Pickett was no ordinary small-town printer. A two-term state senator, Pickett was also president of the Illinois Editorial Association. Nonetheless, Lincoln was not yet ready to visit Rock Island “to deliver a lecture, or for any other object,” as he put it in his carefully worded reply. It was too early to encourage a presidential boomlet. “I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he took pains to add. “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.”18 At least not yet. But Lincoln would warmly remember Pickett’s early support, and reward him as soon as he was able.
Two months later, Lincoln renewed his subscription to Joseph Medill and Charles Ray’s Chicago Press and Tribune, taking pains to accompany his check with a self-effacing but wholehearted endorsement: “Herewith is a little draft to pay for your Daily another year from today. I suppose I shall take the Press & Tribune so long as it, and I both live, unless I become unable to pay for it. In it’s [sic] devotion to our cause always, and to me personally last year I owe it a debt of gratitude, which I fear I shall never be able to pay.”19 Like Thomas Pickett, Medill and Ray no doubt were already looking to the day when their favorite politician ascended to a position that made it possible for him fully to repay them for their loyal support.
Notwithstanding his assertions of modesty, Lincoln now began actively, if quietly, planning a strategy for winning the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, a plan that hinged on securing support from the newspapers he had been so assiduously courting. Above all, he needed to obtain the crucial Chicago Tribune’s enthusiastic, if initially covert acquiescence. Then Lincoln would proceed to secure a succession of other Illinois endorsements, culminating in the formal backing of Medill’s Tribune. In the meantime, the candidate would work to give no offense to the supporters of other states’ favorite sons, instead making himself implicitly, but prominently, available as everyone’s second choice. Medill would lobby Republican leaders in Lincoln’s behalf and advocate—successfully and, as it turned out, crucially—to bring the forthcoming national convention to Lincoln-friendly Chicago. Medill later credibly claimed that the entire campaign blueprint was hatched in his newspaper’s own office.20
In September, Medill went a step further, encouraging Lincoln to undertake a speaking tour through Ohio ostensibly to rebut recent pro–Popular Sovereignty speeches by Stephen Douglas, but principally to expose his impressive oratorical skills to a wider public. The one-time Ohioan Medill confidently predicted that Lincoln would “draw big crowds and be well received” in his native state. But the editor did more than act as a cheerleader; he had specific instructions for “his” unannounced candidate. “Do not consider me presumptuous for offering a suggestion or two,” he wrote. “As you are not a candidate you can talk out as boldly as you please. . . . Dont act on the defensive, but pitch hot shot into the back log doughface and pro slavery democracy. Rake down the swindling pretension of Douglas that his Kansas Nebraska Bill guarantees or permits popular sovignty [sic]. We have made a leading article on that subject in our today’s paper. . . . Do not fail to get off some of your ‘anecdotes & hits.’ . . . Go in boldly, strike straight from the shoulder,—hit below the belt as well as above, and kick like thunder.”21
• • •
Certainly no newspaper kicked back at slavery more thunderously than the nearly twenty-year-old enterprise founded and still dominated by the irrepressible Horace Greeley. And no paper of the day reported more often on its own crusading editor. One of his earliest biographers maintained that the attention the Tribune lavished on its founder was entirely appropriate, since no journalist ever did “more to make editing of a newspaper the noblest work that any of us ever set to do.”22
Yet for all the publicity he generated for himself, public opinion remained divided on the subject of Horace Greeley, even as the editor grew just as famous, and nearly as influential, as the leading politicians in the country—thanks at least in part to his relentless self-promotion. “Meek as he looks,” no less a literary celebrity than Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote admiringly, “no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer. Non-resistant as he is physically, there is not a more uncompromising opponent, and intense combatant, in the United States.”23
