Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  Charge of the Police at the “Tribune” Office: Harper’s Weekly depicts New York draft rioters threatening Greeley’s headquarters, portraying the attackers as Irish thugs.

  Soon after the riots, Greeley emissary James Gilmore spent three hours at the White House trying to convince Lincoln that Horatio Seymour had seditiously plotted the entire outbreak. He did not want the Democratic governor to escape unscathed. Sounding much like his Tribune benefactor, Gilmore proposed a patronage-oriented solution to get to the bottom of things: why not appoint his future father-in-law as a special investigator? Lincoln demurred. Having conspicuously withheld military assistance for days, he would continue leaving the matter to local authorities. “You have heard of sitting on a volcano,” the president explained. “We are sitting upon two. One is blazing away already, and the other will blaze away the moment we scrape a little loose dirt from the top of the crater. Better let the dirt alone, at least for the present. One rebellion at a time is about as much as we can conveniently handle.”133

  • • •

  With his dramatic letters of 1862 and 1863—ostensibly to Horace Greeley and Erastus Corning, but also strategically released to the newspapers to reach far wider audiences—Lincoln in some ways wrote the big three New York editors out of the equation when it came to molding public opinion. At the very least, he reduced the editors’ influence. In doing so, he revolutionized the art of presidential communications. Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett may have continued commenting on Lincoln’s statements, but when the president spoke out in print, their own editorials often seemed more like sidebars. Lincoln had come to realize that he could control “public sentiment” best by bypassing the editors and going directly to their readers. Rather than resume making time-consuming public speeches, he transformed the so-called public letter into a weapon of mass communication.134

  One opportunity to speak in person, however, proved irresistible. In late summer, the citizens of Gettysburg, burdened with the horrific task of burying the thousands of dead who fell during the July 1–3 battle, had devised an ambitious plan to create a National Soldiers’ cemetery not far from the scene of some of the worst of the second day’s fighting. Now they were ready for the official dedication. Organizers did not ask the president to deliver the principal oration, however. That honor went to the venerable Edward Everett, whose landmark 1861 defense of press suppression no doubt remained fresh in Lincoln’s mind.

  “A few appropriate remarks” were all that Gettysburg officials wanted from the president, since Everett was to be the main attraction.135 But the stubborn legend which holds that Lincoln sloughed off the opportunity, or left preparation of the speech to the last minute—perhaps even scribbled it on the train ride to Pennsylvania—is unsupported by the facts. Perhaps aware that creating a short address required even more effort than crafting a long one, Lincoln went to work on his talk in early November.

  He knew precisely how to begin it. Four days after the battle ended, he had spoken extemporaneously to serenaders gathered to rejoice over the victory on the White House lawn. “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years,” he had begun, “since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” The following morning, those rambling words appeared in all three New York dailies—the Times, Tribune, and Herald—and Lincoln may have blanched when he read them. But the thought behind them was valid. He resolved to express it more felicitously. Eventually it came into sharper focus in Lincoln’s exordium: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For his closing, Lincoln might have remembered Samuel Wilkeson’s elegiac post-battle obituary to his fallen son, whose blood, he had written, “baptized . . . the second birth of Freedom in America.” In the president’s deft hands, the nation would now be dedicated to “a new birth of freedom.” Lincoln had lost neither his prodigious memory for press reports nor his abundant gift for rewriting.136

  On Sunday, November 8, Lincoln headed to Alexander Gardner’s Washington photography gallery to pose for a new suite of portraits. The Gettysburg dedication was only eleven days away, and the event was likely very much on the president’s mind. Had the president written his own speech yet? wondered Sacramento Bee correspondent Noah Brooks, who claimed he accompanied Lincoln to Gardner’s that day. Yes, came the reply, “but not yet finished.” His draft was brief—“or, as he emphatically expressed it, ‘short, short, short.’ ”137 Atop the small table at which he sat for the cameras, at least according to Brooks, lay an envelope supposedly containing an early printing of Everett’s remarks, thoughtfully dispatched by the famous orator so Lincoln might avoid topics that would be covered in the main address. Whatever its contents, Lincoln did not open the envelope he brought to the gallery that day; the Gardner sitting ended too quickly. But the package can be seen in several of the resulting photographs, lying on the draped table at his side, not far from Lincoln’s massive right hand. Gardner’s studio had not always been so efficient. At a visit to inaugurate the enterprise three months earlier, Lincoln had enough waiting time between poses to unfold and read the latest edition of the Morning Chronicle. Sharp-eyed Lincoln admirers who obtained copies of that day’s mass-produced portraits would have easily been able to identify the paper’s logo on one pose in particular (and perhaps even spot the horsefly clinging to the president’s trousers).138

