Lincoln and the Power of the Press

by Harold Holzer

  63 Ibid., 83–84; Chicago Press and Tribune, October 11, 1858.

  64 Chicago Press and Tribune, August 26, September 6, October 11, 1858.

  65 Quoted in Holzer, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 14.

  66 Lincoln to William A. Ross, March 26, 1859, CW, 3:373.

  67 Quoted in Holzer, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 15.

  68 Sparks, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 594–95.

  69 New York Tribune, November 5, 1858.

  70 Henry Clay Whitney, Life on The Circuit with Lincoln (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 457. Lincoln to Horace Greeley, November 8, 1858, CW, 3:336.

  71 Lincoln to Charles H. Ray, November 20, 1858, CW, 3:341–42.

  72 Ibid. Lincoln was so eager to commence assembling his scrapbook that he wrote to Henry Clay Whitney ten days later to urge Ray to comply with his request, this time offering to “pay all charges, and be greatly obliged to boot.” See Lincoln to Whitney, November 30, 1858, CW, 3:343; Lincoln to Whitney, December 25, 1858, CW, 3:347.

  73 Holzer, ed. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 29.

  74 Quoted in Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, 96.

  75 Speech at Chicago, December 10, 1856, CW, 2:385.

  76 Lincoln at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, CW, 3:27.

  77 Charles Lanphier to Stephen A. Douglas, January 6, 1859, Lanphier Papers, ALPLM; Douglas to Lanphier January 6, 1859, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 433.

  78 New York Herald, November 10, 1858.

  79 Ibid.

  80 New York Tribune, November 17, 1858.

  81 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 357–58.

  82 Lanphier quoted in Charles C. Patton, Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy: A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier, 5 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Privately printed 1973), 1:108; Douglas to Lanphier, January 6, 1858[9], in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 433; Lincoln to Henry Asbury, November 19, 1858, CW, 3:339. Five years to the day after writing to Asbury, Lincoln offered his most unforgettable words on “the cause of civil liberty”: the Gettysburg Address.

  83 “1858. 17th Year. Prospectus of the Illinois State Journal,” supplement in the collection of ALPLM.

  84 Lincoln to Gustave P. Koerner, July 25, 1858, CW, 2:524. Conversely, Republicans chronically worried that unregistered Irish-Americans were voting illegally for Democrats.

  85 Christian Schneider took over the Alton Freie Presse, which lasted until the spring of 1859. See Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 2:616–27.

  86 Canisius originally harbored hopes of printing a Springfield edition of his Alton paper, asking U.S. senator Lyman Trumbull in early 1858 “to give me a recommendation to some influential men in that city as have no acquaintance among the Am[ericans] [t]here.” Trumbull may have introduced the editor to Lincoln. See Canisius to Trumbull, January 15, 1858, Lyman Trumbull Papers, Library of Congress.

  87 The proposed Massachusetts constitutional amendment withheld voting rights until immigrants were resident for seven years, and naturalized for two.

  88 New York Tribune, April 25, 1859.

  89 New York Herald, December 9, 1860.

  90 Herndon’s speech appeared in the Illinois State Journal, May 17, 1859.

  91 Lincoln to Theodore Canisius, May 17, 1859, CW, 3:380.

  92 Illinois State Journal, May 18, 1859. Lincoln was not the only prominent Illinois Republican to respond to pressure for denunciations of the Massachusetts referendum. Senator Lyman Trumbull, Congressman Owen Lovejoy, State Chairman Norman Judd, and others also replied. See F. I. Herriott, The Premises and Significance of Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Theodore Canisius (Reprinted from Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblatter Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischenb Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois, 15, 1915): 37–45.

  93 Canisius even asked for a second round of reprints after determining that initial translations were inaccurate. See his article in Illinois State Journal, June 20, 1860.

  94 Lincoln’s letter to Judd does not survive; we can surmise the gist of his request from Judd’s reply; see Norman B. Judd to Lincoln, May 13, 1859, ALPLC.

