The life and letters of John Hay

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

IN order that readers may not be disappointed in their expectations, let me say at the outset that this is a personal biography and not a political history. The time has not yet come when it would be proper to give the names of all witnesses and to cite by direct reference the official documents, as is required in a formal history. There is also much material in the State Archives of England, France, Germany, and Russia, which may not be available for publication for a long time to come, if ever. So I have endeavored to let John Hay tell his own story, wherever this was possible. Being in many respects an ideal letter-writer, he recorded his impressions so freshly and so vividly that he never leaves us in doubt as to what he thought of persons, political affairs, or life's experiences. My part has been to sketch in a sufficient background to render intelligible each episode or situation, so that Hay's relation to it would be clear almost at a glance.

Shortly after Mr. Hay's death, Mrs. Hay assembled a considerable mass of his letters to his more intimate correspondents, which she edited with selections from his Diaries. She had a few copies of these viii PREFACE

memorials printed privately for distribution among friends. Her volumes form the basis of the present biography; but I have drawn from a still larger store of material, including Mr. Hay's letter-books, documents in the Department of State, and files, not only of his own letters, but also of those of his official colleagues and friends. In addition, many persons who knew him in his middle and later life have kindly given me their recollections of him.

Wherever the actual form of word or phrase seemed to require exact reproduction, I have printed it as he wrote it ; but in many cases he used abbreviations, and in his Journals even short-hand symbols, which I have not hesitated to expand, always taking care, however, not to change his meaning. For the convenience of the reader should be kept in view, when it does not involve the sacrifice of essentials. In those volumes which Mrs. Hay edited she scrupulously substituted capital letters or dashes for all the proper names. I have been unable in several cases to recover the original letters which she used and so I have been obliged to rely upon the version which she printed. This will explain the appearance here of capital letters and dashes where I could not identify the original names; but occasionally I too have suppressed names where it seemed advisable to do so.

PREFACE ix

It is not possible for me to mention here, as I should like to do, all those persons who have assisted me in the preparation of this work, but I cannot close without making grateful acknowledgment to Mr. Hay's daughters, Mrs. Whitney and Mrs. Wadsworth; to the Honorable and Mrs. Charles E. Hay; to Mr. Samuel Mather ; to President Theodore Roosevelt; to President William H. Taft; to Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root; to the Honorable Henry White, late Ambassador to Italy and to France; to the Honorable Joseph H. Choate, late Ambassador to Great Britain; to General John W. Foster, former Secretary of State; to the Honorable Charlemagne Tower, late Ambassador to Germany and to Russia; to the Honorable Alvey A. Adee, Francis B. Loomis, and William Phillips, Assistant Secretaries of State; to the Honorable Herbert W. Bowen, former Minister to Venezuela; to Professor Harry L. Koopman, Librarian of the John Hay Library at Brown University; to Professor Brander Matthews; to Admiral and Mrs. F. E. Chadwick; to the Honorable Wayne MacVeagh; to Mr. William D. Howells; to Mr. James Ford Rhodes; to Dr. W. W. Keen ; and to Miss Helen Nicolay.

Needless to say, the responsibility for all statements and opinions rests with me, except in cases where my informants have authorized me to give their names.

x PREFACE

As I have been prevented from revising the final proofs, I shall be grateful to readers who will notify to me any errors they may find.

The index has been made by Mr. George B. Ives, to whom I am also indebted for many suggestions.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, August j, iqij.

I

Contents

I. BEGINNINGS

II. LIFE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY 23

III. THE POET IN EXILE 52

Chapter I

DURING the second half of the nineteenth century, the vicissitudes in the personal fortunes of Americans were so swift, and yet so common, that contemporaries took them almost as matters of course. In truth, however, not since the Elizabethan age, and then on a much smaller scale, had anything similar been seen. It was as if, in the animal kingdom, not merely individuals but whole varieties should change their nature so rapidly as to become scarcely recognizable after the lapse of a single generation. The children of privation grew up to be masters of untold wealth. An obscure rail-splitter became President of the United States, wielding a power surpassing that of Europe's absolute monarchs. And as if the natural expansion over a vast continent did not offer sufficient opportunities for individual development, there intervened a Civil War which served as a ladder for talents which lie dormant in peace.

