Abolitionist newspapers and their editors, by contrast, continued their struggle merely to survive—financially as well as in peace and safety within their communities. In particularly hostile Washington, Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era, a paper that years earlier had come perilously close to destruction by mobbing, found new life beginning in June 1851 by serializing a new novel about life in the slaveholding South. For the next forty weeks, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe created a sensation. When the book version appeared in 1852, few doubted that it would prove equally popular. Within three years, however, newly retitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it sold a staggering 300,000 copies in the United States, and a million more in Europe. The total number reached two million by the end of the decade, by which time the indelible characters introduced in an abolitionist newspaper—Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and Simon Legree—had become staples of American folklore, and rallying cries for the growing antislavery movement.79
In June 1853, a full two years after the tale initially appeared in the abolitionist press, the New York Times acknowledged the immense impact and growing influence of the most widely read and noticed book “ever issued in this country.” As the Times pointed out: “Such a book was scarcely needed to demonstrate to the people of the North the odiousness of many of the features of Southern slavery.” Optimistically, the paper predicted, “it cannot fail to do good in the South.”80
• • •
Though he increasingly admired Stephen Douglas and lavished considerable praise on him in print, James Gordon Bennett withheld approval when in May 1854 the senator masterminded passage of yet another congressional initiative designed to calm the roiling slavery issue. Much as Bennett hated abolition and feared Negro equality, he opposed expanding slavery into the West. Douglas’s most important piece of legislation ever, the new Kansas-Nebraska Act, threatened to do precisely that.
The bill passed after five months of acrimonious debate in the House and Senate, leaving neither Southerners nor Northerners satisfied that their interests had prevailed, and sending sectional tensions percolating to a fever pitch. To the horror of antislavery forces, the legislation effectively repealed the long-standing Missouri Compromise, which for thirty-four years had outlawed slavery above latitude 36°30’. Under the terms of its most hotly disputed provision, the bill granted white settlers in new Western territories the right to vote for themselves on whether to permit slavery within their boundaries. Eager to organize these territories so they could accommodate a transcontinental railroad, Douglas sincerely believed that the bill would calm the emotional slavery issue altogether. He actually imagined that Popular Sovereignty, his name for this new system of voter choice, would quiet the simmering debate over slavery. Instead, it blew the lid off the slavery cauldron altogether and inspired a wave of violence in disputed Kansas Territory.
In some ways, Bennett viewed passage of the Douglas legislation not only as a welcome blow to abolitionism, but as a sign of the “decay” infecting abolitionist newspapers. The Herald crowed about the “curtailment of the anti-slavery journals of this city,” reserving special gloating for Greeley and Raymond, whose readership Bennett contended had declined because of their sympathy for abolition. “In the matter of circulation,” Bennett bragged, “the Tribune led the way, in a marked reduction of its size, and in the substitution of a cheap and inferior quality of paper in place of a comparatively expensive article. Next, our junior Seward organ,—the Times, adopted the same expedient of ‘making both ends meet.’ ”81 In truth, neither rival paper showed any sign of “decay” following passage of Kansas-Nebraska. In fact, the controversy they began fanning in response to the legislation made them greater forces than ever. Each editor sought to distance himself from the crumbling remains of the Whig Party and launch a new national political organization more strongly opposed than ever to slavery expansion in the West.
Greeley had long made manifest his own staunch opposition to slavery expansion. On January 5, 1854, the Tribune called on Northerners to unite in battle against what he called a blatant effort by the South—and Douglas—“to make the West pastureland for slavery.” Calling for “resistance to the last,” Greeley confidently predicted: “The passage of the Nebraska bill will arouse [emphasis added] and consolidate the most gigantic, determined and overwhelming party for freedom that the world has ever known.” As Greeley vowed, “The United States will extinguish slavery before slavery can extinguish the United States.” George William Curtis of the popular new illustrated periodical Harper’s Weekly saluted the reinvigorated Greeley for pounding out what he called the “drumbeat of the nation.”82
Despite its growing influence, the New York Tribune had yet to turn a consistent profit, or so managing editor Charles Dana later maintained. At one point, Greeley managed to persuade his archenemy Raymond to hike the street price of both their papers to three cents in order to raise additional revenue from circulation. But Jamie Bennett, awash in revenue and eager to squeeze his competitors, was said to have “scotched” the deal (ethnic slur surely intended) by refusing to go along. Dana thought he had a solution for the Tribune’s woes. “The Whigs,” he suggested in 1854, “have got to nominate Greeley for Governor.”83 Politics remained a journalist’s refuge of final resort. New York Whigs, however, now far closer to Raymond and the Times, would have none of it.
