Lincoln had hoped that emancipation would unleash “a stampede of ‘loyal blacks’ deserting their rebel masters,” the Washington Intelligencer reported, but no doubt spoke with authority when it conceded: “We have reason to know that his own faith is weak on this point.”109 The New York World was even blunter. “Massa Greeley,” it chortled a month after the preliminary proclamation was made public, “where’s your nine hundred thousand warriors?”110 Lincoln must have been sorely tempted when his former press partner Theodore Canisius wrote from his desk at the Viennese consulate to recommend “General Baron Lenk”—the “most prominent artillery officer of the Austrian army,” according to the former Springfield editor—who now wished to volunteer his services to the Union cause. “Men like the General we ought not to refuse,” wrote Canisius. Ultimately, Seward talked Lincoln out of offering a commission to someone “from abroad.” The president would have to wait patiently for his African-American “warriors” after all.111
• • •
If Lincoln’s faith in the public response to emancipation weakened during the summer of 1862, it nearly evaporated altogether that autumn. Election season ignited a popular revolt against the president, the proclamation, and the Republicans, just as Montgomery Blair had prophesied. To be sure, political parties in power customarily lost congressional seats in off-year canvasses, but considering that the North was committed to a fight to save the Union itself, and that voters in Confederate states did not even participate, the results proved as surprising as they were discouraging. Not that savvy observers like Bennett failed to prophesy what he called “a glorious triumph . . . over our radical abolition disorganizers.” As New York City voters headed to the polls in November, Bennett confidently invited Horace Greeley to a “fete competre,” requiring only that his rival “be mum on the nigger question and make his appearance in neat and clean apparel.” Once the results became clear, Bennett hailed the “Conservative Revolution” as a “rebuke” to Lincoln.112
When all the votes were counted, twenty-two Republican House incumbents lost their seats—even the speaker. The total Democratic gain, including pickups in formerly independent districts, amounted to twenty-eight. The Republicans retained control of the House and preserved their majority in the Senate, but surrendered the governorships of New Jersey and New York as well as state legislative majorities in Indiana and Pennsylvania. The next House delegation from Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, once 5–4 Democratic but enlarged in accordance with population growth, would now tilt Democratic by a margin of 9–5. The president’s friend Orville Browning lost his Senate seat, and even Lincoln’s own home congressional district elected a Democrat to his onetime seat in the House of Representatives. It was a thorough drubbing, and while Lincoln was willing to accept responsibility, he believed there was blame enough to share—particularly with the press.
Admitting that “the ill-success of the war had much to do” with the Democratic comeback, a disappointed Lincoln also believed, “Our newspaper’s [sic], by vilifying and disparaging the administration, furnished them all the weapons to do it with.”113 Left unsaid was an extraordinary implication: Lincoln and his party had done nothing to discourage free expression during the off-year elections. Newspaper shutdowns had decreased, and press criticism widened, unchecked by censorship. A commander-in-chief in time of rebellion had not only allowed popular elections to proceed as scheduled, remarkable in and of itself, but had permitted the uninhibited resumption of a partisan war of words in the country’s press.
In the newspaper capital of the nation, earlier the scene of newspaper suppression on an unprecedented scale, New York Democrat Horatio Seymour, now governor-elect, had campaigned openly on an antiwar platform. Seymour’s victory not only embarrassed Lincoln in a state he had won two years earlier, it automatically transformed the new governor into a viable challenger in the 1864 presidential contest. (After the vote, Lincoln dispatched Thurlow Weed to caution Seymour that no national candidate could ever succeed in the loyal states without demonstrating a thorough devotion to the Union.) In Henry Raymond’s opinion, Seymour remained a man “trusted by traitors.”114
Horace Greeley, convinced that Democrats had triumphed in the off-year elections because so many thousands of Republican-leaning New York soldiers were away at the front, unable to cast ballots, for once agreed with the Times: “That all Seymourites are disloyal, we never said nor believed,” he editorialized. “That the disloyal are nearly or quite all Seymourites, we do know.” Then Greeley warned the president that “the Country cannot endure another month’s inaction in our Armies.” The war for the Union, he insisted, “must be fought out speedily and resolutely or it will die out. Defeat will be a calamity, but delay is ruin.”115 This time Lincoln sent Greeley no reply. But in a breathtaking show of nerve, especially in the wake of so strong an electoral rebuke, the president fired George McClellan and replaced him with General Ambrose E. Burnside.