Greeley himself admitted: “I have been accused of all possible offenses against good morals, good taste, and the common weal; I have been branded as an aristocrat, a communist, an intellectual, a hypocrite, a demagogue, a disunionist, a traitor, a corruptionist.” Yet he seemed to relish each charge, even as his enemies stepped up their attacks in proportion to the editor’s expanding influence. Texas politician Sam Houston denounced him as “the whitest man in the world,” explaining: “He wears a white hat and a white coat; and . . . his liver is of the same color.” Even admirers conceded he often acted the distracted innocent, one observer maintaining, “if he goes to a restaurant to dine, he puts down a bill to pay for his meal and never looks at the change . . . he is often cheated with counterfeit notes by persons who know his carelessness and unconcern in such matters.”24
His absentmindedness may have grown to legendary proportions, but Greeley’s selfless earnestness struck a chord among sympathetic readers and respectful fellow professionals alike. Praising him as “unselfishly devoted to the public good, especially to the lowly and oppressed,” Pennsylvania newspaper editor A. K. McClure spoke for many journalists of the period when he said of Greeley: “He did not thirst for power, for he had little regard for the usually empty honors of office, but I never knew a man who more earnestly yearned for the approval of his countrymen.” McClure believed that Greeley “taught through the Tribune with more power than that of the President.”25 Expanding his reach even further, Greeley augmented his newspaper work by publishing a book about his recent trip to Europe, and issuing a collection of his speeches and writings.26
Of course, Bennett fumed over his fellow editor’s rising reputation and growing success. What particularly irked the owner of the New York Herald was that much of Greeley’s political power came from the Tribune’s well-read national edition, the best-selling synopsis of the age. This weekly spread Greeley’s editorial opinions throughout the country. Its circulation quadrupled to nearly 200,000 by decade’s end. For his part, Greeley reveled in its popularity. In an unusually daring slap at Bennett, whose own New York edition still outsold the Tribune locally but whose national compendium lagged behind it in circulation, Greeley went so far as to place a provocative paid notice for his national paper on the pages of the rival Herald. The heavy-handed, tongue-in-cheek pitch cautioned potential advertisers not to place such notices in the Weekly Tribune. Buying space would prove “dangerous to your quiet,” warned the advertisement, citing the experience of a tobacco seed importer who had unsuspectingly advertised his product with Greeley. “I did not anticipate so many applications, and consequently I was quite unprepared for it,” testified St. Louis merchant Oliver Tarbell Bragg. “ . . . Your paper must certainly have an enormous circulation, judging from the many applications for seed which I have had.”27 Bennett, who had often been called upon to defend the Herald’s policy of publishing any advertisement paid for with cash in advance, no matter how objectionable or tasteless, had little choice but to print Greeley’s taunt.
Their latest squabble, however, ended almost before it began. It was superseded by the seismic cultural and political shock waves that swept the country when news of a sensational event sped its way north from Virginia to New York. As never before, the incident and its aftermath set North and South, and their respective newspapers, at each other’s throats over the slavery issue. In October 1859, just one month after Greeley planted his playful advertisement in the Herald, “Osawatomie” John Brown of Bleeding Kansas repute stealthily marched a band of armed abolitionists—including five African Americans—into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the riverfront site
of a well-stocked federal arsenal and armory. His plan was as simple as it was fantastic: to seize the installation by surprise, inspire local slaves to flee their plantations and join his force, and then to deploy his growing army and newly acquired weapons to launch a widespread slave revolt across Virginia.
The plot failed in a miasma of bloodshed. On October 18, Colonel Robert E. Lee, dispatched to lead a force to quell the revolt, cornered Brown’s vastly outnumbered band inside a firehouse on the arsenal grounds and then stormed the structure. Ramming their way inside, Lee’s troops killed ten of the raiders on the spot and captured seven more—among them John Brown himself. Though wounded in the brief but pitched battle, Brown faced a quick trial for both treason and inciting a slave revolt. To the surprise of few, Brown was convicted and condemned to hang. He died on the gallows on December 2.
