Although the general public did not realize it at the time, there was a good deal more to this epic struggle between masterful political writers, and the long-ignored details offer further evidence of Lincoln’s rare gift for directing “public sentiment.” Here was no ordinary case involving an editorial that inspired a reply. More accurately, the episode constituted a duel of public messages, each timed to earn political and historical credit for freedom. Before either composition appeared in print, a backstory unfolded behind the scenes.
On August 18, just two days before Greeley published his editorial, the Tribune’s information procurers Robert Walker and James Gilmore arrived at the White House for a conference with Lincoln. Before the meeting began, the well-placed Walker whispered to Gilmore: “I have good news for you, but it must be strictly confidential,—the Emancipation Proclamation is decided upon.” Secret or not, under the terms of the three-way news-sharing agreement put in place a few months earlier, Gilmore owed such scoops to the Tribune.
As Gilmore now reminded Walker, “all of Mr. Greeley’s impatience would be removed if he knew these facts.” But Walker cautioned: “We had better ask Mr. Lincoln. I have suggested it, but he has been fearful Greeley would leak out.” During their meeting, the president considered Gilmore’s advice that he alert Greeley to his emancipation plans, but replied: “I have only been afraid of Greeley’s passion for news. Do you think he will let no intimation of it get into his paper?” Besides, as Lincoln pointedly reminded his visitors, “I infer from the recent tone of the Tribune that you are not always able to keep Brother Greeley in the traces.” When the president pressed Gilmore further on why Greeley had lately become so “wrathy,” his visitor suggested that it was the “slow progress of the war” and “your neglect to make a direct attack upon slavery.” Now, Gilmore reported, Greeley had embarked on writing an “appeal to the country, which will force you to take a decided position.” When Lincoln then suggested that Greeley should come to Washington himself to discuss matters face-to-face, Gilmore offered the remarkable admission that the famous editor feared the president’s ability to influence the press. Greeley “objected,” Gilmore confessed, “to allowing the President to act as advisory editor of the Tribune.”81
“I have no such desire,” Lincoln fired back. “I certainly have enough now on my hands to satisfy any man’s ambitions,” adding: “Does not that remark show an unfriendly spirit in Mr. Greeley.”82 No one left a record of how the conversation ended, but Gilmore’s revelations would have hardly inspired the president to take Greeley into his confidence.
Gilmore later claimed that he did not arrive back in New York until the day Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” appeared in print, but he never denied that he might have managed to share his advance knowledge of emancipation as soon as he could transmit the news. But even if Gilmore did not do so immediately, Lincoln had also confided his emancipation plans to Tribune managing editor Sydney Howard Gay, though impatient abolitionist Wendell Phillips still cautioned Gay: “If the proclamation of Emanc. is possible at any time from Lincoln (which I somewhat doubt) it will be wrung from him only by fear.”83 From whichever source he heard the stunning news, Greeley reacted by publishing the Phillips letter and also rushing into print his own “Prayer of Twenty Millions.” His plan was not merely to encourage Lincoln to issue an emancipation order, but to position himself to earn personal credit when the inevitable order was announced.