Henry Raymond shared his own post-election analysis with Lincoln on November 25, offering shrewd advice on how best to craft the January 1 final Emancipation Proclamation so as to alarm as few conservatives as possible. It should, Raymond maintained—almost as if he had been reading Lincoln’s mind—be couched as “a military weapon purely & exclusively.” Any attempt “to make this war subservient to the sweeping abolition of Slavery,” he warned, “will revolt the Border States, revolt the North and West, invigorate and make triumphant the opposition party, and thus defeat itself and destroy the Union.” An emphasis on military necessity, on the other hand, would prevent “cavils on points of legality and constitutionality,” stay “the public odium and dissension inevitable in a more sweeping and less guarded movement,” and “free just as many slaves and thus attain the same practical results” as a decree designed for “those who deem the mode of more importance than the result itself”—meaning reformers like Greeley.116
Whether Raymond genuinely influenced Lincoln, or merely echoed the president’s own inclination to proceed just as the editor advised, remains difficult to ascertain. All Lincoln promised Raymond in his acknowledgment of December 7 was to “consider and remember your suggestions.” But when he began composing his final proclamation, this supremely talented writer in fact suppressed his proven gift for lofty expression. Instead, he created a dry, legalistic document that one liberal European newspaperman dismissively likened to “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer.” The journalist’s name was Karl Marx.117
• • •
No one leaked the Annual Message to Congress that Lincoln sent to Capitol Hill on the first of December 1862—but not for want of trying. Lincoln always “acted on the fear that his annual messages might, if supplied to the press, find their way into print in advance of delivery,” remembered the AP’s Lawrence Gobright.118 This time, however, no Wikoffs lurked in the White House library to dispatch a premature text to James Gordon Bennett or anyone else.
The morning of its scheduled release, Gobright did hasten a note to presidential secretary John Nicolay, who was slated to carry the message to Capitol Hill for John Wein Forney to read aloud to the Senate. The Associated Press manager did not want Forney to enjoy both that privilege and an exclusive, too. “I will be on the lookout for you at the door of the Senate, after you shall have delivered the Message to Congress,” Gobright scrawled. “Please have two copies for me in the envelope, for the better convenience of transmission.”119
Forney, who had already asked Lincoln to extend him a similar courtesy, wrote the White House the same morning to vow that he would not only “do justice to the message in reading,” but expected that his paper, rather than the Associated Press, would secure earliest access to the text. His Washington Chronicle was now a daily—just as Lincoln had strongly urged—and as a devoted administration mouthpiece, Forney now believed he should always be the first to publish the president’s words. He, too, asked Nicolay to hand over a copy of the Annual Message, promising, “it shal
l see no mortal eye but mine.”120
On this occasion, no doubt recalling the humiliating scandal of the previous December, Lincoln kept his message a closely guarded secret. Even so, Forney’s absolute loyalty did not crack. A few days later he instructed his editor John Russell Young to run an “Occasional” item supporting the message’s renewed call for Border State compensated emancipation, hinting that its “facts were furnished from the highest authority.” If it came from Lincoln himself, it was not the first or last time the president had authored an anonymous piece for Forney.121
“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history,” Lincoln declared in that annual message, defending both emancipation—scheduled to take effect in a month—and his stubborn plans to promote gradual abolition in the loyal slave states and voluntary colonization for free African Americans. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”122
Lincoln was far too battle-scarred to expect the entire newspaper world to bless even one of his finer (if most schizophrenic) literary achievements, devoted both to embracing freedom and ridding the country of those freed. In the end, Republican newspapers praised the message (the Times hailing it as “concise, clear, and perspicuous,” and Greeley pitching in with reservations only about Lincoln’s compensation plan). To no one’s surprise, Democratic journals assailed it. The reaction in the African-American press was generally negative as well. “As free colored men, we thank Mr. Lincoln for nothing,” bristled the Weekly Anglo African, “when he asks Congress to provide the expatriation of such of us as may be desirous to leave the country. We are decidedly of the opinion that we will stay.” The always unpredictable Bennett was critical for other reasons. “We have always admired the President as a joker,” he taunted, “but we never imagined that he could so aptly blend exquisite humor and practical common sense in an official document.” Worst of all, Bennett reported “no public curiosity” over Lincoln’s words. Instead, he noted “a prevailing anxiety to hear the latest news from the army.”123
That news came less than two weeks later, and it proved disastrous. The African-American weekly Pacific Appeal had ushered in the final month of 1862 by expressing the hope that Lincoln would “not yield to pro-slavery pressure, by the modification or withdrawal of his great mandate for emancipation” no matter what happened on the battlefield. But when Union forces under Burnside suffered a devastating battlefield defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, at a cost of more than twelve thousand casualties, no editor, black or white—indeed no American in any profession—remained altogether sure that Lincoln retained the power or conviction to make his proclamation final. The staggering loss had an air of farce to it: correspondents who staggered back to Washington in its aftermath were forbidden for a time from reporting it. “The rule was,” Lawrence Gobright bitterly commented, “we must not let the enemy know what was taking place, as if the enemy did not already know he had fought a battle.”124
