Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  Special thanks go to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, who shared his knowledge of Henry J. Raymond’s armed defense of the paper during the 1863 Draft Riots and also gave me several opportunities to visit my favorite relic from that era: Raymond’s own desk. Arthur’s late father, “Punch” Sulzberger, was chairman of both the Times and the Met when I first arrived on the museum’s staff. Punch shared his own trove of Times stories over the years, not to mention a copy of an 1870 Raymond biography—the first book I read for this project. Additional thanks go to current and former Times friends who have so often helped celebrate my books on the nineteenth-century press: Ethan Riegelhaupt, Lou Fabrizio, Alexis Buryck, Denise Warren, Barbara Jackson, and Nancy Karpf.

  Lincoln never employed a public relations man—none existed in his day—but as one who once served in that capacity, for a somewhat later generation of public officials, I underestimate neither the craft nor its best practitioners. For their friendship and years of shared insights about the press and politics, I thank Howard Brock, Richard Edelman, Mortimer Matz, Martin McLaughlin, Ethan Riegelhaupt (again), Kevin Sheeky, William Cunningham, Ken Sunshine, and especially the late and much missed John O’Keefe, who, had he lived in the nineteenth century, would no doubt have induced Abraham Lincoln to wine and dine at the River Café in Brooklyn. Lincoln would have emerged from the experience a happier man.

  Many public officials, past and present, have been equally enthusiastic about this book, especially my former boss, the inspiring Mario Cuomo and his extraordinary successor in Albany, Governor Andrew Cuomo. I am also grateful to President Bill Clinton for sharing his insights on this subject at several treasured encounters and for generously acknowledging my Lincoln work on many occasions. I have enjoyed my opportunities to discuss the nineteenth-century press with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. Special thanks go to Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, and his chief of staff, Patrick Souders, for giving me access to the Senate floor, where I saw and touched the desk where Congressman Preston Brooks nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death in 1856. Talk about Washington infighting!

  Fortunately, no such disharmony reigns at my terrific publishing house, Simon & Schuster. It is hard to imagine being blessed with a more skillful or inspiring editor than Alice Mayhew. This is my third book for Alice, and with each successive project I become increasingly grateful for the opportunities to work with her. Her astute guidance—my occasional resistance notwithstanding—has made this a far better book. Further gratitude goes to Jonathan Cox of S&S for his additional help in organizing the project and its illustrations, to his successor Stuart Roberts, to indefatigable copy editor Fred Chase, to Julia Prosser and Maureen Cole of the PR team, and of course to publisher Jonathan Karp for his enthusiasm for the project. And I’m grateful as ever to my agent Geri Thoma, who has so ably represented me for more than twenty years.

  Last but not least, I thank my family members for their abundant patience and help. Love and appreciation go to my brilliant daughters Meg and Remy (who ably proofread every page of manuscript), my gifted son-in-law Adam Kirsch, and my precious grandson Charles, who keeps me in my place and showers me with more affection than I deserve. My amazing mother Rose Holzer turned ninety-eight years young as I handed in this manuscript—a day after I marked my own sixty-fifth birthday—and much as I regret the Saturdays I had to postpone my usual weekly visits to her and my sisters Deanne and Susanne in order to press on with the book, her understanding reduced my customary level of Jewish guilt.

  Above all, I want to express adoration and appreciation for Edith, my wife of forty-three years. For this project, we conducted much research side by side. We shared day after day at the Library of Congress, transcribing the papers of countless journalists and politicians and eyeballing blurry microfilm reels in the Newspaper Reading Room until we could barely see. Edith not only helped unearth many gems; her subsequent review of the first manuscript draft immeasurably improved the final book. Just as importantly, her constant care and feeding made it possible for me to survive twelve-hour workdays every weekend for more than four years—and then nursed me back to health after a hideous accident, a botched surgery, complications, and setbacks, so I could proofread galleys and keep the project on schedule. Edith is my sounding board for ideas, a shoulder to lean on when things are going in the wrong direction, and an honest critic whose approval means everything to me, as it has ever since high school. I could not possibly have written this book without her love and help, and only hope she’s not too exhausted for the next one—whatever and whenever that may be.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © DON POLLARD, SCULPTURE BY FRANK PORCU

  Harold Holzer is the chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and the Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society. The author, coauthor, or editor of forty-six books on Lincoln and the Civil War, Holzer has also published sixteen monographs, more than five hundred articles in scholarly and popular magazines, and introductions and chapters in another fifty volumes. He lectures throughout the country, appears regularly on national television, and serves on the advisory boards of a number of Lincoln-related institutions, and as vice chairman of the Lincoln Forum.