The vulpine Lincoln remained a step ahead. Greeley may have cynically rushed his “Prayer of Twenty Millions” into print as soon as he received the tip that emancipation was imminent, but Lincoln had already drafted his “paramount object” text as a public message justifying his forthcoming emancipation decree. Once the opportunity arose, he simply converted it into a letter to Greeley. War correspondent Whitelaw Reid confirmed this sequence of events in a now-forgotten dispatch two days later for the Cincinnati Gazette. Reid revealed that the president had read a “rough draft” of his “paramount object” statement aloud to at least one friend “some days” before Greeley’s editorial ever appeared. “So novel a thing as a newspaper correspondence between the President and an editor excites great attention,” Reid reported of the result, knowingly adding: “The National Intelligencer in publishing the letter reads Greeley a lesson in good manners.”84
The outmaneuvered Greeley eventually came to believe, too, that “Mr. Lincoln’s letter had been prepared before he ever saw ‘Prayer,’ and that this was merely used by him as an opportunity, an occasion, an excuse, for setting his own altered position—changed not by his volition, but by circumstance—before the country.” Greeley grandly added: “I’ll forgive him anything if he will issue the proclamation.”85 It is hard to judge who proved craftier in this affair: the editor who knew emancipation was imminent but then, eager for credit, publicly demanded it anyway; or the president who had already decided to proclaim emancipation but now argued that he would do so only if it would restore the Union. The prize for nerve ultimately went to Lincoln, for while Greeley’s editorial called on him only to enforce the Confiscation Act, the president replied as if the editor had demanded the broader executive order he was planning. “I do not see,” Greeley later admitted, “how these points can have escaped the attention of any acute and careful observer.”86
More importantly, Lincoln’s “reply” mollified conservative Unionists, inspiring James Gordon Bennett to chirp, “It shows that the incessant hue and cry of our abolition radicals for a proclamation of emancipation does not disturb the equanimity or shake the honest convictions of Abraham Lincoln.”87 But not everyone appreciated Lincoln’s reply to Greeley. Antislavery diarist Adam Gurowski lamented: “Mr. Lincoln is the standard-bearer of the policy of the New York Herald,” likening him to Pierce and Buchanan. “You cannot refine Mr. Lincoln’s taste, or extend his horizon,” added Ralph Waldo Emerson when he read Lincoln’s reply. “He will not walk dignifiedly through the traditional part of the President of America, but will pop out his head at each railroad station and make a little speech, and get into an argument with Squire A. and Judge B. He will write letters to Horace Greeley, and any editor or exporter or saucy party committee that writes to him, and cheapen himself. But this we must be ready for, and let the clown appear.”88 On this occasion, Emerson badly underestimated the president.
It is little wonder that William Seward chose this moment to forward to the White House a letter from a rural citizen named Edgar Cowan, who offered this assessment: “Certainly to-day nine tenths of the Republicans are groaning over the tyranny exercised upon the Country by the N.Y. Tribune and its suite, and are looking to the Administration for deliverance in some unmistakeable [sic] form, so as to break the thrall and allow the Country press to follow its bent in support of the President.” Lincoln surely found solace in Cowan’s reminder that “no greater mistake was ever made than to suppose the newspapers are correct indices of popular opinion.”89
Still striving for the upper hand, Greeley attempted to trump Lincoln one more time, fully armed now with James Gilmore’s gossip from the White House. The very morning Lincoln issued his “paramount object” message, the Tribune published an entirely different story under the headline: “From Washington. The Abolition of Slavery. Proclamation of Emancipation by the President.” Reporting that it had obtained the exclusive news “from so many sources that it can no longer be considered a state secret”—the unnamed sources of course being Gilmore and Walker—the Tribune announced: “Two or three weeks ago the President laid before his Cabinet a proclamation of Emancipation abolishing Slavery wherever in the 1st of next December the Rebellion should not be crushed.”90 Though the account muddled some of the details, including the date the order would take effect, it otherwise seemed the scoop of the century.91
As it turned out, Greeley had again overplayed his hand. Rather than attract the attention his editorial had generated, the national press ignored Greeley’s report amid the avalanche of conversati
on and commentary on Lincoln’s reply to the “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” In a typical accolade, the New York Times commented that Lincoln “could not have said anything more satisfactory to the country,” adding a slap at Greeley: “It is in infinitely better taste, too, than the rude epistle to which it is an answer.” Raymond directly charged his onetime employer with trying “to substitute his own conscience for Mr. Lincoln’s in the present National perplexity. The President not yet seeing the propriety of abdicating in behalf of our neighbor, consoles him with a letter that assures the country of abundant sanity in the White House.”92 Few papers took the Tribune’s emancipation exclusive seriously enough to republish it. Thus, as it turned out, Lincoln’s letter served as a response not alone to the editorial of the 18th, but also to the premature news flash of the 22nd. It is no wonder that Greeley, who did not print Lincoln’s “paramount object” letter until Monday the 25th, a day after the competition had done so, reportedly complained: “I can’t trust your ‘Honest Old Abe.’ He is too smart for me.”93