Among the many who were a part of this process of transformation was John Hay. Born the son of a frontier doctor, in a small dwelling on the edge of the Western wilderness, he died in a palace at Washington, as Secretary of State, in the midst of a world crisis which his counsel had helped to direct.

Hay himself, at a dinner of the Ohio Society of New York, on January 17, 1903, summed up in pleasant fashion the contrasts in his career. "When I look back on the shifting scenes of my life," he said, "if I am not that altogether deplorable creature, a man without a country, I am, when it comes to pull and prestige, almost equally bereft, as I am a man without a State. I was born in Indiana, I grew up in Illinois, I was educated in Rhode Island, and it is no blame to that scholarly community that I know so little. I learned my law in Springfield and my politics in Washington, my diplomacy in Europe, Asia, and Africa. I have a farm in New Hampshire and desk-room in the District of Columbia. When I look to the springs from which my blood descends, the first ancestors I ever heard of were a Scotchman, who was half English, and a German woman, who was half French. Of my immediate progenitors, my mother was from New England and my father was from the South. In this bewilderment of origin and experience, I can only put on an aspect of deep humility in any gathering of favorite sons, and confess that I am nothing but an American." x

An American he was, on both sides of his house, but with an heirloom to which theorists in heredity might attribute his cosmopolitan affinities. For although the Hays had their roots in Scotland, one of them, in the early part of the eighteenth century, took service under the Elector Palatine. What rank he held in the Elector's army I do not know, nor whether he himself emigrated with the swarm of Germans who came over from the Palatinate to Pennsylvania about 1750. Certain it is, however, that of his four sons John, the eldest, settled at York, Pennsylvania, while Adam went on to Berkeley County, Virginia, and made his home at the bottom of the Shenandoah Valley. Adam probably did his share of Indian fighting; possibly he enlisted in the Revolution; at any rate, his son John remembered being patted on the head by General Washington. This John, born February 13, 1775, growing restive under his father's severe treatment, struck out for himself at the age of eighteen, joined a party of Virginians who tramped across the mountains into Kentucky, and found an abode at Lexington. There he married Jemima Coulter, who bore him fourteen children. For thirty-five years he helped to upbuild 1 Addresses, 219-20.

that town, which boasted of its refinements and intellectual interests; and he had for a neighbor, Henry Clay, another Virginian, who also sought his fortune in Kentucky soon after John Hay's arrival. Hay became one of Clay's followers, hated Andrew Jackson and detested slavery.

The latter antipathy led him in 1830 to cross the Ohio River into the free State of Illinois, where he established himself at Springfield. That same year Abraham Lincoln moved into Sangamon County, and as time went on he and the elder Hay were friends. Old John Hay died May 20, 1865, having lived "to watch Lincoln's funeral pass his windows."

Among his many children, Charles, born February 7, 1 80 1, in Fayette County, Kentucky, was educated at Lexington, where he received the diploma of doctor of medicine, and being, like his father, a hater of slavery, he crossed into Indiana in 1 830, and began to practice his profession in the village of Salem, a few miles north of the Ohio River. The following year, on October 13, 183 1, he married there Helen Leonard,1 three years his junior, a young woman of pure New England stock, come into the west from Middleboro, Massachusetts, to live with her sister. The husband of this sister, John Hay

1 Born at Assonet, near New Bedford, Massachusetts, February 7, 1804.

Farnham, was the leading lawyer of Salem and its neighborhood.

Thus, after four generations of wanderings out of Scotland to the Rhenish Palatinate, and thence to Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, the Hay line met that of the Leonards, who had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the days of the Stuarts.

