From the number of buses infesting downtown D.C. – and especially the monuments – it is clear that school tour season is in full swing here in Washington. What’s less obvious is that we’re finally reaching the end of it. Nonetheless, I still have one tour to go this week, and so to find a topic for today’s post, I have to look back at some research I did quite a while ago, on a topic that intrigued me, though never really gelled. However, as I do like to point out famous people who have lived on the Hill, it seems appropriate that I write about these two.
Abraham Lincoln had two secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay. They served him throughout his presidency, and thus were intimately involved in the day-to-day operation of war operation, and Lincoln’s many battles. While only Hay kept a diary, the two later collaborated on a 10-volume biography of the slain president, as well as various versions of ‘Complete Works.’ In short, it is through their work that so much is known on Lincoln, and why people have been able to write so much about him since his death.
Less-well known about these two is their connection to Capitol Hill. John Nicolay, who, after being consul in Paris as well as a newspaper editor after Lincoln’s assassination, moved back to Washington and became Marshal of the United States Supreme Court, and thus in charge of security for the highest court. Unsurprisingly, he chose to live close to his job, and found a house on the 100 block of B Street (today Independence Avenue) SE. In 1879, he moved up in the world, buying a four-story brick house a few doors down at 212 B Street SE. It was a 36-foot wide house, and thus quite grand for Capitol Hill.
It was in this house – as well as Hay’s house on Lafayette Square, near the White House – that Lincoln’s former secretaries would work on the biography of their old boss. Nicolay’s large first-floor study became known as containing “one of the largest private collections of Civil War documentation and secondary scholarship in the country.”
In 1887, Nicolay was forced to step down from his position due to ill health. By then, however, the Lincoln biography was already being serialized, and work on this and the final book publication consumed him for another seven years.
Nicolay, Lincoln, and Hay can be seen in this detail of an 1863 photograph (LOC)
Nicolay lived in this house until the end of his life. He died just a few days after President McKinley died in 1901, and thus when Hay went to visit his old friend one last time, he was already wearing the black armband that was de rigueur for mourners in the 19th Century.
Sadly, neither of Nicolay’s houses on the Hill remain. The house he died in was the first to succumb, being demolished to make way for the Adams building of the Library of Congress, while his former abode survived quite a while longer, succumbing to the wrecker’s ball to make way for the Madison building of the Library of Congress.