Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  As a public philosopher, however, Greeley was no laughing matter. Adopting as his lecture subject “The Nation,” Greeley commenced with the witty admission that he remained a “peculiar institution” in Washington, but hoped that Union military successes might soon make it possible for him to raise his voice farther south. Turning serious, he argued forcibly against compromise on abolition. “We must emerge from this struggle essentially free,” he loudly declared in his whinny of a voice. “And now, if the Union is to be restored, it is only on the basis of freedom . . . it is time to look the enemy in the eye. . . . Compromise is impossible.”10 As he pronounced those sharp words, the speaker turned around as if to address Lincoln personally. “A more dramatic scene has seldom been witnessed by any popular assembly,” Croffut testified. The crowd responded with a “wild and prolonged cheer.”11

  When the pro-Frémont audience rose to greet Greeley’s conclusion with a standing ovation, Lincoln remained conspicuously seated, his face frozen in an expressionless mask. Bennett’s Herald denounced the entire spectacle as “a shrewd dodge on the part of our white-coated philosopher to get a hearing from ‘Honest Old Abe.’ ”12 All Lincoln would concede afterward to the abolitionist Indiana congressman George W. Julian, who sat on his other side that night, was: “That address was full of good thoughts. I would like to take the manuscript home with me and carefully read it over some Sunday.” Whether he ever found “some Sunday” to do so remains unknown. From Greeley’s Washington correspondent Homer Byington, however, an exasperated Lincoln demanded to know: “What in the world is the matter with Uncle Horace? Why can’t he restrain himself and wait a little while?” With or without Lincoln’s encouragement, however, the fight over slavery was about to take center stage alongside the fight for the Union.13

  • • •

  Around this same time, still hoping to salvage his foundering career in America, London Times correspondent William Howard Russell undertook one final campaign to woo his detractors. He treated Raymond, Forney, Greeley, Seaton, and Bryant to “the best dinners I could give them . . . and laid it on frightfully. . . . The result was that I only increased the hostility of those who were not invited.”14

  From Bennett, who was intentionally excluded from this roster, Russell insisted he would accept only a full apology for his many “gross & unprovoked attacks.” Receiving none, Russell contented himself with his exaggerated belief that he had made Bennett “eat so much dirt” because “The [London] Times would not quote the Herald in future & that thus the European notoriety on which he prides himself” was “injured if not totally destroyed.” A few weeks after Greeley’s lecture, Russell sulked that it would be his rivals’ “great triumph to drive me away.” Soon he discovered that he could no longer secure interviews with prominent officials. They had become “fearful of being attacked in the press if they are pointed out for any civility to me.”15

  Greeley the lecturer, acknowledged—and ridiculed—in a March 1862 Vanity Fair cover story, and Raymond dismissed as a mere newsboy a few months later.

  “You must either go to the front or come home,” his editor finally advised him from London in late March. Despite Russell’s problems, the paper still expected stories to be filed from America. Worse, Secretary of War Stanton acted in April to revoke and reevaluate all existing press credentials, threatening to arrest any reporter who attempted to visit the front without fresh certification. The department never disclosed the official reason. When journalists objected, Stanton modified his order to apply only to foreign correspondents whom he could not “punish . . . if they gave aid to the enemy.”16

  Sensing, no doubt correctly, that this latest purge was aimed specifically at him, Russell lodged a protest with the War Department. He received no answer. Russell then appealed directly to the president, calling on him at the White House and eliciting a one-sentence letter—in which Lincoln ambiguously urged that “if any charges should come against Col. Russell let us give him a hearing before acting.” The embattled correspondent remembered that the vague assurance “at first gave me hopes” that the president would overrule Stanton, but “the next day [he] informed me he could not take it upon himself to do so.” Perhaps Lincoln had decided to heed a recent warning about Russell from Congressman Elihu Washburne: “I think his sympathies are all with the rebels, and he expresses himself entirely confident that we cannot subdue the rebellion. I have no doubt he is doing all he can to get his govt. to recognize the negro confederacy.”17 According to Ben Perley Poore, Lincoln told William Seward: “This fellow Russell’s Bull Run letter was not so complimentary as to entitle him to much favor.”18 Yet Russell pugnaciously insisted to Charles Sumner—one of “innumerable Senators” to whom he pleaded his case—“I write for the English people, not for the American people.”19

  No doubt fearing just such declarations of independence and immunity, Stanton reacted with an iron fist: he could not close the London Times, but he could close it off from Union war news. A defiant Russell booked passage for the front anyway, but when he tried to embark by sea, authorities forcibly put him off the boat.

  With neither a valid pass nor a means to enter the war zone, with no defenders left in the army or the government, and few sources willing to confide in him, Russell had little choice but to abandon his assignment and return to England. He did so in April. In one of his final comments from America, he proclaimed: “There is more in Lincoln than you would imagine.” But Russell never got to report on the president’s next three years in office. Instead he exacted revenge for what he regarded as his unwarranted banishment by compiling his American notes and publishing them in London the following year in a sensational book entitled My Diary North and South.20

  Russell’s departure from American soil deprived the conflict of one of its most incisive observers. In lobbyist Sam Ward’s opinion, by ousting him, the Union foolishly “tomahawked” its own most potentially influential overseas eyewitness, at a time when the government desperately needed England’s support, or at least, neutrality.21 Less obviously, but perhaps even more significantly, Russell’s exile cemented government control over information about the conflict, foreign and domestic alike.

