Settled or not, the Times contretemps continued to worry Douglas, who needed Illinois Democrats to remain united in support of Kansas-Nebraska and himself. As he warned Sheahan: “No party, no matter how patriotic its men, and how fine its principles can survive such a suicidal course.”16 Chicago was not yet like New York—not yet big or diverse enough to sustain journalists who agreed with each other politically but battled over style. Certainly no one doubted Douglas’s political gifts. In New York, even Horace Greeley conceded the Little Giant’s intelligence. But he added a caveat. “Douglas has brains,” he editorialized in 1856. “So did Judas.”17
Such harsh language did nothing to lower the temperature of the overheating sectional debate over slavery, or to temper the violence it increasingly inspired against journalists and politicians alike. That same year, as astonished onlookers watched helplessly, pro-slavery Arkansas congressman Albert Rust (later a Confederate general) used his fists to pummel Greeley outside the U.S. Capitol. When the stunned editor wobbled to his feet and bravely pursued his assailant to the nearby National Hotel, Rust struck him again in the arm, this time with his cane. The incident marked the first—and as it turned out, the last—time the Tribune editor ever endured a physical assault. Undaunted, the frail but feisty Greeley boasted to his public that he would continue to “unmask hypocrisy, defeat treachery, and rebuke meanness.” While promising to avoid future “brawls,” he pledged, when necessary, to “defend myself.”18 Although Greeley declined to press charges against Rust, Joseph Medill took up Greeley’s cause in Chicago, berating the congressman: “He had been accustomed to lashing male, and knocking down female slaves, in the State from whence he came. . . . Fresh from women-whipping, those cotton lordlings import their plantation airs and manners to the federal city.”19
Just four months later, armed with his own rock-hard cane of gutta-percha, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks launched a far more ferocious attack on outspoken Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner—right on the Senate floor. Forced to abandon his duties for more than a year while he recovered from the near-fatal beating, Sumner became a living martyr to antislavery. Speaking for many outraged Northern journalists, Raymond’s New York Times condemned the “ruffianly assault” as “another example of the arrogance and overbearing insolence by means of which a portion of the champions of the slave power seek to crush out all liberty of speech or of the Press wherever that privilege is exercised in behalf of Freedom.”20
• • •
Events now moved swiftly, propelled by political and economic currents that no politician, and no editor, had the power to predict, much less arrest. First a severe financial panic threatened all but the most established papers, including the revived Chicago Tribune. “The whole pathway of newspaperdom is strewn on either side,” the paper fretted in March 1857, “with the bleaching bones of defunct concerns.”21 Somehow Medill kept his young concern above water—fending off creditors because he believed the issues of the day too important to permit the mere specter of bankruptcy to still his voice.
That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court took the slavery debate to a provocative new level when it issued its eagerly awaited ruling in the landmark case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. In a majority opinion written by eighty-year-old Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the court found that the enslaved Scott had failed to gain his liberty by domiciling temporarily in a free state. In a broader conclusion that outraged much of the North, the majority declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and held that blacks could never be citizens and enjoyed “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In one ironic sense, the decision burst Stephen Douglas’s dream of Popular Sovereignty as a remedy for slavery agitation—for Taney’s opinion implied that slaves could now be dragged into unpaid service anywhere in the country, North or South. Even supporters of Popular Sovereignty had no legal excuse to bar slavery.
The ruling aroused the New York press into a frenzy. Denouncing Taney’s ruling as “wicked” and “atrocious,” Horace Greeley spent the better part of a week hurling volleys at the “cunning chief” for his “collation of false statements and shallow sophistries” and his “mean and skulking cowardice.” Slavery was now “National,” warned the editor. “At this moment, indeed, any wealthy New York jobber connected with the Southern trade can put in his next orders: ‘Send me a negro cook, at the lowest market value! Buy me a waiter! Balance my accounts with two chambermaids and a truckman!’ ”22
“Slavery is no longer a local institution,” echoed Raymond’s New York Times. “ . . . It is incorporated into the Constitution of the United States. . . . It is not too much to say that this decision revolutionizes the Federal Government, and changes entirely the relation which Slavery has hitherto held towards it.” Sounding at long last like a radical, Raymond further charged that Taney had “laid the only solid foundation which has ever existed for an Abolition party,” predicting: “it will do more to stimulate the growth, to build up the power and consolidate the action of such a party than has been done by any other event since the Declaration of Independence.”23
To no one’s surprise, James Gordon Bennett vehemently disagreed with these sentiments, expressing entire satisfaction with the Dred Scott decision. In one sense, Bennett was speaking for many New Yorkers who were eager to see the slave system protected in order to safeguard the city’s profitable trade with the South. But he also viewed the court ruling as a political watershed he predicted would destroy the new Republican organization before it gained national power. The Herald expressed the hope that the court “at a single blow, shivers the anti-slavery platform of the late great Northern Republican party into atoms.” Bennett’s reasoning came disconcertingly close to the arguments advanced in celebratory editorials published in response to Dred Scott throughout the South. In a typical example, the Richmond Enquirer hailed the Supreme Court justices “as learned, impartial, and unprejudiced as perhaps the world has ever seen,” insisting: “The nation has achieved a triumph, sectionalism has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned.” To the New York Herald as well, the Taney ruling constituted “supreme law” as “expounded by the supreme authority”—meaning that “disobedience is rebellion, treason, and revolution.”24
Roger B. Taney (left), long-serving chief justice of the United States, and Dred Scott (right), the subject of his most infamous Supreme Court decision, which ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship.