In a single, daring, and violent gesture against an inherently violent institution, John Brown ratcheted up the slavery debate to an electric new intensity. Realistically or not, abolitionists took solace from the episode, convinced that Brown had gravely wounded the slave power simply by piercing the Mason-Dixon line, thereby raising a glimmer of hope that a massive slave insurrection might yet be possible in the future. With equal, almost paranoid fervor, slaveholding interests, fearful of bloody midnight massacres at the hands of their long-suppressed slaves, reacted by condemning abolitionists and abolitionism with unprecedented vitriol. The Times and Herald both reported breathlessly on the complicity of the so-called Secret Six—New England men of some standing who had bankrolled Brown. That discovery made the raid not just the act of a sole madman, but a widespread plot by perfidious abolitionists.
Abolitionist John Brown, whose 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry inflamed the sectional crisis and divided editors nationwide.
Slavery, many Southerners now insisted, must not only be protected but made national. The slave power demanded that all future federal officeholders denounce illegal acts like Brown’s and endorse the perpetuation, indeed the widening, of slavery. If Northern officials failed to renounce abolitionism, newspapers in the Deep South began openly threatening, then slave states were ready to consider abandoning the Union. For their part, Republicans expressed renewed determination to resist threats by the South’s unbreakable power, recognizing that any additional new slave territory would only generate new and increased Democratic, slave state representation in the U.S. House and Senate, not to mention the Electoral College. The odious result would be “Slave Power” domination of all branches of the government—for Senate consent was required to name new federal judges—in perpetuity.
Caught in the middle of this enormous row, moderates like Abraham Lincoln wanted nothing more than to ignore the John Brown episode or characterize it as an aberration, hoping its roiling impact would quickly fade away. As the Chicago Tribune’s Charles Ray confided frankly to Lincoln just a few days after Brown’s capture: “We are damnably exercised about the effect of Old John Brown’s wretched fiasco in Virginia upon the moral health of the Republican party! The old idiot—the quicker they hang and get him out of, The way, The better.” Then Ray tantalizingly added what sounded like an offer of support—in return for caution: “Do you know that you are strongly talked of for the Presidency—for the Vice Presidency at least.”28
In truth, Lincoln needed no such alluring reminders that he would be wise to hold his tongue (Ray admitted that Lincoln was by nature “close-mouthed and cautious”).29 Displaying his usual facility for prudence, Lincoln for months said as little as possible on the contentious subject of John Brown’s raid, save for an unrecorded speech in the small Illinois village of Mechanicsburg, where, according to a brief summary for the Illinois State Journal, he placed blame for “agitation,” “sectionalism,” and “wrangling on the slavery question” not on John Brown, but on Democrats in general and Stephen Douglas in particular.30
Inconveniently, Lincoln soon found himself on a previously scheduled out-of-state political speaking tour in Kansas, the scene of Brown’s earlier antislavery attacks. Now, and particularly here, the toxic subject of John Brown was impossible to avoid. Yet in a speech in the sleepy town of Elwood, on December 1, 1859, Lincoln still only “adverted briefly to the Harper’s Ferry Affair,” according to an account in the local paper. “He believed the attack of Brown wrong for two reasons,” the report continued. “It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” Yet Brown had “shown great courage,” Lincoln added—deftly citing Virginia governor Henry A. Wise, who had earlier said much the same thing. “But no man, North or South,” Lincoln hastened to add, “can approve of violence or crime.”31
Lincoln’s most extensive comments on the Harpers Ferry raid came forty-eight hours later on December 3 at Leavenworth, just one day after Brown died on the rope. Now there was no way to avoid confronting the subject. “Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state,” Lincoln acknowledged almost nonchalantly at the end of his long antislavery address. “We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.” Turning the tables, Lincoln ended with a frank warning to Southerners threatening to quit the Union should a Republican win the White House the following year: secession would be no less treasonable than insurrection. In Lincoln’s view, “if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as Old John Brown has been dealt with.”32
For entirely different reasons, the usually outspoken Stephen Douglas had comparatively little to say about John Brown, either, and what he did express ultimately proved less than helpful to his own political ambitions. Complicating the matter for him was the fact that he was stuck in Washington, not only to attend the latest session of Congress; he had placed himself in virtual exile at his residence there to nurse his wife through a grave illness. In mid-November, his Illinois mouthpieces, the Chicago Times and Springfield State Register, did publish a Douglas manifesto on the subject in which he predictably placed primary blame for slavery agitation on an increasingly radicalized Republican opposition. To his credit, Douglas acknowledged how “sensitive large numbers of professedly respectable citizens at the north” had become “on this subject of slavery.” Southerners, he suggested, would be well advised to abandon their “wild and absurd” calls for the nationalization of slavery and “meet the northern democracy [his own wing of the Democratic Party] on a middle tenable ground”—as well as end their “unreasonable hostility” to his own efforts to achieve both compromise and national office.33 It was not a message calculated to satisfy Southern Democrats who felt themselves increasingly threatened by violent uprisings allegedly inspired by Republican zealotry.
