Poignant letter by Hayes remembering his wife’s death precisely three years earlier

Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 1822–1893.  19th President of the United States, 1881–1885.    Autograph letter signed, Rutherford B. Hayes, one page, 5½” x 8½”, on plain stationery, Spiegel Grove, Fremont, Ohio, June 25, 1892.  With original mailing envelope addressed in Hayes’s hand.

Hayes sends a poignant response to genealogist Clair A. Newton, who evidently asked about his wife, former First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes, noting for Newton that she had died precisely three years before.  He writes, in full: “My precious wife Lucy Ware Webb Hayes was born in Chillicothe Ohio 28 August 1831 and died three years ago this day! — June 25, 1889.  /  Sincerely . . . ”

Lucy Hayes was nine years younger than President Hayes.  Hayes’s mother had encouraged him to get acquainted with her when he was a 23-year-old student at Ohio Wesleyan University, where Lucy’s brothers were enrolled, but he thought that, at age 14, she was too young.  Later he began to see her when, to boost his law practice, he moved to Cincinnati, where she was enrolled at Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College. Hayes wrote a friend in January 1850 that he “found her as soon as she returned from her holiday visit, and have enjoyed the light of her gleesome smile and merry talk times not a few nor far between.” 

They began to date seriously and became engaged in 1851. Hayes’s love was unbounded.  Thus, he began a long Sunday morning love letter to “ Dearest Lucy” on June 22, 1851, this way: 

I know it is very wicked to spend this holy Sabbath morning writing sweet nonsense to my lady-love, instead of piously preparing to go to church with mother, as a dutiful son ought to do, but then I’m hardly responsible.  This love is, indeed, an awful thing; as Byron said, “it interferes with all a man’s projects for good and glory.” Besides, I am only fulfilling my scriptural destiny in “forsaking father and mother”—and all that—and—and—I can’t quote any farther.  But the pith of it is—leaving your mother to go alone to church, and stealing off up into a quiet chamber to spoil good paper with wretched scribbling to puzzle the eye of the dearest girl of all the world.  Well, you’ll forgive the sin I hope.  I know you will if you have thought a tithe as much about me—but you haven’t—as I have about you, the five or six days past,—and with a pardon beaming from your—I was a-going to say deep, and then sweet, but no one adjective can describe it—eye, I shall feel a heathenish indifference as to any other forgiveness.  For “at this present,” that eye has become to me, and I trust will ever continue, “like a star in the mariner’s heaven”—an eye which is to give color, shape, and character to all my future hopes, fancies, and “reveries.” . . . .

To think that I am beginning to realize that revery [before the glowing anthracite]!  To think that that lovely vision is an actual, living, breathing being, and is loved by me, and loves in return, and will one day be my bride—my abiding, forgiving, trustful, loving wife—to make my happy home blessed indeed with her cheerful smile and silver voice and warm true heart!

I Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States 367 (Charles Richard Williams ed. 1922).

Hayes and Lucy were married on December 30, 1852, in a simple ceremony at her mother’s home in Cincinnati.

Lucy died at the Hayes estate, Spiegel Grove, in Fremont, Ohio, following a stroke that she suffered at age 57.  Her death was hard on the former President.  He wrote that upon her death, “the soul had left” Spiegel Grove. When Hayes suffered a heart attack at home some 3½ later on January 17, 1893, his last words before his own death were, “I know that I’m going where Lucy is.”

Clair Alonzo Hemenway Newton (1872–1956), to whom Hayes wrote this letter, was a genealogist and author.  He compiled family histories, concentrating on the Hemenway and Newton families and the records where he lived in Naperville and DuPage County, Illinois.

President Hayes has written and signed this letter in black fountain pen.  There is quite a bit of transfer of the wet ink where the parts above and below the bottom mailing fold transferred to each other when Hayes folded the letter.  Significantly, the ink transfers do not affect Hayes’s signature itself.  The transfers include the ink from Hayes’s bold signature, which transferred lightly to a blank area at the end of the text of the letter, thus in a sense providing a second Hayes signature.  Most of the transferred ink affects the blank area at the bottom of the letter, where the text touched it, although transfers from below the bottom fold affect a bit of the text above the fold, and the ink from the place and date from the top of the letter transferred to the bottom of the back of the letter.  The laid stationery is clean and bright except for a bit of soiling on the back of the letter around the folds.  It appears that the stationery originally had an integral leaf that has been cleanly removed.  The original envelope, which Hayes addressed, was opened at the right end, and part of the preprinted 2¢ postage stamp is missing.  The postage was cancelled in Fremont, Ohio, and the letter has a second postmark from Naperville, Illinois, on the back.  Pencil notations on the front of the envelope in an unknown hand identify the piece as coming from Hayes.  The envelope has typical soiling and a vertical stain in the middle of the front side that affects four letters in the name and address.  Overall, the letter is in fine condition, and the envelope is very good.

In addition to its poignancy, this letter is quite desirable because Hayes has signed it with his full signature, as opposed to the shortened “R. B. Hayes” that he often signed on correspondence.  It belongs in a fine collection of Presidents’ or First Ladies’ autographs.

Unframed.