Crowded for space after reprinting Seward’s address, the Boston Atlas found no room to print Lincoln’s full remarks. But the Boston Daily Advertiser reported approvingly that Lincoln had spoken “in a clear, and cool, and very eloquent manner, for an hour and a half, carrying the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations,—only interrupted by warm and frequent applause.” Not only was the speech “masterly and convincing,” the Advertiser reported; the “very tall and thin figure, with an intellectual face” had shown “a searching mind, and a cool judgment.”33 On September 25, providing an “answer to the many applications which we daily receive from different parts of the State for this gentleman to speak,” the Daily Atlas felt compelled to report that “Hon. Abraham Lincoln” had “left Boston on Saturday morning, on his way home to Illinois.”34
• • •
In his entire career, Lincoln had never earned more enthusiastic out-of-town reviews, or more gratifying acknowledgment at home. Predictably, Democratic journals in Illinois mocked the peripatetic congressman for spending so much time campaigning in safe Whig territory like Massachusetts. “We are pleased to observe that his arduous duties since the adjournment of Congress in franking and loading down the mails with whig electioneering documents, have not impaired his health,” taunted the State Register when Lincoln returned to Springfield, almost grudgingly adding: “He looks remarkably well.”35 On Election Day, both of the Eastern states where he had campaigned went handily for Taylor, and doubtless would have so voted without his help. The general won the national contest by a healthy margin, but to Lincoln’s disappointment, Cass prevailed in Illinois, fatally hurt by a third-party campaign by former Democratic president Martin Van Buren, running as an antislavery Free Soiler—pledged (like Lincoln and most Northern Whigs) to keeping slavery out of the West in order to safeguard opportunity for white labor.36 Lincoln had done his best to deliver his home state to the Whigs—giving speeches in Peoria, Beardstown, Jacksonville, Petersburg, Metamora, Magnolia, Lacon, and other towns—to little avail. The final outcome in Illinois may not have startled the Taylor camp, but it hardly boosted Lincoln’s chances for a significant, post-congressional presidential appointment.
The national Whig victory notwithstanding, when Lincoln and Douglas resumed their seats in December 1848 for the second session of the 30th Congress, it was Democrat Douglas whose career seemed to be on the ascendant. By contrast, Representative Lincoln’s political prospects appeared bleak, his options limited, and his relationship with the national press, such as it was, stalled.
• • •
One thing in Washington did change, and dramatically, when the House reconvened in December: none other than Horace Greeley arrived in Washington, too, not as a correspondent for the Tribune, but as a congressman himself. Whig leaders had installed Greeley as a compromise choice to occupy a disputed New York seat for the final three months of the session.37 Greeley, who had briefly flirted with the idea of supporting Van Buren over Taylor for the presidency, had finally endorsed the general in October. Perhaps grateful for the last-minute support, New York’s Whig political boss, Thurlow Weed, offered him the interim seat as a reward, and Greeley, who for years had yearned for public office, seized the opportunity, however brief.38
Once again the intersection of politics and the press was destined to blur the line between reporting and making news. Even with Philadelphia Daily Sun editor Lewis C. Levin in his second term in the House, few in Washington could remember so prominent a working journalist ever taking a seat in Congress. The crusading Greeley of course saw nothing inappropriate about continuing to manage the Tribune from Washington while serving there himself. Greeley used his new status and enhanced access to ferret out Capitol Hill scoops and pen highly critical “insider” commentary. The editor marked Christmas 1848, for example, by publishing a column entitled “Waste of Time in Congress.” He branded the lethargy there as “so chronic and in my judgment so pernicious—operating at once as a serious detriment to public interests and a cruel wrong to individuals who have just claims against the government,” that he vowed to continue exposing conditions there until the House began accelerating its work schedule.39
Greeley proceeded to make himself further obnoxious to his new colleagues by fearlessly challenging House traditions and introducing impossibly idealistic bills, which he publicized lavishly in his own paper even though they were all doomed to defeat. That he had become an irritant was evident when he tried in January 1849 to stall a routine allocation to fund the salaries of naval officers, arguing that the service was burdened with more commissioned officers than it needed and had too little money to pay ordinary seamen. But the weak-voiced Greeley was no Lincoln when it came to oratory. Once the editor concluded his appeal on the House floor, Georgia congressman Thomas Butler King rose in his seat to jeer that “not a word that he had said could be heard” in his part of the House. Greeley’s whispered amendment was rejected.40
Greeley’s presence in the Whig congressional caucus nonetheless presented a major opportunity for Lincoln to impress his important new colleague. It did not happen. However alike their early life struggles, however compatible some of their progressive views, they simply failed to connect with each other on either a personal or political level. Lincoln was too practical for Greeley’s taste. And Greeley was too idealistic to suit Lincoln. Whether or not they ever got the opportunity to trade memories of their eerily similar migrations into adult life in the summer of 1831, we just do not know.
