While Lincoln and Douglas established themselves in different circles—despite occasional exceptions to the unwritten custom, most legislators at the time socialized exclusively with men of their own party—the two made for quite a contrast whenever their paths crossed in Washington. A virtual anecdote machine, the gangly giant Lincoln moved with an awkward gait, often seemed lost in thought, and invariably appeared too long in the limbs for his country-made broadcloth suits. The hard-driving Little Giant, by contrast, made up for his diminutive stature by drinking and smoking to excess and boiling over with an aggressive energy that one contemporary sniffed revealed “a touch of the rowdy.”8 The elderly Whig congressman John Quincy Adams, for his part, was repelled by the sight of Douglas hurling “abusive invectives” during one of his typical congressional orations. As Adams noted in his diary: “His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made out of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and the aspect of a half-naked pugilist.”9
Legend would later hold that, back in Springfield, earlier in the decade, Lincoln and Douglas had both courted the vivacious Mary Todd. Neither swain was much to look at even then: the thickset, short-legged Douglas was hardly more pleasing to the eye than the tall, angular Lincoln, whose spiky hair had a way, he joked, of “getting up in the world,” and whose acne-pitted skin, a reporter later noted, looked “indented, as though it had been scarred by vitriol.”10 Perhaps Mary ultimately found Lincoln the more appealing of the two because he was less forward with women; his rival, squat physique notwithstanding, ostentatiously considered himself a ladies’ man. Mary herself would only admit, many years later, that both “choice spirits” had indeed once been “habitués of our drawing room,” but proudly maintained that Lincoln was “always a ‘World above them all.’ ” In a cutting reference to Douglas’s nickname, she pointedly added that he was “a very little, little giant by the side of my tall Kentuckian.”11 Douglas went out of his way to remain polite to Mary for the rest of his life, but may have regarded his failed pursuit of her as a loss worth avenging on his political nemesis.
Physically, Lincoln may have stood taller, but professionally, there was no doubt about which of the two had risen higher. Politically, “Long Abraham” was dwarfed in the much larger shadow of the “Little Giant.” Douglas ascended to the Senate before his thirty-fourth birthday. Lincoln, though four years his senior, had never before even set foot in Washington, much less served there. As fellow freshmen, to be sure, the roles both men could play in their respective chambers would remain for a time somewhat limited by the fusty traditions of Congress. Yet both men arrived in the capital in December 1847 aspiring to notice. And once seated, they resumed waging a war there that uniformed armies had all but ceased fighting. Imminent military victory notwithstanding, the press, along with politicians like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, clung to the Mexican conflict in an effort to maintain readership and voter enthusiasm.
• • •
The violence that had triggered the war between Mexico and the United States had erupted in April 1846 on Texas land that Lincoln described poetically as the “stupendous desert” between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers—territory claimed by both countries.12 Without waiting for the border issue to be resolved, President Polk charged that Mexico had “passed the boundary of the United States” and spilled American blood on indisputably American territory.13 Congress declared war two days later and Polk promptly dispatched an invasion force.
By early 1847, superior American armies had overrun Mexican defenders at Buena Vista, Veracruz, and Cerro Gordo, and by September occupied Mexico City. Now Polk, a Democrat committed to the policy of coast-to-coast expansion known as Manifest Destiny, sought ratification of a peace treaty that promised to vastly enlarge American territory in the Southwest at Mexico’s expense. Under its terms, the United States would “purchase” at a bargain price of $15 million (and assumption of Mexico’s debts to American claimants) some 500,000 square miles of land in what are now California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, not to mention previously annexed Texas, where the war had flamed to life the year before.
