Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  The political and military situations had suddenly grown murkier. On July 30, Grant had suffered a rare, humiliating defeat at Petersburg. True, on August 5, Union admiral David G. Farragut triumphed at Mobile Bay. But that very day, leaving little time for celebration, Horace Greeley allowed two Radical Republican leaders, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, to use the pages of the Tribune to condemn Lincoln for his recent pocket veto of their Reconstruction plan. Lincoln favored a more lenient and flexible blueprint for readmitting seceded states to the Union—one that would require only 10 percent of the voting population to swear their allegiance to federal authority (the Wade-Davis bill insisted on outright majorities). In the “Wade-Davis Manifesto,” as published in the Tribune, the authors declared it “their right and duty to check the encroachments of the Executive on the authority of Congress.” No doubt motivated in part by the legislators’ decision to announce their manifesto exclusively in a rival newspaper, the Times condemned it as “a treacherous and malignant attempt to stab a President whom they profess to support.”72

  Agitated by this new assault on Lincoln from the radical wing of his own party, Raymond warned his readers on August 10 that “Democrats everywhere are very confident of victory in the pending Presidential canvas.” Then, two weeks later, on August 22, the editor and chairman took up a piece of official Union Party Executive Committee letterhead and poured forth his morose and brutally frank doubts to the president, fashioned more in the hand-wringing spirit of Horace Greeley than he probably realized. Democrats had still yet formally to anoint their candidate for president, but the Republican chairman appeared ready to surrender to the opposition on policy matters. “I am in active correspondence with your staunchest friends in every State,” Raymond informed Lincoln, “and from them all I hear but one report. The tide is setting strongly against us.” Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana were all leaning Democratic. Disappointed over “the want of military successes,” and certain that future peace overtures would be rejected, Raymond warned, the Northern electorate was ready to rebel, too.

  “Nothing but the most resolute and decided action on the part of the government and its friends, can save the country from falling into hostile hands,” a desperate Raymond insisted. His astonishing solution was that Lincoln now publicly abandon emancipation as a precondition for armistice. The president must appoint a commissioner to negotiate with Jefferson Davis “on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the constitution,” Raymond implored, “—all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States.”73 Word of Raymond’s misgivings sped all the way to Ohio, where Lincoln ally Richard Corwine darkly predicted that “Weed & Raymond would urge Lincoln to withdraw and that they had assurances of success because Seward had said, and Lincoln concurred in it, that the latter had no prospect of being elected.” Corwine was sure that the two editors were actively scheming to replace Lincoln at the head of the ticket with General Benjamin Butler.74 Thurlow Weed then reported to William Seward that Lincoln’s “re-election was an impossibility,” adding that “nobody here doubts it. . . . Mr. Raymond, who has, just left me, says that unless some prompt and bold step be now taken, all is lost.” Seward promptly shared the dire letter with the president.75

  As Lincoln saw it, not only his own survival, but that of the Union and emancipation, now hung in the balance. Displaying the same restraint he had exhibited in response to earlier doomsday warnings, Lincoln held off on responding to his doubters, though it was clear that Raymond’s and Weed’s messages depressed him. On the very day he likely received both letters, August 23, and perhaps with their glum assessments in mind, Lincoln asked the members of his cabinet to sign, sight unseen, a memorandum conceding that “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.” The document pledged cooperation with his successor in order “to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” The following day, just as he had done earlier with Greeley, Lincoln seemed to invite Raymond to “obtain, if possible, a conference for peace with Jefferson Davis, or any person by him authorized for that purpose.” Appearing to abandon his long-standing insistence on peace only with slavery ended, Lincoln drafted a letter authorizing the Times editor to propose that “upon restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.”76

