Other soldiers made gestures to distance themselves from Democratic-leaning journals, especially those widely believed in the ranks to be disloyal. When in October 1862 a group of enlistees objected to an article posted in the American Volunteer, they broke into its Carlisle, Pennsylvania, headquarters, “injured the presses and threw the type into the streets.”24 During the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, a captain observed one of his men picking up an unexploded Confederate shell. After emptying it, he “put into it a copy of the New York Herald, when after plugging he fired back again to the enemy, where I presume it has been received and contents noted.”25 But the lively Herald also counted many admirers. For a time, Bennett’s men operated what amounted to newsstands at several army camps, selling papers to soldiers. No Northern paper reached more troops in the field. But none enjoyed greater confidence among the Union high command than the Tribune. When James Parton wrote to General Benjamin Butler in January 1865 scolding him because New Yorkers “were disappointed this morning in opening their Herald, Times, and Tribune, not to find therein your report of the Wilmington expedition,” and James White reminded Butler that he had “promised to send” his report “to the Tribune,” the general felt obliged to explain that the War Department had forbidden him to share the information. “I have done my duty,” he added.26
Correspondents of the New York Herald gather at a Union encampment beside their “N. Y. H. Headquarters” wagon. The Herald put more journalists in the field than any paper.
Shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg, two enterprising reporters, the brothers William Conant Church and Francis Pharcellus Church, both correspondents for the New York Times, moved to fill what they saw as a void. They established the weekly Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, a private venture despite its name, established “in obedience to an insistent demand for an official organ for members of the American Defense and those connected to it.” The Times soon acknowledged that the paper managed “to supply what hitherto we had been without—an organ devoted to the military and naval history and organizations of the United States”27—and one that reflected no obvious political orientation except support for the troops. Soldiers paid ten cents per copy or five dollars for an annual subscription. Major John Chipman Gray wrote to his friend John Codman Ropes that a recent Army and Navy Journal “résumé” of the hard Union fighting in Virginia “was really exceedingly well done and put some little order into the confusion of the daily newspapers.”28 So did the special newspapers issued for the behemoth Sanitary Fairs organized throughout the North to raise funds to support sick and wounded soldiers. Few of these extravaganzas lacked for their own daily publications.29 War, and even the suffering and charity it inspired, all proved good for the newspaper business.
Civilian papers would nonetheless play an especially significant role in camp during the election year of 1864. Soldiers followed the political campaign through their favorite papers, whenever available, and for good reason: for the first time, men in uniform were widely encouraged to return home on furlough to cast ballots, or alternatively to vote in the field. A new battle raged—this time between Democrats and Republicans in the ranks. In this atmosphere, former newspaperman McCalmont, now stationed in Pennsylvania, did nothing to hide his strong support for the Democrats. He stood firm, he boasted, even when a “Republican correspondent volunteered to give me a puff in a Philadelphia paper” in return for a ten-dollar loan.30
• • •
While soldiers on both sides yearned for news, Abraham Lincoln found a new way to shield himself from it: by largely abandoning his lifelong addiction to reading the papers every day. Copies of the latest editions were never far from his office or mind, but the harried president eventually began delegating the task of perusing them to his staff. He still might take a newspaper along to a photographer’s gallery to fill the long, empty moments between camera exposures. But he no longer read them routinely, cover to cover, day after day. And he no longer recited their stories aloud to anyone within earshot—as he had done so routinely, and to some, so irritatingly—during his days as a lawyer back in Illinois.
“After he gave up reading them,” testified White House clerk William Stoddard, “we had a daily brief made for him to look at, but at the end of a fortnight he had not once found time to glance at it, and we gave it up.”31
Unless major issues dominated the print conversation, Lincoln’s appetite for devouring the news abated. By 1864, he confided to a visitor that he could “find no time to read any papers.”32 His new, self-imposed insulation provided Lincoln with a way to distance himself from the press even as he increased his direct contact to its readers through his public letters—not to mention the regular office hours he maintained throughout the war in order to see ordinary Americans in person. “I call these receptions my ‘public-opinion baths,’ ” he told journalist Charles G. Halpine in 1863, “ . . . for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way.”33
“Heaps of newspapers” still continued to arrive at the White House every day, Stoddard remembered, complaining that “we have to buy the newspapers we really need and read, like other people, but a host of journals, all over the country, supply the White House gratis. Open them if you wish to learn how the course of human events, and of the President in particular, is really influenced. How very many of these sagacious editors have blue-and-redded their favorite editorials, and have underscored their most stinging paragraphs!”34
Unable to inspire a reaction to their columns, frustrated correspondents and their pro-administration editors often sought face-to-face private meetings with the president. “That is because they fear lest Mr. Lincoln may otherwise fail to be duly impressed,” Stoddard sneered. “He might even not see their points! His first complete failure was an attempt he made to watch the course of public opinion as expressed by the great dailies East and West.” In Stoddard’s view, it was no great loss; the editors had begun “dancing around the situation in such a manner that no man can follow them without getting too dizzy for regular work.”35 Ironically, Lincoln’s growing indifference brought him closer to Washington journalists, for it compelled them to seek him out and build their relationships with him.
