Lincoln and the Power of the Press
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Bennett learned that bitter lesson the hard way. By April 15, the American flag could be seen floating “from all the principal newspaper offices” in Manhattan with the notable exception of Bennett’s headquarters on Nassau Street. At the Herald, the flag’s “absence seemed to excite the public indignation,” Raymond almost gleefully reported. According to another of Bennett’s infuriated contemporaries: “If the flag of the United States had been trailed in the mud of Nassau Street, followed by hooting ruffians of the Sixth Ward, and the symbol of the Rebellion has floated in its stead from the cupola of City Hall . . . it would not have cost this isolated alien one pang,—unless, perchance, a rival newspaper had been the first to announce the fact. That, indeed, would have cut him to the heart.”17
Later that tense day, braving a chill rain, “an excited crowd filled the sidewalk” outside the Herald, “and gazing up at the windows . . . indulged in various expressions of dislike to that establishment.” Frightened employees armed themselves and summoned help. Bennett himself was “pursued and hooted in the street.” Then, after a phalanx of police deployed outside the building, a “Committee of gentlemen” called on the besieged editor and strongly “suggested that, if he wished to save his ‘institution’ from attack, he must display the Stars and Stripes” at once. Not until 4:30 P.M. did the crowd spy a newsboy racing toward the building, a flag folded under his arm. Minutes later, a limp “American ensign” finally appeared from one of the paper’s upper-story windows. Disappointed protesters emitted a mixture of “groans and cheers” at this “tardy compliance with the wishes of the people.” Only after what the Times ridiculed as Bennett’s “sudden conversion” did the “multitude” gradually disperse.18
They soon took their anger elsewhere. The next afternoon, lawyer George Templeton Strong was working at his desk when he suddenly heard strange “unwonted sounds” coming from outside his window on Wall Street. Peering down, he saw “a straggling column of men running toward the East River.” Strong’s first impulse was that “they were chasing a runaway horse, but they soon became too numerous to be engaged in that.” The crowd instead surrounded the office of the nearby, pro-Democratic Journal of Commerce, which had editorialized that the South ought to be allowed to leave the Union in peace. Strong heard some muffled “outcries,” then “the black mass was suddenly in motion with waving hats.” A line of policemen came running down the street, and the crowd reluctantly moved on, “cheering lustily.” Strong later learned that the demonstrators, “mostly decently-dressed people, but with a sprinkling of laboring men,” marched next to the Democratic Express, Day-Book, and Daily News, “requiring each to put up the flag,” too. Other marchers headed across the river to demand the Brooklyn Eagle do the same. “Flagmania,” as the Tribune dubbed the phenomenon, had engulfed the entire New York newspaper world.19
Bennett’s own “sudden conversion” was only beginning. Although he blamed the Times and Tribune for exciting “a mob to the committal of acts of violence,” he proclaimed the very next day that the time had “passed” for “public peace meetings, in the North,” instead vowing: “War will make the Northern people a unit.” The “actual presence of war cuts short all debate and closes the argument.” And any “discussion of the right and wrong in this matter” had become “a waste of time.” Bennett was never one to cling to a lost cause. War, which only twenty-four hours earlier had to Bennett posed the threat of economic disaster for New York, now would surely “result in a happy revival of business in this city and all over the North.”20
For his part, refusing even to acknowledge that other New York editors had preceded him in praise of Lincoln’s response to Sumter, Bennett as usual chose to go on the offensive against his rivals: “Our military chieftains of the Courier and Tribune are jubilant; the little whisperers of the Times . . . seize the occasion to ventilate their petty malice and spleen against their neighbors.”21 This time his competitors tried denying him the last word. When Mayor Fernando Wood issued a proclamation of his own, calling on New Yorkers to maintain order and respect property and person, Republican editors charged that the “ridiculous message” was designed to protect deserving targets like the mayor’s friend Bennett. Reminding readers that the treacherous Wood had only weeks earlier advocated that the city secede from the Union, Greeley thundered that if “any journal issued within the limits of the Jeff. Davis Confederacy” had published such a decree, “its editors . . . would at once be strung up to the handiest lamp-post or some convenient limb of a tree.” Greeley pronounced himself delighted that the “journals lately parading the ranks of the Secessionists with scarcely disguised exultation, have been suddenly sobered.”22 This salvo prompted Bennett to protest, “we cannot see the propriety of minor journals like the Tribune . . . pitching into the Mayor’s proclamation. When a public man issues an unobjectionable document he should not be abused.”23 No one could accuse Bennett of lacking gall.
The New York press lords at the start of the Civil War. From left to right: James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, and Henry J. Raymond.
