Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image Author: Visit Amazon's Joshua Zeitz Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0670025666 | Format: EPUB
Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image Description
From Booklist
Many of Abraham Lincoln’s friends and associates claimed to have known and understood him well. Some, most notably William Herndon, his former law partner, wrote extensively about him. But Lincoln was deeply reticent about revealing details about his background, his personal feelings, and even some of his political motivations. Still, Hay and Nicolay, his young personal secretaries during his presidency, could certainly lay claim to a close and constant political relationship with him. Zeitz, who has taught American history at both Cambridge and Princeton, places the early life of Hay and Nicolay within the context of the intensifying dispute over slavery. The core of his account, however, is their service to Lincoln as president, followed by their effort to define Lincoln’s legacy by jointly writing a massive biography. That biography, done with input (or approval) of Lincoln’s son Robert, continues to influence current views of Lincoln, General McClellan, and various cabinet officers. This will be an excellent addition to Civil War collections. --Jay Freeman
Review
"What a wonderful, welcome book. Zeitz has pulled off a difficult task -- revealing how the myth of Lincoln came to be without distorting the true greatness of our extraordinary 16th President."
-- Ken Burns (filmmaker)"Joshua Zeitz's delightful study of John Hay and John Nicolay interweaves intimate biography, political drama, and the shaping of historical memory to produce an arresting and original narrative. Above all, it reminds us that, thanks to Lincoln's secretaries, the moral dimensions of the emancipationist Civil War could not be bleached from the historical record by an increasingly fashionable understanding of the struggle as a romantic 'brothers' conflict'."
--Richard Carwardine, author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power“Abraham Lincoln was blessed with truly first-rate biographers in John Nicolay and John Hay, so it is ‘altogether fitting and proper’ that Nicolay and Hay have now attracted a terrific chronicler of their own life and times in Joshua Zeitz. This fine book traces the extraordinary evolution of Lincoln’s two private secretaries from clerks into tireless historians and rabid keepers of the flame. Historians have long remembered their roles as canny observers of the White House during the Civil War, but this study adds much fascinating new material about their peerless role in crafting and preserving the Lincoln image.”
—Harold Holzer, author of The Civil War in 50 Objects
See all Editorial Reviews
- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Viking Adult (February 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670025666
- ISBN-13: 978-0670025664
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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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