Unlike Republican papers, whose loyalty to Lincoln sometimes wavered over the issue of federal vacancies, the Copperhead press differed with the president on fundamental issues, and aired its grievances harshly and unrelentingly throughout the campaign. In perhaps the most infamous example, beginning in April and for five continuous months, the New York World hammered away at the scabrous charge that during an inspection trip to Antietam back in 1862, Lincoln had callously urged his traveling companion, Ward Hill Lamon, to sing a comic song as the two strolled among the dead and wounded still littering the battlefield. “The American people are in no mood to re-elect a man to the highest office,” the World howled a few weeks after Lincoln’s nomination, “whose daily language is indecent, and who, rising over the field of Antietam, when thirty thousand of his fellow citizens were yet warm in their freshly made graves, could . . . call for the negro song of ‘Picayune Butler.’ ”6 The paper punctuated its attack with a comic ditty of its own: “Abe may crack his jolly jokes / O’er bloody fields of stricken battle, / While yet the ebbing life-tide smokes / From men that die like butchered cattle.”7
Even though the libel was at first confined to the pages of hostile Democratic sheets like the World, it was repeated often enough to prompt one concerned pro-war Democrat to warn Horace Greeley in April that the story must be “authentically contradicted.” Looking on the bright side, the correspondent hoped that “if the charge can be disproved,” then other members of his party would “forsake the fortunes of Mac the Unready”—meaning George McClellan, the likely Democratic nominee for president—for surely even Peace Democrats would “not support a party resorting to such brutal charges.”8 Typically, Lincoln resisted the impulse to respond, even after Lamon warned him that he was being “painted as the prime mover in a scene of fiendish levity more atrocious than the world had ever witnessed since human nature was shamed and degraded by the capers of Nero and Commodus.”9
“Let the thing alone,” Lincoln insisted. “If I have not established character enough to give the lie to this charge, I can only say that I am mistaken in my own estimate of myself. In politics, every man must skin his own skunk. These fellows are welcome to the hide of this one. Its body has already given forth its unsavory odor.”10
Then on September 9, the World issued the most scurrilous version of the story yet. This time it alleged that McClellan, Lincoln’s host on the day in question at Antietam, had heroically attempted to halt the inappropriate serenade by telling the president: “Not now, if you please. . . . I would prefer to hear it some other place and time.”11 The latest report prompted yet another fevered letter of concern, this time addressed directly to Lamon, insisting that the “damaging” report must be denied once and for all. Lamon hastened back to the White House armed with his own draft response to the World. Still, the president hesitated. “I would not publish this reply,” he told Lamon after reading it. “It is too belligerent in tone. . . . If I were you, I would simply state the facts as they were . . . without the pepper and salt.” Then Lincoln unexpectedly offered, “Let me try my hand at it.”12 Taking up pen and paper, he began ghostwriting a letter to the editor himself.
In the version of the Antietam episode Lincoln crafted that day: “Neither Gen. McClellan or any one else made any objection to the singing; the place was not on the battle field, the time was sixteen days after the battle, no dead body was seen during the whole time the president was absent from Washington, nor even a grave that had not been rained on since it was made.” Though the account radiated with his unique literary style, the president asked Lamon to sign his own name to it.13 But inevitably, Lincoln’s characteristic “better angels” again took hold, and he told his friend, “I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right. Keep this paper, and we will see about it.” The statement was not made public after all. A frustrated Lamon, who later explained that he had volunteered comic songs near Antietam only to bring his friend out of a “spell of . . . melancholy,” was never allowed that entire campaign season to express his belief that “Mr. Lincoln was as incapable of insulting the dead . . . as he was of committing mean and unmanly outrages upon the living.”14
Emboldened and unchallenged, the World and the city’s other Democratic papers stepped up their attacks. The Antietam episode enjoyed relentless additional exposure, inspiring publication of a slanderous cartoon entitled The COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF conciliating the SOLDIER’S VOTES on the Battle Field. The lithograph depicted a heartless Lincoln ignoring the bleeding troops strewn across the landscape as he asks Lamon to “sing us ‘Picayune Butler,’ or something else that’s funny.” In a significant break with tradition, the New York World itself engineered publication of this and several other campaign cartoons, three of them warning of an “abolition catastrophe” should Lincoln win a second term. A fourth portrayed Lincoln, Greeley, and other Republicans burying the last vestiges of the “Constitution, the Union, Habeas Corpus, Free Speech, and Free Press” in order to promote their secret goal of racial equality.15 Until publication of these ferocious caricatures, campaign prints had always been commercial products, issued by publishers seeking profits, not political advantage. Now, for the first time, a party newspaper had coordinated production not only of editorial invective, but also caricatures, and, as would soon be revealed, a mischievous book project as well.