At Salem, John Milton Hay, the third child a of Dr. Charles and Helen Hay, was born October 8, 1838, in a small one-storied brick house, symbolical of the straitness of pioneer existence. But out of thoseborder cabins, like oaks out of acorns, sprang many a man whose life became a part of the nation's history.

In 1834, Dr. Hay, in partnership with Royal B. Child, issued the Salem Monitor, a newspaper of approved Whig views, to which he contributed articles. During the Harrison campaign of 1840 he wrote the

1 The other children were: Edward Leonard, b. Nov. 9, 1832; d. Oct. 8, 1840. Augustus Leonard, b. Dec. 2, 1834; served in the Civil War, and became captain of the Ninth U.S. Infantry; d. Nov. 12, 1904. Mary Pierce, born Dec. 17, 1836, married Captain A. C. Woolfolk, U.S.A., in 1863; he was later a circuit judge, and died at Denver, Colorado, in 1880; she died March 21, 1914. Charles Edward, b. March 23, 1841 ; served during the Civil War in the Third U.S. Cavalry and on General Hunter's staff; was subsequently Mayor of Springfield, Illinois; married Mary Ridgely, May 10, 1865. Helen Jemima, b. at Warsaw, Indiana, Sept. 13, 1844; married Harwood O. Whitney in 1870; died June 19, 1873. Dr. Charles Hay died at Warsaw, Sept. 18, 1884; his wife died there Feb. 18, 1893.

political leaders, which show, according to a local writer, that he had a thorough knowledge of the issues of his time and "handled them in a masterly manner."

Either because Salem offered too narrow a field for an energetic young doctor, or because Charles Hay was impelled by the desire, common to the Western settlers of his time, to move on in search of better conditions, he took his family in 1841 to Warsaw, Illinois. This frontier settlement, perched on the banks of the Mississippi, at the head of the navigation of the great river, and opposite the mouth of the Des Moines, counted then only a few hundred inhabitants ; but the surrounding country was fertile, its climate was healthful, and its outlook on Missouri and the boundless possibilities of the Far West seemed to promise that it would become an important distributing center.

Many years later Hay wrote to a friend: "Towns are sometimes absurdly named. I lived at Spunky Point on the Mississippi! This is a graphic, classic, characteristic designation of a geographical and ethnological significance. But some idiots, just before I was born, who had read Miss Porter,1 thought Warsaw would be much more genteel, and so we are

1 Jane Porter (1776-1850) published, in 1803, Thaddeus of Warsaw, a romance which had a great vogue for half a century.

Nicodemussed into nothing for the rest of time. I hope every man who was engaged in the outrage is called Smith in Heaven." *

At Warsaw, the young Hays passed their childhood. Their father's practice, which he pursued on horseback, led him far up and down the river and inland through the neighboring counties. Life was undeniably hard. It provided the material necessaries, but few luxuries; it called for enterprise, courage, resourcefulness, versatility. The husband must be a jack-of -all-trades; the wife must not only perform the duties of cook and maid and housekeeper, but nurse and rear the children, and, outside of the small towns, she must spin and make the family clothing. During the forties of the last century, the crudest hardships of the pioneer days had been outgrown in the Western Illinois settlements, but the railroads had not yet brought the conveniences of civilization, or opened the way to Eastern markets, or quite dispelled the brooding sense of isolation which, no matter how bravely self-reliance may face it, prevents a well-rounded life.

John Hay himself, in writing of Lincoln, traversed the notion, spread by a few survivors, that the pioneers enjoyed a glorious existence. "They see it," he says, "through a rosy mist of memory, transfigured 1 Hay to Miss H. K. Loring, June 30, 1870.

by the eternal magic of youth. The sober fact is that the life was a hard one, with few rational pleasures, few wholesome appliances. The strong ones lived, and some even attained great length of years ; but to the many age came early and was full of infirmity and pain. If we could go back to what our forefathers endured in clearing the Western wilderness, we could then better appreciate our obligations to them." x And he cites a letter from Lincoln who, at the age of thirty-nine, calls himself an old man.

