The World has “been ungagged,” diarist George Templeton Strong commented, and “vomits acid bile most copiously . . . full of protest and fury . . . suggesting, inter alia, a parallel between Uncle Abe Lincoln and Charles the First! One might as well compare dirty little penny-a-lining Marble with Catiline.” Strong wondered: “Will this most novel suggestion tempt Honest Old Abe to cultivate a peaked beard and long curls and to extend his shirt collar into a wide area of ornamental lace?”128 Republican papers, divided over the original suppression order, now united to condemn Marble’s “impudent” letter to the president.
Marble left no doubt that he believed the suppression of the World was politically motivated. “Had the Tribune and Times published the forgery,” he demanded of the president, “(and the Tribune candidly admits that it might have published it and was prevented only by mere chance) would you, sir, have suppressed the Tribune and Times as you suppressed THE WORLD and Journal of Commerce? You know you would not.” Marble insisted that Governor Seymour prosecute Dix and all the officers who had acted against him, a course of action that posed the threat of a constitutional crisis. Seymour obliged by ordering New York district attorney “Elegant” Oakey Hall, himself a onetime newspaperman, to launch an inquiry. A grand jury convened, but in June refused to indict.129 Reluctant to drop the matter, the governor pressured Hall to issue a warrant for Dix’s arrest. The case was heard before City Court Judge A. D. Russell—although at Lincoln’s instructions Dix refused to appear: he was “not to relieve himself of his command or be deprived of his liberty for obeying an order of a military nature which the President of the United States directs him to execute.” Not until July did the district attorney give up and drop the charges.130
Still the imbroglio refused to die. Unlike Marble and Prime, the real culprits, Joseph Howard and a cohort, Brooklyn Eagle reporter Francis Mallison, did end up at Fort Lafayette, and languished in confinement there for months. Not until August did Henry Ward Beecher, an old friend of the Howard family, ask for mercy, offering Public Printer John Defrees the lame excuse that “Joe” had been “the tool” of a “man who turned states evidence and escaped.” Defrees forwarded Beecher’s plea to Lincoln, who three weeks later instructed Stanton: “I very much wish to oblige Henry Ward Beecher, by releasing Howard; but I wish you to be satisfied when it is done—What say you?” Stanton replied, “I have no objection if you think it right—and this a proper time.” The president issued an order freeing the reporter on August 23: “Let Howard, imprisoned in regard to the bogus proclamation, be discharged.”131
Joseph Howard, Jr., of the Brooklyn Eagle forged the counterfeit presidential proclamation in 1864 and ended up in Fort Lafayette. Three years earlier, the same reporter had invented the story that President-elect Lincoln had sneaked through Baltimore in disguise.
Defrees then urged Lincoln to release Mallison as well, pointing out that since he was a Democrat (Howard was actually a Republican), the latter’s parole was “being used to shew that the President uses his power for party friends.”132 In this case it took a remorseful letter from Howard himself—admitting that Mallison had been “comparatively subordinate in the affair” and assuring Lincoln of “sincere regret at my folly”—to earn presidential clemency. It helped that the chastened Howard, too, believed “that certain ‘Democratic’ stumpers are making a handle of his continued confinement, taking the absurd ground that he is held on account of his Democratic affiliation.” On September 20, Lincoln ordered Stanton: “Let Mallison, the bogus proclamation man, be discharged.”133
Yet Lincoln never stooped to explain, much less apologize for, the arrests and shutdowns in New York—or, as Marble put it, to “confess and repair your mistake” and “make reparation for the wrong you have done.”134 In fact, the evidence suggests that the president not only tolerated, but perhaps encouraged, a far wider crackdown at the time, believing the forged proclamation to be a much more dangerous hoax than he ever publicly admitted. For the very night before the World published Howard’s forgery, the president had been working on an authentic proclamation that indeed called for more troops—300,000 more, to be precise—by either enlistment or conscription.135 The sudden appearance of the Howard forgery unleashed panic within the White House and among the cabinet: fear that someone may have leaked a genuine proclamation, and one for which Lincoln had not yet laid the needed political and press groundwork. James Gilmore was told that while the World announcement was “a fabrication,” Lincoln “had decided to call for 300,000 in July, but not before.” Now he had good reason to fear that what appeared to be its premature leak might incite another deadly anti-draft riot in New York—worst of all, in an election year.136
