Who was Abraham Lincoln's assistant?

Answer 1

Lincoln did not have anyone whose job title was "personal assistant". He did have two secretaries, both named John - John G. Nicolay and John Hay. They lived in the White House and shared a room beside the family quarters. They had one room for an office, and their bedroom was off of that room. Presidents did not have large staffs like they do today, and these two handled all of Lincoln's correspondence, kept up with his papers, kept files of newspapers clippings cut from papers from all over the country, attended cabinet meetings to keep notes of what was said, and were generally very helpful. Since the president was given no budget money to pay for any staff assistants, they both held a clerk's job in some other department of the government, but that was just on paper. Both were young, unmarried men in their 20s. Nicolay was somewhat older, and had come to America as a child, and still had a slight accent. Hay was a recent college graduate, hired on the recommendation of a lawyer who knew him and who had the law office next door to Lincoln's in Springfield, Illinois. Both were hired after the election, but before Lincoln went to Washington and was sworn in. Thus these two were present from the very beginning of the Lincoln Administration and privy to all that went on during those tumultuous years, though Hay left after Lincoln was reelected in 1864. Hay and Nicolay collaborated on one of the best biographies of Lincoln, a huge effort in ten volumes, which still must be consulted by anyone wanting to write a serious book about Lincoln in the Civil War years to this day. Hay went on to be the Secretary of State during the McKinley Administration, and is perhaps best remembered today for saying that the Spanish-American War of 1898 was "a splendid little war". When Lincoln had trouble sleeping, what with the pressing problems of the war and his disturbing dreams, he would often drop in to the bedroom his two secretaries shared, and talk with them in the middle of the night, his long legs sticking out the bottom of his nightshirt. Johnny Hay seems to have been somewhat sweet on Kate Chase, the older daughter of Lincoln's rival and the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. Chase's wife had recently died and Kate served as his hostess in the endless round of parties and dinners that go on in Washington. She was the prettiest girl in Washington, and had a brilliant mind. (In Richmond there were a half dozen girls who were "the belle of the Confederacy", but in Washington there was no one to rival Kate Chase). When Salmon P. Chase decided to try to challenge the president of his own party in the election of 1864 and run against Lincoln in the primaries, Kate, who loved her father, made a loveless marriage with a bizarre but incredibly wealthy man from Rhode Island, Sprague, who had basically bought himself a seat in the US Senate in 1864, in order to gain access to Sprague's money for her daddy's presidential campiagn. That came to nothing because scandals were about to develop over revelations that Chase had signed permits for Sprague to trade with the enemy, to obtain cotton from the south to feed his Rhode Island textile mills. This allowed Lincoln to rid himself of Chase, by making Chase Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, after old Roger B. Taney finally died in 1864. But by then it was too late for Kate Chase and Johnny Hay; Kate was stuck with the alcoholic, abusive Sprague. Kate had a notorious affair with New York politician Roscoe Conkling in the 1870s, after which Sprague divorced her, and she died at a relatively young age, in poverty, around the time her old beau Johnny Hay was at the heights of Washington power.

Answer 2

John Hay was Lincoln's secretary and personal assistant.