Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  Kossuth himself understood these circumstances as well as Lincoln did. When crowd noise made it impossible for him to offer his first prepared address to New Yorkers, he simply gave up and handed his text to reporters so it could be reprinted. Even had he been able to deliver his oration, the Hungarian leader believed that “whenever and wherever I publicly speak, it is always chiefly spoken to the Press.” The newspaper, he argued, was “that great controller of every word spoken by a public man.”58

  • • •

  The Little Giant knew this as well as anyone. In sharp contrast to Lincoln, Stephen Douglas basked in the attention the press lavished on him both in Washington and at home during the first years of the decade. Few—even his enemies—doubted he had earned it. In 1850, the young senator helped revive a crucial slavery compromise after Henry Clay’s omnibus bill died in the Senate. Thereupon, the much less experienced Douglas seized management responsibilities for the legislation, ingeniously broke it into separate pieces, and steered their passage through Congress, one element at a time—including the heinous Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to return escapees. The Compromise of 1850 also called for admission of California to the Union as a free state, and the abolition of the domestic slave trade in Washington (while guaranteeing that slavery itself would remain protected in the nation’s capital). The agreement required enough concessions from both Northern and Southern legislators to arouse bitter complaints about the result from both. But Bennett, who had compared Senator Douglas favorably to Webster and Calhoun, poured on the praise. The slavery genie was back in the bottle—for a few years, anyway.

  Even Greeley’s antislavery New York Tribune now grudgingly acknowledged the senator’s mastery of “the practical business of legislation.”59 An especially remarkable legislator because he was still a “bantling”—a mere child—in the admiring view of Bennett’s Herald, Douglas further lived up to the description by emerging as the quintessential representative of the Young America movement, an inchoate but alluring crusade to replace the “old fogies” in power with a new generation of energetic spirits.

  Before long, supporters began openly mentioning Douglas as a serious contender for the 1852 nomination for president. He was still not forty years old.60 “In regard to the Presidency,” Douglas confided to Charles Lanphier of the Register just before the new year, “ . . . Things loom well & the prospect is brightening every day. . . . Perhaps you & our friends at Springfield may be able to exert some influence upon the subject.” When the Washington Union instead endorsed Sam Houston for president, Douglas, his eye increasingly fixed on publicity, responded with an anonymous editorial extolling his own virtues. He ended by quoting a recent Senate address famous for his impossible promise: “I have determined never to make another speech upon the slavery question.”61

  Though not officially a candidate, Douglas advanced his White House interests by making efforts to tighten his control over press coverage in his home state. He had stuck close to Washington for many months, unavoidably neglecting politics at home, and in his absence the Quincy Whig acted to deflate his growing reputation by reminding readers about the senator’s potentially damaging personal connection to slavery: his wife’s plantation inheritance. Now Douglas turned to the Register’s Lanphier to argue: “It is true that my wife does own about 150 negroes in Miss. & cotton plantation. My father-in-law in his lifetime offered them to me & I refused to accept them.” Of course, Douglas neglected to point out that under Illinois law, his wife’s property was considered his own. “It is our intention,” he instead vowed, “ . . . to remove all our property to Illinois as soon as possible.”62 He did no such thing, but for months labored to change the conversation by bombarding Lanphier with letters, most meant for publication, vigorously defending his record in Congress. Douglas’s focus was well placed. By then, the Register counted subscribers throughout Illinois and in nearby out-of-state cities like St. Louis.

  Douglas could always rely on Lanphier, but even with its broadened circulation the Register’s reach remained limited. The senator still counted no dependable organ in upstate Chicago, whose voting and reading populations were rapidly expanding. Thus when John Wentworth’s Chicago Democrat opposed the Compromise of 1850, Douglas decided it was time to encourage competition. First, Douglas urged the Washington Union’s recently departed associate editor Edmund Burke to establish a new Democratic paper in Chicago. When that overture fell on deaf ears, Douglas asked Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield neighbor Isaac Diller to consider relocating there for the same purpose. This effort failed as well. A sympathetic journalist named Ebenezer Peck ultimately did establish a Democratic sheet in Chicago, but Douglas continued to feel neglected there. Powerful national politicians like the Little Giant expected to fully control the party press at home—not worry about its absolute loyalty while serving the state’s interests in distant Washington.

  For a time, Douglas was compelled to depend on Charles Lanphier to fill that crucial role. At least additional praise could be expected from the Quincy Herald, but it literally came at a cost. Douglas had sent financial contributions to sustain that paper, and now expected—and received—support in return.63 Not until the summer of 1854 would the senator finally persuade Washington journalist James Washington Sheahan to launch another Democratic daily in Chicago. Douglas not only provided financial backing for the start-up venture, he personally saw to the distribution of a circular promoting the new Chicago Daily Times as “the only true and reliable Democratic Paper published in this City.” For the rest of the decade, the Times would serve as the senator’s principal press organ outside Springfield, its reach and influence limited only by what editor Sheahan insisted was its undercapitalization. Douglas had been generous. But not generous enough.64

  Charles Lanphier, anti-Lincoln editor of the Illinois State Register throughout the 1850s, as he looked in later life.