Lincoln, for one, was inclined to do precisely what the Herald cautioned against—directly challenge the Supreme Court decision—though typically he took his time to do so. Ultimately seizing the issue as a club against his political nemesis, Lincoln responded to Dred Scott with an impassioned speech in Springfield on June 26, in which he assailed Taney and Douglas alike. Heretofore, Lincoln thundered, “our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves they could not at all recognize it.” In an emotional conclusion, he asked: “Are you really willing that the Declaration shall be thus frittered away?—thus left no more at most, than an interesting memorial of a dead past? Thus shorn of its vitality, and practical value; and left without the germ or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it?” Medill’s Chicago Press and Tribune seemed particularly impressed by the speech’s “force and power.” In the East, few yet paid attention.25
At least Lincoln was working assiduously to keep the local press in his corner. In recent years, Lincoln had markedly stepped up his efforts to court the press—aiming not only to reach more voters through the newspapers, but also to curry long-term support among Republican editors and increase the circulation and distribution of their journals in every part of the state. Sometimes his efforts proved less than subtle.
On one occasion he sent ten dollars to th
e editor of the Paris, Illinois, Prairie Beacon, apologizing that he had read the paper for “three or four years, and have paid you nothing for it.” He quickly added that he now expected the paper to endorse two judicial candidates he favored, sweetening the gesture by promising to pay a “reasonable charge” to have the Beacon print up electoral ballots. A few months later, he submitted a provocative anonymous editorial to several Galena newspapers warning local Germans that Democrats were “anxious to deprive foreigners of their votes.” And soon thereafter he asked a Chicago editor to send “a hundred german papers . . . in one bundle” to a Bloomington supporter, and fifty more to another in Mount Pulaski, with the clear object of widening circulation. Added Lincoln, with undisguised urgency: “Pray do not let either be neglected.” Then in 1857, Lincoln joined six political allies donating a total of $500 “to be used in giving circulation in Southern and Middle Illinois” to the pro-Republican Missouri Democrat. He was now looking for support from as far away as St. Louis.26
• • •
By late 1857, Illinois Republicans seemed nearly united in the conviction that Abraham Lincoln should be the next leader to occupy the United States Senate seat that Stephen Douglas had held for nearly twelve years. But Lincoln had been down this tempting path before. Two years earlier, he had entered a legislative session called to fill another Senate seat as the overwhelming favorite, only to be left at the altar by his supporters. Understandably, Lincoln hesitated to risk another humiliation, making clear that he would stand for the Senate again only if the party united behind him at the outset of the 1858 canvass.
Preparing to launch his own campaign for a third term, Douglas pugnaciously reminded Springfield editors Lanphier and Walker: “The Battle will soon begin. We will nail our colors to the mast and defend the right of the people to govern themselves against all assaults from all quarters. . . . Send me your paper.”27 Douglas’s bravado (and curiosity about what the Springfield press was writing) was understandable. In New York, Horace Greeley, of all people, had begun hinting at the unthinkable: that he might throw his support not to his former congressional colleague, Lincoln, but to the Democratic incumbent, Douglas. Half a continent removed from the maelstrom of Illinois politics, Greeley had come to believe that Douglas at least represented the more progressive wing of the opposition and might actually align himself with antislavery forces in the future.
