Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  When, like Bennett before him, Greeley was forced from his maiden headquarters by fire (which in this case nearly spread to the Sun), he brushed off the disaster as a mere nuisance and despite $8,000 in uninsured losses soon moved the Tribune into expanded space on nearby Nassau Street.89 Again like Bennett, he used the relocation to promote the paper’s durability. But it was his earnest editorial writing that set Greeley—and the Tribune—apart. Dedicated to providing his readers more than “a dry summary” of “the most interesting occurrences of the day,” Greeley aimed at creating “a newspaper, in the higher sense of the term.” As he explained it: “We need to know, not only what is done, but what is purposed and said, by those who sway the destinies of states and realms.”90

  The brilliant staff of the New York Tribune in the 1840s: from left to right, financial correspondent George Snow; music writer William H. Fry; literary critic Herbert Bayard Taylor; managing editor Charles A. Dana; editor Horace Greeley; assistant editor Henry J. Raymond (who had already left the paper); and literary editor George Ripley.

  Perhaps most effectively of all, Greeley transformed himself into a genuinely original New York character: an eccentric humanitarian dreamer who conveniently looked the part, topping his ghostly pale, prematurely balding head with dented top hats and ambling through town in scuffed boots and ink-stained white dusters whose pockets overflowed with scraps of paper. He earned renown as a “great wit,” one upstate newspaperman fondly remembered, who “said cute things because he could not help it.”91 His public appearances often sold out, but even an admirer like fellow temperance advocate Theodore Cuyler conceded that Greeley’s weak voice and “quaint queer way” usually elicited a “titter” from audiences before his earnest logic lured them into rapt attentiveness “tight as in a vice.”92

  When not working at the paper or making speeches to spread its gospel and fame—along with his own—the myopic daydreamer might be spotted wandering Manhattan’s boulevards aimlessly, it seemed, his clothes disheveled and his posture stooped, apparently lost in abstract thoughts. One of his most persistent enemies, James Fenimore Cooper, the celebrated novelist who sued him more than once for libel (winning $200 in one such judgment), joked that Greeley was “so rocking in gait that he walks down both sides of the street at once.”93

  Whether the image of homespun philosopher was carefully calculated or the product of authentic idiosyncrasy, it certainly helped Greeley to promote himself and his newspaper, and to arouse the jealousy of his competitors. Accusing him of dangerous “tomfooleries,” his broadsheet rival James Watson Webb once fumed of Greeley: “He lays claim to greatness by wandering through the streets with a hat double the size of his head, a coat after the fashion of Jacob’s of old, with one leg of his pantaloons inside and the other outside of his boot, and with boots all bespattered with mud, or, possibly, a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, and glorying in an unwashed and unshaven person.”94

  But Greeley was much more than a caricature—as often as he began appearing as such in period cartoons that typically depicted him as a windmill-tilter. In one sense the editor exuded a carefully crafted humility, once urging people to come early to one of his lectures at Cooper Union so they could obtain seats close enough to hear his all but inaudible voice. Yet his modest affect masked a burning faith in his abilities and opinions. He may have portrayed himself as a careless-looking farmer’s son eager to experiment with panaceas for the betterment of mankind, but his seeming guilelessness masked the reality of a tirelessly ambitious and self-assured, some said self-centered, professional. As a later employee put it, Greeley “knew no language but his own, but of that he possessed the most extraordinary mastery.”95 Whoever the real Greeley was—crusader, crank, or both—he emerged by the late 1840s as one of the ablest and most outspoken young newspapermen not only in New York, but also in the country. At decade’s end, the New York Tribune came close to equaling the robust circulation of the New York Herald: an astounding thirty thousand a day. Beginning in September 1842, Greeley, like Bennett before him, also began publishing a weekly synopsis edition available for a dollar a year to readers across the country—later to include among its 200,000 subscribers a rising politician in distant Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

  In a sense, both these editors—the outrageous, shoot-from-the-hip Bennett and the earnest, do-good gadfly Greeley—triumphed in mid-century New York journalism because they had more in common professionally than either would have admitted. They were both brilliant writers, willing not only to cover but create the news. And they were high-strung, unrepentant individualists, both set somewhat apart from conventional society: Bennett the cunning, foreign-born, mercenary rogue and Greeley the airy, experimental do-gooder. Though they differed dramatically in personality, detested each other with a vengeance, and shared nothing but their passion for journalism, in their fierce pride in their outsider status and in their power to influence the masses while thumbing their noses at the rich and powerful, they were frighteningly alike. It was no accident that their talent made each rich and powerful himself.