Now the Herald editor went on the offensive, audaciously seizing upon a patriotic cause of his own to champion: the briefly disputed reputation of Major Anderson, the officer who had surrendered Fort Sumter. As it happened, Anderson arrived in New York on April 19, the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, carrying the Sumter flag with him, and unfurling it at a patriotic rally at Union Square. Imbued by holiday patriotism, New Yorkers gave him a hero’s welcome—but not before another of the city’s newspaper editors questioned his conduct at Charleston Harbor. When James Watson Webb labeled Anderson “the vilest traitor the world ever saw,” it was Bennett who most indignantly countered that “Major Anderson has proved himself a brave and faithful officer.” Further embracing the president—whom he had subjected to relentless criticism for months—as the only proper arbiter of such matters, the Herald insisted that Lincoln was “better qualified to form a correct judgment in the case than even our Wall street contemporary, with all his learning and experience in military affairs.”24 Bennett rescued his battered reputation, perhaps even his business—by all but wrapping himself in the flag he had earlier shunned. Where measuring public opinion was concerned, Bennett still boasted the magic touch.
Lincoln was not unappreciative of the Herald’s sudden support; because of its unsurpassed circulation in Europe, the president considered it vital. So he dispatched Thurlow Weed, who had not spoken to the “Satanic Majesty” in three decades, to confirm Bennett’s willingness to back the war. Lincoln chose the Albany editor for the mission, he told Weed, because he had experience “belling cats.”25 Bennett confirmed his extraordinary about-face by summoning correspondent Henry Villard to his office. There he assigned the writer who had covered Lincoln back in Springfield to travel to Washington and tell the president that “the Herald would hereafter be unconditionally for the radical suppression of the Rebellion by force of arms, and would advocate and support any ‘war measures’ by the Government,” particularly if the administration agreed to offer his son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., a commission as a navy lieutenant. Though Villard believed his employer “utterly selfish,” he agreed to carry the message to the White House. Before they parted, the editor added that he also wished Villard to visit Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, and offer him his personal yacht as a “gift to the Government for the revenue service.” The man who just days earlier had advocated laying down arms was now prepared to supply them. Villard agreed to the mission, the younger Bennett became a lieutenant in the naval service, and the elder Bennett rewarded his correspondent with a raise in salary to thirty-five dollars a week.26
Bennett’s somersault proved no less acrobatic than Henry Raymond’s, for the Times editor now did yet another about-face and resumed hurling criticism the president’s way, notwithstanding the otherwise unifying effect of the Sumter attack. Only ten days after the surrender, Raymond picked up where he had left off on April 3, this time a
ccusing the administration of lacking not only a policy, but a chief. In a way, the editor’s frustration was understandable. On April 19, a pro-Confederate mob had attacked Massachusetts troops as they passed through Baltimore en route to the defense of Washington. Four soldiers died in the melee, earning distinction as the first Union martyrs of the Civil War.27 Then, to Raymond’s chagrin, Union forces abandoned the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk, torching it before its evacuation so Confederates could not make use of it, and surrendered the antislavery landmark of Harpers Ferry, also without firing a shot. Now, in an editorial outburst published on April 25 under the headline, “Wanted—A Leader,” Raymond demanded courage—or change.
“In every great crisis,” the blistering new opinion piece began, “the human heart demands a leader that incarnates its ideas, its emotions, and its aims. Till such a leader appears, everything is disorder, disaster and defeat. The moment he takes the helm, order, promptitude and confidence follow as the necessary result. When we see such results, we know that a hero leads. No such hero at present directs affairs. The experience of our Government for months past has been a series of defeats. It has been one of continued retreat.” The administration, Raymond again charged, was still spending far too much time dealing with patronage matters, and not enough on restoring the Union. Arguing that a “holy zeal” now animated “every heart,” Raymond asked, perhaps in one final effort to “nominate” Seward for president: “Where is the leader of this sublime passion? Can the Administration furnish him?” If federal officials could not correct their “constitutional timidity” and “innate reluctance . . . to face the horrors of war,” then “let them earn the gratitude of the people by . . . laying their ambition on the altar of their country”—in other words, by yielding authority to others willing to fight.28
Lincoln had endured his share of press criticism over the years, but even for him this was beyond the pale. Never much for keeping records, he showed his displeasure on this occasion by clipping the offending Times article and filing it, along with similarly critical recent columns, with a handwritten label that underscored his anger: “Villainous articles.” Wisely, he expressed none of his outrage directly to Raymond. Instead he worked to bring the Times chief closer into his orbit. Lincoln invited Raymond to Washington, where he poured on the rustic charm, confiding the enormous pressures he faced in filling up patronage vacancies in the North while facing down disloyalty in the South. After their White House meeting, Raymond accepted the president’s extraordinary excuse that he “wished he could get time to attend to the southern question” but for the fact that “the office-seekers demanded all his time.” The editor remembered sympathetically, even fondly, that Lincoln likened himself to “a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of the house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.”29 Thereafter the Times was far more supportive of the administration.