Still, as far as Douglas was concerned, this was hardly a moment for Northern and Southern Democrats to risk widening their already substantial differences—not with their own next presidential nominating convention scheduled for April 1860, and set to take place in a hotbed of pro-slavery militancy: Charleston, South Carolina. To cement his status as front-runner and Illinois favorite son, Douglas quickly enlisted the Register’s Charles Lanphier to make certain that friendly local delegates, rather than Buchanan men, would be chosen for the upcoming convention. Using a politician’s prerogative to make suggestions about the newspaper business, the senator asked, too, if Lanphier was in the habit of exchanging political articles with Alabama’s moderate Mobile Register. “If not you ought to do so,” he advised. “It is making a glorious fight on the right line.” The Little Giant very much wanted middle-of-the-road papers in the South to exchange friendly editorials with his supporters in the North.
One of the costs of holding a federal office was geographic isolation in the national capital. Douglas was feeling increasingly remote from his home base. “Write me in full,” he implored Lanphier, �
��and send me the Register. I do not get. Be sure to send it regularly to Washington.” Concurrently, the senator strove to build his reputation for statesmanship, already recognized by Horace Greeley, to Lincoln’s dismay, by reaching out to New York’s other prominent Republican editor. Douglas flattered the Times’s Henry Raymond (in the act of trying to get him to publish one of his speeches) by acknowledging “the courtesy and kindness which it alone of all the New York journals, has shown me.”34
For the most part, the journalists themselves evinced none of Lincoln’s or Douglas’s restraint in their commentaries on the John Brown affair. Coverage was ubiquitous and often incendiary. In articles that paralleled, and no doubt further fueled, the rage on the political hustings, editors accused each other variously of fomenting race war or encouraging destruction of the republic. Unlike the moderate politicians boxed into safe silence by Brown’s violent gesture, even the more temperate newspapers could not afford to let their inhibitions stand in the way of securing, featuring, and commenting breathlessly on news of the volatile topic. It was simply too big a story to ignore. As much as some Republicans wished that interest would fade, John Brown’s raid, trial, and execution dominated the New York press for months to come.
Predictably, Raymond’s Times took the most measured approach. At the outset, it declared the Harpers Ferry raid a “Negro Insurrection” and a “desperate” act by a “notorious” man long associated with “scenes of violence.” But with his eyes open to the public’s insatiable appetite for news from the scene of John Brown’s ill-fated adventure, Raymond also dispatched a special correspondent to the adjacent village of Charles Town to provide detailed coverage of Brown’s trial and hanging. The Times journalist soon reported melodramatically—and with a hint of sympathy—on Brown’s final hours, which included an emotional last meeting with his distraught wife.35 Raymond’s paper never quite decided whether John Brown was a terrorist or a martyr.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 29