We must not, however, confuse the pioneers who blazed their way into Indiana, Illinois, and the Northwest Territory with the successive waves of immigrants from Ireland, Southern Italy, Hungary, Poland, Greece, and Western Asia which latterly have at times threatened to submerge our institutions. The Irish bog-trotter was as illiterate and bigoted as the Calabrian peasant or the Russian serf; while the pitiable offscourings of the European capitals surely planted the slums in our own cities and rendered honest and efficient municipal government an almost insuperable task. The pioneers of Indiana and Illinois, on the other hand, whether they came from Virginia through Kentucky, or from Pennsylvania down the Ohio, or from New England direct, had been nourished on certain common principles. 1 N. & H.( i, 68-69.

Whether they traced their descent from Covenanter, Roundhead, or Cavalier, they believed in political and religious liberty. They respected trial by jury and those other safeguards of the individual, which were the cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon justice. Their fathers, North and South, had fought in the Revolutionary War to uphold the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation, and they themselves placed passionate trust in popular government. The New Englanders brought with them the town meeting and the country school. Whoever would might read the Bible unforbidden by priest and unprevented by illiteracy. Even among the 'poor white trash' from the South there lingered, however dimly, traces of the Anglo- Saxon tradition. Young Abraham Lincoln, as bereft of opportunity for culture as any lad in the country, had access to the Bible and "The Pilgrim's Progress," ^Esop's "Fables," and "Robinson Crusoe," and, a little later, to Shakespeare, Burns, and Blackstone's "Commentaries." With the English Bible and Shakespeare one may inherit not only the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but also the world's supreme achievements in prose literature, in poetry, and in religion.

No doubt the settlers, men of energy and initiative, were too busy developing the new country to pay much heed to books; but they recognized the need of education in technical concerns, and they had not wholly lost the respect for learning as an ideal which had come down to them from their British forebears. To them the spoken word was the living word. Lawyers, politicians, preachers, lecturers flourished among them. Politics, which involved the interpretation of the Constitution and fundamental conceptions of morals and humanity, became their vital interest. Should Slavery be allowed in the new communities? If not, where draw the line of restriction? If the South persisted in slaveholding, how long could the nation survive, half bond, half free? Was not the preservation of the Union more important than the welfare of the negro?

However unequipped with the refinements of civilization, a people which, besides conquering for itself a home in the wilderness, was earnestly confronting such questions, could not be charged with stagnation.

These were the general conditions, material and intellectual, which formed the background of John Hay's boyhood; and as his father, grandfather, and uncle made their homes in towns which New Engenders had settled, he grew up in an anti-slavery atmosphere.

Among the Hay papers the earliest I find are two

BEGINNINGS n

letters from Charles Hay at Salem to his parents at Springfield. They are yellow, time-stained documents, folded and wafered as was the custom before the days of envelopes, without postmark, and with the postage, i8f cents each, written in ink on the cover. Letter-writing was a costly pleasure then. The first letter reads as follows: —

Salem, Nov. 25th, 1832.

Dear Father and Mother —

I presume before this time that you have received my former letter and although I have not received an answer to it I deem it proper to write you another. I hope before this time that you are comfortably settled and perhaps nearly or quite ready for business. I shall be gratified to hear from you soon, and to hear as much as possible in regard to every particular. My chief motive in writing this letter is not to inform you that I have received a legacy or a fortune in any other way, but to receive that which poor people are much more certain of. On the 9th of the present month we had a son born which is of course your first grandson; he weighed "j\ pounds the day after he was born and is a very thrifty fellow. Now I suppose you would like to know what your first grandson looks like and I must endeavor to tell you. When Helen asked me first whom he looked like

I said he looked like John ; when Cornelia was asked whom he looked like she answered like the Dr.'s brother John without knowing what had been my opinion; his eyes are quite black and his head is covered with more hair than I have usually seen [on] children at 3 or 6 months old, both he and his mother are doing well. His name is Edward Leonard after Helen's deceased brother. It would have been John had it not been for the circumstance [of] her brother's death who was a great favourite in the family. I hope you are all enjoying health and contentment; you may all expect to have the blues more or less for a while but courage will overcome all difficulties. I will close my letter and wait till I hear from you again.

