink of war, folks sensed it, and Ellsworth was an avatar of courage and honor. He is a part of the history, essential to getting it under way, and also a victim of it, the first of many lives sacrificed to a cause at first only dimly understood. Lincoln met him during the winter of 1859–60 when Ellsworth came to study law in Springfield. After watching the Chicago Zouaves drill in a Springfield meadow in August 1860, the presidential candidate invited Ellsworth to remain in town and study law with him. Impressed with the soldier's zeal and intelligence, Lincoln sent him out, with John Hay, to stump for him in the election. He had served the candidate so well that when Lincoln was elected, in November, he invited Ellsworth to attend him as a bodyguard on the train to Washington, with a further prospect of getting him a position in the War Department.

Traveling on the train with Ellsworth was twenty-two-year-old John Hay. Hay was a poet, a smooth-faced, handsome fellow with a strong chin, long upper lip, and slightly protruding elfin ears that his wavy brown hair partly concealed. His dark eyes were deep-set, liquid, and his friends used to say you could see a mile into them. Only four inches taller than Ellsworth, Hay saw from his vantage point the soldier's "form, though slight,—exactly the Napoleonic size,—was very compact and commanding"; Ellsworth's sunny smile and deep, musical voice "instantly attracted attention; and his address... was sincere and courteous." Hay might as well have been describing his own winning smile and manner; it was not military skill or poetry that had won John Milton Hay his seat on the train to the capital—it was his eloquence and charm.

Hay also owed his place in Lincoln's retinue to the insistence of his best friend, the twenty-nine-year-old journalist John Nicolay. Standing next to the poet Hay and the soldier Ellsworth in the train's saloon car, Nicolay, at five feet ten inches and 120 pounds, looked like a gaunt giant, older than his years, with his receding hairline and dark goatee. He had served as Mr. Lincoln's personal secretary—at a salary of $75 per month—since June 7, 1860, soon after the Republicans nominated the "rail-splitter" to be their standard-bearer. He was Lincoln's doorkeeper, his amanuensis, and his confidant. Born in Bavaria, the secretary had a low voice that still showed traces of a German accent. Orphaned at age fourteen and thrown upon his own resources—a vigorous mind in a frail body—the former printer's devil and editor had never wanted anything so much in his life as to serve the Republican nominee. Lincoln must have sensed this and, knowing Nicolay's politics as well as his past, knew he could count on the young man's loyalty and complete discretion.

Shortly after the election, on November 11, 1860, Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, Therena Bates, still living in Pittsfield, Illinois, where they had met as children.

I can myself hardly realize that after having fought this slavery question for six years past and suffered so many defeats, I am at last rejoicing in a triumph which two years ago we hardly dared dream about. I remember very distinctly, how in 1854, soon after I had bought the Free Press Office [in Pittsfield], I went to Perry, with others, and heard Mr. Atkinson (the preacher) make the first anti-Nebraska speech which was made in Pike County in that campaign. Though I was fighting as something more than a private then, I should have thought it a wild dream to imagine that in six years after I should find the victory so near the Commander in Chief.

It was "Nebraska," the bitter conflict over Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act—which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the new territories to the extension of slavery—that brought Nicolay and Lincoln together. Nicolay, as a crusading editor of the Free Press, and Lincoln, as an ambitious politician, denounced Douglas's idea of "popular sovereignty," the very idea that settlers in the territories might choose to allow slavery if they pleased.