Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  Simeon Francis, Lincoln’s first newspaper ally—founding editor of the Sangamo (later Illinois State) Journal—as he looked after selling the paper and moving to Oregon. Francis wears the uniform of an army quartermaster, a post with which Lincoln rewarded him at the start of the Civil War.

  Simeon Francis’s departure from Springfield held symbolic importance for Lincoln, and very likely Lincoln both understood and accepted it. For nearly twenty years, he had relied on the portly founding editor, and his young successors, to bring his message to voters and to cheer his accomplishments on the pages of the hometown Journal. He remained a “frequent visitor,” often bringing his “two small boys” to the Journal office. There, Willie and Tad repeatedly sneaked off to the workrooms, where they no doubt began playing with the type and ink. Lincoln would repeatedly “find that the boys had gone,” and “go and find them, leading them back by the hands; this would occur two and three times at each visit.” But when not distracted by his sons’ antics, Lincoln would occupy his time talking intensely with new editor Edward Baker “and reading the New York Tribune and other eastern papers.”116 But the Canisius and Francis appointments were still in the future—as was the 1860 presidential election.

  As he waited for the campaign to begin, Lincoln had ample time to ponder the impact that the press had made on the nation since he began his political career and he immediately sensed what historians later proved. The United States now boasted more than four thousand newspapers and periodicals, and 80 percent of them could be classified as political. Perhaps it was no coincidence that voter turnout in presidential elections now regularly approached that same 80 percent. Yet in a lecture on discoveries and inventions that he delivered several times from 1858 to 1860, Lincoln took pains to describe the communications revolution through a nonpartisan lens. “Writing,” he told his audiences, “—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye,” was nothing less than “the great invention of the world.” But the world remained mired in “the dark ages” until writing could be mass-produced. “At length,” Lincoln declared, “printing came. It gave ten thousand copies of any written matter, quite as cheaply as ten were given before; and consequently a thousand minds were brought into the field where there was but one before. This was great gain; and history shows a great change corresponding to it.” Lincoln’s tone may have been uncharacteristically ponderous—these lectures were usually failures—but the lecturer surely understood that his own political ascent had taken flight on the wings of that “great change.”117

  Lincoln’s sights were now aimed nationally, not locally, practically, not philosophically. For future success, he needed support not just from Springfield, but from Chicago and New York.

  He would now have to enlist those most stubbornly indifferent of potential champions: Henry Raymond and Horace Greeley. The latter would pose a challenge. As the Chicago Tribune’s Horace White bluntly put it, Lincoln still had a “score . . . to settle” with Greeley.118

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Perilous Position of the Union

  As the tempestuous 1850s drew to a close, the rift between North and South—and their increasingly rabid newspapers—widened further over the smoldering issue of slavery. Within the quintessentially Northern metropolis of New York, the dailies intensified their own rivalry, hardly surprising since political fissures within the city itself had expanded as well. More than ever, Gotham seemed, both in print and on the streets, to be living up to its growing reputation as a city of stark, irreconcilable contrasts—of “clouds and sunshine, corpse lights and bridal lamps, joy-anthems and funeral-dirges,” in the words of one observer. On New York’s thronged streets, the rich rubbed elbows with the poor, the honest with the “rough,” bohemians with “dead-beats,” and seldom harmoniously.1

  The white population, no matter how impoverished, enjoyed far broader rights than the black. Many free African Americans could achieve no higher social status than that of the beggars who crowded trash bins outside the best hotels waiting to rummage through the day’s garbage heaps for scraps of food. Appalled by the treatment of blacks there, the English journalist Edward Dicey described New York’s African Americans as “a race apart, never walking in company with white persons, except as servants.”2 Facing such restrictions, it was little wonder that the city’s black population had stopped expanding—though its community newspapers continued to attract readers; New York still offered scant opportunities to people of color, and countless restrictions. Confronting these inequities, an elite white philanthropic antislavery minority tried agitating for reform, often clashing with commercial-minded forces determined to preserve the lucrative trade with the South, even if doing so required tacit approval of slavery—for slave labor harvested most of the crops and goods profitably imported from Dixie into New York docks.

  Unconstrained urban sprawl in 1850s Manhattan butted up incongruously against picturesque, but ever-scarcer green space, although the plan for a vast new uptown “Central Park” promised future relief. One of the oldest of these precious oases was the cherished little City Hall Park, its enduring “freshness and beauty,” however, growing ever more dissipated by overcrowding and neglect. At the northern end of this modest plot of grass and trees stood the jewel-like, marble-fronted City Hall, already an unofficial historic landmark, having served as the seat of municipal government since 1812. To the south, perpendicular to the cobblestoned crosstown boulevard known as Park Row, ran the narrow, north-south thoroughfares now crowded with undistinguished two- and three-story brick buildings lately occupied by printing presses, editors, artists, engravers, lithographers, and reporters—the merchants and employees of the city’s rapidly growing publishing industry. This was their neighborhood, too. By the end of the decade the area served as home to all but a handful of the skyrocketing population of city newspapers: 174 dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and foreign language journals (there were now four thousand newspapers and periodicals nationwide—more than three thousand of them political in nature).3 The latest entries in Manhattan included the wildly popular new picture press: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, founded in 1852; the New York Illustrated News, which first appeared in 1859; and the behemoth of the fledgling industry, Harper’s Weekly, launched in 1857, abounding with superb woodcut portraits and cartoons, inflected by such steadfastly moderate politics at first that some Northern critics scoffingly dubbed it “Harper’s Weakly,” but nevertheless avidly read by 200,000 subscribers.4