  • • •

  On March 6, 1862, two months after hearing Greeley wave his freedom banner at the Smithsonian, Lincoln reclaimed center stage on the issue, sending a Special Message to Congress pledging the government “to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to the state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in it’s [sic] discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such change of system.” The proposal constituted Lincoln’s first concrete effort to launch America on a path toward abolition: a national order for gradual emancipation, to be enforced at the state level, but financed with federal funds. The measure would not end slavery everywhere, or even ban it anywhere immediately, but Lincoln optimistically believed that if embraced, the plan would secure Union loyalty in the Border States and perhaps even end the war “at once.”22

  Editorial reaction followed within a day, bringing the expected kudos from Republican newspapers and praise even from Bennett. Clearly pleased, Lincoln preserved laudatory clippings from five New York papers: The Times, Tribune, Herald, World, and Evening Post—all wholeheartedly supportive save for one Times item that questioned the government’s ability to finance such an undertaking. On March 9, John Nicolay entered Lincoln’s office “to read to the President the most recent Tribune and Herald articles concerning his emancipation message—both papers continuing to warmly endorse it.”23 Still irked over the misgivings expressed by the Times, Lincoln showed his secretary a copy of a letter he had just sent off to Henry Raymond.24 The president was not about to let the profligacy charge stand unanswered.

  “I am grateful to the New-York Journals, and not less so to the Times than to others,” Lincoln began, “for their kind notices of the late special Message to Congress.” Then Lincoln confided his objec
tion to the article in question. “Your paper . . . intimates that the proposition, though well-intentioned, must fail on the score of expense. I do hope you will reconsider this. Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?—that eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense[?]” Lincoln wanted not only the last word on the subject, but also a correction. “Please look at these things,” he concluded his letter, “and consider whether there should not be another article in the Times?”25

  As so often resulted when Lincoln reached out directly to editors, the personal touch worked wonders. Raymond replied within the week: “You will have seen long before this reaches you . . . that the Times has published several articles in support of your special message. As soon as I saw the one to which you allude, I telegraphed to the office to sustain the message without qualifications or cavil, and I believe the paper has done so since. . . . I regard the message as a master-piece of political wisdom and sound policy.”26

  Meanwhile Lincoln continued his effort to build bridges to the Grumbler. The crafty president coveted Greeley’s continued backing for his Border State initiative, but wanted the Tribune to temper its editorial enthusiasm so as not to make his initiative seem threatening to the affected Border States. Greeley, too, had thrown full support behind the “wisdom” of Lincoln’s proposal, terming it “one of those few great scriptures that live in history and mark an epoch in the lives of nations and of races.” Of course, Greeley also seized the opportunity to excoriate Bennett for the “cheat and sham” of praising both Lincoln and his pro-slavery foes in Congress. Greeley also blasted Raymond for the “mistake” of doubting whether the plan could succeed.27 “If I were to suggest anything,” Lincoln soothed Greeley, “it would be that as the North are already for the measure, we should urge it persuasively, and not menacingly, upon the South.” Greeley responded to assure the president, “I am sure you will find great patience in the country as well as in Congress with regard to all action respecting slavery if it can only be felt that things are going ahead.”28

  Typically, Greeley wanted something in return for his moderation: Lincoln’s support for the latest congressional initiative to ban slavery in the District of Columbia—the fulfillment of a dream both men had harbored since introducing similar bills of their own while serving in Congress together more than a decade earlier. The idea was again before the House and Senate, and this time, with most Southern representatives gone and no longer voting, it stood a good chance of enactment if Lincoln agreed to sign it. When Lincoln cautioned that he still believed, as he had back in 1850, that District-wide emancipation ought to be subject to a referendum of its white citizens, Greeley even dropped the objections he had raised to that proviso back in their House days. “I will advocate it in the Tribune if you desire it,” Greeley pledged. He hoped for passage by the symbolic deadline of July 4. Their latest rapprochement also meant, as usual, that Lincoln resumed tending to Greeley’s patronage recommendations.29

  Perhaps emboldened by both Raymond’s latest reassurance of support and Greeley’s new pledge of restraint, Lincoln accelerated his efforts against slavery. In April—three months earlier than Greeley had hoped—the president approved the newly passed bill abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital. “That I should live to see the President of the United States deliberately advocating Emancipation,” wrote Frederick Douglass in his monthly paper, “was more than I ever ventured to hope.”30 In short order, Lincoln also made good on his party’s 1860 platform pledge to prohibit slavery expansion, signing a law that once and for all outlawed the institution in the Western territories. Still, abolitionists continued to press for more widespread action. Lincoln meanwhile yearned for battlefield successes that would bolster his authority to act more decisively, but antislavery forces actually regarded the bleak military situation as an opportunity. As Greeley told the president: “The stagnation of the grand Army has given life to all manner of projects which would be quiet if the War had been going vigorously on.”31 Unlike Raymond, Greeley believed Lincoln should strike boldly against slavery everywhere, and sooner rather than later.