  None of these manipulations worked to Douglas’s benefit in time for the 1852 presidential race. New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce, not the Little Giant, won the Democratic nomination that year after forty-nine exhausting convention ballots. Though keenly disappointed, Douglas turned his attentions to winning reelection to the Senate (which he easily accomplished) and campaigning loyally for the party’s White House choice against his Whig opponent, Mexican War hero Winfield Scott.65

  Two milestone events that year—the death of Clay and the birth of Scott as a presidential candidate—brought Lincoln closer to resuming an active political life. Within two years, he again sought and won election to the state legislature. He also found himself “debating” Douglas for the first time in years over the presidential contest, albeit in separate Illinois towns and on different days.66 Their rivalry was heating up again.

  • • •

  So were the New York City newspaper wars, ignited to a fever pitch, as usual, by the quadrennial contest for the nation’s highest office. Only reluctantly did Greeley throw his support behind Scott. “He is a Know-Nothing, body and soul,” the editor privately lamented (a reference to the Nativists who opposed immigration—particularly by Catholics—but professed to “know nothing” of the rapidly expanding antiforeigner movement). To Greeley, the war hero was “an aristocrat, and anything else but wise and winning.”67 Worse for Greeley was the fact that the general was a Virginian by birth, and as with Taylor, Greeley doubted that any Southern-born Whig would reliably oppose the expansion of slavery. Trying to advance the antislavery cause, the editor publicly questioned the late Henry Clay’s longtime advocacy for the colonization of African Americans, suggesting that he was now willing to encourage free black settlement in America. He only inspired Frederick Douglass to reply sarcastically: “We are glad that the Tribune is ‘willing’ that the blacks should colonize in this country. . . . Be patient, Mr. Greeley, a nation may not be born in a day, without a miracle.”68

  In response to Greeley’s misgivings about Scott, the ever-loyal organization man Raymond—who personally cover
ed (and became a last-minute replacement delegate to) the Baltimore convention that nominated Scott—tried to read Greeley out of the Whig Party entirely. Greeley huffed that he would not be kept “silent about slavery” even to elect another military hero. Meanwhile, the pugnacious James Watson Webb, who also harbored doubts about Old Fuss and Feathers, picked an ill-fated fight of his own with Raymond—verbal, for once—at the Baltimore convention. But it was the Times editor who emerged as the more important leader, with Webb’s influence further reduced. Thurlow Weed later recalled that Raymond “bore himself with becoming calmness and dignity” at the convention, offering his “clarion voice” to herald the “death-knell of slavery.”69 As for James Gordon Bennett, he lived up to expectations by dredging up long-discredited charges against Scott and attempting to eviscerate the war hero’s hard-earned reputation.

  Greeley carries General Winfield Scott’s oversized, plumed military hat in a cartoon mocking the war hero’s 1852 Whig presidential campaign. Henry Raymond trails behind the procession, holding a copy of the Times.

  When Democrat Pierce prevailed with outright popular majorities in both Illinois and the nation that November, Stephen Douglas commenced to call in political debts to make sure his supporters were amply rewarded. “Do you want anything besides the Patronage for your Paper? and if so what?” Douglas wrote Charles Lanphier in December. “ . . . Answer me directly & frankly on all these points. Your answer will be confidential.” Meanwhile, Douglas asked Pierce to name John Moncure Daniel, editor of the Richmond Enquirer and “a man of . . . sound political faith,” as minister resident to Belgium “or some one of the other European powers.” No one, Douglas bluntly argued, “on account of partizan service, has stronger claims upon the favor & support of a Democratic Administration.” The White House obligingly named Daniel as minister to Sardinia, a post he held for the next eight years—until Lincoln himself assumed presidential patronage power and replaced him.70

  Lanphier, however, had no interest in a political job from the Pierce administration. He preferred to remain at the helm of Springfield’s Register, and by late 1853 Douglas was again reminding him of his abiding loyalty to the newspaper—yet, as usual, fretting that he felt somewhat out of touch with Illinois affairs. “Why don’t you send me the Register?” he flattered the editor on November 11. “I have not seen a copy for more than six months. I am certainly a subscriber to it, altho I may never have paid my subscription. Send me the Register that I may see what you are doing & saying. I know all is right & that the paper takes the right course, yet I want to read it so much the more on that account.” And then, perhaps in a sly effort to stimulate another presidential boom in his own behalf, Douglas counseled the editor to make no efforts at all to promote him for the 1856 nomination—yet. “I see many of the newspapers are holding me up as a candidate for the next Presidency,” he reported. “I do not wish to occupy that position. . . . Let us leave the Presidency out of view”—tellingly adding, “for at least two years to come.”71

  • • •

  Both politics and newspaper technology were changing rapidly, each in a sense because of the other. Politicians now routinely subjected their opponents to ever-more-rapid responses in the hope of attracting daily coverage; the press obligingly reported their increasingly heated debates within days, even hours. In New York, the Harbor News Association hired its own boat, appropriately rechristened the Newsboy, to meet approaching ships, secure overseas reports, and speed them to shore even before the dispatch-bearing transatlantic vessels docked. When a well-publicized need for repairs exposed the steamer’s perilous financial condition, Henry Raymond led a collaborative effort to rescue it from default.72