The bizarre book venture was an elaborate hoax masterminded by the race-obsessed World to ensnare the president into supporting a mock proposal for white-black amalgamation. The broader goal was to make the supposedly genuine “threat” of black equality the key scare tactic in the race to deny the president a second term. But for the book ploy to succeed, the World assumed Lincoln’s gullibility, and few enemies ever triumphed by underestimating him. The plot began unfolding when Bromley & Company, the same printers assigned to issue the paper’s anti-Lincoln cartoons, published the ninety-page tract by World correspondents David G. Croly and George Wakeman. Entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, the deadpan text was crafted to outrage Negrophobic Democrats by soberly designating the Civil War as a struggle for “the blending of the white and the black” to achieve social harmony.16
The authors, in truth flagrant bigots, next dispatched a copy of their incendiary booklet to the White House, straightforwardly asking Lincoln for his endorsement. Had he offered praise for the publication, the World planned to use it as proof of the president’s latent enthusiasm for race mixing. Instead, suspecting at once that a fraud was afoot, Lincoln tossed both the request and the book into his files and never replied, hinting to friendly journalists that he had foiled an attempt to draw him into a dangerous intrigue. Not to be outdone, while the World itself refrained from overtly promoting Croly and Wakeman’s Miscegenation—preferring that readers conclude that the book had appeared spontaneously—editor Manton Marble encouraged like-minded Copperhead publications to hail it. In a supreme show of self-confidence, the publishers even advertised the volume in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper, The Liberator. The World did arrange the uncredited publication of a Miscegenation lithograph visualizing the dangers of a “millennium of abolitionism” in a Lincoln-led future. The image showed the president cordially bowing to a mixed-race couple, while in the background white liverymen drive black passengers in a carriage. And here was a caricatured Horace Greeley as well. The anonymous artist portrayed the Old Philosopher eating ice cream alongside a black woman.
Though he deftly sidestepped the Miscegenation plot, Lincoln continued to endure ferocious attacks from the white supremacist New York press. John Van Evrie, publisher of the New York Weekly Day-Book, a paper founded on the ashes of the onetime daily the administration had suppressed back in 1861, produced a screed of his own entitled Subgenation. Though cast as an earnest rebuttal to the outrages proposed in Miscegenation, it is unlikely that its author was not aware that the World’s book was a hoax, or that his response was certainly designed to perpetuate the cont
roversy it ignited. Arguing perversely that the Southern states which had denied the so-called “lower races” their rights had as a result incubated the most “democratic ideas,” Van Evrie’s book charged Lincoln with hatching a secret plan to erect a new government “founded on miscegenation,” and asked voters: “Shall we allow him to do so?”17
In the same vein, the New York Daily News fanned the flames by warning that, despite Lincoln’s supposed enthusiasm for amalgamation, white women would never consent to reproduce with black men because “the negro’s body is disagreeably unctuous, especially . . . when under the strong ‘emotional’ excitement so certainly produced on his animal nature if permitted to follow her with lascivious glances.”18 In a no less repugnant report, the New York Freeman’s Journal complained that “filthy black niggers . . . now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President’s levees.”19 Such inflammatory articles harped on a common theme: Lincoln’s reelection would pollute America by making blacks the equals of whites, and encouraging interracial sexual congress.