  95 Quoted in Frank Baron, Abraham Lincoln and the German Immigrants: Turners and Forty-Eighters (Topeka: Society for German-American Studies for the University of Kansas, 2012), 98. The legal fee story, which came to light in Carl Sandburg’s award-winning, but unsourced, Lincoln biography, was never told by Herndon in any of his own writings.

  96 The frustrating disappearance of all known copies of the Staats-Anzeiger was most recently confirmed in James Cornelius, From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (August 30, 2011), in which the institution’s chief historian noted: “Lincoln’s ownership of the paper—profits going to Canisius, for his efforts—was secret. Unfortunately, its contents have remained secret, too, since not a single copy of it exists today to the knowledge of anyone in the Lincoln field. See http://www.alplm.org/blog/tag/theodore-canisius/.

  97 Two co-signed copies of the contract in Lincoln’s hand survive, differing slightly in punctuation and capitalization. Canisius’s copy—which includes Lincoln’s autograph and signed release—is in the John Hay Library at Brown University; presumably Lincoln retained it and gave it at some point to Hay, in whose papers it remained. This copy acknowledges that local banker Jacob Bunn funneled the money for the purchase to Canisius (CW, 3:383). Lincoln’s copy is in the ALPLM. I am grateful to Lincoln Collection curator James Cornelius for bringing it to my attention and pointing out the small discrepancies. See also Lohne, “Team of Friends: A New Lincoln Theory and Legacy,” 36.

  98 Contract with Canisius, May [?], 1859, CW, 3:383.

  99 In fact, the Republican National Convention had yet to meet: it would gather in June and nominate John C. Frémont as its candidate for president.

  100 Contract with Canisius, May 1859, CW, 3:383.

  101 Illinois State Journal, June 21, 1860.

  102 Lincoln to Frederick W. Koehle, July 11, 1859, CW, 3:391. Koehle was a political officeholder: assistant circuit clerk in Lincoln, Illinois. Lincoln’s letter mentioned a similar sales pitch to a Mount Pulaski merchant named John Capps.

  103 The Democratic newspaper in town ironically speculated earlier that Lincoln had instead helped his friend James Matheny open a conservative paper called the Springfield American, established as “a bridge for old whigs to cross to black Republicanism.” See Illinois State Register, June 26, 1858, and noted in Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:564.

  104 Illinois State Journal, June 21, 1860.

  105 Illinois State Journal, November 10, 1860. Lincoln made one reluctant “nonspeech” that August, when he was hoisted to a platform at a massive rally at Springfield. He devoted most of the opportunity to declaring he had “no intention of making a speech” and asking the assemblage to “kindly let me be silent” (CW, 4:91).

  106 Testimonial, August 14, 1860, CW, 4:44–45.

  107 Original at the John Hay Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

  108 New York Herald, December 9, 1860.

  109 Gustave P. Koerner to Lincoln, June 13, 1861, ALPLC. Further testifying to the almost obsessive secrecy surrounding Lincoln’s investment in the Staats-Anzeiger, the ever-loyal Gustave Koerner never mentioned Canisius’s name in his exhaustive, nearly 1,500-page memoirs. See Thomas J. McCormack, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809–1896: Life Sketches Written at the Suggestion of His Children, 2 vols. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1909).

  110 Lincoln to William H. Seward, June 29, 1861, CW, 5:418.

  111 Sunderine Temple and Wayne C. Temple, Abraham Lincoln and Illinois’ Fifth Capitol (2nd ed., Mahomet, Ill.: Mayhaven, 2006), 279. Three weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, the Illinois State legislature passed a joint resolution “allowing the members a bound copy of the Register or Journal.” See Charles Lanphier to unid
entified correspondent, March 29, 1861, Lanphier Family Papers, ALPLM.

  112 Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 3:428–29.