Your affectionate son

Charles Hay.

John Hay Jemima Hay

How much a single letter like that brings with it!

The only other letter in this earliest packet is dated, "Salem Indiana Dec 4th 1834" and addressed to "Dear Father and Mother."

"I have of course something to write, you will think; true. Well, what is it; nothing dreadful of course or I would not write it ; well what is it you will say. Why it is simply this that on the morning of the

2nd inst a stranger came to visit us; and who was it? Why he could not tell his name although he was neither deaf blind nor dumb; but he has tarried with us and for convenience we have agreed to call him John Augustus Hay. What, another boy you will say. Well, be it so. His weight with the little trappings about was nine pounds and three quarters full 2 pounds more than the first born. Well done, say you. And both mother and son are doing well in every way. . . .

" I am still in hopes that you can let one of the boys come to live with us. I am not sanguine in promises to myself or others but I think I could get one of them into tolerable good business here before long if he would come. Clerks in stores are often wanted and there are few native hoosiers who are fitted either by education manners or habits for the business. Of course merchants are often disappointed or compelled to take these entirely unfit for the business. Even a good overseer in a factory, should their feelings incline that way, is often wanted, and good wages given. But I will wait till your next letter before I say more on the subject. Mr. Farnham's children are still with us and will stay till spring ; perhaps then they may go to Boston. Our town is healthy and business prosperous generally. "Yours affectionately."

The firstborn son, Edward, lived only a few years : the second — who was named Augustus Leonard, and not John Augustus, as the parents first intended — was the hero, in youth, and through life, of John Hay, the statesman. When he died, on November 12, 1904, the younger John, then Secretary of State, and nearing the end himself, told his grief in a noble letter to President Roosevelt. It can best be placed here, because it gives what, after half a century, he remembered as the brightest aspects of his boyhood.

Nov. 16, 1904.

Dear Theodore —

I cannot talk about it — so I will write you a word. My brother was my first friend and my best. I owe him everything. He was only four years older than me, but he had a sense of right and of conduct which made him seem much older. He was always my standard. He was not so quick at his books as I was, but far more sure. He taught me my Latin and Greek so that I made better recitations than he did, and got higher marks — which was a gross injustice. But he took more interest in my success than in his own. He made many sacrifices for me, which, with the selfishness of a boy, I accepted as a matter of course. He fought my battles. It was ill for the big boy whom he caught bullying me. Once I dreamed we were Christians thrown to the beasts in the Coliseum. He stepped between me and a lion and whipped the great cat with his fists, then seized me and dragged me through a subterranean passage till we came out on the Appian Way. Years afterwards when I went to Rome, I looked about to see where all that had taken place. It was as clear and vivid as any real action of my life.

He was my superior in every way but one — the gift of expression. His scholarship was more exact than mine. He had wonderful skill with his hands; could make better balls, bats, kites, fishing-rods, etc., than could be bought in the shops. Once he gathered up all the pamphlets in the house, and bound them neatly though he had never seen a book-bindery. He was — as I have been told by those who served with him — the best company officer and the best adjutant in the army. Yet he had no luck in promotion. His rigid sense of duty forbade him to seek advancement, and he sternly forbade me ever to mention his name at headquarters. I obeyed him because I knew he would have refused a promotion which came through the solicitation of his friends.

He was the chief of my tribe, in birth as well as in mind and in character. We were not a handsome family, the rest of us — but he was unusually good-looking, tall and straight and brave.

