Archive of correspondence received by John Hay, including a telegram from Jennie Churchill about Winston

Collection of 23 pieces of correspondence retained by journalist and Secretary of State John Hay, primarily from the 1880s and 1890s, with the majority from fellow politicians and journalists.

The archive includes letters from Joseph R. Hawley, John Bell Brownlow, John Addison Porter, George William Curtis, and Charles Grosvenor, as well as a lengthy partial letter from Jacob D. Cox related to Hay's biography of Lincoln, four letters from The Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder, and a telegram received from Jennie Churchill (not in her hand) in 1899 requesting that Hay's son deliver a message to Winston Churchill in Pretoria.

John Hay began his political career as Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary during the Civil War. He went on to work as a journalist, author, diplomat, and eventually Secretary of State under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Collections of Hay's incoming correspondence are held by the John Hay Library at Brown University and the Library Congress. Scans of each of the individual letters included in the collection are available on request.