Lincoln ended the oration with a flourish, urging the nation to “take hold of the larger works, and the states the smaller ones,” thereby taking full advantage of “the intelligence and enterprize of it’s [sic] people.”6 Reporting that Lincoln “well understood the subject,” Greeley’s Tribune offered him a rare tidbit of praise, calling his oration a “very sensible speech.”7 And in an item appearing on the same crowded front page that boasted a story on “The Death of a Clam”—but not as prominently—Gales and Seaton’s National Intelligencer at least reported in passing that Lincoln had “delivered a speech on the subject of internal improvements.”8
Apparently not satisfied with this unusual little burst of newspaper attention, Lincoln dashed off a grouchy letter to Herndon the very day the New York item appeared, describing himself as “a little impatient” for more pro-Whig press coverage back home. “I, at the beginning of the session made arrangements to have one copy of the [Congressional] Globe and Appendix regularly sent to each whig paper of our district,” he complained. “And yet, with the exception of my own little speech, which was published in two only of the then five, now four whig papers, I do not remember having seen a single speech, or even an extract from one, in any single one of those papers. With equal and full means on both sides, I will venture that the [Democratic] State Register has thrown before it’s [sic] readers more of Locofoco speeches in a month, than all the whig papers of the district, have done of whig speeches during the session.”9 Try as he might to focus his concern on the scant coverage that party journals were giving fellow Whigs, Lincoln could barely conceal, between the lines of his truculent letter, the neglect he felt he was enduring himself.
Clearly hungering for more coverage, the increasingly press-savvy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past. Like many Whigs who believed that, peace notwithstanding, the smoldering war issue still presented the most fertile ground for political and press harvests, Lincoln remained reluctant to move entirely past the Mexico controversy. And he remained a stickler for facts on the issue, even among friendly journalists. This was particularly so if his meticulous reading of the press might earn acknowledgment from the journalistic elite. A case in point occurred as Congress neared its 1848 summer recess. Lincoln spied a minor error regarding Mexico in the columns of the New York Tribune, a paper he now followed religiously. Somewhat like a precocious child determined to prove his father wrong, Lincoln seized the opportunity to pen a correction to editor Horace Greeley, whom he had seen briefly for the first and—so far—only time the previous July in Chicago. There they had both served, along with five thousand fellow delegates, at a “rowdyish” convention—billed as the largest mass meeting ever held in America—promoting river and harbor improvements.10 During the thronged sessions the busy newspaperman managed to take notice of “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoisan, just elected to Congress from the only Whig district in the State,” who “spoke briefly and happily” at the convention.11 According to another eyewitness, the elongated and careworn Lincoln in fact looked so woebegone at Chicago, dressed in a “short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of some material, thin pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, [and] a straw hat and a pair of brogans with woolen socks,” that a visiting orator anointed him then and there with a nickname that stuck: “Old Abe.”12
Now, a year later, “Old Abe” wrote familiarly to “Friend Greeley” to point out that his “little editorial” of July 26, 1848, had mistakenly contended that Whigs and Democrats alike concurred that Mexico’s boundary with Texas “stopped at the Nueces” River. “Now this is a mistake which I dislike to see go uncorrected in a leading Whig paper,” Lincoln lectured. “Since I have been here, I know a large majority of such Whigs of the House of Representatives as have spoken on the question have not taken that position. Their position, and in my opinion the true position, is that the boundary of Texas extended just so far as American settlements taking part in her revolution extended; and that as a matter of fact those settlements did extend, at one or two points, beyond the Nueces, but not anywhere near the Rio Grande at any point.”
