At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings

325 Pages·2000·14.361 MB·English

by  Michael Burlingame

At
Lincoln’s
Side
John Hay’s
Civil War
Correspondence
and Selected
Writings
Edited by
Michael Burlingame
At Lincoln's Side

At Lincoln's Side
John Hay's Civil War Correspondence
and Selected Writings
Edited by Michael Burlingame
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale
Copyright © 2000 by the Board ofTrustecs,
Southern Illinois University
Paperback edition 2006
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 09 oS 07 4 3 2 1
Frontispiece: Photograph of John Hay, dated 1861.
From the John Hay Papers, Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hay, John, 1838-1905.
At Lincoln's side: John Hay's Civil War correspondence and
selected writings I edited by Michael Burlingame.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. Hay, John, 1838-1905-Correspondence. 2. Statesmen
United States--Correspondence. 3. United States·· History
Civil War, 1861-186s-Personal narratives. 4. Lincoln, Abraham,
1809-1865 - Friends and associates. 5. United States-Politics
and government-1861-1865. 6. Hay, John, 1838-1905. 7. States·
men - United States-Biography. 1. Burlingame, Michael, 1941-.
II. Title.
E664.H41A4 2000
973·7'092-dC21
ISBN 0-8093-2293-5 (cloth: aile paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-8093-2711-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
rSBN-1O: 0-8093-2711-2 (pbk. : all<. paper)
Printed on recycled paper. <)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39A8-1992. @
For Sue Burlingame Coover and Edwin R Coover

Contents
Acknowledgments
1X
Introduction xi
Part One. Civil War Correspondence
1. 1860-1862 3
2. 1863 29
3. 1864-1865 72
Part Two. Selected Writings
4. Hay's Reminiscences of the Civil War 109
Letter to William H. Herndon (1866) 109
Obituary of Tad Lincoln (1871) 111
The Heroic Age in Washington (1872) 113
Life in the White House in the Time of
Lincoln (1890) 131
5. Biographical Sketches 141
Elmer E. Ellsworth (1861) 141
Edward D. Baker (1861) 151
Appendix 1: The Authorship of the Bixby Letter 169
Appendix 2: Mary Todd Lincoln's Unethical
Conduct as First Lady 185
Notes 205
Index 281

Acknowledgments
To JOHN Y. SIMON, dean of documentary editing in the field of Amer
ican history, I am grateful for his encouragement as this volume and
its companions have slowly gestated over the past several years.
At Brown University's John Hay Library, I have been the fortunate ben
eficiary of many kindnesses from Jennifer Lee, Samuel Streit, Jean Rain
water, Mary Jo Kline, Andrew Moel, Pat Soris, and their colleagues. To all
I extend heartfelt thanks.
To their counterparts at Connecticut College, Yale University, the Uni
versity of Chicago, the Illinois State Historical Library, Allegheny College,
the Library of Congress, the Chicago Historical Society, the Lincoln Mu
seum of Fort Wayne, the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, the Henry E. Hunt
ington Library, the Lincoln Museum at Lincoln Memorial University, and
the New York Public Library, I am indebted for their generous assistance.
The R. Francis Johnson Faculty Development Fund at Connecticut Col
lege helped defray the costs of research and travel involved in editing this
volume.
In identifying Lincoln's word usage, I was assisted both by David Her
bert Donald, my mentor at Princeton University and Johns Hopkins Uni
versity, and by Dr. C. A. Tripp of Nyack, New York.
Appendix 1, Authorship of the Bixby Letter," is a much-expanded
and revised version of my article "New Light on the Bixby Letter:' Journal
of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16 (winter 1995): 59-71. I am grateful to
Thomas F. Schwartz, Illinois State historian and editor of the Journal of the
Abraham Lincoln Associatiol1, for granting permission to use that article in
this volume.
Appendix 2, "Mary Todd Lincoln's Unethical Conduct as First Lady;' is
a revised version of a talk given in 1994 to the Lincoln Fellowship ofWis
consin, which published it in pamphlet form as "Honest Abe, Dishonest
Mary:' Daniel Pearson kindly gave permission to reproduce that essay.
IX