Overall, Greeley paid Lincoln only casual notice in Congress, and barely acknowledged their association years later in an autobiography published at a time when it would have been unthinkable to ignore a man so recently elevated to national sainthood (even if he had made little impression a generation earlier). Infused with antislavery zeal, Greeley recalled Lincoln as typical of “the very mildest type of Wilmot Proviso Whigs from the free States.” The editor unenthusiastically recalled his colleague as “a quiet, good-natured man” who “did not aspire to leadership and seldom claimed the floor. I think he made but one set speech during that session, and this speech was by no means a long one.” Greeley did acknowledge Lincoln’s “unhesitating, uncalculating, self-sacrificing devotion to the principles and aims of his party”—but his assessment remained unpublished until 1891, nearly five decades after the fact.41 Merely a temporary congressman, and an unelected one at that, Greeley nonetheless considered Lincoln, not himself, a “new member,” conceding only that he was “personally a favorite on our side.”42 If he remembered Lincoln’s recent “correction” on the Texas boundary editorial, he never afterward bothered to say so.
Tellingly, Greeley later admitted that while he regarded Lincoln as a “buoyant, cheerful spirit,” the editor never once heard the celebrated yarn-spinner tell “an anecdote or story,”43 a sure sign that their acquaintance only went so far. Lincoln was already renowned for amusing fellow congressmen with a bottomless trove of well-aimed humor. Even the crusty House sergeant-at-arms, himself an old newspaperman who had earned his post years earlier in return for favorable coverage of the party, remembered Lincoln as “ever ready to match another’s story by one of his own.”44 Greeley’s obliviousness suggests that he and Lincoln kept their distance. It was a lost opportunity—for both ambitious men. Easily enough, they might have found early common ground on such nonpolitical subjects as child-rearing. Greeley worried that his young son had a “terrible propensity for mischief,”45 and few in the vicinity of Sprigg’s boardinghouse who remembered the fractious Lincoln boys before their father sent his wife and children packing for her father’s home in Kentucky would have thought otherwise of the irascible Bob and Eddy.
Greeley was not always easy to like, but Lincoln lost a valuable chance at forging a lasting alliance by not more aggressively courting the editor as a friend. In turn, Greeley forfeited the chance to exert more influence on a future statesman by failing to recognize Lincoln’s promise. Their paths w
ould cross many times in the future, but as historian Harlan Hoyt Horner pointed out in a joint biography of the two men, they remained functionally irreconcilable: Greeley the incurable idealist, and Lincoln the hard-nosed realist. Their personal incompatibility could never really be bridged. For the rest of their lives, the two men remained trapped in an uneasy and occasionally volatile relationship.46
Lincoln remained largely ignored not just by Greeley but by most of the influential Whig journalists in the capital. His first known direct written communication with the editors of his party’s most important Washington paper came in an innocuous note to “Messrs. Gales & Seaton” of the Intelligencer in January 1849. The letter had nothing to do with policy matters. It merely sought collection of $1,500 due on drafts drawn by an unknown character named Thomas French—an episode whose details are lost to history. “Let me hear from you on the subject,” Lincoln concluded his brief appeal to the editors. No record of a reply survives.47 The issue at hand likely involved an outstanding debt incurred for writing or jobbing out some forgotten campaign publishing project. It would have logically fallen to an outgoing freshman like Lincoln to close the books on such an arrangement. Editors Gales and Seaton themselves operated at a far loftier level.
