Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to face political flare-ups ignited by journalists from his own party. During the summer, Chicago postmaster John L. Scripps initiated a re-election challenge to the president’s friend, sitting congressman Isaac Arnold, and allegedly used his own hundred postal appointees to promote his candidacy among local Republicans. The outraged incumbent fired off a letter of protest to Lincoln, who had appointed Scripps to his plum job back in 1861. “Is it right or fair,” demanded Arnold, “that the power of the government should be used to crush one who has sustained the administration as faithfully as I have?” Lincoln drafted a carefully written letter to Scripps, omitting specific names and merely reporting the “complaint” that the postmaster was using his “official power” to defeat a congressman with whom he was “well satisfied.” Lincoln proposed a “correct principle” to guide both of the aspirants to the coveted seat: “all our friends should have absolute freedom of choice.” Arnold almost gleefully reported that Scripps received the note “in a storm of rage & passion . . . said it was an insult” and branded as “untrue” the charge that he had “used his office” to promote his candidacy. Pressed to publish a “general circular” advising all postmasters against political activities, Lincoln withdrew from the controversy altogether. In the end, neither Arnold nor Scripps won the congressional seat. The Republican nomination fell to yet another onetime editor, John Wentworth.33

  • • •

  James Gilmore’s interview with Jefferson Davis was hardly the most potentially subversive press gambit undertaken that campaign summer. That dubious honor belonged to Gilmore’s imprudent backer Horace Greeley. Like many Republicans, Greeley wanted an end to both slavery and war; but unlike most, he oscillated between one exclusive aspiration and the other, adding to his reputation for grandiose waffling. By mid-1864 the formerly hawkish Greeley suddenly concluded that an exhausted North above all wanted a cessation of hostilities. And he believed he had found a means to achieve that goal. For more than a year, the editor had been quietly discussing peace with a shady antiwar Democrat from Maine named William Cornell “Colorado” Jewett, who now proposed bringing Northern and Southern leaders together for an armistice parley. Greeley not only endorsed the idea, but for a time proposed (mainly to irk Secretary of State Seward) that European powers assume the role of arbitrators. Then the editor changed course yet again and began suggesting that he himself might be the best negotiator for the North.34 The urge to prove he was a better diplomat than the secretary of state he despised must have been for Greeley irresistible.

  On July 7, Greeley wrote Lincoln to report what he believed to be a major breakthrough: Jewett had reached neutral territory, Niagara Falls, Canada, with so-called Confederate ambassadors in tow, all supposedly armed with full authority from “J.D.”—meaning Jefferson Davis—to negotiate for peace. Greeley now urged that the emissaries be granted safe passage to Washington to confer with Lincoln. “I entreat you, in your own time and manner,” the editor prodded him, “to submit overtures for pacification . . . which the impartial must pronounce frank and generous.” His lecture to Lincoln concluded with a blunt assessment of the national mood no less desperate in tone than his suicidal letter after Bull Run: “I venture to remind you that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.”35

  Greeley accompanied this outburst with a “Plan of Adjustment” he proposed submitting to the negotiators. It called for an immediate cease-fire in return for a renunciation of secession and an end to Lincoln’s effort to abolish slavery, offering total amnesty and restored citizenship for Confederates, as well as a national convention to ratify all terms. Greeley even threw in the unaffordable offer of $400 million in federal funds to compensate Rebel owners for their freed slaves. And he proposed full representation for the seceded states in the House of Representatives—even though this last concession would certainly doom congressional approval of a constitutional amendment banning slavery everywhere, a hallmark of the National Union Party platform. The man who had prayed for emancipation on behalf of “twenty millions” was now signaling a willingness to cancel or at best delay the freedom he had so ardently advocated.