  Beginning to edge slightly northward, ever closer to the park, were the newly expanded headquarters of New York’s major dailies. After a few years of occupancy at a succession of inadequate buildings along nearby Nassau Street, Henry Raymond in 1858 hired an architect to build a Romanesque, five-story New York Times tower, the most lavish newspaper headquarters ever built, on the site of the Old Brick Church on Park Row between Nassau and Beekman Streets. Raymond drew much criticism for buying and tearing down the “mouldering,” ninety-year-old house of worship, but the controversy did the Times little permanent harm. Once constructed, his ornately colonnaded new headquarters quickly became a tourist attraction.5 Punctuating his arrival uptown, Raymond’s large “Daily Times” sign, surmounted on the roof by flagpoles flying the national colors, could be seen for blocks, staking the paper’s claim to both neighborhood and industry dominance.

  Printing House Square in New York, an undated lithograph by Endicott & Co., showing the new headquarters of the New York Times and, at left, the Tribune building.

  Until then, as Raymond biographer Augustus Maverick recalled in 1870, “New York journals had always been housed in dilapidated headquarters” near Wall Street, where windows “remained unwashed till the grime of years formed cakes and diligent spiders spun dense and endless cobwebs in uncleansed corners.” In stark contrast, the Times’s gleaming new tower drew praise as “the wonder of its day.”6 Notwithstanding the latest national economic panic, the Tribune and Herald began making plans to follow R
aymond into the neighborhood.

  The formidable new structures that rose around what soon came to be known as “Newspaper Row” pointedly faced City Hall, as if to turn their backs on the financial district to the south that had spawned the town’s first commercial broadsheets. Now they looked northward as if to announce that politics, not trade, had become their principal beat. Theirs were New York’s first skyscrapers, and the structures literally looked down on municipal government. Whatever else transpired on the street and green, the dailies’ close proximity to City Hall hinted to the mayor, the Common Council, and the courts that the press was watching over them.

  From its own warren of offices farther downtown (not for another few years would James Gordon Bennett abandon them for Newspaper Row), the New York Herald achieved no less notice. According to one visitor, the Herald’s “very crooked and extremely dark” headquarters “consisted of half a dozen houses, taken up one by one, as the business of the paper had grown.” As he remembered the intimidating warren of rooms, “You had to go up or down two or three steps as you passed from building to building, the floors being on a different level, and there were any number of quaint nooks and corners” to navigate—behind any one of which lurked the possibility of running unexpectedly into the ferocious Bennett himself.7

  Writing in 1859, veteran journalist Lambert A. Wilmer acknowledged that, however outmoded his headquarters and vituperative his prose, Bennett’s “power and influence” were now “universally acknowledged”—and as often copied as condemned. As Wilmer put it: “Although the Herald is denounced from one end of the country to the other as the most corrupt and profligate in existence, its opinions on almost every subject are often quoted as indisputable authority, and hundreds of other newspapers adopt its views and republish its statements without the least reservation.” Wilmer had nothing good to say about Greeley, James Watson Webb, or Duff Green, either, but he reserved his bitterest venom for Bennett. To Wilmer, he was “the arch-contriver of our present newspaper system, with all its ambitious, unscrupulous and diabolical peculiarities,” a schemer so perverse that he relished every duel and brawl he had survived. “He has been horse-whipped, kicked, trodden under foot, spat upon, and degraded in every possible way,” Wilmer reminded readers, “but all this he courts, because it brings money. Horse-whip him, and he will bend his back to the lash and say thank you. . . . Kick him, and he will remove his coat-tails, that you may have a better mark. Spit upon him, and he prizes it as precious ointment.” It particularly galled Wilmer that Bennett was a foreigner. Not that Bennett enjoyed any personal popularity overseas, either. When a British author included Bennett and Greeley in an encyclopedia devoted to Famous Boys, and How They Became Great Men, the London Spectator took exception, arguing that neither man, “Bennett especially . . . should be held up as a model to show English youths how to accomplish the end of earnest living.”8

  They may have been locked in mortal combat, fighting over which of the two had more influence, but by the end of the decade both Greeley and Bennett had become wealthy men. Though they continued to battle over preeminence in teeming lower Manhattan, Bennett now lived in a splendid estate at the northern tip of the island in Washington Heights, while Greeley spent considerable time at his farm at Chappaqua in Westchester County.