In retrospect, this rather high-handed example of nitpicking seemed a ploy to attract notice from an influential newspaperman. But by “putting us in the position of insisting on the line of the Nueces,” Lincoln insisted at the time, “you put us in a position which, in any opinion, we cannot maintain, and which therefore gives the Democrats an advantage of us.” Barely disguising his attempt to impress America’s leading Whig journalist, the congressman enclosed a copy of his own speech on the subject for Greeley’s elucidation.13 Lincoln no doubt was referring to both his letter and his speech when the congressman added in an almost pleading tone: “Will you look at this?” Doubtless to Lincoln’s pleasure, the Tribune at least published his complaint in full a few days later under the headline, “The Boundary of Texas—Letter from the Hon. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.”14 But Greeley ignored Lincoln’s strong hint and did not publish his long oration.
Consistent press attention beyond Illinois’s borders still eluded the Springfield Whig. More dispiriting still, just a few weeks after communicating with Greeley, a disappointed Lincoln received a letter from his law partner, William Herndon, enclosing a batch of “newspaper slips”—the term of the day for press clippings—whose contents Lincoln found “exceedingly painful to me.”15 Herndon’s letter and enclosures have long since disappeared—Lincoln was a notoriously poor record keeper—but one can reasonably speculate from the congressman’s disheartened reaction that the package bulged with negative home state coverage of his stubborn opposition to the late war, as collected by the young acolyte who had warned of just such a calamitous response. To add insult to injury, one of these clips, by Herndon’s own admission, featured a published report on his own recent rant against “the old fossils in the party.”16 It was no wonder Lincoln found the communication from his junior partner “painful.”
With no real way to increase his influence in Congress during his brief remaining time in Washington, Lincoln wisely turned his attentions primarily to the approaching contest for the White House. Its potential for press coverage certainly played a role. A presidential campaign offered countless opportunities for Whig surrogates to speak out for the ticket, and to coax their stump orations into print in the party press. Political calculations factored into Lincoln’s new emphasis as well. After all, if a Whig won the White House in the fall, there would be plenty of federal jobs to go around. An outgoing one-term congressman with limited electoral prospects at home might still enjoy a political soft landing via a prestigious federal appointment. Taking no chances, Lincoln had earlier dropped his longtime support for his political “beau ideal,” perennial candidate Henry Clay, the loser to Polk four years earlier who yearned for yet one more chance at the White House.17 Instead, the outgoing Illinois congressman declared himself early and “decidedly” for the more electable Zachary Taylor—conveniently ignoring the fact that General Taylor was one of the signal heroes of Mexico, and that Lincoln had come close to denouncing him as a Polk puppet in his first speech on the war only months earlier.
Other Whigs proved more reluctant to abandon the “Great Compromiser,” particularly the influential Greeley, who hastened to Washington in late April in an effort to head off defections from the Clay camp. The New York Herald chortled that the desperate Greeley had told fellow Whigs that “if he can’t get Clay, he will take [Ohio senator] Tom Corwin—if he can’t get Tom Corwin, he will take Mr. [John] McLean [Associate Justice of the Supreme Court]—if he can’t get Mr. McLean he will take General Scott.”18 For Greeley, it was anyone but Taylor. None of Greeley’s dark-horse alternatives gained traction, but it is not difficult to understand why the crusading editor had such difficulty embracing “Old Rough and Ready.” Ready Taylor may have been in 1848, but for four decades, he had not even bothered to vote, and worse, as progressives complained, he unapologetically owned slaves.
Such
details proved inconsequential once the popular general made himself available to a party thirsting for a return to power. A meeting of Whig power brokers at the Tribune offices may have inspired nine cheers “for Harry Clay,” and as many groans for General Taylor.”19 But with formerly dependable admirers like Lincoln defecting, the seventy-year-old career politician proved no match for the hero of Buena Vista when balloting got under way June 7 at the Whig National Convention at Philadelphia. Taylor won the nomination on the fourth ballot, and Millard Fillmore of New York emerged as the choice for vice president. Both Lincoln and a disgruntled Horace Greeley were on hand for the proceedings. Unable to accept the result with grace, Greeley stormed out, threatening to abandon the ticket altogether. The Tribune editor thereupon turned up at the offices of the Philadelphia North American, “carpet bag in hand,” and eager to share his discontent. Encountering a roomful of Taylor supporters, he “scowled upon them, turned around, and started for the door.”