One long-term guest who also took note of the president’s growing indifference to newspapers was the young New York artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who spent six months at the White House in 1864 working on his ambitious painting, The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Given the run of the mansion to make sketches, Carpenter enjoyed repeated opportunities to observe Lincoln and his staff as they conducted daily business. Carpenter could recall only a single occasion during all his time there when he noticed Lincoln “engaged in looking over the contents of a journal, which he had casually taken up.” Otherwise, Carpenter testified, “it might have dampened the patriotic ardor of many ambitious editors” had they known that their products were often “appropriated by the servants . . . and rarely, or never, reached the one they were preeminently intended to enlighten as to his duty and policy.”36
The painter did often spy newspapers strewn about “the Secretaries’ quarters.” These included Forney’s Philadelphia Press and its rival, the North American, as well as: Baltimore’s Sun and American; Boston’s Advertiser, Journal, and Transcript; the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Journal (but not the hostile Chicago Times); the Cincinnati Gazette and Commercial; the Missouri Republican and Missouri Democrat—for both of which John Hay contributed his occasional uncredited editorials—and no fewer than six newspapers from New York City: the Times, Tribune, Herald, World, Evening Post, and Independent.37 But only occasionally did a few titles make it into the president’s inner office. “The Washington dailies,—the ‘Chronicle,’ ‘Republican,’ and ‘Star,’—were usually laid on his desk,” the painter attested, “and I think he was in the habit of glancing at the telegraphic reports of these; but rarely beyond this. All war news of importance, of course, reach
ed him previous to its publication. He had, therefore, little occasion to consult newspapers on this account. The Private Secretaries . . . kept him informed of the principal subjects discussed editorially in the leading organs of the country.”38 Chief of staff John Nicolay corroborated this observation, admitting: “Excepting the Washington City Dailies, in which he carefully reads the telegraphic dispatches, the President rarely ever looks at any papers, simply for want of leisure to do so.”39
This did not inhibit longtime Lincoln ally Joseph Medill from writing testily to Nicolay after learning that the president “had not seen a copy of the Chicago Tribune for four months.” Bristled the editor: “If it miscarries we will have that corrected. If he does not want it—declines to read it—we will discontinue sending it.” Nicolay assured Medill that the paper continued to be “received very regularly, opened and kept with other papers on the newspaper table in my office [emphasis added],” noting, “it is very regularly examined by myself, and especially sought after by the Western men who happen here.” Rather than place the Tribune “under ban at the Executive Mansion,” Nicolay soothed Medill, Lincoln would be “very glad to receive it here so long as in your kindness you may please to send it”—that is, without charge.
But Lincoln’s secretary did not leave matters there—knowing that the president’s onetime official Chicago organ had recently fired off some cranky editorials about military conscription. “I can assure you of what you ought to be able to guess,” Nicolay added icily,
that the President’s task here is no child’s play. If you imagine that any man could attempt its performance, and escape adverse criticism, you have read history in vain, and studied human nature without profit. But was it not to be expected that those of the President’s friends, who knew him long and intimately—who understood his integrity and his devotion to the country and the cause entrusted to his charge—would at least abstain from judging him in the blindness of haste, and condemning him in the bitterness of ill-temper? . . . I desire to continue reading the Tribune—reserving only the privilege of finding as much fault with it as it finds with the Administration.40
Undeterred, Medill made his way to Washington together with a Chicago delegation to lodge his opposition to the draft in person. A “public-opinion bath” must have been in full swing the day the editor tried to gain entry to the White House, for Medill retreated back to his rooms at Willard’s hotel and peevishly wrote to Lincoln: “Not having either time or inclination to hang round waiting rooms among a wolfish crowd seeking admission to your presence for office contracts or personal favors, I prefer stating in writing the substance of what I would say verbally.”41 Notwithstanding the disobliging note, Lincoln summoned Medill and his delegation back to the mansion, where the reunion proved less than cordial. After the visitors tried making their case against conscription, Lincoln erupted at them: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. . . . Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when the cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.”42
Lincoln proved far more tolerant when it came to another longtime Illinois press supporter, Thomas Pickett, editor of the tiny Rock Island Register. Pickett’s early support for Lincoln’s presidential ambitions had been repaid with a plum, $700-per-year job as official agent for the local army quartermaster’s department—an increasingly popular patronage assignment for struggling editors eager to make some money off the war.43 But in March 1863, the town’s Democratic paper accused Pickett of using the job to line his own pockets through the inflated sale of timber and stone. Protesting his innocence, Pickett appealed to Nicolay to bring his case before the president, arguing: “Our republicans think it is a queer state of affairs if a copperhead editor, acting on his malicious feelings, can have the power to remove a loyal man from office.”44 Before Lincoln could review the matter, however, Pickett lost his position “without chance to be heard,” prompting a hurried telegram to the president himself. While the editor awaited word from the White House, he organized a petition campaign to Secretary of War Stanton. The flurry of letters had their desired effect. Lincoln intervened on April 20, writing to the Rock Island postmaster to ask that this “old acquaintance and friend of mine” be allowed to give testimony in his defense. Pickett eventually won his reinstatement.45