As New Year’s Day—the deadline for final emancipation—approached, the only thing certain was that the competition for news—especially now that it involved the biggest story of the century—would proceed as usual. “The New York Editors are anxious, if possible, that your Proclamation, if ready, may be telegraphed to the Associated Press this afternoon or evening,” Indiana congressman Schuyler Colfax nagged Lincoln on December 31, “so that they can have it in their New Year’s morning newspapers with Ed[itoria]l. articles on it.” Colfax, a faithful Lincoln supporter who at the age of sixteen had begun contributing what Greeley had called “invaluable” antislavery articles to the Tribune, was in line to become the next House speaker, so his advice mattered. “You are aware,” he pointed out to the president, “that, as no papers are printed throughout the land the morning of New Year’s, if this is not done, it will not be published in any morning paper till Jan 3rd, robbing it of its New Year’s character.”125
Lincoln considered the request—even pondered sending an advance text to James Gordon Bennett as well. “It is important to humor the Herald,” he advised Nicolay. “Is there any objection to [correspondent Simon] Hanscoms [sic] telegraphing the proclamation?” In the end, however, neither the Associated Press nor the New York papers earned an advantage, not even Greeley or Raymond, each of whom believed he merited the exclusive in return for years of antislavery advocacy. Instead, late on New Year’s Eve, the editors received a disappointing alert from Nicolay: “The Proclamation cannot be telegraphed to you until during the day tomorrow.”126
By then Lincoln undoubtedly had come to the realization that his order ultimately would generate a response well beyond the realm of mere news reporting. For the first time in his life, he looked beyond ephemeral journalism to validate his place in history—although it did take a journalist to help him see the light. On December 30, John Wein Forney sent Philadelphia portrait painter Edward Dalton Marchant to the White House armed with the editor’s personal introduction. Marchant, Forney’s letter revealed, had been “empowered by a large body of your personal and political friends to paint your picture for the Hall of American Independence. . . . There is no likeness of you at Independence Hall. It should be there.”127
As it turned out, Forney was the only newspaperman whose advice Lincoln took to heart in those fraught hours leading up to final emancipation. At the editor’s well-timed recommendation, Marchant began three full months of work inside the White House creating a romanticized portrait of Lincoln signing the proclamation with a feathered quill such as the founding fathers might have used to approve the first Declaration of Independence. In the background of the canvas, the chains on a statue of “Liberty” were portrayed as symbolically shattering.128
Here was the kind of heroic interpretation that Bennett, Raymond, and Greeley, even at their most flattering, could never have provided.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sitting on a Volcano
As the clock ticked down toward the midnight hour for freedom, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet ascended the pulpit at New York’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church to lead a New Year’s Eve worship service—what the Times called “a grand jubilee” for “the colored people of this City . . . in anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation.”1 Garnet planned for his congregation to pray together until word arrived from Washington that Lincoln had indeed signed the final document. None of his parishioners could doubt that, on this historic night, the abolitionist preacher, born a slave, deserved at least some of the credit for the momentous decree now at hand.
Yet toward the end of the emotional service, Garnet generously made clear that he believed that credit should be shared—with a crusading white journalist who had also opposed slavery for a generation. When Garnet spied a pale, white-whiskered man shambling down the church aisle, he interrupted his sermon to announce that a true abolitionist hero had just entered the house of worship—someone who had “done more to destroy the vile institution of Slavery than any man in the country. . . . I allude to Hon. Horace Greeley.” The congregation rose and began to cheer and chant Greeley’s name.
But then Garnet noticed that the new arrival was applauding as well. The minister motioned for quiet, then admitted: “A gentleman right here before me looked so much like Mr. Greeley that I thought it was him, but when I mentioned Mr. Greeley’s name, he clapped as hard as the rest, and then I saw my mistake.”2 Garnet laughed, and his congregants joined in the merriment. “Nobody would be ashamed to look like him,” the minister offered. To which a voice from the pews called out: “Some of the most eminent writers have called Mr. Greeley handsome”—followed by more laughter.3 It was not so much that Greeley was not inside Shiloh Church that night. It was the fact that his attendance would have surprised no one. For all hi
s personal peculiarities and inconsistencies on secondary issues, the Tribune editor had never wavered in his fight against slavery. Had Greeley joined this or any other “midnight hour” worship service on the eve of emancipation, he would have been welcomed as a hero.
As it happened, Lincoln did not sign the final proclamation until the following afternoon. In Washington, Bishop H. M. Turner had fortuitously scheduled his own worship service for the evening of January 1. Well before sunset, parishioners filled every last seat at his Israel African Methodist Church. Turner was astounded when an overflow crowd packed into the churchyard outside, oblivious to the winter cold. Then the bishop had an inspired idea. Remembering that he had witnessed an emotional public reading of the preliminary proclamation back in September, he determined to obtain a copy of the final decree and recite it to his congregation. Turner knew exactly where to secure one: from the nearest evening newspaper office. So began his dramatic quest:
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 55