• • •
“Nebraska,” as Northerners later began calling the landmark 1854 legislation, brought Abraham Lincoln roaring back into the political arena, reinvigorating the rivalry with Douglas that had been dormant since Lincoln’s exit from Washington five years earlier. As Lincoln admitted, “I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again”—once more, as he had done while serving in Congress, deploying a word he may have consciously borrowed from the weekly New York Tribune that he read so religiously. Confirming this epiphany in a later autobiographical sketch, Lincoln resorted to the third person, but used that same bold word yet again—“arouse”—to describe his impassioned reaction to Douglas’s initiative: “the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”84 Greeley was still no particular friend, but evidently remained an inspiration.
Horace Greeley, around the time of the 1852 presidential election, wears a woolen shawl to accentuate his image as a common man.
At first, Lincoln chose to fight back using an old weapon of choice—the anonymous editorial. His initial criticism of Kansas-Nebraska appeared in a column for Springfield’s renamed Illinois State Journal on September 11, 1854. In it, Lincoln likened supporters of the legislation to knaves and fools who “pulled down the fence for the purpose of opening the meadow for his cattle” (tellingly employing much the same “pastureland” metaphor Greeley had used in print eight months earlier).85 Lincoln was likely responsible as well for a series of additional editorials that followed onto the pages of the Journal. Soon enough, however, he returned to another familiar platform: the political stage.
After delivering a brief anti-Nebraska speech at Bloomington on September 12, Lincoln headed back to Springfield in time for the annual state fair. With the city overflowing with excited visitors, he appeared at the State Capitol on October 4 to offer a three-hour-long reply to an impassioned defense of the bill by Douglas. Describing him as “the Goliath of the anti-Nebraska black Republicans,” even Lanphier’s Register conceded that Lincoln “made what some of his hearers seemed to consider good hits, and called forth the cheers of his friends.” But the Democratic paper hastened to add: “It might as well be expected to crush the Rocky Mountains with a snow flake as to put down the principle of popular sovereignty, sustained and advocated by such a man as Stephen A. Douglas.”86
As for Douglas, he returned to the State Capitol to hear Lincoln’s October 4 reply for himself, and according to eyewitnesses interrupted it repeatedly, frontier style, inspiring the Journal to comment wickedly: “We venture to say that Judge Douglas never in the Senate ch
amber or before the people, listened to just such a powerful analysis of his Nebraska sophisms, or saw such a remorseless tearing of his flimsy arguments and scattering them, to the winds, as he endured yesterday from Mr. Lincoln.” As usual, the opposition press saw things quite differently. The Register insisted it was Douglas who “went over every one of Mr. Lincoln’s points, and when he concluded there was nothing left of his arguments . . . he seemed not content to butcher his antagonist with tomahawk and scalping knife, but he pounded him to pumice with his terrible war club of retort and argument.”87
Then, on October 16, Lincoln delivered his most powerful and influential political address to date, a long oration at Peoria in response to yet another stem-winder by Douglas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was “wrong,” Lincoln thundered, “wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska—and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it.” Though he maintained that he harbored “no prejudice against the Southern people”—that, indeed, they were “just what we would be in their situation”—Lincoln made no secret of his moral indignation at the retrograde notion of owning other human beings:
This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.88
Western Whig papers applauded vigorously. The Chicago Daily Journal called the performance “as thorough an exposition of the Nebraska iniquity as has ever been made,” noting that Lincoln’s “eloquence greatly impressed all his hearers.” In the equally enthusiastic judgment of the Quincy Whig, Lincoln established himself at Peoria as “one of the ‘truly great men’ in Illinois.”89 The hometown Sangamo Journal echoed these sentiments, publishing the opus in its entirety after first printing the text in advance for Lincoln to use as his reading copy. The newspaper had now become so closely identified with Lincoln that it had all but commenced serving as his personal typesetter.
For the Journal’s newspaper version, William Herndon himself supplied the accompanying editorial encomium (the editors gave to “Lincoln and to me the utmost liberty in that direction,” he blithely admitted). Herndon’s commentary extolled the “anti-Nebraska speech of Mr. Lincoln” as “the profoundest in our opinion that he had made in his whole life. He felt upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul.”90 Still, as yet New York’s leading dailies remained uninterested in—and Eastern readers generally unaware of—Lincoln’s political reemergence.
• • •
As one political rivalry was gathering renewed steam in the West, a mighty political fraternity began crumbling in the East. On November 11, 1854, just one month after Lincoln galvanized antislavery forces with his speech in Springfield, Horace Greeley unleashed a salvo of his own meant to scuttle his longtime political alliance with Senator William Seward and editor-boss Thurlow Weed in New York—although, dying along with the Whig Party itself, their coalition had all but ceased to exist anyway.
Deeply frustrated by years of perceived neglect when it came to political reward, Greeley had decided he must make a dramatic break with his oldest and closest allies. In a long, overheated letter to Seward, the Tribune editor terminated their political relationship—or, as Greeley grandiosely put it, announced “the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed, & Greeley, by the withdrawal of the junior partner” effective February 1, 1855. Over the years, Greeley had disagreed with his two colleagues over such subsidiary issues as monetary policy and voting rights for new citizens. But there was no concealing Greeley’s primary gripe: above all, the editor felt the two upstate politicians had repeatedly failed to give him the respect and reward he deserved.
