The Witness Series: The Room — John Hay, Beside Abraham Lincoln

A Limited Series from Echoes in the First Person

The Room brings listeners into the final hours of Abraham Lincoln’s life through the perspective of John Hay, the young assistant private secretary who served beside him throughout his presidency. On the night of April 14, 1865, after Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, Hay accompanied the president’s son, Robert, to the Petersen House across the street. There, in a small back bedroom, the mortally wounded president lay unconscious as those closest to him gathered and waited.

Before that vigil, Hay’s relationship with Lincoln had been shaped by four years of demanding work and unusual proximity. He joined the presidential staff in 1861 at twenty-two, working alongside private secretary John G. Nicolay. Together, they screened visitors, handled correspondence, and carried messages—responsibilities that placed them close to both the business of the presidency and the person carrying its burdens. For Hay, Lincoln was not simply a public figure. He was someone encountered in conversation, humor, exhaustion, and the ordinary exchanges of a shared working life.

That familiarity gives the episode its emotional center. Monday’s dramatized monologue moves between the crowded room and memories of quieter encounters: a joke that dissolves formality, a drink placed on a desk, an invitation to remain nearby without speaking. These imagined private moments explore the difference between attending to someone’s needs and recognizing their need for companionship.

Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865. Hay later helped shape how the president would be remembered, collaborating with Nicolay on the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History, published in 1890. The young secretary who had witnessed Lincoln’s working life and final hours became one of the writers responsible for preserving his story.

This is not only the story of a president’s death. It is the story of John Hay: an aide, a confidant, and a witness confronting the limits of what loyalty can do. The Room asks us to look beyond the public monument—and toward the people who knew the person behind it, whose memories held not only the weight of history, but the unfinished meaning of an ordinary exchange.