More than during any previous war, Americans readers at home came to consider themselves participants in the saga. Their hunger for information was nourished by new technologies that made it possible for publishers to rush firsthand coverage to readers more speedily than ever before. Transported via steamboat, railroad, Pony Express, and, when possible, the newly introduced telegraph, dispatches from the front occasionally reached Washington in advance even of official military reports transmitted via the U.S. mails. It was said that Polk himself first learned of the American victory at Veracruz from forty-year-old Baltimore Sun publisher Arunah Shepherdson Abell.14 A Rhode Island–born, New York–trained penny press pioneer, Abell championed the innovative uses of Pony Express, carrier pigeon, and ultimately telegraphic transmission of news, and also introduced the novelty of establishing a Washington bureau to cover government affairs firsthand. Now he beat the army itself in announcing an important victory.
One of the newspapers on which Abell had modeled his Baltimore daily, the increasingly popular New York Sun, further expanded the role of the press in wartime. Its new publisher, Ben Day’s successor, Moses Yale Beach, agreed at one point to carry a secret, unofficial peace feeler from the White House to the Mexican capital. But the New Orleans Picayune violated the secrecy of the mission and announced the editor’s arrival. Suspected of entering the country to stir antiwar sentiment, Beach barely evaded capture by Antonio López de Santa Anna, the feared general who had conquered the Alamo.15 Ignoring such risks, Beach’s star reporter, a fortyish woman journalist named Jane McManus Storm, continued churning out war dispatches for the Sun under the pen name “Montgomery.”16
Displaying what Senator Thomas Hart Benton admiringly called a “masculine stomach for war and politics,” history’s first female war correspondent later boasted, with some credibility: “I can and do control over half of the entire daily circulation [of the Sun] and from my position thus hold the balance of opinion on any man or measure.” Fiercely committed to territorial expansion, she wrote from the front to demand that all of Mexico “be transferred” to American rule. Not everyone accepted her as a professional. When she tried to pass vital information to commanding general Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers” huffily told her editor that he was opposed to receiving intelligence from “a plenipotentiary in petticoats.”17
Her sex made “Montgomery” unique, but she was but one of many such influential opinion makers stationed with the troops at or near the Mexican front. For the first time, battlefield correspondents embedded themselves within war zones and dispatched eyewitness reports while news was still reasonably fresh. The papers closest to the action naturally enough provided the timeliest coverage. Taking advantage of its geographic proximity to Mexico, for example, the New Orleans Picayune generated dispatches with unheard-of speed. Editor-publisher George Wilkins Kendall made himself his own star reporter, producing reports that found their way into papers nationwide.18
Although their editors continued to battle over the justification for the Mexico adventure, to their credit, their battlefield correspondents kept the American public more informed, more promptly, about this war than about any conflict in the country’s young history. To keep up with demand, newspaper owners replaced their steam-powered cylinder presses with improved, double-cylinder models capable of printing double the number of editions within the same time. The reward for pouring money into modernization was a vastly increased readership and with it, vastly increased revenues.
More than any other innovation, it was the telegraph that entirely revolutionized the newspaper business. Although inventor Samuel F. B. Morse had made the words “What hat
h God wrought?” his first message over the new system, he quickly followed it with another equally important question: “Have you any news?” Realizing the advantage he could earn over his competitors with promptly transmitted dispatches from the front, James Gordon Bennett paid for the installation of telegraph wires at the New York Herald, and offered bonuses for scoops. During the war, Manhattan streets teemed with newsboys from the various dailies loudly hawking extra editions that came fresh from busy presses, day or night, whenever a major story broke.
When it came to introducing expensive technological advances, many newspapers chose to begin working in tandem, political divisions notwithstanding. Earlier in 1847, despite its loathing for Henry Clay, Bennett’s Herald triumphantly arranged for a Clay speech in Lexington to be telegraphed to New York, sharing the text—and the cost of assembling and transmitting it—with other journals in both New York and Philadelphia. The idea of a national wire service was being born. By May of the election year, 1848, Bennett’s managing editor, Frederic Hudson, together with future newspaper titan Henry Raymond, then working for the Courier and Enquirer, organized a coalition of six New York papers to secure cheaper telegraph rates. And in January 1849, six of the big city’s largest newspapers would band together to form the New York Harbor News Association, pooling resources for the first time to end the historic rivalry for shipping news.19 (Ironically, the cost of receiving telegraphed news put an added burden on small village newspapers like Springfield’s rival sheets, the Journal and the Register, although both had little choice but to respond by converting from weekly to twice weekly, and eventually daily publication around this time.)