  • • •

  Where was Henry Raymond in March 1862 when his New York staff published the critical editorial that provoked such a strong response from the president? He was back in Albany, serving yet another term in the New York State Assembly, unable to resist the call of politics even during wartime.32 His latest and last sojourn as a state legislator ended after a single session. A few weeks later, Raymond headed off to a different battleground—electing to travel south to cover George McClellan’s long-awaited offensive against the Confederacy.

  McClellan had devised an ambitious—and, as it turned out, wholly unwieldy—plan to seize Richmond. The “Young Napoleon” transported more than 100,000 men and fifteen thousand animals by ship to Fort Monroe at Hampton Roads, Virginia, and from there began slowly marching them up a tongue of land between the York and James Rivers, intending to capture the Confederate capital from the southeast. From the start, Lincoln feared that the scheme would leave Washington exposed to attack, but he reluctantly consented to McClellan’s strategy. At least his recalcitrant general was finally proposing to use his army somewhere, anywhere.

  After Bull Run, Raymond had supposedly put his days as a war correspondent behind him, but he could not resist again journeying to the front to witness what he and other Northern editors believed might be the campaign that ended the rebellion. Raymond went on to file a succession of hopeful dispatches from the Peninsula, several of them predicting the capture of Richmond without resistance, but eventually he came to realize that McClellan had bogged down hopelessly, his advance reduced to a crawl. Indeed, convinced by faulty intelligence that he was vastly outnumbered, the overcautious McClellan paused so often to dig in that he gave the enemy ample time to rally to the defense of its capital.

  Worse, the general still seemed more hostile to the press than to the Rebels. McClellan repeatedly fired off telegrams to Stanton in Washington to complain about unauthorized leaks and violations of his tight restrictions on newspaper coverage. The general became particularly outraged when he learned that, barred from reporting his army’s movements, several enterprising Philadelphia and New York journalists (the Herald alone boasted at least two dozen correspondents on the Peninsula) took to obtaining the latest copies of the Richmond dailies—which bulged with useful details of his army’s activities—and shipping them north so their editors could extract and reprint the information.

  For a time, Raymond enjoyed his time on campaign. He bivouacked at a nine-dollar-per-week farmhouse along the Chickahominy River, sharing a room with young Herald correspondent George Alfred Townsend. There he regaled the younger journalist with stories about covering war in Europe, and lobbed frank barbs about rivals like Greeley (jealous of his political success, claimed Raymond) and Townsend’s own boss, Bennett (a “monstrous blackguard”). Raymond tried but failed to convince Townsend to abandon the Herald and join the Times at a higher salary. Townsend, who believed Raymond suffered from “a predilection for ‘Bohemia’ ”—the voguish term for a reporter’s life on military campaign—nonetheless praised him as “an indefatigable correspondent.”33

  Eventually, the lack of newsworthy military progress, coupled with decreasing access both to and from McClellan’s headquarters—the army established a rigorous new censorship operation at Fort Monroe—increased Raymond’s restlessness. The memory of the general’s outlandish effort to suppress the Times for treason a few months earlier remained raw. Frustrated, Raymond published some mildly critical commentaries from the front (noting, for example, the “high spirits” of the Rebels at the May 4–5 Battle of Williamsburg),34 a
nd eventually concluded that McClellan was unlikely to give him any future advantage. This became increasingly the case once Lincoln began advancing his emancipation initiatives back in Washington. McClellan believed the war should be waged to restore “the Union as it was,” with slavery intact, and recoiled at the idea at commanding an army of liberation for blacks. In late June, with the enchantment of Bohemia gone, Raymond decided to return to New York. It was the last time the editor would report directly from a battlefield. His paper exacted a bit of revenge by alerting its readers that, as McClellan stalled against the real enemy, a distracting “little side war” raged uncontrollably “between the newspaper correspondents and the military.”35

  One journalist who remained on the scene on the Peninsula complained in the Chicago Tribune a month later that the remaining correspondents were “puffing” McClellan: “The amount of lying that has been sent abroad on the wings of the press and telegraphed to mislead and delude the country is enormous.” When the press began blaming the latest military reversals not on the general but on the War Department, the Chicago paper regarded it as poetic justice for Edwin Stanton’s sometimes brutal attempts to control even indisputably loyal, well-meaning journalists. As the Tribune reminded its readers of Stanton: “He commenced his career by an unjust and crazy warfare upon them—a warfare wholly without purpose, without system, without excuse. His campaign was directed against his friends. From the arrest of Forn[e]y . . . strange fanaticism has marked his conduct toward the loyal American press. If they now have their revenge on him, it may be said that ‘turn about is fair play.’ ”36 But some readers never did learn the truth about the Union army’s lack of progress in Virginia. By August, ever-supportive of McClellan, Bennett was blaming New York Tribune leaks for the military setbacks on the Peninsula. “We wish the disgrace,” insisted the Herald, “to fall where it belongs.”37