  Holzer has also organized several museum exhibitions, including the award-winning “Lincoln and New York” at the New-York Historical Society. He was historical advisor to Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln and wrote the official young readers’ companion book.

  From 2000 to 2010, Holzer was chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton. In turn, President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. Holzer’s many other awards include a second-place Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union and lifetime achievement awards from the Daughters of the American Revolution and Civil War Round Tables and Lincoln Groups in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Cleveland.

  In his full-time professional career, Holzer serves as Senor Vice President for Public Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he has worked for twenty-three years. A resident of Rye, New York, Holzer and his wife Edith have two daughters and a grandson.

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  NOTES

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes

  * * *

  ALPLC

  Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

  ALPLM

  Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  CW

  Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55.

  OR

  The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

  INTRODUCTION: A MORE EFFICIENT SERVICE

  1 Quoted in Paul M. Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield, 1821–1865, orig. pub. 1935 (Chicago: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1971), 85–86; Lincoln to Mary Owens, May 7, 1837, CW, 1:78.

  2 For Springfield population shifts, see Kenneth J. Winkle, “The Voters of Lincoln’s Springfield: Migration and Political Pa
rticipation in an Antebellum City,” Journal of Social History 25 (1992): 595–611.

  3 Sangamo Journal, n.d., quoted in Angle, “Here I Have Lived,” 113–14.

  4 William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Lincoln’s Herndon, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, orig. pub. 1889 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 231.

  5 See Peter Bain and Paul Shaw, Blackletter: Type and National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  6 See Harry E. Pratt, The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1943), 112; for the first modern report of Lincoln’s investment in the German newspaper, see “A Bit of Staggering Information,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1941.

  7 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, orig. pub. 1835–1839, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968), 517–18.

  8 See Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972).

  9 It was a falling out with pamphleteer and journalist James Thomson Callender—imprisoned for sedition under Adams—that in fact led to the most humiliating episode of Jefferson’s career. When Jefferson pardoned Callender but denied him the federal patronage job he coveted, the journalist exacted his revenge by publishing the first scandalous reports that Jefferson had fathered a child by his slave Sally Hemings. Quoted in Leonard W. Levy, ed., Freedom of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson: Early American Libertarian Theories, volume 1 of a 2-volume survey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 360, 371. In his own rise to power, not surprisingly, Jefferson was capable of praising newspapers—when they agreed with him. See Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, orig. pub. 1963 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), 48–55.

  10 Edward Connery Lathem, Chronological Tables of American Newspapers, 1690–1820 (Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishing, 1972), 31–35.

  11 Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011), 281.

  12 Matthew Warshauer, Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law: Nationalism, Civil Liberties, and Partisanship (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 33.

  13 See Donald B. Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

  14 W. Stephen Belko, The Invincible Duff Green: Whig of the West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 104.

  15 Ibid., 98–99.

  16 One nineteenth-century account held that Green “denounced” Jackson as a “tyrant” for choosing Martin Van Buren, not John C. Calhoun, as his successor. See Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 20.

  17 L. D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune, with Extended Notices of Many of His Contemporary Statesmen and Journalists (New York: Union Publishing, 1873), 103–4.

  18 Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 151.

  19 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Extra Journal: Rallying the Whigs of Illinois (Fort Wayne, Ind.: Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, 1982), 3.

  20 Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 54.

  21 Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11–12.

  22 “The New York Herald from 1835 to 1866,” North American Review 102 (April 1866): 374.

  23 Anthony Trollope, North America, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), 2:427.

  24 Ludwig Gall quoted in David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 133.

  25 Elizabeth R. Varon, “Tippecanoe and Ladies, Too: White Women and the Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 504.

  26 Dr. Amos Willard French quoted in Wayne C. Temple, “The Linguistic Lincolns: A New Lincoln Letter,” Lincoln Herald 94 (Fall 1992): 110.