  On a larger scale, a newly formed news-gathering consortium calling itself the Associated Press was now routinely distributing the latest copy from all these sources by wire, including reprints from New York papers, an innovation that served to increase their reach and influence exponentially. The AP had been founded by five of the principal New York dailies back in 1846—the Sun, Herald, Courier and Enquirer, Journal of Commerce, and Express—in an effort to pool news-gathering operations and, more importantly, share the high cost of transmitting and receiving telegraphed reports from Mexico during the war. Greeley’s Tribune joined the AP three years later, followed in short order by Raymond’s Times. One of the earliest books on the growing power of telegraphic transmission boasted at the time that if the governor of New York delivered a five-thousand-word speech in Albany, it could be typeset and dispatched for publication in downstate newspapers within only two hours. An upstate New York paper called the AP “the most potent engine for affecting public opinion the world ever saw.”73

  Even though he had helped launch all of these remarkable advances, James Gordon Bennett loved to boast that he had not altered his own time-tested daily routine in more than a decade. He was not about to change it now. Instead, Bennett directed his energies to initiating a new and newsworthy feud with impresario P. T. Barnum and to promoting the handsome, pro-slavery Tammany Hall Democrat Fernando Wood for mayor of New York. And since he believed that all of his readers—and his jealous competitors, too—desperately wanted to know the full details of his personal schedule, he made sure it was fully reported in print.74

  Though he was now nearing sixty, Bennett informed his followers that he still unfailingly arrived at his brick-and-limestone headquarters shortly after 7 A.M. each day, ascended to his upstairs office, and for an hour pored over the day’s letters to the editor, diligently separating those he deemed worthy of publication from those destined for the trash bin. By eight o’clock he commenced reading the city’s rival dailies over a modest meal of tea and toast, and an hour later summoned an office boy to rapidly dictate editorial copy, “making his points with effect . . . sometimes smiling as he raps one of his dear political friends over the knuckles,” and invariably ending each outpouring of prose with the phrase, “that will do.” At midday the publisher conferred with his associates on news placement, reviewed copy, and sent stories to his staff of compositors. By 2 P.M. he personally had proofread galleys, then appeared in his pressroom to make “pithy speeches” meant to boost employee morale. He checked the arts reviews with particular attention (claiming he never liked to authorize a bad notice), and headed off by eight to take in a play or concert himself.75

  Late each night, Bennett returned to his seat of power for one last glance at late-breaking dispatches, earmarking some for last-minute publication, and composing fresh copy himself—in a reportedly fine hand, of course. (Horace Greeley’s scrawl, by contrast, was widely ridiculed as so indecipherable that it often provoked “strong language” from frustrated typesetters.)76 Bennett claimed he concluded each of his busy workdays by listening attentively for the reassuring vibrations that sent gentle tremors through his building whenever the huge presses began rumbling to life in its basement. By 1849 the editor could even claim to be performing twice the work on Monday evenings, for starting that year the Herald began publishing eight-page double-sheet editions every Tuesday.

  Bennett’s rivals enjoyed no more sleep or performed any less labor than the titan at the penny press. But only Bennett made his sacrifices and toil matters of public interest and civic virtue. In his self-congratulatory official view of himself, which he promoted with deadpan earnestness, there was no time for feuds, fistfights, or the amassing of money—all of which he managed to pursue inexhaustibly as well. “My ambition is to make the newspaper Press the great organ and pivot of government, society, commerce, finance, religion, and all human civilization,” he insisted. “I go for hard work, just principles, an independent mind, a name that will last for ages after death, and a place in the glorious hereafter.”77 Although many contemporaries believed that the celestial jury was still at best deliberating on the matter of Bennett’s eternal rest, the earthly newspaper business boasted no more famous a name in the 1850s than this vainglorious innovator.

  Sir John E. E. D. Acton—the E
nglish journalist and intellectual best remembered for coining the phrase “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—may not have had New York newspaper editors in mind when he invented that aphorism, but surely found nothing to contradict it when he visited the city in June 1853. He found the Tribune to be “ultra-democratic in every question,” but had harsher things to say about its proprietor. “Greeley,” observed Lord Acton, “has taken up a number of hobbies, such as temperance, which he pushes to extravagance. He defends his topics through thick and thin. He is sincere, though much suspected, for there is so much method in his madness as to make it seem likely.” The English visitor was no more impressed by the Tribune’s competitors. “The N.Y. Herald,” he wrote, “corresponds, on a somewhat inferior scale, to the Times. It discovers which way public opinion will turn, and by bending its course accordingly appears to direct where it really only follows.” Not surprisingly, Lord Acton reserved his harshest observations for James Gordon Bennett—dismissing him as “a Scottish adventurer, who began by editing a low paper, which he made himself notorious, and wrote his way up.” Yet Lord Acton was surprised to discover that the Herald “is not a venal paper,” adding: “I am curious to know whether that can be said of the rest of the press.”78 If he ever discovered the answer to that question, Lord Acton kept it to himself.