  113 Simeon Francis to Lincoln, December 26, 1859, ALPLC.

  114 Simeon Francis to Lincoln, December 16, 1859, ALPLC.

  115 Simeon Francis to Lincoln, October 29, 1859, ALPLC.

  116 J. D. Roper (later publisher of the Journal), quoted in A. W. Shipton, Lincoln’s Association with the Journal (Address at an Annual Conference of Copley Press executives, n.d, [10]).

  117 Lincoln’s so-called Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (more likely part of his first), dated February 11, 1859, CW, 3:360, 362; Mark E. Neely, The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5. See also Thomas A. Horrocks’s excellent introductory chapter, “Texts, Contexts, and Contests: Politics and Print in the Age of Lincoln,” in his Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014).

  118 Horace White to Lincoln, February 2, 1859, ALPLC.

  SEVEN: THE PERILOUS POSITION OF THE UNION

  1 Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York . . . (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1869), 27, 28, 122.

  2 Herbert Mitgang, ed., Edward Dicey’s Spectator of America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 11.

  3 Mark E. Neeley, Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5.

  4 Records can be found in the New York City Register (New York: H. Wilson, 1859).

  5 Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years . . . (Hartford, Conn.: A. S. Hale & Co., 1870), 155–56.

  6 Ibid., 155–58.

  7 “Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond,” The Journalist 4 (October 2, 1886): 1–2.

  8 Cincinnati Daily Press, May 14, 1860; Lambert A. Wilmer. Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 75, 82, 311.

  9 Springfield Republican, quoted in Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 204. See also George S. Merriam, Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 179.

  10 Chicago Daily Journal, August 16, 1858, quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 96.

  11 Quoted in Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 214.

  12 William M. Smith to Lincoln, February 23, 1860, ALPLC.

  13 Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 198–99; Central Illinois Gazette article reprinted in Illinois State Journal, May 12, 1859.

  14 Quoted in Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), 2:258–59.

  15 Preston Bailhache, “Recollections of a Springfield Doctor,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 47 (Spring 1964): 59, 60.

  16 Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 427.

  17 Thomas J. Pickett to Lincoln, April 13, 1859, ALPLC.

  18 Lincoln to Thomas J. Pickett, April 16, 1859, CW, 3:377.

  19 Lincoln to the Press & Tribune Co., June 15, 1859, CW, 3:385.

  20 H. I. Cleveland, “Becoming the First Republican President,” Saturday Evening Post, August 5, 1899, 84–85; see also Jeffrey Justin Anderson, “Joseph Medill: How One Man Influenced the Republican Presidential Nomination of 1860” (Master’s thesis, Roosevelt University, 2011).

  21 Joseph Medill to Lincoln, September 10, 1859, ALPLC.

  22 William M. Cornell, The Life and Public Career of Horace Greeley (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1872), 279.

  23 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-Made Men (Hartford, Conn.: Worthington, Dustin & Co., 1872), 294.

  24 Wilmer, Our Press Gang, 114–15.

  25 A. K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, Mass.: The Salem Press Co., 1902), 161.

  26 See Horace Greeley, Glimmer of Europe (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1851), and Hints Toward Reforms: Lectures, Addresses, and Other Writings (New York: Fowles & Welles, 1853).

  27 New York Herald, September 17, 1859.

  28 Charles H. Ray to Lincoln, October 20 [31], 1859, ALPLC.

  29 Charles H. Ray to Elihu Washburne, January 7, 1861, Elihu Washburne Papers, Library of Congress.

  30 Summary of remarks at Mechanicsburg, Illinois, November 4, 1859, CW, 3:493.

  31 Speech at Elwood, Kansas, December 1 [?], 1859, CW, 3: 496–97.

  32 Speech at Leavenworth, Kansas, December 3, 1859, CW, 3:502.

  33 Illinois State Register, November 12, 1859, quoted in Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 716.

  34 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, October 1, 1859, and to Henry J. Raymond, October 24, 1859, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 475, 478.