With such extraordinary new technology at their disposal, it is not difficult to understand why, when the fighting in Mexico ceased, Whig newspapers proved disinclined to rejoice, and Democratic ones seemed unwilling to call for unity. There was far more profit to be made by continuing to stir up the public. The new technologies only encouraged the frequency and volume of their provocative salvos. By the end of the war, most of the larger papers had replaced their double-cylinder presses with even faster revolving presses capable of printing a breathtaking twelve thousand copies an hour.20 Such technological advances made the bitter debate over Mexico more ubiquitous than ever, just as the growing conflict over slavery expansion was making it more acrimonious.
• • •
So Lincoln discovered—to his pleasure, for he, too, sensed political opportunity in extending the Mexican quarrel—when he first arrived in Washington. Lincoln, of course, was accustomed to operating in the overlapping milieu inhabited by both rowdy politicians and rival papers. Here in the national capital, however, their roles were greatly magnified. For one thing, Washington was where truly important news originated: the District’s Whig and Democratic journals generated the very stories routinely reprinted by isolated rural presses like those back home in Springfield. More importantly, Washington editors served often and openly as advisors to government leaders, or as politicians themselves, obscuring the firewall that would only much later separate journalists from elected officials to preserve objectivity.
When the opening sessions of Congress gaveled into order, pro-war Democrats squared off against antiwar Whigs, with newspapers editorializing on the dispute on an almost daily basis. Their readers included senators and representatives now debating armistice terms, among them both of the Illinois freshmen learning the rules and traditions of their respective houses. In the upper chamber, Douglas took to the Senate routine with obvious relish, confidently savoring his opportunities to engage senior colleagues in public debate. Lincoln, quickly bored by the routine tasks required of mere congressmen—such as shepherding constituent requests to federal bureaus—found it more congenial to exchange political gossip by the fireside at the cramped House post office, where he emerged as a favorite.
Correspondent Benjamin Perley Poore remembered that Lincoln became the “champion story teller” among the “jovial raconteurs who met almost every morning in the Capitol hideaway to exchange witticisms.21 Yet Lincoln also attended formal sessions diligently, often arriving before the noon call to order and sometimes remaining at work throughout sessions that lasted until nine or ten at night, attending to correspondence and writing speeches from his backbench desk, for congressmen of that era had neither separate office quarters nor staff.22
First photograph of the U.S. Capitol with its original dome, as it looked when Lincoln arrived to begin his term in Congress in 1847. The House of Representatives met in the wing at left.
In the opening days of the session, as legislators and journalists commenced debating Polk’s proposed pact to end the war with Mexico, they continued as well to quarrel over how the conflict had begun. Fearing that the proposed territorial acquisitions would swell the nation’s slave territory, thus perpetuating the longtime dominance of Southern pro-slavery interests in Congress, “Conscience” Whigs like Lincoln vehemently protested both the treaty and the war that preceded it. Although the Sangamo Journal had reported back in July 1846 that all members of the party had at first “united in support of the war with all their power and influence”—pointing out that even Lincoln attended one patriotic Springfield rally that summer—Whig enthusiasm for the adventure rapidly eroded, with the slavery issue driving the wedge. Within six months, the Quincy Whig assailed Douglas for a willingness to “gratify the south in their cherished desire of forming more Slave States in the south west.”23
One Washington newspaper that amplified the Mexico debate with particular vehemence was the long-influential, pro-Whig National Intelligencer. Brothers-in-law Joseph Gales, Jr., and William Winston Seaton had turned the sleepy paper into a daily back in 1812, in the throes of a much earlier and, they argued, more justifiable foreign war. For years thereafter, the Intelligencer supplied readers—and posterity—with the only gavel-to-gavel newspaper transcripts of House and Senate debates, its reporters occupying seats in each chamber between the presiding officer and “the snuff-box,” and evolving into the Congressional Record of the early nineteenth century.24 Published from a sprawling, barnlike building at Seventh and D Streets, near which the publisher’s huge mastiff dog could often be seen carrying a basket of mail in his mouth bound for the post office,25 the Intelligencer opposed the Mexican War from the start. Now it warned that the war’s territorial conquests would seed vast slavery expansion.