  Deeply annoyed, Lincoln told his friend, Illinois house speaker Shelby M. Cullom, that Greeley was beginning to cause him “almost as much trouble as the whole Southern Confederacy.”36 And, indeed, Greeley’s schemes did pose a real political threat, for Lincoln knew he could not appear to reject any serious peace proposal out of hand, even one that had virtually no chance of success. As the president groused to New York secretary of state Chauncey M. Depew, Greeley clearly meant to “influence the peace sentiment of the North, to embarrass the administration, and to demoralize the army,” and in those goals proved “successful.” The entire mission, Lincoln sensed, was a “subterfuge” aimed at sabotaging his prospects for reelection.37 Then the president hit on a way to outmaneuver the editor. In a stroke of sheer public relations genius, Lincoln decided that rather than repudiate the overture outright, or permit the emissaries to travel south to Washington, in full view of the capital’s press corps, he would instead encourage Greeley to travel north and engage Confederate officials himself at Niagara Falls. “I just thought I would let him go up and crack that nut for himself,” he drawled.38 Although Lincoln believed that the initiative could never succeed (“Don’t you worry; nothing will come of it,” he assured Toledo congressman James M. Ashley), he shrewdly calculated that empowering Greeley would both shift responsibility for the outcome and suck the air from the peace-at-any-price balloon.39

  “Niagara Dove” Greeley admits to Lincoln that he has brought “narey nothink” home from the aborted 1864 Canada peace conference.

  Further calling Greeley’s bluff, the president sent John Hay by ship to New York to visit the Tribune office and provide the editor with official passes guaranteeing safe conduct to Canada for all participants in the proposed conference. Suddenly balking, Greeley told Hay that he now believed himself “the worst man” to negotiate for peace, whining that rival “newspapers would be full” of invective if he failed. The editor tried wriggling out of the assignment with yet another communication to Lincoln: would it not be better for the Confederate negotiators to head straight to Washington and parley directly with administration officials? But the president coolly insisted that Greeley was not “to send me a letter but to bring me a man, or men” willing to talk, if such men could be identified at Niagara, adding: “I am disappointed.” Lincoln now hit on a way to turn the tables. “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace,” he alerted Greeley, “but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.”40 Trapped in a web of his own spinning, Greeley had no choice but to proceed to Canada. Although just back in Washington from New York, Hay raced north again to join the summit. Lincoln wanted Hay to keep a watchful eye on the unpredictable editor and the Confederate representatives alike.

  Hay brought yet another surprise for Greeley to Niagara Falls. Lincoln had crafted his own statement of conditions, aimed at restraining Greeley and distancing himself from the talks themselves—and above all, to preserving emancipation. As his new “To whom it may concern” instructions made clear to the editor: “If you can find, any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis, in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, what ever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you, and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall, at the least, have safe conduct, with the paper (and without publicity, if he choose) to the point where you shall have met him” [italics added]. Greeley “didn’t like it,” Hay confided.41 The editor had suddenly come to the conclusion that imposing any conditions at all, especially these, would imperil negotiations. But it was too late. As far as Lincoln was concerned, there could be no peace without freedom.

  To the surprise of no one
on either side of the war, Greeley’s peace mission to Canada imploded almost as soon as it began. Shadowed by Hay, he did meet briefly with three of the emissaries, J. P. Holcombe of Virginia, George Sanders of Kentucky, and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi—Hay dismissing one as “a seedy looking rebel with grizzled whiskers” and another as “a tall solemn spare false looking man with false teeth false eyes & false hair”—but the delegates readily admitted that they had no real authority to negotiate. Their hesitancy turned to outrage when Greeley asked Hay to share Lincoln’s “To whom it may concern” letter. The memo, they bristled, amounted to “a rude withdrawal of a courteous overture.” To accept its preconditions, they huffed, would be akin to submitting to conquest, and “the generation was yet unborn which would witness such submission.” Echoing the Confederate position, the New York Daily News likened Lincoln’s terms to “the caprice of a foolish girl trifling with her submissive lover.”42