  Lincoln meant this dare to signal no abandonment of his commitment to freedom. That became evident when around the same time he invited Frederick Douglass to the White House. There, the president asked Douglass to draft a plan to spread news of the Emancipation Proclamation southward to as many enslaved people as could be reached before March, when a new Democratic administration would certainly nullify it. Douglass obliged with a detailed proposal to assign agents to hasten “squads of Slaves . . . within Union lines.” In Douglass’s view, the meeting provided “evidence conclusive on Mr. Lincoln’s part that the proclamation, so far as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a ‘necessity.’ ” But as Douglass lamented to Theodore Tilton in late October, Lincoln said nothing publicly “in this Presidential canvass for the reason that Republican committees do not wish to expose themselves to the charge of being the ‘N—r’ party.”77

  At around the same time, August 25, Lincoln summoned Raymond and the members of the Republican National Committee to another White House meeting, which cabinet members Seward, Stanton, Welles, and Fessenden joined. Although he had scuttled the Greeley peace gambit by empowering the Tribune editor to make a fool of himself publicly, Lincoln wished to handle the circumspect Raymond privately, sensitively, and with the kind of effort he knew worked best with the more loyal and conservative Times editor: personal persuasion along with what the president had early in his career called “cold, calculating reason.” Fresh from his uplifting session with Douglass, Lincoln convinced Raymond that any new peace initiative, especially one without freedom guaranteed, would be an error of historic proportions. To send a commission to Richmond, he convincingly argued, “would be worse than losing the presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” Bowing to both logic and pressure, Raymond pledged not to advocate for peace after all, even if it meant that the administration might indeed go down to defeat. The editor left the White House “encouraged and cheered,” and “Lincoln’s experimental letter thereafter slept undisturbed, in the envelope he placed it, for nearly a quarter of a century.”78

  Then, just a week after Raymond’s forlorn predictions reached Lincoln’s desk, fate—in the ironic form of news from that most unapologetic enemy of the press, General William T. Sherman—dramatically intervened to upend the political equilibrium. First, on August 31, George McClellan, as long expected, finally secured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, albeit saddled with a party platform that even some Democrats thought overeager for peace at any price. Much worse for Lincoln’s newly anointed opponent, McClellan enjoyed barely twenty-four hours in which to dominate the news. The very next day, Confederate defenders surrendered Atlanta, and Sherman’s victorious army moved in to occupy that fiercely contested city. Breathless newspaper coverage of Atlanta’s capture all but eclipsed the McClellan story, turning the tide of the military and political wars simultaneously. Renewed Union “confidence” and “prestige,” exulted the New York Times, would now “surely spread its infection.”79 Frequent critic Theodore Tilton of the Independent, admittedly “never . . . a partisan for Mr Lincoln’s re-election,” now wrote John Nicolay to crow: “If the President has not said he was ‘a beaten man,’ he will hereafter have no occasion to say it. We are going to win the Presidential election. The divisions are going to be healed. I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of the public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta.”80

  After years of hostility, the
press now began showering accolades on Sherman, with Bennett’s Herald calling him “one of the great men of the time,” and even the general’s longtime nemesis, the Cincinnati Gazette, hailing his Atlanta triumph as “the blast of a war trumpet.” Not until Election Day, when an Indianapolis reporter dared to hazard a guess as to the size of Sherman’s force as it prepared to march to the sea—an estimate promptly reprinted in the Richmond newspapers—did Sherman erupt in his customary manner and demand that the correspondent be prosecuted. The press blackout that had preceded Sherman’s capture of Atlanta now resumed in a new blaze of adverse publicity, but in another stroke of luck for Lincoln, did not commence until the very day ballots were being counted in the contest for president, when it was too late to impact the election. Voters thus never learned that Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, onetime managing editor of Greeley’s Tribune, had urged Sherman to counteract news leaks by “publishing other paragraphs, calculated to mislead the enemy”—in other words, through a campaign of disinformation.81

  Yet the final outcome of the presidential race was still far from settled. Lincoln’s foes—from the Democratic and Republican sides alike, journalists as well as politicians—continued to plot against him. Greeley, as usual, led the assault from among the president’s “friends.” In early September, deaf to renewed public confidence in the administration and the army, Greeley, together with Evening Post veteran Parke Godwin and Theodore Tilton—notwithstanding the latter’s enthusiastic recent note to John Nicolay—launched a quixotic campaign to rally the Republican faithful back into convention in Cincinnati in order to dump the president from the ticket.