So did the opposition press, which functioned not only as reporters of the outgoing Polk administration, but also as counselors. When Congress neared passage of milestone legislation to organize the newly acquired Oregon Territory with slavery banned, Polk summoned close advisors to the White House in his final weeks in office to discuss whether to approve it. Among them was none other than septuagenarian Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Union, who strongly urged a presidential veto. Polk ultimately rejected his advice and signed the bill into law, but typically, old Ritchie had participated in the story not only as a journalist, but as a would-be policymaker, too.48
• • •
Lincoln’s finest hour in Congress came in January 1849 when, with Congressman Greeley no doubt in attendance, he offered a resolution to ban slavery in the District of Columbia. No one knows exactly what inspired Lincoln to take so liberal a stand on this stormy issue at this specific moment. By his own description always “naturally anti-slavery,” he had nonetheless long been inclined, as he later put it, to “bite my lip and keep quiet.”49 But the horrors he routinely observed in the slave city of Washington may have aroused the latent abolitionist in him. One particularly nauseating incident at Sprigg’s boardinghouse a year earlier no doubt contributed to this awakening. There, an African-American waiter named Henry Wilson had been violently cornered, shackled, and dragged from the residence bound for a slave pen, in full view of horrified boarders. The servant’s sole “offense” was coming but $60 short in an ongoing effort to buy his own freedom for $300. Although Wilson was still making payments, his owner had tired of waiting for his money and decided to sell him south. Apparently taking offense that such a tussle had erupted in the home he leased to Mrs. Sprigg, Duff Green himself went to court to seek Wilson’s release. “By the well-timed efforts, we learn, of Mr. Green,” reported the local abolitionist journal, the National Era, “Henry was brought back to the city.” Antislavery Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, another boarder at Sprigg’s, quickly raised the balance of Wilson’s debt from colleagues on the House floor, and the waiter was legally manumitted.50
As if this was not enough motivation to stir antislavery feeling even among the nonabolitionists, from some windows of the Capitol itself, Whig members of Congress at the time could easily see what Lincoln described with disgust as a nearby “negro-livery stable, where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.”51 Lincoln, for one, had seen enough.
Illinois Free Soil man Isaac N. Arnold, a political intimate and biographer, would later describe Lincoln’s 1849 legislative initiative in glowing terms, recalling: “The future great leader of emancipation introduced a bill to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia.”52 Written in hindsight after Lincoln’s martyrdom, Arnold’s gilded assessment is a bit overblown, viewed from the post-emancipation era backward, instead of the other way around. In fact, though a brave effort on Lincoln’s part, it was also a typically cautious one, proposing to liberate only the children of slaves born after 1850, and requiring them thereafter to serve apprenticeships. Moreover, Lincoln proposed that emancipation take effect only if a majority of Washington’s white residents voted to approve it. For some it was not enough. Focused at the time on an alternative bill of his own that would have instead outlawed the District’s odious slave trade, Horace Greeley sarcastically likened Lincoln’s plan for a slave owners’ referendum on slavery to “submitting to the inmates of a penitentiary a proposition to double the length of their respective terms of imprisonment.”53 It was the first time the two men actually opposed each other on a major congressional initiative. That the disagreement portended years of struggle over the issue neither man could have suspected.