  Just as Greeley feared, and as Lincoln surely expected, perhaps even hoped, the Tribune editor did not escape the debacle without his own share of rebuke. As one of the Confederate emissaries complained of the reluctant ambassador: “It must be confessed that Mr. Greeley, in his hysterical, deluded, and quixotic course in this affair, cuts a shabby and pitiable figure.” Not only had Greeley exhibited none of his “usual frankness and straightforwardness in these goings-on,” the critic charged; he had violated the code of chivalry, criticizing his own government by “bitterly” reproaching Lincoln and insisting that “nine tenths of the whole American people, North and South, are sick of slaughter and anxious for peace on almost any terms.”43

  When one Southern negotiator added insult to injury by bidding farewell to the Tribune editor with the remark, “I wanted old Bennett to come up but he was afraid to come,” a thoroughly deflated Greeley sputtered: “I expect to be blackguarded for what I have done. . . . I am not allowed to explain. But all I have done has been done under instructions.” In Gideon Welles’s analysis, once Lincoln insisted on “the abolition of slavery as one of the conditions [for peace], a string in Greeley’s harp was broken.” To Welles’s delight, Lincoln’s hard line on slavery “embarrassed Greeley and defeated a wily intrigue.”44 In retrospect, the escapade seemed to many observers nothing more than a sham incited by the Rebels—and relying on Greeley as their dupe—intended to coax war-weary voters from the Lincoln reelection camp. But the galling “result,” Lincoln soon pessimistically observed, “is that he is still attacking me for needlessly prolonging the war.”45

  The mortified editor meanwhile returned home to New York pondering a way to save face. Convinced that Lincoln had sent him off on a hopeless adventure while blocking any possibility for genuine negotiations, Greeley embraced a new scheme he thought would salvage his reputation. In an effort to fix blame for the Niagara Falls disaster squarely on the president, the Tribune seconded Henry Raymond’s August 4 proposal that the entire Lincoln-Greeley correspondence on the peace negotiations be made public. After Raymond called for its publication—doing so only to help vindicate the president, unaware it contained Greeley’s unsettling rant against the war—Greeley disingenuously told Hay, “I have no special desire to see it in print, but certainly not the least objection.” Suddenly finding himself back on the defensive, Lincoln replied, “With the suppression of a few passages in your letters, in regard to which I think you and I would not disagree, I should be glad of the publication. Please come over and see me.” But in a breathtaking show of disrespect, Greeley refused the invitation. He would “come to Washington whenever you apprise me that my doing so may perhaps be of use,” he stiffly replied, but a visit now was sure to incite “further mischief” at the hands of the editor’s “bitterest personal enemies” in the administration. “What, then, can I do in Washington?” he demanded to know. “Your trusted advisors nearly all think I ought to go to Fort Lafayette for what I have done already.”46

  The president had little choice but to send Greeley the full file of their correspondence. But he also made clear he would consent to its publication only if Greeley agreed to a few editorial deletions—which the president boldly marked in red pencil. “The parts of your letters which I wish suppressed,” Lincoln bluntly explained, perhaps carefully choosing that ominous word to remind Greeley that entire newspapers had been shut down for less, “are only those which, as I think, give too gloomy an aspect to our cause, and those which present the carrying of elections as a motive of action.” But Greeley was adamant. “I do not feel disposed to let my letters to you go to the public with such suppressions as you indicate,” he protested. “ . . . I prefer . . . not to print the correspondence, unless as it was written.” To cover all contingencies, Lincoln dispatched another set of the letters to the loyal Raymond, while still recommending it not appear in print. As the president saw matters, “it is better for me to submit, for the time, to the consequences of the false position in which I consider he has placed me, than to subject the country to the consequences of publishing these discouraging and injurious parts.” Greeley came close to the truth when he concluded his next note to Lincoln: “I fear my chance for usefulness has passed.”47 With cunning rather than force, the president had finally managed to “suppress” one of his harshest and most dangerous Republican critics.