By August 26, even the more conservative Republican newspapers seemed to bow not only to the inevitability of emancipation, but, for all of their previously expressed reservations, the need for it. “When the proper moment shall arrive for such a step,” the Times editorialized, “we believe the President will take it, and we do not believe he will be coerced into taking it a single day sooner than his own judgment tells him, it can be taken with effect, and made instrumental in preserving the Union.”94 Meanwhile, the administration continued to send out signals that the proclamation awaited only some Union victory as a trigger. On August 27, the Chicago Tribune concluded “from the tenor” of Lincoln’s Greeley letter that “if the next battle in Virginia results in a decided victory for our army,” a proclamation “will be forthwith issued.”95
Just days later, however, General Pope suffered a crushing defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The secret of emancipation may have begun leaking out, but the moment for its announcement was lost. Bryant’s New York Evening Post lamented that it was “well known that the President had this proclamation ready some weeks” before and would have issued it sooner but for the latest “shameful” defeat at Manassas. The New York Times still hoped that when “the proper moment shall arrive for such a step, we believe the President will take it.” A leader less firmly committed to liberty might have retreated from his commitments and folded his tent as quickly as the whipped Army of the Potomac. By this time, however, even the increasingly anti-Republican New York World acknowledged that “Proclamation Mania” had overrun the North.96
Lincoln’s most mystifying effort to frame emancipation came a few weeks after the Second Bull Run catastrophe. On September 13, 1862, the president welcomed to the White House a three-man delegation of Christian ministers from Chicago. The clergymen had recently sent Lincoln an impassioned “memorial” urging “National Emancipation . . . without delay.”97 Having just learned that Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee had launched an invasion of Maryland, and that the Union army, restored to McClellan’s command, was now approaching a potentially epochal confrontation, Lincoln was perhaps off his guard, and certainly more desperate than ever for the elusive battlefield victory that could unleash freedom, even if he had no reason on earth to be confident of the coming encounter.
Speaking from an armchair while his visitors took notes—suggesting that he well knew that his comments would eventually be published—Lincoln began the meeting by expressing a desire to understand God’s will on emancipation, emphatically adding: “And if I can learn what it is, I will do it!” Then, conceding that slavery was at “the root of the rebellion” and that Southerners would have “been impotent without slavery as their instrument,” Lincoln let loose with an exasperated outburst: “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!”—a reference not to the recently humiliated General Pope, but to a fifteenth-century Roman Catholic pope named Calixtus III, author of a famously impotent order banning what was to become known as Halley’s Comet.98 James Welling later maintained that Lincoln had expressed all these comments with a “festive humor.”99
“Would my word free the slaves,” Lincoln continued in this vein, “when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?” Then he reiterated the substance of his Greeley letter: “Understand, I raise no objections against it on legal or constitutional grounds; for, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of the possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South. I view the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.” Reiterated the president: “Whatever shall appear to be God’s will I will do.”100
After an hour more of discussion, the Chicago ministers departed, assuring their host “that God would reveal the path of duty to the President.”101 Lincoln’s patient, complex effort to pave the way for public acceptance of emancipation ended rather anticlimactically. He had cited military necessity as the inspiration for any future action. He had emphasized—and exaggerated—his fading commitment to colonization. And now he had promised to seek divine guidance as his army took up positions to defend Maryland from Confederate invaders. Not surprisingly, the clergymen shared the story of their meeting as soon as they got home—in the press, of course—but their effort backfired, on Lincoln as much as themselves. The passage of time, fast-moving military developments, and slow-moving trains all conspired to render the ministers’ revelations superfluous, and moreover to make Lincoln appear strangely indecisive, when their report finally appeared in print. In the interval, on September 15, the New York Evening Post predicted: “When success shall again have crowned our arms, this important document may be confidently expected.”102
