Jones rekindled Raymond’s interest early the next year by shrewdly confiding that the Tribune had just reported a staggering annual profit of $60,000. The news set Raymond’s competitive juices aboil. Surely there was ample room in the marketplace for another Whig journal after all, and now was as good a time as any to launch one. Earlier, Raymond had been reluctant to cross an ethical line by promoting his employer for the Senate. Now he used his legislative clout to aid the entire banking industry—and perhaps in the bargain shake loose much needed funding for his newspaper enterprise—by opposing a bill in Albany to regulate financial institutions. As it transpired, the regulatory law passed anyway. But Raymond’s stance may have helped lure investors to the business-friendly speaker’s newspaper venture. Within months, the newly established firm of Raymond & Jones attracted additional backers from Albany, Auburn, and Manhattan, who handsomely capitalized the new enterprise to the tune of $100,000—some fifty times the modest amount with which Greeley had launched the Tribune just a decade earlier. On September 18, 1851, the new firm of Raymond & Jones published the maiden edition of the paper they called, in homage to the great London powerhouse, the New-York Daily Times.I
In a prospectus issued to announce the paper, Raymond promised that his new, one-penny broadsheet would offer the “news of the day, in all departments and from all quarters, special attention being given to reports of legal, criminal, commercial, and financial transactions in the city of New York, to political and personal movements in all parts of the United States, and to the early publication of reliable intelligence from both continents.” In addition, the paper would feature foreign correspondence “written expressly for the Times,” plus literary reviews, drama and music criticism, and “tales, poetry, biography . . . editorial articles upon everything of interest or importance that may occur in any department,—political, social, religious, literary, scientific, or personal, written with all the ability, care, and knowledge which the abundant means at the disposal of the subscribers will enable them to command.”36 The paper would appear in both morning and evening issues six times a week—every day but Sunday. Subscribers could sign on for four dollars per year. A weekly national edition, featuring “interesting and valuable” summaries, would be “mailed to subscribers in any part of the country” for two dollars per annum.
From the outset, Raymond pledged himself to a journalism that emphasized restraint over sensation, orthodoxy over tub-thumping. His prospectus promised that the Times would not commit itself to “the advancement of any party, sect, or person.” It would subject “the character and pretensions of public men,” “governments,” and “administrations” to equal scrutiny. Notwithstanding its vow to shun promoting “any party,” the circular left little doubt as to where the newspaper—and its editor—would tilt politically: “It will be under the editorial control and management of HENRY J. RAYMOND; and while it will maintain firmly and zealously those principles which he may deem essential to the public good, and which are held by the great Whig party of the United States, its columns will be free from bigoted devotion to narrow interests, and will be open, within necessary limitations, to communications upon every subject of public importance.” Its governing principles would be defined by “Christianity and Republicanism . . . devotion to the Union and the Constitution, obedience to Law, and a jealous love of that Personal and civil Liberty which constitutions and laws are made to preserve.”
Overtly reaching out to woo disgruntled Tribune readers, Raymond pledged almost oxymoronically that the Times would be “CONSERVATIVE, in such a way as shall best promote needful REFORM.” Distancing itself from Greeley’s quixotic windmill-tilting, the new paper pledged to “avoid rash innovation, and to defeat all schemes for destroying established and beneficent institutions.” Raymond added a final principle that would in fact guide the Times for generations: it would be “a family newspaper” committed to “allay, rather than excite, agitation.”
From a purely entrepreneurial perspective, Raymond was convinced he could carve out a profitable niche in New York’s congested newspaper arena. The city’s population was growing rapidly, and even the fastest new printing presses could barely keep up with rising demand. Circulation was booming. Led by Bennett’s Herald, about to achieve a milestone of fifty thousand daily paid copies, readership of all the city papers had exploded from one for every sixteen residents in 1830, to one for every 4.5 by 1850.37 Newspapers had become big business. The Herald alone now boasted thirteen staff reporters and editors, twenty compositors, and sixteen pressmen. Within a few years, Greeley would employ a staff of a hundred. Proliferation of the telegraph and the expansion of news associations had sped the transmission and receipt of news. The nation’s rapidly growing railroad system was dramatically reducing delivery time. And postal rate reform would soon make newspapers more cheaply available by mail.38
Front page of the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, September 18, 1851, introducing the logotype that remains virtually unchanged to this day.