  Professional illustrators of the day, whose work could uncannily capture, and sometimes influence, public attitudes, were quick to catch on to the two editors’ potential as contrasting artistic prototypes—one representing the more sinister aspect of the newspaper business, the other its crusading side. A representative cartoon of the day—conceivably the first ever to depict rivals Greeley and Bennett together—showed the Herald proprietor outdistancing his younger competitor in the race for a lucrative Post Office printing contract (a reminder that newspapers of the day did furious battle over outside publishing jobs as well as politics). The circa 1843 lithograph presented the Tribune editor as a translucent ghost astride a reformer’s symbolic white steed, a battered hat falling away to reveal a prematurely receding hairline. (“He reminds me of Death on the Pale Horse,” comments a well-dressed African-American bystander in the foreground, a none too subtle suggestion that Greeley’s readership was composed of dangerous abolitionists and overprivileged free blacks; his less elegant companion agrees—in dialect—“My presumption is dat de debil himself helps dat dam Bennett!”). An extravagantly cross-eyed and hook-nosed Bennett, by contrast, is portrayed riding a black charger, and, to remind viewers of his alien status, wearing a kilt, plaid tartan sash, and Scottish tam o’shanter, boasting he has outraced “The Squash” in the race toward the New York Post Office. “The largest circulation gets it!” comments an indifferent postmaster. The saddlebag on Bennett’s horse tells a different story about the competition. In a blistering indictment of Bennett’s ethics, it is labeled: “Black Mail.”96

  Greeley (left) and Bennett race for the “Post Office Stakes,” in an 1843 cartoon mocking the rival editors’ unseemly competition for a lucrative printing contract.

  Throughout their long competition for readership and influence, Greeley remained much more the faithful party man than Bennett, though neither editor was ever reluctant to admit disappointment when he felt his organization had chosen an inferior political nominee. During the presidential election of 1844, Bennett’s Herald endorsed Democrat James Polk, but not before charging that “a more ridiculous, contemptible, and forlorn candidate was never put forth by any party.”97 That year, the Tribune editor threw “heart and soul” into the doomed campaign for Henry Clay (a politician whom Greeley, like Lincoln, “profoundly loved”).98 Polk triumphed in New York state as well as nationally, but soon enough the new president handed Greeley an issue with which to launch yet another crusade: a controversial war with Mexico in which victory almost guaranteed the expansion of American slave territory.

  For the next two years, Greeley railed against Polk and his divisive Mexican adventure, while Bennett cheered both. By the end of 1847, more powerful than ever, Greeley had helped set the stage for a new session of congressional debate over Mexico, for a national referendum on Polk’s policies in the next presidential election, and for an even more prosperous era
for the increasingly influential newspaper he owned. In this arena, freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln and first-term senator Stephen A. Douglas were destined to meet in Washington in a renewal of the fierce political combat for which they would continue to rely on the party press for both fuel and fire.

  • • •

  Back in Lincoln’s Springfield, almost as if inflamed by his own pro-war editorials, Register founder William Walters determined he must do what fellow pro-war editors like Bennett never considered: fight in Mexico himself—with bullets instead of mere words. Entrusting the paper to his young assistant, Charles Lanphier, Walters enlisted and left town in 1846, determined to see battle action. He never did. Nor did he ever return home. Before reaching the front, Walters died in St. Louis of “congestion of the brain”—brought on, his critics whispered, by years of heavy drinking. When morticians submerged his body in an alcohol preservative before shipping his lead coffin back to Springfield, even his closest hometown friends winked that Walters would have been as “content in that environment” as he had been for so many years in the toxic brew of newspaper competition in Illinois.99

  * * *

  I. Loco-Foco was the sobriquet given to the radical, New York–born wing of the Democratic Party committed to hard money. The name came from the newly introduced matchsticks these insurgents had held aloft when Tammany Hall regulars turned out the lights in an attempt to shut down a political meeting before the opposition could be heard.

