CHAPTER 4
JOHN HAY'S DIARY
JUNE 29, 1861
Hallelujah, the long faces of May and June are lifting. (If sad faces are long,
why are happy faces not described as short?) The Tycoon is in a fine whack,
no longer pacing the Mansion as if he wanted to kick the cat. When A.
Lincoln wants to look miserable, nobody alive can out-melancholy him, but
he has reason to be perkier these days.
Not only is he well served by his two secretariesGeorge Nicolay of the
furrowed brow, and mustachioed me, John Hay of the short facebut the
Prsdt has good news in the public prints.
Old Roger Taney got his comeuppance. Henry Raymond of the New York
Timesa good egg, friend of the Tycoon'sdenounced the jurist who sup-
ported the plug-ugly Merryman as "the man destined to go through history
as the Judge who draggled his official robes in the pollutions of treason."
("Draggled"? Does the editor of the Times mean "dragged" or an active form
of "bedraggled"? As a putative poet, I have the obligation to ask these ques-
tions.)
From Illinois, the land to which I shall one day return, burdened with
honors, after my years of faithful service to the greatest American since
Henry Clay, came this blast: "When Judge Taney delivered the Dred Scott
decision he was already in his dotage," wrote the Chicago Tribune, which
always supports us, "and the Merryman decision was evidence that in the
intervening years his faculties have brightened none whatsoever." Horace
Greeley, in the New York Tribune, who blows hot and cold, blew hot on this
issue: "When Treason stalks abroad in arms, let decrepit judges give place to
men capable of detecting and crushing it."
My employerto whom I shall refer in the pages of this most secret diary
as The Tycoon (after the potentate of Japan) or the Ancient of Days (display-
ing my affection for the poet Blake)went over these cuttings with delight. I
did not bother to show him the Louisville Courier, which would have lowered
his spirits. Mr. Seward wants to shut the rag down, and we have to do that
soon, as its editors are poisoning the minds of the too-neutral Kentuckians.
Hill Lamon, my cousin from Illinois who has appointed himself the Prsdt's
bodyguard, has been walking around for the past month with what some say
is permission in his pocket to arrest the Chief Justice. I would love to see the
old recreant sitting in a military prison cell, issuing meaningless writs of
habeas corpus for himself, but no such drastic remedy as arrest seems neces-
sary. Nobody much cares about Taney's Merryman opinion, and so the Prsdt
has decided to ignore it. It must be lying around here somewhere, but Nico
has conveniently lost it. That's what democratic government is about: if the
courts don't have public sentiment behind them, then the President rules the
roost. Why should Lincoln make a martyr out of Taney by jailing the old
man? Since there has been no uproar, we'll just file and forget his opinion and
replace him with a more amenable judge when he finally gives up the ghost.
Then there is the good news about Maryland. With all the Union troops
pouring down from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, the riotous city of
Baltimore is calm again. Whiff of the grape was what those plug-uglies
needed. Now the capital in Washington is no longer surrounded and we can
get the newspapers again. There is a North!
The other morning I went in to give the Prsdt a selection of the correspon-
dence that has come in urging that we enlist slaves in our army. General Ben
Butler, he of the large paunch and crossed eye, has the notion that he should
retain such fugitive slaves as come within his lines, arm them, and aim them
at their former masters.
The Prsdt was looking downriver through his telescope. He tilts his chair
back, rests his stocking feet on the windowsill, and perches his telescope on
his toes. Butler is down there somewhere, at Fort Monroe, all hot for arming
slaves and abolishing slavery like most of his fellow politicians from Massa-
chusetts.
"Some of our Northerners seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement
of the hour," the Tycoon observed. "They seem inclined to think that this war
is to result in the entire abolition of slavery."
That, of course, is not the case. Although brother Butler has come up with
the legally creative idea of declaring runaway slaves "contraband of war,"
seizing them as enemy property, we have told him to merely hire them and
keep a record of their services.
"The central idea pervading this struggle," he told me, still looking
through the spyglass, "is the necessity of proving that popular government is
not an absurdity."