  Ultimately, fragments from the letters found their way into the nation’s press after all, and a six-page pamphlet version appeared by August 15, all of which at least omitted Greeley’s inflammatory “dying country” lament. No red pencil could obliterate the overall political damage caused Lincoln by Greeley’s ill-advised, ill-timed quest for peace. The New York Evening Post spoke for many pro-war newspapers when it labeled the affair “inexpressibly sickening.” Marble’s New York World chortled that if the Niagara Falls escapade had not been “too serious for laughter,” it would “go into convulsions.”48 In a more ominous vein, the Cincinnati Enquirer spoke for many angry Democrats when it charged that Lincoln’s “To whom it may concern” letter had at last revealed the president’s true abolitionist tendencies. “Every soldier” killed in future battles, the paper put its readers on notice, “will lose his life not for the Union, the Stars and Stripes, but for the negro.” In this opinion, Chicago editor Joseph Medill concurred. He thought the letter would encourage “Copperheads to get an enfilading fire on us,” because Lincoln had effectively proclaimed “the war was waged to free negroes.” As a result, Medill gloomily predicted, “our political prospects do not look bright.” This flurry of anti-Lincoln editorials did not go unnoticed in the Confederacy. In fact, peace negotiator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama—who for unknown reasons had absented himself from the actual meeting with Greeley and Hay—concluded that the attacks might prove damaging enough to doom Lincoln at the polls and thus bring peace and independence to the South after all. As Clay reported to the Confederacy’s secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, on August 11: All the Democrat newspapers “denounce Mr. Lincoln’s manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses (and among them the New York Tribune) admit it was a blunder. Mr. Greeley was chagrined and incensed by it, as his articles clearly show. I am told by those who profess to have heard his private expressions of opinion and feeling, that he curses all fools in high places.”49

  On August 19, Lincoln summoned his cabinet to the White House to report on the “particulars” of the aborted Niagara Falls conference and the publication of his Greeley correspondence. He told his ministers that he hoped, at least, that the debacle “will shut up Greeley, and satisfy the people who are clamoring for peace.”50 Welles remembered the president explaining that “though G. had put him in a false attitude, he thought it better he should bear it, than that the country should be distressed by such a howl, from such a person, on such an occasion.” Welles took solace from the hope that the scandal might once and for all end Lincoln’s attempts to woo Greeley—a man, Welles insisted, to whom the president had “clung too long and confidingly.” Welles was not the only advisor who believed that
, much as Lincoln and Greeley still had in common—their backwoods origins, a common genius for communication, and a shared passion for free labor—there were now far more issues dividing than uniting them.51

  At the end of the cabinet meeting, Lincoln could only agree. Greeley had become “an old shoe,” he grimly admitted, “—good for nothing now, whatever he has been.” Of course the president proceeded to explain the aphorism. “In early life, and with few mechanics and but little means in the West, we used to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful. The stitches all tear out.”52

  If that were so, cabinet members and friends alike wondered, why not reply to the weakened editor publicly, just as Lincoln had so successfully done in response to Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” two years earlier? Indeed, the president confessed to one visitor that Greeley’s conduct “annoyed” him “probably more than anything which happened during his administration.” As the guest implored, “Why don’t you publish these facts in a card? They will be printed in every newspaper in the United States. The people will then understand exactly your position, and your vindication will be complete.” Lincoln pondered the suggestion for only a moment before explaining: “Yes, all the newspapers will publish my letter, and so will Greeley. The next day he will take a line and comment upon it, and he will keep it up, in that way, until, at the end of three weeks, I will be convicted out of my own mouth of all the things which he charges against me. No man,” the president concluded, “whether he be private citizen or President of the United States, can successfully carry on a controversy with a great newspaper, and escape destruction, unless he owns a newspaper equally great, with a circulation in the same neighborhood.”53