  35 New York Times, October 19, December 2, 1859.

  36 New York Tribune, October 19, 1858.

  37 Charleston Mercury, October 31, November 4, November 28, 1859.

  38 Missouri Democrat, December 15, 1857, quoted in 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), 77.

  39 Cincinnati Enquirer, October 19, 1859.

  40 New York Herald, January 23, 1858, October 18, 1859; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 563. “Interviews with distinguished individuals is now quite a feature in New York journalism,” wrote Hudson just fifteen years after the event. “It was commenced by the New York Herald in 1859, at the time of the celebrated John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry.”

  41 New York Herald, December 5, 1859.

  42 New York Herald, June 15, 1859.

  43 New York Herald, December 5, December 29, 1859.

  44 New York Herald, quoted in Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 373.

  45 Douglass’ Monthly, November 1859.

  46 Stephen A. Douglas, “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 19 (September 1859): 519, 521, 526, 528. See also Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 35–38.

  47 For the interesting assertion that Douglas meant with his article to claim that the rights of community trumped those of equality, see Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 473–89; Douglas to Harper & Bros., September 14, 1859, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 468.

  48 Lincoln to James W. Sheahan, January 24, 1860, CW, 3:515.

  49 Lincoln to Norman Judd, February 9, 1860, CW, 3:517.

  50 Chicago Press and Tribune, February 9, 1860; Norman Judd to Lincoln, February 21, 1860, ALPLC.

  51 New York Tribune, February 25, 1860.

  52 Henry C. Bowen, “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” in William Hayes Ward, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Tributes from His Associates (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 27; Joseph H. Richards, “ ’57 or Thereabouts: Personal Recollections of a Publisher,” The Independent 50 (December 8, 1898): 1692.

  53 New York Times, March 12, 1859. The comment was inspired by reports that Lincoln had become a serious contender for the vice presidency.

  54 Quoted in Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 104.

  55 Quoted in the New York Times, February 28, 1860.<
br />
  56 Francis Fisher Browne, The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: N. D. Thompson, 1886), 316.

  57 CW, 3:538.

  58 CW, 3:550.

  59 Illinois State Register, February 22, 1860; New York Tribune, February 28, 1860; Joel Benton, ed., Greeley on Lincoln . . . (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1893), 24.

  60 New York Times, New York Tribune, February 28, 1860; New York Evening Post, February 28, March 7, 1860.

  61 New York Daily News, March 1, 1860; New York Herald, February 29, 1860.

  62 Chicago Tribune, February 29, 1860.

  63 Lincoln to Mary Lincoln, March 4, 1860, in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Supplement, 1832–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), 49.

  64 Lincoln to James A. Briggs, March 6, 1860, in ibid., 50.

  65 Tribune Tract Number 4: National Politics. Speech of Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, Delivered at the Cooper Institute, Monday, Feb. 27, 1860. Original copy in the Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society (GLC-4471).

  66 Lincoln to John Pickering, April 6, 1860, CW, 4:38–39.

  67 Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell with enclosure, December 1, 1859, CW, 3:511–12. Politician Fell had previously owned the Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph, which he would reclaim after Lincoln’s presidency.

  68 Ibid.

  69 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 389.

  70 Douglass’ Monthly, June 1860.

  71 Bromley quoted in Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Intimate Memories of Lincoln (Elmira, N.Y.: Primavera, 1945), 279.

  72 Thurlow Weed Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 2:268–69.

  73 Lucy Lucile Tasher, “The Missouri Democrat and the Civil War,” Missouri Historical Review 31 (July 1937): 402–3

  74 Chicago Press and Tribune, May 15, 1860.

  75 Quoted in Jay Monaghan, The Man Who Elected Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 169. Medill and Ray were no longer on speaking terms when the former offered this recollection. Others on the scene later recalled that the deal had indeed been struck, but did not mention the Chicago editors as parties to the agreement. Medill in the Ohio delegation quoted in Elmer Gertz, Joe Medill’s War (Chicago: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1945), 6.