When he was not assailing Lincoln and the “national humiliation” of military stalemate, Manton Marble predictably aimed barbs against Greeley, taunting him as “the great agriculturalist” who has “beaten his plowshare into a bayonet.”20 By October, the World darkly hinted that Greeley had “lost all moral control over the insubordinate type-setters, the eccentric model-farmers, the moon-struck poets, the free-lovers, the socialists, the long-haired abolitionists, and the other human beings of all colors of political doctrine . . . who make up that unhappy family known as ‘The Tribune Association.’ ”21
The World meanwhile solidified its role as the official national organ of the Democrats. When the party ill-advisedly postponed its national convention from July 4 to August 29, a move that left too little time for the fall campaign, it was to Marble that George McClellan confided his displeasure at the delay; the general petulantly threatened to refuse to have his “name used” as a candidate until he was formally nominated.22 Once the campaign did get under way, the World tried making up for lost time with a series of hagiographical pieces puffing McClellan’s military record, accompanied by a barrage of renewed attacks on his opponent. “Lincoln has been as dishonest as he has been unjust in his treatment of General McClellan,” went a typical editorial in late September. In another salvo, Marble charged Lincoln with “four years of usurpation, of lawless, reckless, mis-government.” And in a series of front-page stories that ran through autumn, Marble bombarded readers with provocative headlines: “Why Mr. Lincoln Should Be Removed from Office,” “Mr. Lincoln’s Plot to Disenfranchise Maryland,” “The South to Be Throttled and the Negroes Freed,” “Abraham Lincoln: Is He Honest? Is He Capable?” and “McClellan Is the Hope of the Nation.”23
Greeley (center) helps lower the coffins of Union, Habeas Corpus, and Freedom of the Press into “The Grave of the Union” in an anti-Lincoln 1864 campaign print engineered by the New York World.
In these and other front-page stories, the World accused Lincoln of such sins as relentless partisanship, corruption, abuse of power, spiking the national debt, encouraging violence against Democrats, abetting fraud in local elections, and approving “Postoffice espionage.” Lincoln, Marble charged, based his presidency on “no principle [and] no respect for law.”24 In September, the World sensationally charged that New York Republicans had staged a shocking “Miscegenation Ball” at party headquarters, at which mixed-race couples allegedly cavorted on the dance floor—a report that in turn inspired yet another anti-Republican cartoon. The potential for a politically damaging scandal prompted Greeley’s Tribune to denounce “the scoundrelly World” for encouraging it.25 When not portraying Lincoln as a dangerous radical, Marble mocked him as a crude jester. Just before Election Day, the World again put its contempt into rhyme: “There is an old joker named Aby— / Who, it must be confessed, is a gaby; / He sickens the folks / With his malaprop jokes / Till they vow to get rid of old Aby.”26
• • •
That such unabashedly vicious coverage emanated from New York unchecked in 1864 certainly demonstrated an extraordinary and seldom acknowledged shift in the political culture. Earlier that year, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt had left little doubt that he believed that anti-administration editors like Marble and Wood posed a genuine threat to the Union. They poisoned the “community,” Holt complained, “a large part of whom, styling themselves democrats, and professing strong attachment to the constitution and government of the United States, adopted the opinions and prejudices speciously inculcated by the widely circulated New York press, hostile to the administration and its principal measures for conducting the war.” Holt believed that “such newspapers, denouncing the draft as unconstitutional, and calling on the people to oppose it were read at public meetings . . . and there appears to be reason for the belief that some honest and patriotic men were deceived by them.” Despite such concerns, for the most part, the previously restrained free press again operated freely throughout the heated presidential race, a condition for which Lincoln has received too little credit.27
No record exists of any official decision to relax censorship and suppression during the political campaign, but the absence of any renewed crackdown strongly suggests a new tolerance. There were exceptions. General Lew Wallace did suppress two antiwar Baltimore papers in September—the Loyalist and the Evening Post—prompting Manton Marble to warn his readers that should Lincoln be reelected he would surely impose similar restrictions everywhere, and “throughout the term of his natural life.”28 And in August, a pro-Democratic Maine editor was indicted for treason in the federal courts for writing an anti-draft editorial entitled “More Victims for the Slaughter Called For”—but also, court papers hinted, for consorting with foreign agents in a scheme to furnish “arms munitions and supplies of war and fitted out armed vessels for the prosecution of . . . war against the United States.”29 But these cases were the exceptions, not the rule.