  CHAPTER THREE

  That Attractive Rainbow

  Though certain to be hotly contentious, the 1848 presidential election was still almost a year away when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas made their way to Washington to represent Illinois in Congress.

  The war with Mexico, however controversial, was winding down with what loomed as a triumph for the United States. In ordinary times, the approaching holiday season might have signaled a period of calm and unity in America. But in December 1847, with the House and Senate heading back into session, politicians and editors eager for advantage were not about to let the volatility or bitterness of the past few months evaporate. After all, healing threatened to translate into voter apathy and with it, diminished readership of newspapers. The war itself was nearly over, American victory was assured, but the fight over the conflict’s meaning was just getting under way. The partisan press, now endowed with better technology for both receiving and printing news and making it available to readers faster and cheaper, was more emboldened than ever not merely to report, but to inflame, the waning drama.

  Early in the month, the two rising political stars from Illinois arrived in Washington to take their seats in the 30th Congress: Democrat Douglas and Whig Lincoln, not only physical opposites but already political foes, if not quite yet outright rivals. The same August 1846 election that saw Lincoln elected to the House of Representatives with a record-high Whig vote in his district also produced a sufficient Democratic majority statewide to assure the selection of a Democrat to the United States Senate.1 To no one’s surprise, when state legislators met in Springfield that December to choose the next senator, they elevated Douglas. So it happened that these future political opponents made their way to Washington around the same time to assume the highest posts to which either had ever ascended.

  Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln, age thirty-seven, in his first photograph, taken by Nicholas H. Shepherd in Springfield around 1846.

  Actually, one of the two had already done previous service in Congress, while the other probably could have. Douglas, by then a veteran of three terms in the House, had briefly occupied his new Senate seat nine months earlier. Then he married the wealthy Martha Martin, returned to Illinois once the session ended, and relocated his residence to the rapidly growing lakefront city of Chicago. Not long after his own victory in the race for Congress in and around Sangamon County, Lincoln found himself pressed by local Whigs to run in a special January 1847 election for a neighboring House seat made vacant when the incumbent resigned to fight in Mexico. Success, which seemed likely, would have entitled Lincoln to proceed to Washington immediately instead of waiting an exasperating thirteen months to take office on his own, as the rules of the day required.

  Further signaling the increasingly open alliance between politicians and editors, Whig leaders hatched the plan to hasten Lincoln to Washington at meetings in the offices of the party organ, the Sangamo Journal. This clearly meant the idea had the full backing of editor Simeon Francis, who more than ever expected to influence, not merely cover, politics. By then the local Whig cabal that crafted political strategy at the newspaper had acquired a new name: the “Journal Junta.” The title suggested that the paper, even more than the politicians, represented the group’s unifying principles. Among its leading members was Lincoln. But in a rare display of resistance to the Journal’s aspirations for him, he declined to undertake another exhausting campaign so soon. Thus, for entirely different reasons, it was not until the first week of December 1847 that the two manifestly talented Illinois adversaries converged in the nation’s capital.

  For politicians so far apart in terms of fame and fortune, not to mention their differences on the leading issues of the day, they enjoyed curiously similar excursions en route to the capital. Douglas barreled into town fresh from a visit to his new bride’s eight-hundred-acre family plantation in North Carolina. Lincoln and his brood journeyed across the country from Springfield, but not before stopping for three relaxing weeks at his own in-laws’ home in Lexington, Kentucky. Though Lincoln’s antislavery credentials already outdistanced Douglas’s, his itinerary created an irony that testified to the complexity of the slavery issue: like Douglas, Lincoln, too, had vacationed before entering Congress at a luxurious Southern home attended by slaves.