Raymond exacted his only measure of compensation by besieging the president with “rapacious and selfish” patronage recommendations of his own—adding to the very burden he had earlier charged was taking too much of the chief executive’s precious time. One aspirant for a foreign consulate earned a face-to-face meeting with Secretary of State Seward simply because, as Lincoln scribbled, “You see he has a note from H. J. Raymond. Give him an interview.” When a congressman-elect from New York later sought Lincoln’s aid on “a matter of political importance,” Lincoln urged him to consult the editor of the Times first. “Raymond,” he said, “is my Lieutenant-General in politics. Whatever he says is right in the premises, shall be done.”30 Apparently it no longer seemed to matter, as Raymond had previously complained so bitterly, that Lincoln was wrong “to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters.”31
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Opportunities soon ran out entirely for Lincoln’s longtime political nemesis, Stephen Douglas. Weeks earlier, offering conspicuous public gestures to promote unity, he had held the new president’s hat outside the Capitol during his swearing-in, escorted Mrs. Lincoln to the inaugural ball, and taken to the Senate floor to heap praise on his old rival’s inaugural address.32 Then, when the Illinois state legislature announced it would go into special session on April 23 to discuss the crisis, Douglas’s loyal Springfield press defender Charles Lanphier urged the senator to rush home to calm escalating antiwar sentiment, as if no one else in public life possessed the influence do so.
Douglas thereupon embarked on a tiring journey west, pausing at stops along the way to warn crowds against “the new system of resistance by the sword and bayonet to the results of the ballot-box.” The loser of the recent presidential election repeated his message along a route that amounted to an ironic retracing of Lincoln’s recent inaugural journey—but in the opposite direction. Reaching Springfield, he received a hero’s welcome in the same State Capitol chamber where Lincoln had delivered his anti-Douglas “House Divided” address three years earlier. Now, with the “house” indeed split, Douglas railed not against Lincoln, but against Southerners disloyal to “the government established by our fathers.”33
The senator reported to Lincoln that “the state of feeling” in Illinois was “much less satisfactory than I could have desired or expected when I arrived.” Still, he hoped “for entire unanimity in the support of the government and the Union.” In what turned out to be his final letter to the State Register’s Charles Lanphier, he wrote: “The prospects are gloomy, but I do not yet despair of the Union. We can never acknowledge the right of a State to secede and cut us off from the Ocean and the world, without our consent.”34 It was perhaps his finest moment.
Worn to the bone by his exertions, Douglas staggered back to his Chicago residence on May 1, and almost immediately took to his bed suffering from a bout of rheumatism compounded by what appeared to be typhoid fever. For a time he rallied, then relapsed. With the national press reporting almost daily on his fluctuating condition, Douglas took a final turn for the worse at the end of the month. A few days later, the decades of exuberant campaigning and hard drinking took their ultimate toll. On June 3, the Little Giant died, just forty-eight years old.35 His lifelong competition with Abraham Lincoln—in both politics and the press—was over. Yet the New York Times gave no quarter in announcing the “sad news.” Acknowledging that Douglas’s name “will have a prominent place in history,” Henry Raymond could not help reminding readers that the “measures which he in the main originated” lay “at the foundation of our present complications.” Raymond conceded only that it was “greatly to be regretted that he could not have been spared to take part in the struggle in the origin of which he was so prominent an actor.”36
Lincoln refused to take part in any Republican press effort to blame his old rival for the crisis he alone now shouldered. Rather, in a magnanimous show of respect—the equivalent of holding Douglas’s hat, and more—he ordered the White House and all federal offices in Washington draped in black for thirty days.
• • •
In Washington, a long-established newspaper tradition was in its death throes as well. For generations, presidents had designated one capital newspaper or another as their official “organ”—the recipient of exclusive announcements and lucrative government printing orders. Now a revolution was at hand. Effective with Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, Congress had upended the custom by establishing the first U.S. Government Printing Office. More than 350 federal workers would soon assume responsibility for publishing most of the nation’s executive, legislative, and judicial records. As consolation, any officially designated newspaper “organ” could still earn profitable government advertising, as well as reputation-building access to administration scoops. Even during the tense hours when Confederates began aiming their artillery against Fort Sumter, Lincoln found time to attend to this obligation—and in something of a surprise, to alter it further.
The large, established journals like the National Intelligencer (
now under the management of James C. Welling, veteran publisher William Seaton’s new partner) and the pro-Democratic National Union would continue to earn official advertising placements by virtue of “having the largest permanent subscription.” In a remarkable shift from tradition, however, Lincoln decided to reward a newcomer to the city’s journalistic pantheon: the tiny National Republican. The daily had been founded just a few weeks after the presidential campaign by an abolitionist survivor of two separate mob attacks by pro-slavery Washingtonians.
Though the paper was now less influential than in previous years, its designation sent a clear signal about the new president’s sincere antislavery sentiments. The National Republican’s novice editor, Lewis Clephane, had once served as business manager for the National Era, the now defunct abolitionist paper mobbed back in Lincoln’s days as a congressman. More recently, Clephane had operated a pro-Republican Wide-Awake political club in Washington, which barely survived another violent attack soon after Lincoln won the election. On November 26, a defiant Clephane converted the Wide-Awake headquarters into a newspaper office and there launched the National Republican. Now Lincoln repaid him for his loyalty and sacrifice. “In virtue of his authority to designate at discretion one newspaper in the city of Washington for the publication of notices and advertisements from the Executive departments,” went the April 11, 1861, order, “ . . . the President designates the ‘National Republican.’ ” As further reward, the administration also named Clephane postmaster of the District of Columbia.37