Still, Lincoln’s legislation seemed radical enough at the time to send many fellow Whigs running timidly for political cover. Disheartened, he complained that most of the “former backers” on whose support he relied “abandoned” him at the crucial moment, ensuring the bill’s failure.54 But the event marked significant moral growth in a man who, only two years earlier, while already a congressman-elect, had agreed to take on the legal case of a slave owner seeking to recover his runaways.55
The unsettling experience did bring Lincoln closer at last to National Intelligencer editor William Seaton. “I visited Mayor Seaton,” he recollected, “ . . . to ascertain if a bill such as I proposed would be endorsed by them.” There he no doubt found the legendary Whig editor in his customary place behind his cluttered desk at the paper’s “smoke-stained” headquarters, his hands interlocked, reclining in his chair, and regarding Lincoln with his customary “native politeness.” Informed by the mayor and his co-publisher, Joseph Gales, that his emancipation initiative “would meet with their hearty approbation,” Lincoln attested: “I gave notice in congress that I should introduce a Bill.” Later he declared from the House floor that no fewer than fifteen of Washington’s leaders supported his measure, but when challenged by Democrats with shouts of, “Who are they? Give us their names!” he refused to identify anyone; his new acquaintance with Mayor Seaton went unreported.56 And of course his bill died. At least the New York Tribune later took notice of the effort, praising Lincoln as “conspicuous in the last Congress—especially during the last session, when he attempted to frame and put through a bill for the gradual Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” adding, in a backhanded compliment: “He is a strong but judicious enemy to Slavery, and his efforts are usually very practical, if not always successful.”57
• • •
Antislavery forces were long accustomed to failure. Far more prominent freedom spokesmen than Lincoln hungered in vain for positive coverage in the newspapers. Denied respectful attention in the mainstream press—subjected, rather, to frequent and merciless attack—they thrived largely on the pages of their own abolitionist journals. Back on New Year’s Day 1831, William Lloyd Garrison had founded one of the most famous of them, the Liberator, with an editorial pledge to be “harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice.” Garrison accompanied this declaration with a famously contemptuous attack on the U.S. Constitution as “a covenant with death”—a condemnation right out of the Book of Isaiah.58 Garrison nearly paid for his daring with his life. In 1835, a mob cornered the editor backstage at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, placed a noose around his neck, and marched him outside as if to lynch him; police came to his rescue just before his assailants could do him real harm.59 Fearlessly and unapologetically, Garrison’s paper continued for years to rail against slavery each and every week, operating out of an attic loft at Merchant’s Hall in Boston. There the crusading abolitionist lived and worked amid “dingy walls . . . small windows, bespattered with printer’s ink; the press
standing in one corner; the composing stands opposite; the long editorial and mailing table, covered with newspapers; the bed of the editor and publisher on the floor.”60
In his very first edition, Garrison and his partner had vowed to “print the paper as long as they can subsist upon bread and water, or their hands obtain employment. The friends of the cause may therefore take courage; its enemies may surrender at [their] discretion.” With the approach of the 1850s, Garrison neared his twentieth anniversary of continuous publication by declaring that he had been so long “looked upon with contempt” that the “outrageous abuse” had all but lost its meaning. Not that the paper was ever truly read widely. For years, as an example, the only place where residents of Pennsylvania’s state capital could buy The Liberator was at a local, black-owned oyster restaurant. (The owner’s son later became a Civil War battlefield correspondent, one of the few African Americans to cover the war.)61
William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist editor of The Liberator.
The late 1830s had seen the launch of a promising new African-American-owned and operated newspaper as well. But New York City’s Colored American, founded in 1837, lasted only until late 1841. Subsequent titles rose and fell, struggling for advertising and influence even though most had scant hopes of reaching beyond small audiences of free blacks and like-minded abolitionists. The future editor of one such paper remembered that his earliest experience as a “young, ardent, and hopeful” free man in 1841—just three years out of bondage at the time—had come working to sign up subscribers for the The Liberator as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. The escaped slave’s name was Frederick Douglass, a self-described “graduate from the peculiar institution, with my diploma written on my back.”62
Rapidly making a mark as a mesmerizing lecturer and orator, Douglass briefly took the abolitionist gospel to Europe. After returning to America in 1847, he decided to devote himself to “wielding my pen as well as my voice in the great work of renovating the public mind, and building up a public sentiment, which should send slavery to the grave.” In short, he proposed establishing a newspaper of his own, devoted to restoring “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to “the people with whom I have suffered.” Friends warned Douglass that another new antislavery paper “was not needed” and “could not succeed.” Further, they cautioned, the very idea of a “wood-sawyer”—the period term for effervescent public speakers whose gestures resembled sawing wood—“offering himself to the public as an editor” was “absurd.” Undeterred, Douglass relocated to Rochester, New York, and there established the most famous black-owned newspaper of them all: The North Star—later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and ultimately Douglass’ Monthly. “Now,” he proudly recalled, “I had an audience to speak to every week.”63
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