Even so, Raymond’s success was by no means guaranteed, and during its first days in business the Times endured the kind of bad luck and minor catastrophe that seemed to plague fledgling newspapers. As a headquarters, the editor secured a handsome building still under construction on Nassau Street not far from City Hall, and promptly ordered office furnishings for the upper floors, along with a $20,000 Hoe-brand Lightning Press to be installed under the sidewalk in the basement. But as publication day neared, the structure was not yet ready for full occupancy, and for weeks an embarrassed Raymond, who always favored lavish professional surroundings, was forced to operate from a cramped temporary location around the corner. The Times’s opening days in print were similarly compromised. One early humiliation occurred when the paper publicly doubted the authenticity of a widely reported major fire. Not only did the fire story prove accurate; to Raymond’s embarrassment, while the Times ignored the catastrophe, the Tribune and Herald both wrote it up in irresistibly gruesome detail. Worst of all, Raymond’s new but untested cylinder press, capable as it was of printing hundreds of newspapers each minute, at first produced illegibly overinked impressions, compelling the Times to apologize for its initially smudgy appearance.39 Eventually, reporters and machines began functioning more reliably.
For his part, no doubt feeling jilted, Greeley did everything in his power to sabotage the upstart competition. Where social issues were concerned, “Uncle Horace” may have emphasized his avuncular image as a bleeding heart, but in business he was as cutthroat as they came. And he regarded the birth of the Times as both an unforgivable personal affront and a genuine professional threat. The Tribune greeted its debut by warning each local newsdealer that he would “forfeit his right of property in the Tribune route” if he dared to carry the new daily. The dealers defied him. During the ugly circulation war that ensued, each editor accused the other of constituting a danger to both New York City and the Whig Party. Greeley branded Raymond a radical abolitionist and a party hack. The Times founder struck back by dangling the offer of higher pay to poach a compositor and a pressman from the Tribune.40
“We have not entered upon the task of establishing a new daily paper in this city, without due consideration of its difficulties as well as its encouragements,” Raymond admitted. “We understand perfectly that great capital, great industry, great patience are indispensable to its success, and that even with all these, failure is not impossible. But we also know that within the last five years the reading population of this city has nearly doubled, while the number of daily newspapers is no greater now than it was then; that many of those now published are . . . made up for particular classes of readers; that others are objectionable upon grounds of morality; and that no newspaper, which is really fit to live, ever yet expired for lack of readers.” In a “malicious desire to prejudice the public mind,” Raymond charged, unscrupulous competitors had falsely warned that the Times would be a radical journal. But he insisted he would make the pape
r “acceptable to the great mass of our people, and shall spare no effort to do so.” With another slap at Greeley, he added: “we shall make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as possible.”41
Raymond proved no less savvy a marketer than Greeley. By the time its fourth issue hit the streets, the Times had placed nine-by-six-inch circulars under the doors of thousands of Manhattan residences, offering trial home subscriptions at only “sixpence” a week, guaranteeing “an immense amount of reading matter for that price.” Generations before the introduction of recycling, the handbill added an offer to remove used papers from each doorstep daily.42 As always, Raymond’s writing style proved crisp and accessible, devoid of complicated phrasing and allusions to arcane philosophies, even if his relentless capitalization of pet words like “Law” and “Liberty” sometimes bordered on the fatuous. Few of the Times’s initial readers would have doubted its bold opening prediction that it would remain a force “for an indefinite number of years to come.”43