  Lincoln embarked for Gettysburg the day before the November 19 ceremony, along with a retinue of civil and military celebrities larger than any that had accompanied him since his inaugural journey. Among the passengers were John Nicolay and John Hay, who made sure that a corps of supportive reporters joined the traveling party. When he arrived in the village, Lincoln retired to the private home of David Wills, the local judge who had invited him to the event, determined to use whatever time he had left to revise his remarks. Meanwhile, his two secretaries headed over to visit John Wein Forney, also in town for the dedication, “and drank a little whiskey with him.” As Hay observed: “He had been drinking a good deal during the day and was getting to feel a little ugly and dangerous,” particularly on the subject of Montgomery Blair, whom he wanted fired from the cabinet. Forney’s managing editor, John Russell Young, soon joined the group. Forney was still “growling about Blair” when the president stepped outside of the nearby Wills house to pronounce “half a dozen words meaning nothing” to a knot of well-wishers. The response was unenthusiastic and Lincoln withdrew to return to his work upstairs.139

  Horace Greeley studies his own New York Tribune in a photograph taken in 1863. By this time both Lincoln and Greeley—each once noted for eccentric garb—dressed with fashionable dignity.

  The celebrants were growing tipsier and louder by the minute. Nicolay now devilishly proposed that Forney deliver an oration of his own, and searched for a band to serenade him and some reporters to write down his words. “He still growled quietly and I thought he was going to do something imprudent,” Hay recorded in his diary. Forney mumbled, “if I speak, I will speak my mind,” and asked that congenial “recorders” be on hand to transcribe what he said.

  Forney’s Gettysburg address commenced a few minutes later, after the editor took another swallow of liquor and the knot of “recorders” summoned to the scene squatted expectantly in an entryway, writing tablets at the ready. Forney was by now in a foul mood. “My friends,” he began, to a round of applause, “these are the first hearty cheers I have heard tonight. You gave no such cheers to your President down the street. Do you know what you owe to that Great man? You owe your country—you owe your name as American citizens.” In a way, Forney was making sense, even if he was slurring his words. “He went on blackguarding the crowd,” Hay recalled, denouncing pro-slavery Democrats, then resuming his paean to Lincoln, “that great, wonderful mysterious inexplicable man; who hold
s in his single hands the reins of the republic; who keeps his own counsels; who does his own purpose in his own way no matter what temporizing minister in his cabinet sets himself up in opposition to the progress of the age.”

  On and on Forney went, until finally he ran out of steam. “That speech must not be written out yet,” John Russell Young nervously instructed the “recorders.” “He will see further about it, when he gets sober.” (The Associated Press devoted a few lines to the address anyway.) The party then launched into a loud rendition of “John Brown’s Body” and retired for the night, while inside the Wills house on the town square, the object of Forney’s adulation continued laboring over the two pages of manuscript he was trying to massage into an elegy. No one knows whether Lincoln went to bed that night. The unrelenting noise from drunken revelers thronging the streets must have made it difficult, even impossible, to sleep.

  Nor is anyone certain whether Forney managed to get himself to the cemetery the following day for the ceremonies, or if he did, whether a massive hangover clouded any reliable observations about the president’s performance. Fortunately, a large contingent of journalists from all over the country assembled near the speaker’s platform, and John Hay himself took notes and ultimately provided Forney with a superb report of the ceremony.140 None of the reporters attempted to record Edward Everett’s two-hour-long oration, for the great man had supplied it to the newspapers in advance. All the correspondents needed to do was watch in awe as he intoned the entire marathon speech from memory.

  Long practice had taught Lincoln that while his piercing voice could carry only a few hundred feet, newspapers could spread his words to the entire country. When his turn finally came, the reporters were ready—or were they? Disagreement broke out later about whether Lincoln, too, spoke without notes, or whether, as others recalled, he removed his manuscript from his breast pocket and began reading from it. Or perhaps he grasped the sheets but spoke without referring to them at all? Whatever the case, the skilled orator may (or may not) have failed to arouse an audience exhausted by Everett’s stem-winding lecture. Just two minutes after he began, Lincoln resumed his seat—to silence, applause, an ovation? Reports differed on that point, too. A startled John Russell Young, who had been distracted by the desperate efforts of a photographer trying to arrange his camera in front of the platform—he never managed to take the president’s picture—realized he had failed to make a shorthand record. From the second row of press benches, he blurted out to Lincoln in an audible voice to ask “if that was all.” The president glanced at Young and answered: “Yes, for the present.”141

  Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon, who served as master of ceremonies for the event, later complained that both the audience and the press corps failed to appreciate Lincoln’s masterpiece. “The marvelous perfection, the intrinsic excellence of the Gettysburg speech as a masterpiece of English composition,” he maintained, “seem to have escaped the scrutiny of even the most scholarly critics of that day, on this side of the Atlantic.” Lamon contended that “the discovery was made . . . by distinguished writers on the other side,” particularly the London Spectator, Saturday Review, and Edinburgh Review—all of which in fact did not extol the address until long after pro-administration domestic papers did.142 In fact, no one did more to create the myth of Lincoln’s “flat failure” at Gettysburg—the president’s own words, at least according to Lamon—than the irrepressible marshal of the District of Columbia. “The speech will not scour,” a distressed Lincoln allegedly told his old friend after he spoke. Lamon agreed: the address “fell on the vast audience like a wet blanket.”143