Seward and Stanton did far more than convince the president to suppress the World and Journal of Commerce. Though, as it was later shown, Howard alone had forged the spurious document, using a stylus that Mallison stole from the Tribune, the administration expanded its initial crackdown. That same day, Stanton ordered General Dix to seize and occupy the New York offices of the new Independent Telegraph Company, which had recently begun service as an alternative provider of the official dispatches carried for the AP by the American Telegraph Company. The War Department monitored traffic on the AP, but not on the Independent lines. Although it was the Associated Press that had inadvertently wired the bogus proclamation west, the agency remained unpunished while the entire New York staff of the Independent Telegraph wound up at Fort Lafayette. The administration also closed down its offices in Baltimore, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia (where it was called Inland Telegraph), and began dragging various employees to Washington for questioning.137
Not yet satisfied that he had identified the source of what he still believed might have been a dangerous security breach, Stanton ordered his aide Major Thomas Eckert to invade the Washington bureau of the Independent Telegraph Company as well. Under his direction, authorities seized the Twelfth Street premises, searched the files, closed down the operation, interrogated its operators, including superintendent James N. Worl, and shipped the lot of them to the Old Capitol Prison in a drenching rain. Finally, Stanton inexplicably ordered the shutdown of the guiltless little news syndicate operated in the capital by Henry Villard, Adams Hill, and Horace White. On May 19, White endured intense interrogation, Hill was placed under “observation,” and the loyal Villard, incredibly, ended up briefly imprisoned.138 If Stanton could not control news at the point of publication, then he would suppress it at its point of origin—even if in this case, the sources he identified were not in the slightest way complicit in the proclamation hoax. Not for days were the wholly innocent Independent Telegraph operators released. Stanton tried atoning for his brutal haste by offering the fledgling operation the privilege of linking its lines to the War Department, as telegraph operator David Homer Bates remembered, “so that a share of the Government telegraph business might be given to them.”139
If Joseph Howard, Jr., Francis Mallison, Henry Villard, Adams Hill, and Horace White—or even Manton Marble and William Prime—ever knew for a fact that Abraham Lincoln was working on a genuine proclamation calling for hundreds of thousands of new men to come to the aid of Ulysses Grant in Virginia, they never admitted so. Yet all of them paid a heavy price for a coincidental hoax that inspired Abraham Lincoln’s one and only direct curtailment of a free press. What happened next was almost as extraordinary as the temporary relaxation of censorship that had followed the crackdowns during the 1861 summer of rage. With a presidential election fast approaching, the government once again retreated from the wave of harsh oversight. Military secrets remained under strict ban, but political censorship became off limits. Freedom of the press made another comeback in war-torn America.
In a kind of ironic coda, Lincoln finally issued his proclamation on July 18. It called not for 300,000, or even 400,000 new volunteers—but half a million!140
• • •
Just weeks after the New York newspaper shutdowns, and while t
he latest suppression controversy was still dominating the political conversation, Republicans headed to their presidential nominating convention at Baltimore. For several months leading up to that event, Lincoln’s path to a second term had been frustrated by opposition from within his party—fanned by the blatant exertions of Horace Greeley to derail his candidacy and find a substitute to run in his place, an effort that had nothing to do with fears about tyranny and press suppression.