At the end of his first year in business, Raymond could report to his readers that neither early miscues nor the hostility of his rivals had inhibited the Times’s rapid growth. “It has been immeasurably more successful,” he trumpeted, “than any new paper of a similar character ever before published in the United States. . . . After one year’s experience, encouraged by the abundant support of the public we have received, we are resolved to go forward.”44 Go forward he did, his goal still to avoid the “white heat” of typical American editorial writing and replace it with the “sober elaborate essay embracing none but mature results of reflection.”45
Greeley bristled at Raymond’s success, and not only because it came, he believed, at the expense of the Tribune’s constituency. For Greeley, it also created a humiliating competition for political influence on, and once exclusive access to, Whig political leaders. Only recently, Greeley had cheered former governor Seward’s 1849 selection as U.S. senator by editorializing that “no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely known and warmly appreciated.”46 Now, to the veteran editor’s irritation, Seward’s speeches began turning up in print in the Times before the texts ever reached the Tribune. This gave “the impression,” Greeley complained bitterly to the senator, “that the Times is your special organ and its filibustering editorials and general negation of principle especially agreeable to you.”47 Seward and Weed, however, could no longer afford to allow the unpredictable Greeley exclusive advance access to Whig news. Their longtime political and journalistic alliance—a triumvirate often dubbed the “firm” of Seward, Weed, and Greeley—came under unprecedented strain. And Raymond, now sporting side-whiskers and a mustache as if to punctuate his growing influence, became a force to be reckoned with.
As for the ever-boastful James Gordon Bennett, though typically unprepared to sit on the sidelines while two competitors squabbled—there was no circulation advantage in remaining above such a fray—he astonished even his admirers by giving himself credit for Raymond’s success. When it came to self-promotion, no one did it better than Bennett, especially in offering suspect compliments to competitors. Now he perversely claimed that the Times had found an audience only because the “machinery and facilities of the Herald” could not keep up with the huge public demand for his own paper. “The surplus of readers unsupplied offered a fair margin for a new journal,” Bennett rationalized, and Raymond’s “experience had taught him to abandon the . . . old stage-coach and sailing-ship epoch of the Courier and Enquirer, and to fall in with the new school of the Herald.” Had Bennett’s new, modern Lightning Press been operating in 1851, the penny press pioneer congratulated himself, “there would have been no opening for the Times.”48 Greeley thereupon reinserted himself into the feud by telling a parliamentary committee during a visit to London that year that the Herald was “a very bad paper.”49
Raymond’s onetime Tribune colleague, Charles A. Dana, came closest to the truth in explaining the Times’s success: it attracted a loyal reader base because it filled a void. Raymond triumphed, Dana maintained, because he “aimed at a middle line between the mental eccentricity of the Tribune and the moral eccentricity of the Herald, at the time of those great newspapers’ greatest greatness, marking out for the Times a mean between the two extremes.” As the pioneer of journalistic history, Frederic Hudson, put it, the Times thrived because of its “respectability of tone and matter:” it stood for the “juste milieu”—the middle ground.50
• • •
In politics, the two “extremes” in Illinois never seemed more so when the second half of the nineteenth century began—fighting with increasing ferocity over taxes, tariffs, and public improvements even as Democrats and Whigs struggled in Washington to find common ground to bottle up the increasingly explosive issue of slavery. Temporarily retired from electoral politics and reengaged in the practice of law, Abraham Lincoln passed the years from 1850 to 1854 largely out of the public spotlight. But those who suggest that he totally abandoned interest in national affairs need only consider his growing addiction to out-of-town political news during this period. Lincoln’s stepped-up newspaper reading hardly suggested indifference. He continued to take the weekly New York Tribune and the Illinois State Journal, and soon began subscribing as well to a new Republican Party daily from Chicago. He and law partner Herndon also sent away for abolitionist papers like the Anti-Slavery Standard, the Emancipator, and the National Era, and to keep track of Southern public opinion, the Richmond Enquirer and the increasingly strident Charleston Mercury.51
