Inside Lincolns White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay
by John Hay, Michael Burlingame, John R. Turner Ettlinger
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Hay's Civil War diary, presented here in a definitive edition by Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger is justly deemed the most intimate record we will ever have of Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The Hay diary is, according to Burlingame and Ettlinger, "one of the richest deposits of high-grade ore for the smelters of Lincoln biographers and Civil War historians." While the Cabinet diaries of Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Gideon Welles also shed much light on Lincoln's presidency, as does the diary of Senator Orville Hickman Browning, none of these diaries has the literary flair of Hay's, which is, as Lincoln's friend Horace White noted, as "breezy and sparkling as champagne." An aspiring poet, Hay recorded events in a scintillating style that the lawyer-politician diarists conspicuously lacked. Burlingame and Ettlinger's edition of the diary is the first to publish the complete text of all of Hay's entries from 1861 through 1864.