Boasting even closer personal and political ties to the president, William Bailhache of Lincoln’s old Springfield “organ,” the Illinois State Journal, believed himself entitled to similar vindication when he, too, came under attack at home. Early in the war, grateful for his years of support, Lincoln had named Bailhache assistant army quartermaster for Springfield with the rank of captain. But in May 1863, no fewer than thirteen hometown Republicans bombarded the president with complaints that Bailhache had proven corrupt. Included among the alerts was a letter from Lincoln’s longtime banker, Jacob Bunn, who had noticed Bailhache’s accounts bulging at a suspicious rate. By the end of the month, Lincoln wearily instructed the accusers to select a successor from among a list of other local Republicans. Transferred to a “subordinate position” in the field, an angry Bailhache urged his co-publisher, Edward Baker, to send Lincoln a “good strong remonstrance (or go & see him in person)” and tender his resignation from the service. He could not believe “Mr. Lincoln ever intended I should be thus used in order to please his ‘life-long friends.’ ”46
Baker indeed made the long journey to Washington, where he claimed that Lincoln expressed “the kindliest feelings” toward the ousted quartermaster. But Baker undoubtedly devoted most of his White House visit to arguing in behalf of an altogether different “victim”: his own father-in-law, Ninian Edwards, who was married to Mrs. Lincoln’s older sister. Despite familial ties, Edwards had recently lost his own army job as Springfield commissary of subsistence in the same purge that sank William Bailhache—in Edwards’s case, accused of helping Democrats to prosper from his contracts, a believable enough charge since he had supported Stephen Douglas in 1860. Making matters even more complicated was the fact that editor Baker had contracted with his father-in-law to supply the rations that Edwards, in turn, distributed to the army, allegedly at a profit. It was an arrangement that invited corruption. Baker’s visit did nothing to reduce the president’s displeasure, especially when, just hours after the editor’s departure, Lincoln discovered yet another letter from Springfield “renewing the pressure upon me” to resolve the dispute. Lincoln had heard enough. He told Baker: “The appeal to me in behalf of Mr. Edwards and Mr. Bailhasche [sic], for a hearing, does not meet the case.” The president still had no “reason to suspect” either man’s guilt, and doubted they would face formal charges. But his other old friends had been “harassing” him for two years “because of Mr. E. & Mr. B.” Though the president still thought they were “without dishonesty,” he believed they easily “could have saved me from this, if they had cared to do so.”47 Lincoln reassigned Ninian Edwards to Chicago, and kept Bailhache in limbo.
Two months later, many of these same neighbors invited the president to return to Springfield to address a giant Union rally in his old hometown. Lincoln ultimately decided that he could not spare the time to undertake the lengthy journey—and perhaps had no enthusiasm for visiting while Republican friends there remained at each other’s throats. Instead, he decided to craft another of his “public letters” to be read aloud in Springfield and circulated to the national press. But the Bailhache affair refused to go away.
Now back home in Springfield, Edward Baker wrote the president one more time to ask that Lincoln find his partner a commensurate quartermaster’s job elsewhere, noting, “I cannot believe you ‘intended’ to disgrace our mutual friend.” When no offer came by October, Bailhache’s wife sent the president a long letter of her own, demanding that her husband not only be restored to his old position, but actually promoted—to “show his enemies
that you still retain confidence in him.”48 William Bailhache received no promotion, and more troubles followed. To Edward Baker’s chagrin, a group the editor labeled “enemies and slanderers” now launched an additional “inquisition” into his own alleged skimming. Melodramatically citing “the memory of all the by-gone devotion and persevering friendship I have ever shown him (when devotion and friendship were valuable to him),” Baker asked former senator Orville Browning to intervene with Lincoln to save him from “disgrace.”49 As far as the president was concerned, however, the case was closed.
More obscure editors with less call on Lincoln’s loyalty continued to bring their own views to the president’s attention, even if they had to resort to writing self-promoting introductory letters to gain an audience. Stoddard maintained that these desperate overtures seemed more an effort to impress Lincoln than to influence policy, and that, in any event, their missives seldom aroused any interest. Editorial criticism, often scathing, poured in unabated, but for the most part Lincoln increasingly let the attacks roll off his back. Ward Hill Lamon noted that “Mr. Lincoln persistently declined to read the harsh comments of the newspaper press.” On one occasion, the president made a point of quoting Daniel Webster to suggest that he had grown a thicker skin. As Lincoln declared of his newspaper detractors on that occasion, “we can afford to pass them by with the dying words of the Massachusetts statesman, ‘we still live.’ ” Then he added: “I am sure they don’t worry me any, and I reckon they don’t benefit the parties who write them.”50 Frank Carpenter seconded this sentiment, testifying: “Violent criticism, attacks, and denunciations, coming either from radicals or conservatives, rarely ruffled the President.”51
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