“Where are you going, Mr. Greeley?” asked the socially prominent and gentlemanly North American editor, Morton McMichael.
“I’m going home,” came the snarling reply.
“But there’s no train to-night,” McMichael pointed out.
“I don’t want any train,” snapped Greeley. “I’m going across New Jersey, afoot and alone.” And out he stormed, vowing to air his disappointment on the pages of the Tribune.20 Besides, he had walked part of the way to New York to begin his career years earlier. Such a trek would make even better copy now.
James Gordon Bennett, never one to shy away from sharing his pleasure over his rivals’ misfortunes, exceeded even his own reputation for self-aggrandizement when he reminded his readers that if “Taylor is to be elected President,” it would be because he “was first named in connection with the Presidency, after his first battle on the Rio Grande, in the columns of the New York Herald.”21
Not until autumn did Greeley reluctantly throw his weight behind the Whig choice, taking one last opportunity to extol Clay, but conceding “the impossibility of defeating” Democratic nominee Cass “otherwise than by supporting Gen. Taylor.” Admitting that both men had once been “wrong” on the “atrocious” Mexican War, Greeley now offered that Taylor at least had a better excuse for his enthusiasm, having been “reared under slaveholding influences.” Most important of all, he argued, a Taylor victory would at least “expel from power the advocates and instate instead the opponents of Slavery Extension.”22
• • •
Late in July, Lincoln took to the House floor to deliver a stirring Taylor endorsement of his own. But the oration was principally notable because it featured a withering attack on Democrat Cass’s supposed heroics during the War of 1812, a record that of course paled before the widely reported exploits of Old Rough and Ready in Mexico. Returning to the vitriol of his “Rebecca” letters period, this time in full view of fellow congressmen and reporters, Lincoln made short and hilarious work of Cass’s claim to glory. He “invaded Canada without resistance,” Lincoln taunted, “and he outvaded it without pursuit.”23 Colleagues howled with laughter. As if in anticipation of such attacks, Bennett’s Herald had warned back in March that Cass was “not the imbecile man that some of the journals represent him,” predicting: “If the whigs . . . think to carry their objects by underrating his popularity, his acquirements, his talents, or his position, they will make a fatal mistake.”24 Lincoln paid no heed; he decided the Cass record was ripe for mockery.
As witnesses to his House performance attested, Lincoln’s public speaking style differed markedly from fellow Illinoisan Douglas’s, even if it yet attracted sparser crowds in the visitors’ section. Rather than plant himself behind his desk, there to peel off successive layers of clothing in heated fury—the Little Giant’s signature oratorical technique—Lincoln preferred to stroll casually up and down the aisles as he spoke, “gesticulating” as he snaked his way among his colleagues, pausing occasionally to return to his back-row desk to check his notes or sip some water while keeping fellow congressmen “in a continuous roar of merriment.”25 Douglas’s oratory was designed for the galleries; Lincoln’s for his peers, and for newspaper subscribers, too, for whom humor and straightforward language often proved more readable than grandiloquence. Perhaps uncertain that his latest effort would earn the attention it merited, Lincoln arranged for this oration, too, to appear in pamphlet form for hometown consumption in Springfield and environs. Pamphlets never substituted for press coverage, but they usefully expanded the reach of both politicians and party newspapers, which were often called on not only to reprint such orations but also to handle their sale and distribution.
Later that election season, Lincoln demonstrated further appreciation for the political power of the press by supporting yet another Whig campaign newspaper, this one launched by Washington’s national party headquarters. Entitled The Battery, it made no pretense at offering anything but party-line propaganda. Loyalists were expected to promote it. In a letter to a fellow Whig back in Illinois, attorney Stephen A. Hurlbut—probably not the only such appeal he wrote, but the sole surviving example—Lincoln dutifully inserted Hurlbut’s name onto a pre-printed subscription sheet and strongly urged him to support the new paper and enlist others to do likewise. The flyer made no secret of its object. The newspaper’s mission was to “promote the election of Gen. ZACHARY TAYLOR to the Presidency.” And in sending it, Lincoln made no secret of his own enthusiasm for the venture:
I respectfully request you to obtain subscribers for the paper in your immediate vicinage. Please send a list of names, and the amount that will be due according to the terms proposed, and I will see that the subscribers get their papers through the mail. As a general dissemination of this paper will, it is believed, be of high importance to the success of the Whig cause, permit me to solicit an immediate attention to the subject.