Proof of the administration’s otherwise unwavering commitment to an unshackled press during election season could be found in its tolerance of an editor who had nearly been confined to Fort Lafayette earlier in the year: Marble himself. Lincoln had previously vowed that he would restrict press freedom only when it endangered the troops or the Union itself. During the campaign, he proved his sincerity by tolerating unrestrained political attacks in the Democratic papers. Having confounded many of his critics merely by allowing the election to proceed during a rebellion, Lincoln now demonstrated his faith in the right of the people to choose their leaders, even during civil war, by accompanying that decision with a commitment to unrestricted press coverage as well.
Further evidence of this election-year tolerance came when prospects looked bleakest for Republicans. In August, the New York Tribune writer James Gilmore managed to secure and publish an interview with Jefferson Davis, one of the few profiles of the Confederate president to appear in the North during the war. The fact that it promoted Davis’s hope for a negotiated peace infuriated some of Lincoln’s friends, who feared that war-weary voters would unseat him if he resisted a credible proposal to stanch the bloodshed. “What business had these fellows with such a subject?” fumed Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. “They place the President . . . at a disadvantage in the coming election.”30 Welles clearly did not know that the president not only sanctioned publication, but endorsed the periodical Gilmore proposed for its appearance. For when Lincoln learned that the audacious Gilmore had conducted his interview with Davis, he welcomed the journalist to the White House with a hearty, “I’m glad you’re back,” and an impatient, “What is it,—as we expected?”
“Exactly so,” came Gilmore’s reply. “There is no peace without separation. Coming down on the boat, I wrote out the interview to read to you when you are at leisure.”
“I am at leisure now,” answered Lincoln impatiently. So Gilmore read his proposed press report aloud at the executive mansion. When he was finish
ed, Lincoln asked eagerly, “What do you propose to do with this?”
“Put a beginning and an end to it, sir, on my way home, and hand it to the Tribune.”
“Can’t you get it into the Atlantic Monthly?” countered Lincoln. “It would have less of a partisan look there.”
“No doubt I can, sir,” Gilmore replied, “but there would be some delay about it.”
“And it is important that Davis’s position should be known at once,” Lincoln agreed. “It will show the country that I didn’t fight shy of Greeley’s Niagara business without a reason; and everybody is agog to hear your report. Let it go into the Tribune.”
In the end, the two men came up with yet another plan: place a brief report about Davis’s insistence on independence in a Boston newspaper, then a longer story later in the Atlantic. Not content with dictating the release of information and the exclusion of Horace Greeley one final time, Lincoln added a request for further control: “Send me the proof of what goes into the Atlantic. Don’t let it appear till I return the proof. . . . This may be worth as much to us as half a dozen battles.”31
Gilmore escaped further criticism, but that is not to say that spontaneous outbreaks against newspapers did not occur during the year. Among the more than thirty papers sacked by mobs in 1864 were the Fairfield (Iowa) Constitution and Union, the (Meadville, Pennsylvania) Crawford Democrat, and the Chester (Illinois) Picket Guard. Civilian mobs did their most pernicious work in Ohio, while federal authorities focused on slave states like Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky—for example banning all Democratic papers (save the Missouri Republican) from circulating in Memphis in October. However chilling, compared to the suppression fever of 1861, such outbreaks remained rare in 1864.32
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 67