Now he has left us, and I never had a chance to get even with him for all he did for me when we were boys. My uncertain health, the weather, and other futilities have even kept me away from his funeral. I feel remorsefully unworthy of him.

Yours affectionately.

Happy the older brother who could inspire such memories! happier still the younger, with such a capacity for hero-worship !

Of Hay's childhood and youth at Warsaw there is little to record. He attended the public school, taught by a Mr. Holmes, and joined in the play of his companions. Great affection bound the family together. Dr. Hay prospered, according to the measure of prosperity of country doctors in the West. Above all, both he and his wife saw to it that their children should enjoy every procurable means of improvement, and the Doctor himself helped John in his Latin.

From our earliest glimpses of him, John Hay appears as an imaginative child. His oldest sister remembers that, when he was still a little boy, he had " the habit of stringing words together into rhymes." His brother Charles tells this incident, which dates back to John's sixth or seventh year. One morning John came and sat down beside him on a log in front of the new brick house their father was building, and

IS

X presently John said: "'I have seen the end of the world.' I asked him: 'What did you see there?' He replied: 'Nothing, only trees and flowers and some birds.' Later on he mentioned this himself, and we then understood that it was only the wild forest land beyond the reservation, on which had been built, in 1 8 14, Fort Edwards on the bank of the Mississippi River."

Other anecdotes furnished by his brother Charles help us to a further acquaintance.

"When he was a small boy, a German of education called on my father to ask assistance in forming a class for the study of German. John listened with a great deal of interest and whispered to his father, 'I would like very much to study German.' This pleased both my father and the German professor, and John became a student with the others, who were all men grown. John was so small that he would occasionally fall asleep during the evening, but he surprised them all by showing he had learned his lesson and could recite equally well with the best of them when awakened."

The following recollection, like a flash of lightning in the night, reveals one of the tragic possibilities of life on the borderland of slavery.

"When we were both quite young," Mr. Charles Hay writes, "he [John] told me he was in the basemerit of our house, and he heard a ghost, which spoke to him and said : ' Little Master, for the love of God bring me a drink of water.' John said he was so frightened he hurried upstairs and went to his room. The next day myjfather told at the table that three runaway slaves had been overtaken by a party of officers from Missouri and the slaves had resisted arrest, and one was captured and taken back, one of the other two was fired upon and killed, and the third had been badly wounded, but escaped, leaving blood tracks in the wood. I saw my brother John staring at me across the supper table, but saying nothing. After the meal, he told his father about the voice he heard in the basement. My father, John, and I went down to investigate, and on a pile of kindling wood was the appearance of some one having used this for a bed ; but there was a stain of blood nearly eighteen inches in diameter. This was probably the blood shed by the runaway slave who had escaped capture. What became of the slave afterward, I never heard. Fully forty years afterward I asked John if he remembered this occurrence, and he replied: 'I will never forget it, and that incident has given me a greater horror than anything I ever heard or read about slavery.'"

From the primary school, John, with his older brother Leonard, was placed under. an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend Stephen Childs, who conducted a private school at Warsaw. There he began Latin and Greek; and perhaps it was Mr. Childs who referred to him as "honest and efficient," — praise which greatly pleased the boy. " I feel my character has been established — 'honest and efficient,' — " he confided to Charles: "this is my pride for my after life." " I am glad to hear that John is progressing so well in his study of Latin," his brother Augustus writes from St. Louis, on July 17, 1 851, to Mr. N. W. Bliss, at Warsaw; " but as regards Greek, I expect he is somewhat ' lazy ' ; however, I hope he will soon get over that and go ahead." 1 In 1851, John was sent to a private academy at Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, a town which emigrants from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, had settled and stamped with genuine Yankee ideals. In that seminary, kept by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Thomson, he met John George Nicolay, a Bavarian by birth, his elder by six years, who was destined to have a decisive influence on his career. " We all remember John Hay at that time," one of his boyhood companions wrote in 1898, "as a red-cheeked, black-eyed, sun-