  By June, however, the Douglas family ascended to an even loftier plateau: they became slave masters themselves when Martha Martin Douglas’s father died and bequeathed her a 2,500-acre Mississippi plantation complete with some 150 slaves. Sensitive to how such a dubious legacy might be regarded back home, the senator made certain that the bequest bypassed him in favor of his wife (though it did make him something of an out-of-town overseer). Title would eventually pass to the newlyweds’ future children. Douglas accepted the inheritance, but embarrassed, or worried, carefully instructed the editor of the Democratic paper back in Springfield: “I do not wish it to come before the public.”2

  The Douglases’ Illinois counterparts were, by comparison, impoverished. Newly arrived in Washington, the Lincolns—Abraham, Mary, and their sons, four-year-old Robert and Edward, not quite two—registered temporarily at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, a handsome building along Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the Capitol and the White House. Centrally located near the city’s bustling market, Brown’s was renowned for its lavish facade and “elegantly furnished” rooms.3 But the establishment may have proved a bit too elegant—and certainly too expensive—for the financially strapped Lincoln family. Soon enough the Lincolns took up permanent residence at Mrs. Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse on Carroll Row, a block of connected homes that stood just across the plaza from the Capitol.4 Here, in a crowded, noisy establishment favored by so many compatible politicians that it became known as “The Whig House,” the new congressman, his wife, and their two young boys could be politically, if not always physically, comfortable in their snug, one-room chamber. At least access to the inn’s library and other common rooms was included with rent. So were meals. One boarder remembered appreciatively that Mrs. Sprigg served mush “twice a day,” washed down with “very good” milk.5

  As the Lincolns probably knew, or at least came soon to realize, the Sprigg establishment was in fact owned by a member of their own extended family, who happened also to be one of the most prominent Whig journalists in all Washington—none other than the onetime Jacksonian editor Duff Green—who had purchased the entire block of buildings in the 1830s to provide investment income. Green was also a relative of Mary Lincoln’s by
marriage—the brother-in-law of her sister’s husband, Ninian Wirt Edwards. By the time the Lincolns moved in with Mrs. Sprigg, the area was known as “Duff Green’s Row,” and the influential Green himself boarded in a nearby house.6 Lincoln no doubt saw him often.

  Excited as they may have been to see and live in the national capital for the first time, however, Lincoln and Mary, like many visitors, likely recoiled at the city’s shocking imperfections. Washington was at best unfinished, at worst primitive. A swampy nightmare of a town whose streets turned to boggy mud (rivaling Springfield’s) in wet weather and swirled with dust and debris when the weather turned dry, Washington was hugged to the south by fetid waterways and pocked throughout town by the incongruous sight of wooden shacks nestling alongside grand public buildings. Just a few years earlier, a visiting English novelist had observed “spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere,” and worst of all, populated with slaves horrifically “linked to each other by iron fetters.”

  In the grip of winter, added the writer, the “unhealthy” city seemed “freezing cold,” made still more unbearable by the “occasional tornado of wind and dust.” The English visitor could not help noticing, too, that Congress, its ornate chambers notwithstanding, appeared to be “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.” Sessions were characterized by “cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers.”7 The observer’s name was Charles Dickens. And not much had changed since his recent visit.

  While Lincoln and Douglas established themselves in different circles—despite occasional exceptions to the unwritten custom, most legislators at the time socialized exclusively with men of their own party—the two made for quite a contrast whenever their paths crossed in Washington. A virtual anecdote machine, the gangly giant Lincoln moved with an awkward gait, often seemed lost in thought, and invariably appeared too long in the limbs for his country-made broadcloth suits. The hard-driving Little Giant, by contrast, made up for his diminutive stature by drinking and smoking to excess and boiling over with an aggressive energy that one contemporary sniffed revealed “a touch of the rowdy.”8 The elderly Whig congressman John Quincy Adams, for his part, was repelled by the sight of Douglas hurling “abusive invectives” during one of his typical congressional orations. As Adams noted in his diary: “His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made out of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and the aspect of a half-naked pugilist.”9