As early as mid-1863, in much the same determined way he had pressed his successful effort to block William Seward at Chicago four years before, Greeley sent James Gilmore to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to see if General William Rosecrans might be interested in making the race. Rosecrans not only rejected the overture, but admonished Gilmore, “you are mistaken about Mr. Lincoln. He is in his right place.”141 (Gilmore loyally reported his secret mission to the president.) Even Greeley was forced to admit that Lincoln still exerted an almost mystical tug on many voters: “The People think of him night & day and pray for him & their hearts are where they have made so heavy investments.”142 Nonetheless, the editor remained convinced that Lincoln should be denied a second term, and stepped up his search for an antislavery alternative. Although his opposition has often been ascribed to his belief that he did not think Lincoln could be reelected, there is no doubt that Greeley opposed Lincoln over policy differences as well. “I wanted the war driven onward with vehemence,” the editor unconvincingly tried explaining a few years later, “and this was not in his nature.”143
In a Tribune editorial published in late February entitled “Opening the Presidential Campaign,” Greeley argued that Lincoln had failed to prove himself “so transcendentally able” as to preclude consideration of men like Treasury Secretary Chase or Generals Benjamin Butler, John C. Frémont, or even Ulysses Grant. “We freely admit Mr. Lincoln’s merits,” the editorial continued, “but we insist that they are not such as to eclipse and obscure those of all the statesmen and soldiers who have aided in the great work of saving the country from disruption and overthrow.”144 The pro-Lincoln editor of the Erie, Pennsylvania, Gazette warned Simon Cameron—in a letter the ex–war secretary promptly shared with the president—that “Greeley of the Tribune is manifesting his usual want of judgment.”145 Greeley had yet formally to propose an alternative, but for now it was anyone but Lincoln. A few weeks later, Greeley punctuated his discontent by attending a Frémont rally at Cooper Union.
With Greeley’s encouragement, the ambitious Chase stepped up his own maneuvering to wrest the Republican nomination from the president. On September 29, 1863, Greeley wrote the treasury secretary to vow, “if in 1864 I could make a President (not merely a candidate) you would be my first choice.” Three days later, Greeley sent his friend, Tribune stockholder Benjamin Camp, to visit Chase in Washington, after which Chase breathlessly confided to his diary that Camp “proposed plan for collecting public sentiment in my favor as candidate for Presy.”146 But the boomlet collapsed in March, and Chase resigned from the cabinet in embarrassment, proving no match for Lincoln in wooing support from politicians and journalists alike.
Like Rosecrans, Grant soon made it clear that he, too, wanted no part of a challenge to his commander-in-chief, so Greeley resumed promoting Frémont. Still a darling of the progressive, so-called Radical wing of the Republican Party, Frémont emerged as a viable third-party candidate after a convention of disaffected Union men, war Democrats, and German-American admirers met in Cleveland on May 31 and nominated him by acclamation. Evidently Greeley did not take the third-party movement seriously, for he continued to lobby the Republican organization to dump Lincoln at Baltimore. On the eve of the national convention, Greeley was still warning: “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow. If we had such a ticket as could be made by naming Grant, Butler or Sherman for President, we could make a fight yet.”147
No real competition materialized. By the time the Republicans, now united under the banner of the National Union Party, gaveled into order at Baltimore in early June, Lincoln’s nomination was a foregone conclusion. And it was not Horace Greeley but Henry Raymond, the new chairman of the party, who won the most “boisterous applause” at the convention, just as Greeley had in 1860. Delegates shouted their approval when Senator Edwin D. Morgan proposed a platform plank calling for a constitutional amendment banning slavery. But they broke out into “yells and cheers unbounded as soon as the beloved name of Lincoln was spoken.”148
As soon as the convention adjourned, New York Independent editor Theodore Tilton headed from Baltimore to Washington to visit the president and report to him on the gathering. At the White House, he told Lincoln how especially pleased convention delegates had been when they first heard Morgan introduce the resolution to end slavery. Interrupting him, the president claimed his own share of credit for the initiative. “It was I who suggested to Mr. Morgan that he should put that idea into his opening speech,” the president proudly pointed out. He was not about to let an antislavery editor return home believing that another leader had originated the momentous recommendation. Fully convinced, Tilton called it “the very best word he has said since the proclamation of freedom” and published the news.149
Lincoln may have stayed home during the Baltimore convention, but he had worked his political magic from a distance to push what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and he wanted the press to know it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Long Abraham a Little Longer
James Gordon Bennett spent most of the 1864 election year openly excoriating Abraham Lincoln in print, while Horace Greeley labored to undermine the president more surreptitiously—plotting to replace Lincoln at the top of the Republican ticket even after the convention renominated him. Republican chairman Henry Raymond, on the other hand, publicly advocated for Lincoln’s candidacy, while fretting privately that it could not succeed.
