Executive Mansion,
Washington, September
11, 1863.
MY DEAR NICOLAY:
A week or so ago I got frightened at
“The brow so haggard, the chin so
peaked,
Fronting me silent in the glass,”
and sending for Stoddard (who had been giving the northern
watering places for the last two months a model of high breeding and unquestionable
deportment), I left for a few days at Long Branch and two or three more at
Providence. I was at the Commencement at Brown University, and made a small
chunk of a talk. I only staid a little over a week, and came back feeling
heartier.
I must be in Warsaw early in October on account of family
affairs. As I infer from your letter that you cannot return before November, or,
as Judge Otto says, before December, I will have to give the reins up for a few
days to Stoddard and Howe again. I hope the daring youth will not reduplicate
the fate of Phaeton.
Washington is as dull here as an obsolete almanac. The
weather is not so bad as it was. The nights are growing cool. But there is
nobody here except us old stagers who can't get away. We have some comfortable
dinners and some quiet little orgies on whiskey and cheese in my room. And the
time slides away.
We are quietly jolly over the magnificent news from all
round the board. Rosecrans won a great and bloodless victory at Chattanooga
which he had no business to win. The day that the enemy ran, he sent a mutinous
message to Halleck complaining of the very things that have secured us the
victories, and foreshadowing only danger and defeat.
You may talk as you please of the Abolition Cabal directing
affairs from Washington; some well-meaning newspapers advise the President to
keep his fingers out of the military pie, and all that sort of thing. The truth
is, if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess. The old man sits here and wields
like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with
a hand equally steady and equally firm.
His last letter is a great thing. Some hideously bad
rhetoric — some indecorums that are infamous, — yet the whole letter takes its
solid place in history as a great utterance of a great man. The whole Cabinet
could not have tinkered up a letter which could have been compared with it. He
can rake a sophism out of its hole better than all the trained logicians of all
schools. I do not know whether the nation is worthy of him for another term. I
know the people want him. There is no mistaking that fact. But politicians are
strong yet, and he is not their “kind of a cat.” I hope God won't see fit to
scourge us for our sins by any one of the two or three most prominent
candidates on the ground.
I hope you are getting well and hearty. Next winter will be
the most exciting and laborious of all our lives. It will be worth any other
ten.
SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and
Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 100-3; For the whole diary entry see
Tyler Dennett, Editor, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and
letters of John Hay, p. 90-1; Michael Burlingame, Editor, At Lincoln’s Side: John Yay’s Civil War
Correspondence and Selected Writings, p. 53-4.
