Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HUWGDPM | Format: PDF
Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image Description
A timely and intimate look into Abraham Lincoln's White House through the lives of his two closest aides and confidants.
Lincoln's official secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president's immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attendeded the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy. They were present at every seminal event, from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln's delivery of the Gettysburg Address - and they wrote about it after his death.
In their biography of Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay fought to establish Lincoln's heroic legacy and to preserve a narrative that saw slavery - not states' rights - as the sole cause of the Civil War. As Joshua Zeitz shows, the image of a humble man with uncommon intellect who rose from obscurity to become a storied wartime leader and emancipator is very much their creation.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Lincoln's Boys is part political drama and part coming-of-age tale - a fascinating story of friendship, politics, war, and the contest over history and remembrance.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 13 hours
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 4, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HUWGDPM
Anyone with more than a passing interest in the Civil War will recognize the names of John Hay and John Nicolay. Dubbed "my boys" by their boss, Hay and Nicolay were President Lincoln's private secretaries. As historian Joshua Zeitz explains in this multifaceted book, that seemingly innocuous job title was misleading because Hay and Nicolay lived in an era when presidential staffs were smaller, and individual responsibilities greater, than they are now.
Zeitz sets out several tasks for himself in "Lincoln's Boys." In part a dual biography of Hay and Nicolay, the book explores the inner workings of Lincoln's White House from the perspective of the two men who were closer to Lincoln during his presidency than everyone but his wife, Mary Todd. But the book's subtitle makes it clear that there is more going on here than opening a new window on Lincoln's years in office. Hay and Nicolay, who later published a 10-volume biography of Lincoln, effectively shaped our understanding of the 16th president by creating what some would call the myth of Lincoln. It is that process that occupies much of Zietz's attention.
Their monumental biography "constituted one of the most successful exercises in historical revisionism in American history," Zeitz notes. Writing against "the rising currents of Southern apologia and a popular vogue for reunion and reconciliation," Hay and Nicolay pioneered what Zeitz calls the Northern interpretation of the Civil War.
Without “Lincoln’s boys,” there might be no “Lincoln” --- no legend, no taller-than-life image, no great emancipator leading us through our most troubled hours. Without Lincoln’s boys, Lincoln might have shrunk to ordinary size, remembered but not a universally admired, even exalted, father figure. Without Lincoln’s boys, the Republican Party would not have its most cherished icon. John Hay and John Nicolay are the “boys,” the subjects of this remarkable account by political historian Joshua Zeitz.
Hay and Nicolay were Lincoln’s closest, most trusted advisors and friends. They were a two-man “White House Press Corps” at a time when that concept did not yet exist. The two Midwesterners met in school and fell in with Lincoln before he became president. Nicolay, a Bavarian-born editor and political activist, was Lincoln’s first appointee, his private secretary; Hay, of Scots descent and a lifelong government worker, who was younger than Nicolay and destined to be linked to him for life, became his assistant. Deputized by the President to be his eyes and ears, and destined to experience history in the making, Nicolay parlayed with skirmishing Indians in Minnesota, and Hay visited the eerily abandoned plantation houses of the Union-occupied South.
After Lincoln’s assassination, the two became partners in an enormous and significant undertaking, composing from Lincoln’s many papers a 10-volume biography (nearly 5,000 pages, serialized in Century Magazine) that would influence historical thinking and create a legend.
The legendary status was well-deserved; it had only to be aired.
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