For his part, Lincoln labored with extraordinary patience and skill behind the scenes to get New York’s two powerful, but perennially feuding, Republican editors committed to his reelection. And he toiled with particular dexterity to defang Bennett’s supposedly independent but consistently pro-Democratic Herald. As always, the intense maneuvering played out against the backdrop of the editors’ insatiable appetite for political reward and their irreconcilable antipathy toward each other. The challenge for Lincoln in late 1864 proved enormous.
Merely attending to the Big Three’s often conflicting patronage expectations proved no easy matter—and the balancing act became more fraught when other editors demanded their share of influence, too. In June, William Cullen Bryant protested when his publisher, Isaac Henderson, lost his post as a navy agent and endured the humiliation of arrest for alleged “frauds on the government.” Lincoln not only defended the dismissal (though he assured Bryant that due process would be respected), he seized on the occasion to lecture the antislavery patriarch with uncharacteristic irritation. “While the subject is up,” he wrote Bryant, “may I ask whether the Evening Post has not assailed me for supposed too lenient dealing with persons charged of fraud & crime? and that in cases of which the Post could know but little of the facts?” Bryant could only thank Lincoln for confirming his reputation for “equity and love of justice,” and assure him that the Post had never consciously offered an “assault” on his “public conduct.”1 Bryant would remain firmly in the president’s corner for the rest of the campaign.
In early spring, however, Henry Raymond’s upstate ally (and Greeley enemy) Thurlow Weed signaled patronage expectations of his own. Weed let the president know that he felt unappreciated and ignored, a complaint the perplexed Lincoln could not wave off without risking political damage. “I have been both pained and surprised recently at learning that you are wounded because a suggestion of yours as to the mode of conducting our national difficulty, has not been followed,” Lincoln wrote him on March 25, “—pained, because I very much
wish you to have no unpleasant feeling proceeding from me, and surprised, because my impression is that I have seen you . . . apparantly feeling very cheerful and happy. How is this?”2
In a conspicuous show of respect, Lincoln sent John Nicolay all the way to New York City to hand-deliver this conciliatory letter directly to Weed at the Astor House. “He read it over carefully once or twice,” Nicolay reported back, “and then said he didn’t quite understand it.” Weed’s only recent gripe had involved federal patronage at the U.S. Customs House in New York, not the “national difficulty.” He (and William Seward) wanted Salmon Chase ally Hiram Barney ousted from his lucrative job as Collector of the Port of New York, and they warned that if the president did not expunge such “weak” and “intriguing” appointees, some of whom “had been engaged in treasonably aiding the rebellion,” their presence would jeopardize Republican success in the forthcoming elections. Weed and Raymond eventually got their wish, but only after another visit to New York by Nicolay, and another secret conference, this time at the offices of the New York Times. As long as Lincoln had brought up the “national difficulty,” however, Weed seized the opportunity to advise him that the entire cabinet ought to be reshuffled, for Welles was a “cypher, Bates a fogy, and Blair at best a dangerous friend.”3
That Lincoln humored Weed may have reflected an abiding respect for the party boss, or perhaps an ongoing need to placate all the Empire State editors who sometimes seemed more determined to defeat each other than to beat the Democrats. Lincoln apparently satisfied Weed, at least for a while, because no further grousing came from the Albany powerhouse that campaign season—even though his first choice to replace Barney, Abram Wakeman, failed to get the coveted job.4 It would not be the last time the president would misinterpret a letter from the so-called Wizard of the Lobby. Denied the right to collaborate with Weed in naming a new collector, Raymond resumed peppering the White House with other patronage recommendations.5
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 66