Pike County Ballads and Other Poems

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.
Pike County Ballads and other poems in this volume by Colonel John Hay represent in the best manner the spirit of our strong and independent sister-land across the Atlantic. Pike County Ballads do full justice to the raw material in the United States, and show a loyal temper in the rough. The other pieces show how the love of freedom speaks through finer spirits of the land, and, dealing with realities, can turn a life of action into music.
Colonel Hay has lived always in vigorous relation with the full life of the people whose best mind his poems represent. He is descended from a Scottish soldier, a John Hay, who, at the beginning of the last century, left his country to take service under the Elector-Palatine, and whose son went afterwards with his family to settle among the Kentucky pioneers. Dr. Charles Hay was the father of John Hay the poet, who was born on the 8th of October 1838, in the heart of the United States, at Salem in Indiana. When twenty years old he graduated at the neighbouring Brown University, where his fellow-students valued his skill as a writer. Then he studied for the Bar, and he was called to the Bar three years later, at Springfield, Illinois.
At Springfield, Abraham Lincoln practised as a barrister. Shrewd, lively, earnest, honest, he grudged help to a rogue. In a criminal case, when evidence threw unexpected light upon a client's character, Abraham Lincoln said suddenly to his junior, Swett, the man is guilty; you defend him, I can't. In another case, when a piece of rascality in his client came out, Abraham Lincoln left his junior in possession of the case and went to his hotel. To the judge, who sent for him, he replied that he had found his hands were very dirty, and had gone away to get them clean. Almost immediately after John Hay's call to the Bar at Springfield he was chosen by Abraham Lincoln, newly made President, to go with him to Washington. At Washington, Hay acted as Assistant-Secretary, and was also, in the Civil War, aide-de-camp to President Lincoln. Throughout that momentous struggle he was actively employed on the side of the North at the headquarters and on the field of battle. He served for a time under Generals Hunter and Gillmore, became a Colonel in the army of the North, and served also as Assistant Adjutant-General. John Hay had in that struggle three brothers and two brothers-in-law serving also in the field.