That struck me as rather an important item to record. I snatched the quill
up, dipped it quickly in the well on the Prsdt's desk, and jotted it down; the
Tycoon likes it when I do that. I read it over and asked him what he was
getting at.
"We must settle this question now," he replied, bringing his feet down and
turning toward his desk, "whether in a free government the minority have the
right to break up the government whenever they choose."
"And if we fail?" I asked, Maebeth-like.
"It will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern them-
selves."
Frankly, the idea of majority rule seems rather an academic notion to fight
a war about, and I hope he can whip up some excitement in the message to
Congress he's been working on. Congress will convene in about a month, and
will be asked to ratify all the war moves we've made so far. It had better;
we've been playing a bit fast and loose with the Constitution. Taney may be
wrong about disloyalty, but we've been spending money for the army that the
Congress never appropriated, and a blockade is an act of war that Congress is
supposed to declare.
The Tycoon thinks the war might drag on until the end of the year, but
that seems unduly pessimistic. I fail to see why it should continue past the
fall. General-in-Chief Scott is whipping the army into shape, and the Army of
the Potomac should make its big push in June, before Congress convenes.
The war that worries me more is the war in the Lincoln Cabinet. The
Ancient may have thought it a good idea at the time to appoint all his chief
rivals for the presidency to his Cabinet, but the result is the fiercest kind of
backbiting. Seward at Stateold "Billy Bowlegs"has been brought to heel,
and realizes finally that Lincoln was the one elected, but that eminence grise
of his, Thurlow Weed, gives me the willies. Pure politician, perhaps sticky
fingers. Seward and Weed, in their turn, get their creeps from our Mr. Money-
bags, Salmon Chase at the Treasury. I do not trust Mr. Chase. The Ancient of
Days says he needs him, and Chase may be eminently qualified to help fi-
nance the war, but unlike Seward, he has not given up his designs on the
presidency. I hear his daughter Kate is worth a look.
The only thing Seward at State and Chase at Treasury have in common is
their distrust of the Biairs. I rather admire our Postmaster General, Mont-
gomery Blair, and the Tycoon certainly respects his father, Old Man Blair.
That cagey old Jacksonian surely helped deliver Maryland, saving this capital
from isolation and evacuation. Now that I think of it, Seward and Chase and
the Biairs have something else in common: belief in the profound corruption
of Simon Cameron, our Secretary of War. The Lincoln Cabinet is not a happy
family.
Even so, today it managed to hold a real council of war. The President
summoned General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to present his plan. Wheezing,
ponderous, and enormously fat, that old hero they call "Old Fuss and Feath-
ers" thinks our troops are too raw for battle and suggests an expedition down
the Mississippi to try to cut off the South and starve it into submission. Not
well received. General McDowell presented his plan for attacking the rebels
under Beauregard at Manassas, a stone's throw across the Potomac from
Washington. That was more like it. The Prsdt said that further delay might
cool Northern ardor, and the public wanted action. So beware, Beauregard
and all you rebels: Manassas will be the site of the battle that wins the war.
Juicy gossip abounds in this hotbed of intrigue. A word from the Wise tells
me that the English Ambassador's valet has just caused Mrs. Emory's maid
to become enceinte, and that Miss Carroll of Baltimore was raped by a negro
last month on her way back from that rowdy town. Wise's only question was
"How did she appear to like it?" Cannot vouch for authenticity; small inci-
dents often get exaggerated, but it's all very titillating.
Enough; I have in my hand a product of the calligrapher's art, in the form
of a formal invitation to a reception a few weeks hence at the Biairs' house
across the street. I am told that their home is not so elegant as the house in
Arlington we snatched from the disloyal Colonel Lee, but reportedly better
furnished than this old, slightly dilapidated presidential mansion. Why is a
lowly secretary like me invited to rub elbows with the likes of the Biairs? Not
because of my intellect or good looks, I fear, but because I am that delicious
oddity: a single man. Unattached men of twenty-one, university graduates,
are coveted by hostesses in this city. Perhaps Kate Chase will be there. She is
reputed to be a redhead.