  Again, the facts speak otherwise. No one will ever settle the debate over whether Lincoln’s most famous speech was rhapsodically or indifferently received. But we at least know for certain that when he concluded, the president made certain that Joseph Ignatius Gilbert, the lucky young Harrisburg reporter hired for the day to cover the event for the Associated Press, got to examine the president’s handwritten manuscript to check it against his shorthand transcription. Gilbert later admitted that, standing directly below the platform, he had become so fascinated by Lincoln’s “intense earnestness” that he had “unconsciously stopped taking notes” just as Lincoln “glanced up from his manuscript with a faraway look in his eyes as if appealing from the few thousands below him to the countless millions whom his words were to reach.”144 As a result, Gilbert desperately needed to check his imperfect shorthand record against the president’s copy.

  Lincoln readily complied, knowing that most papers around the country would pick up Gilbert’s report. The AP stringer then inserted the word “Applause” wherever he had heard the crowd clapping. At the end he wrote: “Long continued applause.” By Gilbert’s original account, the crowd had interrupted the speech to clap hands six times, though he later recalled that Lincoln earned “no outward manifestations of feeling.” As Gilbert explained it in 1917: “His theme did not invite holiday applause, a cemetery was not the place for it, and he did not pause to receive it.” Aside from this incongruity, Gilbert’s shorthand account also suffered from several errors. The phrase “unfinished work” came out as “refinished work,” “government” of, by, and for the people, as “Governments.”145 As a consequence, many newspapers throughout the country garbled their reprints as well—even though stenographers enjoyed “an excellent light” aboard the presidential special returning them to Washington, “around which,” John Hay observed, “busy as bees, they compared notes and transcribed their phonographic reports for the papers for which they were laboring.”146

  Joseph Ignatius Gilbert, the young Associated Press reporter who transcribed Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

  Editorial commentary varied, too, but it would be a mistake to accept Lamon’s assertion that it took the foreign press belatedly to remind readers (and Lincoln) of the greatness of the Gettysburg Address. For one thing, the London Times, not surprisingly, lambasted the speech, charging that the “imposing ceremony” at Gettysburg was “made ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”147 In actuality, domestic press reaction to Gettysburg broke quickly—and, as most reports of the day invariably did—strictly along party lines. Republican papers extolled Lincoln’s address enthusiastically, while Democratic papers—perhaps sensing that the speech represented the opening salvo in a forthcoming campaign for a second term—criticized it mercilessly. Thus the Chicago Times asserted: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.” But readers of the pro-administration Chicago Tribune read the contrary prediction: “The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of the war.”148 Just a few days earlier, the Gettysburg master of ceremonies, Ward Hill Lamon, had visited the White House to read aloud “a slip from the Chicago Tribune in which they very strongly advocate A. L. for his own successor.” That politics was in the air as the ceremony neared was confirmed when Lamon pronounced the laudatory post-Gettysburg editorial “an utterance . . . stimulated by the prospect of a new Administration paper being started in Chicago pledged against grumbling.”149

  Of course, Forney’s Philadelphia Press hailed Lincoln’s effort as an “immortal speech.” But in Ohio, the battered Columbus Crisis mocked Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, and for the people” coda, reminding readers still mourning Clement Vallandigham’s recent political defeat that government power belonged to states, not presidents.150 Few Confederate papers bothered to acknowledge Lincoln’s speech at all; an exception was the Richmond Enquirer, which reported that his hosts had limited the president to a “small compass, lest he should tell some funny story over the graves of the Immortals.”151

  Most remarkably of all, none of New York’s big three—the Times, Herald, or Tribune—bothered to assess Lincoln’s remarks. Instead, while they lavished considerable space on reporting
the ceremonies, and dutifully printed Lincoln’s brief speech in full, they focused far more attention on Everett’s keynote, relegating the presidential address to the status of a footnote. The highest compliment the Times paid to Lincoln was to paraphrase his speech as if to excuse its lack of attention to it, noting that all the Gettysburg orators “seem to have considered, with President Lincoln, that it was not what was said here, but what was done here, that deserved their attention.” The Gettysburg Address was the biggest Civil War story Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett missed.152

  By one account, at least as measured in column inches, Republican papers devoted five times more space to Lincoln’s Gettysburg remarks than did their Democratic counterparts.153 If Edward Everett dominated the next day’s press coverage nearly everywhere, it was because the wily old orator, past his prime or not, had planned things so well. Still, this was one instance when the first draft of history deserved and received major revision. Everett himself generously told Lincoln afterward that he wished he had come “as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”154 Not even the well-practiced tradition of feeding advance information to the press could diminish Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or add luster to Everett’s. Lincoln’s greatest speech may not have evolved into national “gospel,” as historian Gabor Boritt has pointed out, until the early twentieth century.155 But most Republicans who read accounts of the address in 1863 understood that their president had triumphed, even if the New York press remained strangely oblivious.