That long-awaited success finally came two days later, when Union and Confederate forces clashed at Antietam. In a delicious irony, it was that stubborn anti-emancipationist, George McClellan, who accomplished the victory Lincoln had entrusted to a higher power. McClellan eked out his bloody win on September 17, after which Confederate forces withdrew unmolested back into Virginia. It was victory enough. Announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation came five days later—following another historic cabinet meeting at which Lincoln made clear that this time he would brook no objections. If the Confederacy did not end its rebellion by January 1, the commander-in-chief would end slavery there forever. He had made a pact with his “Maker,” Lincoln gravely told his cabinet ministers, and God had “decided this question in favor of the slaves.”103
So accustomed had he become to administration leaks that Treasury Secretary Chase searched that afternoon’s newspapers for an early announcement of the proclamation, and pronounced himself “disappointed to find none.” This was one story Lincoln did not dare release prematurely. Readers in Chicago thus awoke the next morning to a truly discordant set of stories: those from both the president and the local ministers. Lincoln no doubt knew that the clerics would publish a report of their meeting, but could not know precisely when—just as he could not have predicted the timing or outcome of the approaching military clash in Maryland. As matters transpired, McClellan’s army prevailed while the ministers were making their way home. Although they quickly wrote up their report and submitted it to the Chicago Tribune, it became outdated the day it appeared. The Tribune published the clergymen’s “what good would a proclamation from me do?” account on September 23—the very same morning it announced the proclamation itself.104 Sometimes even Lincoln could not fully manage the press.
In his “peculiar, cautious, forbearing, and hesitating way,” Frederick Douglass nonetheless cheered when he first heard the news, this “
slow, but we hope sure” president had, “while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared . . . Thenceforward and forever free. . . . The careful, and we think, the slothful deliberation which he has observed in reaching this obvious policy, is a guarantee against retraction.”105 As a columnist for a West Coast–based African-American paper similarly realized, all of Lincoln’s preparatory statements, however unsatisfying or even offensive they seemed originally, now assumed clarity as part of a logical progression toward emancipation. It was evident “by close observation,” declared the Pacific Appeal, that “there could be seen a constant under-current in favor of freedom.”106 Frederick Douglass’s only complaint was that the proclamation gave Confederates a hundred days to abandon the rebellion before forfeiting their right to own slaves.
The mainstream Republican press rejoiced at the announcement. Typical was the reaction of Lincoln’s old hometown newspaper, the Illinois State Journal, which hailed the proclamation as second in historical importance only to the Declaration of Independence, noting: “True patriots of every name rally around the President.” A nervous Lincoln remained unsure that all of those “patriots” would now fight to free the slaves as well as to restore the Union. As he confided to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, “commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish . . . but breath alone kills no rebels.”107
His concerns proved justified. Onetime “War Democrats” who had supported the fight to restore “the Union as it was” protested vigorously, with Bennett, animated by warnings from his field correspondents that the order will “give us a Military Dictator,” charging that Lincoln had caved in to “our shrieking and howling abolition faction.” The reaction was even louder from Peace Democrats. The president’s longtime enemies at the Chicago Times denounced the proclamation as “an act of bad faith to every conservative man in the North . . . a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.” New York’s once-suppressed Day-Book demanded to know: “Shall the working classes be equalized with Negroes?” The London Times, whose support Lincoln coveted in hopes of heading off British diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy, charged that the “nefarious” president had done his best to “excite a servile war in the States he cannot occupy with his arms.” And the New York World, under new Democratic ownership, charged that the proclamation was unconstitutional, based on “that higher law—that is to say that open defiance of law—which has distinguished emancipation agitators from the beginning.” When Lincoln quietly issued another proclamation a few days later widening suspension of habeas corpus, editorial criticism from all parts of the divided country only intensified. “Not content with proclaiming all the negroes of the South free, and inviting them to engage in a war with their masters,” howled the Richmond Dispatch, “the ruler of Yankeedom has issued another proclamation declaring martial law throughout all that interesting region of the country. . . . Those who were once his fellow citizens, are now his timid and abject slaves.”108
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 54