Enclosing a handwritten cover note, Lincoln added a personal endorsement, advising Hurlbut, as if he were doing him a favor: “I could think of no better way of fitting you out, than by sending you the Battery.” Showing no loss of enthusiasm for the tried-and-true vehicle of the party extra, the congressman urged his friend to “get as many subscribers as you can” for the new Taylor sheet, adding a money-back promise worthy of a professional salesman: “I have put you down for one copy, the subscription for which I will pay myself, if you are not satisfied with it.”26 No record of a reply is known, but Hurlbut almost certainly did as he was asked.I
Lincoln proved indefatigable that season in his support for the Whig presidential choice. After attending House sessions in the broiling summer heat through adjournment in August, he embarked on a long and undoubtedly tiring Eastern campaign swing in Taylor’s behalf. The tour took him through Maryland and then up to Massachusetts. The usually indifferent National Intelligencer took brief but welcome notice of his appearance at Rockville, Maryland, acknowledging “a most interesting speech” before the county’s “Rough and Ready” club by “Hon. Mr. Lincoln of Illinois.” On his return to Washington to deliver another address “in laudation of General Taylor and in opposition to the Democracy,” Lincoln earned another notice, this time in the Baltimore Clipper.27
Press coverage only intensified when Lincoln reached New England. The Boston Daily Atlas hailed the congressman’s September 19 speech at Chelsea, Massachusetts, noting that, “for aptness of illustration, solidity of argument, and genuine eloquence [it] is hard to beat.” When Lincoln spoke the next day at Cambridge, the Atlas correspondent admiringly described the visitor as not only a “popular and convincing speaker,” but “a capital specimen of a ‘Sucker Whig,’ six feet at least in his stockings, and every way worthy to represent the Spartan band of the only Whig district in poor benighted Illinois.”28
Lincoln went on to deliver a well-received ninety-minute oration at a meeting of the Boston Whig Club, “which, for sound reasoning, cogent argument and keen satire,” raved the Atlas, “we have seldom heard equaled.” The paper report
ed that “the audience gave three cheers for Taylor and Fillmore, and three more for Mr. Lincoln, the Lone Star of Illinois.”29 Here in Boston, Lincoln also for the first time met Horace Greeley’s sometime ally, the New York Whig star William Seward, eight years Lincoln’s senior and on the verge of a significant career in the U.S. Senate. The two men shared the same stage at a Whig rally at the Tremont Temple on September 22. Seward was of course the main attraction, but after Lincoln exhibited his customary “humorous strain of Western eloquence” to the distinguished Eastern audience, this event, too, concluded with “three hearty cheers for ‘Old Zack,’ three more for Governor Seward, [and] three more for Mr. Lincoln.”30
Legend holds that at this, their first face-to-face meeting, Lincoln warned Seward of inevitable future national conflict over what the congressman allegedly called “this slavery question”—at least so Seward later remembered.31 But Seward’s further recollection—that “the following night we passed together in Worcester, occupying the same lodging room at the hotel”—is open to challenge (Seward poured it on, adding the self-congratulatory memory that Lincoln later told him “that I was right in my anti-slavery position and principles”). As Seward’s most recent biographer, Walter Stahr, has convincingly shown, the two men did not even pass that night in the same city, calling the entire account into question. But the future president and his future secretary of state did at least share a speaker’s platform to promote Whig principles, and there began an acquaintance, and competition, that would be dramatically rekindled during another presidential campaign twelve years later.32
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 15