  The trio of editors went so far as to send letters to the nation’s Republican governors provocatively inquiring whether “the interests” of party and country did not “require the substitution of another candidate in place of Lincoln.” Loyal Republican leaders quickly distanced themselves from the ill-timed insurgency, while Lincoln supporters rushed to report the coup attempt to the White House. James Conkling, the Springfield neighbor to whom Lincoln had entrusted the public reading of his open letter on black recruitment the previous year, alerted the president that Illinois governor Richard Yates had received one of the letters from Greeley, Godwin, and Tilton “enquiring of him whether we can carry Illinois whether you can be elected and whether it would be advisable to nominate another candidate. The Governor will answer most emphatically that we can carry Illinois—that you can be elected and that it would not be advisable to put any other candidate in the field.” Vowed Conkling: “We shall carry the State by a large majority, if we can keep clear of these faint hearted, weakkneed politicians who are afraid of the popularity of McClellan.”82 Wisconsin’s James T. Lewis spoke for the majority of Republican governors when he wrote the trio of editors on September 7: “You ask . . . ‘in your judgment is the re-election of Mr. Lincoln a probability’? Answer, I think it is a strong probability. . . . In my judgment the interests of the Union party, the honor of the Nation and the good of Mankind, demand that Mr.Lincoln should be sustained and re-elected.”83 Within days, Thurlow Weed jubilantly reported to William Seward that the “formidable and vicious . . . conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln” had collapsed in a “Fizzle.”84

  Just a week later, on September 17, John C. Frémont officially abandoned his third-party candidacy for the White House, calling on his followers to unite behind the president. Frémont’s withdrawal capped a rare, glorious month for Lincoln in the press. On the 23rd, the president responded to—or, as some whispered, repaid—the Frémont faction by asking Postmaster General Montgomery Blair to resign from his cabinet. Perhaps as part of the same complex deal, Henry Winter Davis of Manifesto fame lost renomination to the House of Representatives. After surviving several undermining peace initiatives from the editors of both the Tribune and the Times, Lincoln, with help from the federal military, had finally united the party. As the once despondent Henry Raymond reported to Lincoln from party headquarters in mid-September, “Things look pretty well here.”85 Well enough for a remorseless Greeley to resume besieging Lincoln with requests for favors and renewed pressure for peace, “so anxious am I that not one needless drop of blood should be shed in this terrible struggle.”86 Still stubbornly ignoring the threat that his efforts posed to emancipation, Greeley continued pressing Lincoln to reopen peace talks with the Confederacy, summoning the pluck to advise him: “Above all let nothing be said or done which can touch the pride of the Southrons. They have fought splendidly, and should be treated magnanimously.” Greeley ended this latest advice with a belated offer to come to Washington after all, if he “could do any good.” Not surprisingly, Lincoln replied to no letters and extended no invitations.87

  Scorned and ostracized, the ever-nimble editor responded with yet another dizzying about-face. Offering neither explanation nor apology for his latest transfiguration, he began promoting Lincoln’s reelection as if he had been advocating it from the start. Not only did he commence editorializing in the president’s behalf, he hatched an audacious scheme to sway the important soldiers’ vote to the administration. At Greeley’s urging, with John Nicolay’s help, and with Chairman Raymond’s acquiescence, the army assigned a colonel named Absalom H. Markland to distribute free of charge “such newspapers . . . as the National Committee may determine to circulate in the Army of the Potomac”—meaning only those journals that spoke in “very logical and argumentative speech in favor of our platform and against McClellan.”88

