John Hay

He was sent at 11 from Warsaw, Illinois, to a good school in Pittsfield, where he met a 20-year-old newspaperman named John Nicolay and began a friendship that lasted 40 years. Brown University made him class poet and gave him two degrees by 1858. He read law in his uncle Milton Hay's office in Springfield, next door to Abraham Lincoln's. He worked the 1860 campaign, and when Nicolay was buried in correspondence Lincoln said, well, let Hay come. He was admitted to the Illinois bar on February 4, 1861, and a week later he was on the train east. Thomas Wentworth Higginson took his measure at the White House: a nice young fellow who unfortunately looks about seventeen and is oppressed with the necessity of behaving like seventy.

He handled Lincoln's mail, 20 hours a day by his own account, and kept the office-seekers off. He went to Gettysburg and recorded in his diary only that the President said his half-dozen lines of consecration. He was in the room at the Petersen House when Lincoln died. Then Paris, Vienna, Madrid, the New-York Tribune, and assistant secretary of state under Hayes. McKinley sent him to London in 1897 and made him secretary of state in September 1898. He issued the Open Door note on September 6, 1899, and announced the following March that every power had agreed. A second note in July 1900 kept them from carving China up during the Boxer rising. The Hay-Pauncefote, Hay-Herran and Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaties cleared the ground for the Panama Canal.

Marrying Clara Stone in 1874 made salaries beside the point. Her father Amasa Stone was the richest man in Cleveland, and in December 1876 a bridge built from metal cast at one of his mills went down over the Ashtabula River under one of his trains and killed 92 people. Blame settled on Stone, who sailed for Europe and left Hay running the businesses. Stone killed himself in 1883 and left the Hays very rich. Out of the strikes of 1877 Hay wrote The Bread-Winners and published it anonymously, one of the first American novels written from the owners' side of a labor war and by far the most successful of them. Of Bryan's voters he wrote that they held there is no goodness and wisdom except among the illiterate and criminal classes.

The summer of 1901 took his elder son Adelbert, consul at Pretoria, out of a hotel window. Nicolay died in September, his friend Clarence King on Christmas Eve, and in between Hay stood beside a second dying president. The death of our boy, he wrote later, made my wife and me old, at once and for the rest of our lives. He went to Bad Nauheim in 1905 for his heart, came home, reported to Roosevelt, and died in New Hampshire on July 1. Henry Adams closed The Education of Henry Adams with him — with Hay gone, his own education was over. The ten-volume Lincoln he and Nicolay sold door to door built the Lincoln the country still carries.

John Hay's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Pike County Ballads book
  Dialect poems that made him famous before diplomacy did 1871
• The Bread-Winners book
  Published anonymously — his name did not appear on it until 1916 1883
• Abraham Lincoln: A History book
  Ten volumes with John Nicolay, from papers no other researcher saw until 1947 1890
• The Open Door note other
  Not a treaty and never sent to the Senate — he simply announced that everyone had agreed 1899
• Hay-Pauncefote Treaty law
  Britain gave up its claim to joint control of any isthmian canal 1901
• Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty law
  Gave the United States a ten-mile canal zone across the new republic of Panama 1903

• 1849 aged ~11 Sent to school in Pittsfield, where he meets John Nicolay
• February 4, 1861 aged 22 Admitted to the Illinois bar, a week before leaving for Washington
• November 19, 1863 aged 25 Goes to Gettysburg with Lincoln His diary called it half a dozen lines of consecration.
• April 15, 1865 aged 26 Stands at Lincoln's deathbed in the Petersen House
• 1874 aged ~36 Marries Clara Stone and joins one of the largest fortunes in Ohio
• 1890 aged ~52 The ten-volume Lincoln appears, sold door to door at 50 dollars
• September 30, 1898 aged 59 Sworn in as secretary of state
• September 6, 1899 aged 60 Issues the Open Door note on China
• July 1, 1905 aged 66 Dies at The Fells, his New Hampshire place, still in office

• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. private secretary to
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. served
• William McKinley 1843–1901
  Twenty-fifth president who led the Spanish-American War and overseas expansion before being assassinated. appointed by
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. served