  Experienced newspapermen were not the only observers appalled by the Herald’s power—and popularity. Samuel Bowles III, the young editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican—which Greeley thought “the best and ablest country journal published on the continent”—was similarly horrified “to see the greed with which the Herald is snatched up and devoured on its earliest arrival here in the evening, and what is worse, to see the simplicity of these Southern fellows who seem, to pin their whole faith upon it.” In Bowles’s opinion, “While Northerners look at it only for amusement, as they look at Punch or Frank Leslie, Southern men swallow it gravely with a sigh and a knowing shake of the head.”9

  Many contemporaries fretted that the balance of power in American life had tipped too radically toward journalism. “The Newspaper Press,” carped one disapproving observer near decade’s end, “controls the state and the church; it directs the family, the legislator, the magistrate, and the minister. None rises above its influence, none sink below its authority.”10 And most of that authority concentrated in New York. One envious Philadelphia editor complained that the city’s news transportation network “literally carries New York over every railway, sets it down at every station, and extends it everywhere.” Even the quintessentially Southern Charleston Mercury was forced to admit: “We have to go to New York papers for news of our own affairs.”11 Critics wary of the surging influence of the New York press proved powerless to reverse this trend, or unwilling to sacrifice the support of their own affiliated political supporters by contesting it.

  • • •

  Like most leading politicians, Abraham Lincoln respected (and utilized) his favorite newspapers without expressing similar crises of conscience. His reputation for enthusiastic support of friendly journals grew so widespread that a supporter from the tiny village of Lexington, Illinois, took the liberty of writing him in February 1860 to report, “we have a Paper Published in our Town that has been neutral in Politicks and I think there is a chance to enlist it for the Republican Party.” If Lincoln would endorse the scheme, the writer was willing to take his letter of support to fellow Republicans and “Get Them To Take hold of the Paper and sustain it during the campaign.”12 Though his reply has never been found, there is no reason to believe that Lincoln did not subscribe to the effort to establish an additional Republican journal in Illinois, even in a hamlet of twelve hundred people. Indeed, Lincoln made sure to visit the offices of local pro-Republican papers whenever his law practice or speaking schedule brought him to new vicinities, always endeavoring to convert journalists into supporters.

  On April 27, 1859, for example, Lincoln strolled unannounced into the office of the Central Illinois Gazette in the hamlet of West Urbana and asked to see its young editor, William Osborn Stoddard, who was busy setting type at the time. “Stoddard!” the paper’s owner called upstairs to him. “Old Abe is here and he wants to see you!” Annoyed to be interrupted while he was busy working, the editor murmured that he would “go down” and “wash my hands but I would not roll down my sleeves,” adding of Lincoln: “I did not believe he would care much about a little ink and light clothing.” Indeed, the gigantic visitor barely noticed. He offered Stoddard his hand and “plunged at once into the causes” that interested him, pausing only to ask about voting trends in specific local precincts—“almost,” Stoddard admitted with astonishment, “as if he had lived among them.” From that moment on, the young editor counted himself a Lincoln admirer. A few days later, the paper so noted in print: “We had the pleasure of introducing to the hospitalities of our sanctum a few days since the Hon. Abraham Lincoln. Few men can make an hour pass away more agreeably.”13

  In town after Illinois town, Lincoln repeated this courtesy, calling on editors, putting his feet up on their desks, setting them at ease with his droll stories, dazzling them with his local political knowledge, imparting his ideas, and leaving each premises having converted a stranger into a new, fast friend. Once, when his steamboat ran aground en route home from an 1859 speaking appearance in Iowa, stranding him in Missouri, Lincoln used the time to visit the office of the St. Joseph Journal and charm its editor, too. “In personal appearance,” the paper cheerfully reported on August 19, “he looks like any other ‘six-foot’ Kentuckian, and is very affable in manners.”14

  Lincoln spent the most time, of course, at the offices of his hometown paper. The Journal’s editorial rooms fronted the same public square as the Lincoln-Herndon law office, and between cases the firm’s senior partner could often be found reading out-of-town papers from the journal’s “Exchange List,” or playing “Fives”—a form of handball—against the building’s outside wall. Preston Bailhache, brother of the paper�
��s co-publisher, remembered that “ ‘Old Abe’ was always champion” of the matches outside the Journal, “for his long arms and long legs served a good purpose in reaching and returning the ball from any angle.”15 Lincoln hosted many a political conference at the Journal office, too, but as Senator Lyman Trumbull once admitted to Chicago reporter Horace White, “communicated no more of his own thoughts and purposes than he thought would subserve the ends he had in view.”16

  Lincoln had not only grown close enough to Republican editors to dominate conversations around the stove, borrow incoming papers at will, and suggest editorials; he was now powerful enough to kill stories, too. In April 1859, for example, Thomas J. Pickett, editor of the Rock Island (Illinois) Register, invited Lincoln to come to town to deliver a lecture on “[Discoveries and] Inventions,” a talk that the politician had already offered publicly without generating much enthusiasm at other venues. Pickett frankly hoped to use the visit for other purposes. “I would like to have a ‘talk’ with you on political matters,” he wrote Lincoln, “—as to the policy of announcing your name for the Presidency—while you are in our city. My partner . . . and myself are about addressing the Republican editors of the State on the subject of your name for the Presidency.”17