The Fathers and Saviors of Our Country: A Presidential Sale

3 volumes, 8vo (241 x 152 mm). Original blue cloth, printed paper spine labels (light rubbing to extreme spine ends, toning to paper labels, very minor spotting); slipcase.

ROBERT TODD LINCOLN'S COPY, WITH ANNOTATIONS IN HIS HAND, identifying several names to the redacted portions. Presumably gifted to him by Hay's widow. This edition was one of a small number of copies privately printed for distribution among friends of the Hay family.

John Hay met Abraham Lincoln while working at the firm of his father, Milton Hay, who maintained an office next door to the Lincoln-Herndon firm. Following Lincoln's nomination for president, Hay became one of his most vocal supporters and was eventually hired on as the candidate's full-time secretary. After Lincoln's election, it was recommended that he keep Hay on while president, to which Lincoln replied, "We can't take all Illinois with us down to Washington," before immediately changing his mind.

Dividing his responsibilities with John G. Nicolay, Hay also served as something of a White House propagandist, sending anonymous letters to newspapers that praised Lincoln's piety and sorrow over the war. Charles G. Halpine would later write that "Lincoln loved him as a son." He traveled with Lincoln to Gettysburg and was later gifted a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address. On the night of 14 April 1865, Hay was at the White House, drinking whiskey with Robert Lincoln, when Tad Lincoln burst into the room shortly after 11 p.m. and shrieked, "They've killed Papa dead!" Both men rushed to the Peterson House, where they remained until Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m.

Following Lincoln's death, Hay distinguished himself as a statesman as Assistant Secretary of State under Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom under William McKinley, and finally as Secretary of State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt; it was Hay who signed his name to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War in 1898. After he died in 1905, his widow privately published his letters and diary entries in 200 copies, omitting the names of some historical and private individuals mentioned throughout; at various points, those missing names are restored in Robert Lincoln's own hand.

PROVENANCE:
Robert Todd Lincoln (ownership stamp, small pencil annotations); a private collection (bookplate)