  27 Illinois State Journal, June 29, 1860.

  28 Charles Eugene Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin by His Grandson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1899), 37

  29 Quoted in Charles F. Wingate, ed., Views and Interviews on Journalism (New York: F. B. Patterson, 1875), 163.

  30 See, for example, Louis M. Starr, The Civil War’s Bohemian Brigade: Newsmen in Action (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

  31 The records are unavoidably imprecise because the database lacks such major publications as the New York Times and the Chicago Press & Tribune. Moreover, scanning the words “Lincoln” or “Douglas” yields false positives for people (and even ships and animals) with the same or similar names. But the numbers cited here have been painstakingly cleansed, and the trends they suggest are inescapable: Lincoln and Douglas received escalating press attention over the years, reflecting their growing prominence—and perhaps influencing it as well.

  32 Roy Watson Curry, “The Newspaper Presses and the Civil War,” West Virginia History 6 (January 1945): 226.

  33 George F. Williams, quoted in “Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond. A Glimpse of New York Journalism Twenty-Five Years Ago,” The Journalist 4 (October 2, 1886): 1.

  34 May D. Russell Young, ed., Men and Memories: Personal Reminiscences by John Russell Young (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), 208. Young became Librarian of Congress during the McKinley administration.

  35 Quoted in Ratner and Teeter, Fanatics and Fire-Eaters, 14.

  36 Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 2 vols. (London: John Maxwell & Co., 1864), 1:322.

  37 “The New York Herald from 1835 to 1866,” 378.

  38 Lincoln’s reply at the Ottawa debate, August 21, 1858, CW, 3:27.

  ONE: THE TYPES ARE IN OUR GLORY

  1 These descriptions, along with the coincidence of the two men’s common rite of passage in mid–1831, were first noticed, and beautifully described, in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 1–3.

  2 Theodore L. Cuyler, “ ‘Uncle Horace,’ ” The Temperance Record, January 25, 1873, 40.

  3 “By littles” is from the autobiographical sketch Lincoln prepared for John L. Scripps in June 1860, in CW, 4:62; the reference to “reading,” is from a sketch prepared the previous December for Jesse W. Fell, CW, 3:511. For recollection of young Greeley, see James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of “The New-York Tribune,” from His Birth to the Present Time, rev. ed. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), 26.

  4 CW, 4:62; Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, 35–36.

  5 Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln interview, in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 108; a “schoolmate” quoted in Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, 26. Throughout, I have corrected the more egregious and distracting misspellings by Herndon’s correspondents.

  6 Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 107.

  7 Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 512. This is the best annotated edition yet published of Herndon’s controversial nineteenth-century Lincoln biography.

  8 Quoted in Douglas L. Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 62.

  9 Robert Bray, Reading with Lincoln (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 44; Ida M. Tarbell, The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: S. S. McClure, 1896), 87.

  10 Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 426, 430, 512.

  11 CW, 4:63–64; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 19
60), 1:14–15.

  12 William Dean Howells interview with Dr. John N. Allen, 1860, in David C. Mearns, ed., The Lincoln Papers: The Story of the Collection with Selections to July 4, 1861, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 1:157.

  13 There is still much mythology attached to Lincoln’s life in New Salem. The best book remains Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem, orig. pub. 1934 (Chicago: Lincoln’s New Salem Enterprises, 1973). For Lincoln as village postmaster, see 94–101.

  14 Horace Greeley, ms. autobiographical sketch dictated to Moses Cortland, April 14, 1845, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress. In a postscript written in his own hand, Greeley, already infamous for his illegible penmanship, attested that he had asked his “boy” to copy the manuscript so it would exist in “readable characters.”

  15 Greeley autobiographical sketch; Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, Including Reminiscences of American Politics and Politicians . . . (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 39; Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, 41; 2–4, 24.

  16 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 61.

  17 Ibid., 61–63.

  18 Ibid., 75, 76.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Ibid., 81; William M. Cornell, The Life and Public Career of Horace Greeley (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 148.

  21 “A Working Man’s Recollections of America,” Knights Penny Magazine 1 (1846): 99–100, consulted on http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5839.

  22 Greeley autobiographical sketch.

  23 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 82–87; Greeley autobiographical sketch.

  24 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 88.

  25 Greeley autobiographical sketch.

  26 Simeon Francis to Allen Francis, ca. 1831, Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.