His supporters continued in vain to urge Lincoln back into politics, often planting press items designed to prod him back into the game. In the spring of 1850, the Tazewell (Illinois) Mirror predicted the ex-congressman would make a new effort to regain his old House seat. To put a halt to such speculation, Lincoln insisted that Simeon Francis publish a letter in the Journal “to say that I neither seek, expect, or desire a nomination for a seat in the next Congress.” Not yet ready for a comeback, Lincoln insisted that “the whigs of the district have several other men, any one of whom they can elect . . . quite as easily as they could elect me.” The district could “be made right side up,” he argued, without interrupting his semiretirement.52
Yet Lincoln’s voice was never entirely stilled during these fallow years. In July 1850, when President Taylor died suddenly after eating tainted fruit on a hot Washington day, Lincoln journeyed to Chicago to offer a fulsome eulogy to the leader who had so stingingly rejected his quest for a federal job. Two local newspapers reprinted the oration, even though the tribute did not come across as particularly earnest: the eulogist made several factual errors in relating the late president’s biography, and seemed comfortable only when quoting six maudlin stanzas of one of his own favorite poems. At one point Lincoln tellingly reminded his listeners that Taylor’s greatest virtue had been “a sober and steady judgment, coupled with a dogged incapacity to understand that defeat was possible”—attributes to which, many admirers knew, he aspired himself.53
Lincoln sounded no more convincing when he confided to a similarly disappointed office seeker a few weeks later: “I have felt, and do feel, entirely independent of the government.”54 Yet Taylor was barely in his grave before Lincoln began recommending patronage applicants to the late president’s White House successor, Millard Fillmore. Otherwise Lincoln did concentrate primarily on legal business and family affairs. For one thing, the law offered him his only source of income. And tragedy at home required his attention as well. The Lincolns’ son Eddy died at the age of three in 1850 and although Mary bore a third son, Willie, later that year, and yet another boy, Thomas (Tad), in 1853, the couple never fully recovered from that devastating loss.
Abraham and Mary may have found solace in the anonymous poem “Little Eddie,” which appeared in the Illinois Journal just five days after their son’s burial. Once mistakenly attributed to the grieving parents themselves—whose mutual love for poetry and close relationship with the paper long
suggested them as likely authors—it turns out that the poem was actually the work of a St. Louis verse writer named Ethel Grey. Its appearance in Lincoln’s hometown newspaper, however, was surely not coincidental. To friends and neighbors, and perhaps editor Simeon Francis himself, the rhyme no doubt seemed the perfect vessel through which to express sympathy to the Lincolns. At the very least, its publication showed that condolences through the press had become an accepted expression of grief—to be shared widely in print as uninhibitedly as campaign speeches:
Angel boy—fare thee well, farewell,
Sweet Eddie, we bid thee adieu!
Affection’s wail cannot reach thee now,
Deep though it be and true.
Bright is the home to him now given,
For such is the kingdom of heaven.55
Eulogies of all sorts, especially of the prose kind, routinely found their way into newspapers large as well as small, and they often reflected more evidence of political sympathy than of personal grief. When Lincoln’s onetime hero Henry Clay died two years later in 1852, Lincoln again took to the public stage to mourn, this time one of many to do so. The editor of the New York Tribune also produced a lengthy and heartfelt oration. Lincoln delivered his notable Clay tribute in the Illinois State Capitol, and again earned local publicity. Greeley’s appraisal of the hero he familiarly called “Harry Clay” reached thousands more readers, of course, through the pages of the popular New York Tribune.56 Coincidentally or not, both eulogies tellingly stressed Clay’s devotion to human equality, and reminded their audiences that the unresolved slavery issue was becoming increasingly threatening to the nation. As yet, Lincoln’s own expressions on the subject of slavery remained muted—and largely unnoticed outside his home state.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 20