Greeley’s extraordinary litany of slights began with the complaint that Weed and Seward had boycotted a recent Anti-Nebraska “or Republican” state convention at Saratoga Springs. (Henry Raymond, for one, had attended as a delegate from his old Manhattan assembly district.) But what aggravated Greeley the most occurred a few weeks later, when the regular Whig convention nominated Raymond for New York lieutenant governor. That was the final straw. It was not just that both the senator and the political boss continued clinging to “a shadow” political organization. It was that Greeley had himself yearned to be governor, or as a fallback, lieutenant governor. Weed had cunningly dissuaded him from both races, and now Raymond had earned not one but three nominations for the latter post—from the Whigs, Free Soilers, and Temperance Party—winning election to the state’s second-highest office with a plurality of nearly thirty thousand votes.91
In a precise and self-pitying account of what he considered a decade and a half of mistreatment, Greeley poured forth his resentments. He charged that Weed had already read him “out of the Whig Party,” claiming he was “no longer either useful or ornamental in the concern.” Long before that, Greeley bristled, he had been passed over for patronage after repeatedly doing service to the organization. Greeley had “loved” editing Weed’s old campaign extra, and “did it well,” he recalled. But “when it was done,” he charged of Seward, “you were Governor, dispensing offices worth $3,000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary obligations heaped upon me by bad partners in business and the disastrous events of [the Panic of] 1837. I believe it did not then occur to me that one of these abundant places might have been offered to me without injustice; I now think it should have occurred to you.”
Continuing his enumeration of all the perceived slights to which Seward and Weed had subjected him, Greeley reminded the senator that after the election of 1840, he “ought to have asked that I be postmaster of New York”; that Whig investors should have provided far more generous financial backing when he founded the Tribune the following year; that Seward had further wronged him in his response to an 1848 libel case; and of course that Weed had “humiliated” him by cruelly informing him that the party would not support him for governor in the recent 1854 contest. Had Seward insisted, Greeley hastened to add, it would have been enough to elect him “to any post, without injuring myself or endangering your reelection.” Worst of all, much as he might have loathed the largely ceremonial job of lieutenant governor, “I should have gloried in running for the post.” Instead, in the unkindest slight of all, the nomination had gone to his enemy Raymond, and “the fight left to me”—in return for which support he had since been “rebuked” by “the Lieutenant-Governor’s paper.”
“I trust I shall never be found in opposition to you,” the aggrieved Greeley concluded in his undoubtedly cathartic letter. Vowing to take a sabbatical from journalism, he declared: “I have no further wish than to glide out of the newspaper world as quietly and as speedily as possible.”92 True to his word, the editor soon went off to join his family on a European vacation, and then commenced a national lecture tour. For a time, Greeley seemed to be following the historic advice he had once given young Josiah Grinnell: “Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.”93
Not all his journalistic colleagues were impressed by Greeley’s dramatic break with his Whig allies. The Brooklyn Eagle later condemned the entire “resignation” episode as only a sad “exemplification of the uses to which politicians expect and endeavor to turn journalists,” who were expected “to be self-sustaining advocates of a party and its leaders, content to
exhaust every energy of brain and muscle in behalf of the cause.” In a more forgiving tone, Ohio diplomat Donn Piatt, one of those politicians who later turned to journalism, summed up the schism this way: “Horace Greeley, who to the ignorance and trusting simplicity of a child added a strange power of persuasion with his pen, could not understand that he was disqualified for office because he knew too much, and could not be controlled by the two for whose information on any subject he had a profound contempt.”94
As it transpired, Greeley’s self-imposed exile proved even briefer than Lincoln’s. Before long, the editor was back in New York at the helm of the Tribune, as fractious and determined as ever, but animated now by a single, inspiring new cause: the eradication of slavery. Although his diatribe to Seward remained unpublished for six years, Greeley began searching for new political partners—and a new political party.
Raymond, meanwhile, continued his own quest to coalesce press and political power. Although his earliest biographer argued that “the record of his life would have had no deep shadows” had he “remained a journalist, untouched by the corrupting influences of party chicanery,” Raymond clearly found the political spotlight too alluring—not to mention too good for his newspaper business—to resist. Returning to Albany in January 1855, the new lieutenant governor told the State Senate: “I am profoundly sensible of the dignity and responsibility of the position I am called to fill.” At around the same time, as if to echo Raymond’s rising status in politics, the New York Times moved to a larger headquarters on the corner of Nassau and Beekman Streets.95 In fact, the “Big Three” were all prospering. The “Herald, Times, and Tribune,” admitted a contemporary critic, “occupy a prominent position in the ranks of journalism.” But their preeminence, maintained journalist-poet Lambert A. Wilmer, was attributable to one regrettable trait: their “swaggering impudence.”96
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 22