The press lords of Washington, D.C., during Lincoln’s congressional career. Left to right: Joseph Gales, Jr., and William Winston Seaton of the pro-Whig National Intelligencer, and Thomas Ritchie of the pro-Democratic National Daily Union.
Co-owner Seaton wielded two kinds of influence about town. The man whom one contemporary described as “my beau-ideal of a true Virginia gentleman,” functioned primarily as a newspaperman, but like many editors of his generation, doubled as a working politician as well.26 At age sixty-two, he ran not only the Intelligencer, but the city as well, as the elected mayor of Washington. A “model magistrate” who earned acclaim for expanding the District’s school system, Seaton was said to operate “in the society of choice spirits and Christian moderation,” enough so to attract Dickens himself to his social circle during the author’s well-documented Washington visit.27 The editor’s “quaint humor” was reported to be so irresistible that he could make even the fierce Daniel Webster dissolve into “contagious laughter.” This was hyperbole, perhaps; but in 1848 politicians still beat a path to Seaton’s door, questing not only for press coverage and social recognition, but also for official favors.28
On the opposite side of the war issue—as well as the furious rivalry for both readers and influence—was Seaton’s long-ago colleague at the old Richmond Enquirer, Thomas Ritchie, newly installed as the editor of Washington’s rival, pro-Democratic Daily Union. Though Ritchie consoled himself that he harbored “no mistrust on the score of age” when President Polk arranged for him to run the new administration mouthpiece in the capital—replacing Blair’s Globe�
�he was now past seventy.29 A quaintly anachronistic character partial to plantation garb—“nankeen [yellow cotton] trousers, high shirt-collars, and broad-brimmed straw hats” long out of fashion—Ritchie seemed to the rising young journalist John Wein Forney little more than a “genteel old fogy.” He was “the Grandfather Whitehead of the politicians, the Jesse Rural of the diplomats,” Forney chortled, his “efforts at making peace between contending rivals generally ending in the renewal of strife and his paragraphs in defence of the Administration awakening new storms of ridicule.”30 But old Ritchie still had clout at the White House, where he continued to enjoy the president’s ear. He and Seaton had long ago become journalistic competitors and political opponents, but Seaton’s daughter maintained that their “early personal relationship” survived “forty years of wide divergence in political sentiment.”31 Friends they may have remained, but Seaton’s paper repeatedly assailed the Polk administration, while Ritchie’s zealously defended it, cheered the American victory over Mexico, and applauded the proposed peace pact. In return, the Daily Union maintained the privilege of publishing administration news first.
To the victor the spoils still belonged—in journalism as well as politics. John C. Rives of the pro-Democratic Washington Globe spoke for most of his newspaper rivals (especially those currently enjoying the rewards that came in return for fealty to the reigning political majority) when he employed a set of novel arguments to defend the practice of congressional grants for the district’s newspapers. “I recommend it,” Rives declared, “because it keeps up two daily papers here, advocating the principles and interests . . . of the two great parties into which the Union is happily . . . divided; each of them giving full and fair reports of the debates in Congress, which . . . is worth more to the government, or the people, for each and every year, than the printing of both houses of Congress costs in ten years.” Rives, for one, was convinced that press patronage actually made newspapers more independent by guaranteeing them the subvention necessary to keep them in business. His peculiar logic extended to worrying that if the government instead awarded its printing projects to the lowest bidder, the public would “repose little confidence” in the results. It came as no surprise to most observers that the promise of such rewards only further hardened traditional editorial biases.32
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 12