  The effort clearly proved successful, for within days the New York World was complaining: “The monopoly of the sale of the papers in General Grant’s and Sheridan’s armies is given with the distinct understanding that as few as possible of the Democratic papers shall be sold by them. . . . The only papers our soldiers are allowed to see are . . . all violent administration sheets, daily filled with calumnies on the Democratic party and its candidates.” In the West, as Marble further griped, “by order of the military satraps, the opposition papers are suppressed outright within the military lines; so that there can be no mistake, the World, Chicago Times, Cincinnati Enquirer, etc., are specified by name as being excluded, and so our western armies can learn nothing of political matters except through the medium of the partisan sheets in the interest of Mr. Lincoln.”89 For military and civilian consumption alike, Greeley’s own editorials were by month’s end not only touting the president’s reelection, but ridiculing talk of armistice as “folly or treason,” and adding with a rare display of bellicosity that “the only effective Peace Commissioners” were Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Farragut.90 (When the soldiers ultimately cast their ballots for president, Lincoln would capture four of every five votes.)

  Outmaneuvered among the general’s uniformed constituency, Democrats turned to civilian-based strategies Lincoln had successfully deployed four years earlier, including an attempt to corral ethnic support through the foreign language press. The plan seemed almost quaint in the wake of the blanket coverage now pouring off the presses of the widely read party-affiliated dailies. “How to take, to turn, and to satisfy an ‘Editor,’ is and always has been one of the most difficult problems,” a German Democrat from Philadelphia, Max Langenschwartz, told George McClellan in September. The task was especially difficult, the McClellan supporter pointed out, if “one is unable to be preceded by an overwhelming force of Bank-Checks.” Apparently, McClellan was less willing to invest in foreign language papers in 1864 than Lincoln had been in 1859. Yet Langenschwartz optimistically believed that journalists were susceptible to another form of persuasion: flattery. “He will now hoist our flag,” the correspondent guaranteed after meeting the editor of what he termed “the most influential german paper in the State” on September 26, “ . . . and that will be more useful than fifty public speeches could have done so quickly.”91

  Further details about this clumsy attempt to woo piecemeal German support for the Democrats are lost to history. But focusing on the one ethnic bloc that always dependably t
ilted Republican seemed an unwise investment of energy by McClellan forces. That officials from both parties continued to pay close attention to the foreign language press, however, was evidenced when Lincoln’s Chicago friends urged that the Illinois Staats Zeitung “be dropped from those receiving advertisements of the War Department” in retaliation for “attacking the enrollment law, [and] the call for more troops.”92 Lincoln made sure that year also to reward smaller newspapers that had demonstrated consistent loyalty. During the campaign he saw to it that one of his most faithful journalistic supporters back home earned financial rewards for its backing. “The Journal paper was always my friend; and of course its editor the same,” the president wrote in June in an endorsement meant to encourage local Republicans to buy notices in the Springfield daily. “If there is any special reason why it should not have a share of the advertising I do not know it.”93

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  For reasons that had little to do with financial reward beyond the ever-higher profits he was earning from his own daily and weekly editions, James Gordon Bennett became the last of the big three New York editors to come to terms with the president’s increasingly probable reelection. Editorializing in May, he had sounded not unlike Manton Marble in pillorying Lincoln for “blunders” and “criminalities” and dismissing Republican political prospects as “impossible.”94 Bennett spent the summer of 1864 skewering Lincoln’s candidacy, proposing Grant as an alternative, and lauding the Democratic opposition. Complaining that there was “not an honest, fair-dealing Administration journal in New York City,” Gideon Welles believed that the Herald, in particular, gave “tone and direction” to the rest of the antagonistic Gotham press. “When the Herald has in view to defame or put a mark upon a man,” Welles recognized, “it commences and persists . . . [in] attacking, ridiculing, abusing, and defaming,” until gradually another journal begins to echo “the slanders of the Herald” and “follows up the work.”95 In other words, Bennett’s paper remained especially dangerous because its opinions were contagious.