To Greeley’s satisfaction, Douglas had recently broken with President Buchanan to oppose a bitterly disputed pro-slavery constitution in violence-plagued Kansas. The senator’s principled position on the obviously bogus Lecompton Constitution, Greeley believed, showed that Douglas sincerely meant to exclude slavery wherever white citizens opposed it. Ironically, a stand that was irreparably splitting Democrats now came close to earning the Little Giant Republican support. The Tribune soon invited its subscribers “to read and say whether Mr. Douglas does not speak the words of common sense as well as patriotism.”28 Greeley was not alone in this flirtation. In Chicago, even Joseph Medill began imagining that Douglas might “gradually drift toward our side and finally be compelled to act with us in 1860,” the year of the next presidential election.29
Insisting he was “not complaining” about these unsettling developments, Lincoln nevertheless assumed an uncharacteristically angry tone when he wrote, just after Christmas 1857, to the man who had defeated him in the previous Senate contest: Lyman Trumbull. His point was that the Republican press had no business endorsing Democrats, ever: “What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s [sic] constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying Douglas?” he railed. “Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.” Acknowledging Greeley’s powerful influence in the West through the ubiquity of his national edition, Lincoln warned that “if the Tribune continues to din his [Douglas’s] praises into the ears of it’s [sic] five or ten thousand readers in Illinois, it is more than can be hoped that all will stand firm.”30 James Gordon Bennett seized the opportunity to impugn “Massa Greeley” as the “deposit banker of the Washington lobby.”31
Complicating matters further, Chicago’s two top opposing editors met on their own in March 1858 to plot another way out of the looming competition between Lincoln and Douglas. Fresh from a visit to Washington, James Sheahan of the Democratic Times informed the Republican Tribune’s Charles Ray that Douglas might actually be willing to surrender his Senate seat without a fight and “go into private life for a brief period”—or alternatively run for the House of Representatives from Chicago, providing Republicans agreed not to field an opponent—so determined was the Little Giant to “break the back of Buchanan in every county in Illinois.” Lincoln was aghast when he heard this latest news. Repudiating the idea of forming any “strange and new combinations,” he lectured: “My judgment is that we must never sell old friends to buy old enemies.”32
Around the same time, Lincoln’s surrogate William Herndon decided (no doubt with Lincoln’s encouragement) to undertake his own trip to the national capital—the first of his life—in hopes of discovering exactly where matters stood. Arriving there, he consulted a number of antislavery politicians, learning little he did not already know. Though Douglas was ill, the senator, too, agreed to see Herndon, concluding a “pleasant and interesting interview” by suggesting that the young attorney return to Springfield and tell Lincoln, “I have crossed the river and burned my boat,” the precise meaning of which seemed maddeningly indistinct. En route home, Herndon stopped in New York to take Greeley’s political pulse as well, and there discovered that the editor was indeed on the verge of making official his shocking political defection. Writing home when he reached Boston, Herndon alerted his law partner: “He evidently wants Douglas sustained and sent back to the Senate. He did not say so in so many words, yet his feelings are with Douglas.” Indeed, Greeley had advised Herndon: “Douglas is a brave man. Forget the past and sustain the righteous. . . . The Republican standard is too high; we want something practical.” At least Herndon discovered that Greeley was “not at all hostile to Lincoln.”33
Not surprisingly, the message did not sit well with the victim of all this elaborate scheming. With “mingled sadness and earnestness,” Lincoln dejectedly told Herndon on his return: “I think Greeley is not doing me right. His conduct, I believe, savors a little of injustice. I am a true Republican and have been tried already in the hottest part of the anti-slavery fight, and yet I find him taking up with Douglas, a veritable dodger,—once a tool of the South, now its enemy,—and pushing him to the front. He forgets that when he does that he pulls me down as well.”34 Lincoln was by then accustomed to total loyalty from party editors. He would remember Greeley’s threatened defection for the rest of his life.
In late May, just weeks after Douglas secured the Democratic nomination for reelection, Lincoln buttonholed a few allies in Springfield’s State Capitol library and grimly confided that it appeared that the New York editor “would be rather pleased to see Douglas re-elected over me or any other republican. It is because he thinks Douglas’ superior position, reputation, experience, and ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position, and therefore his re-election do the general cause of republicanism, more good than would the election of any one of our better undistinguished pure republicans.”
Making an attempt to kill the unorthodox editor with kindness, Lincoln added a remarkably generous coda conceding Greeley’s pure motives. “I do not know how you estimate Greeley,” he told supporter Charles L. Wilson, “but I consider him incapable of corruption, or falsehood. He denies that he directly is taking part in favor of Douglas, and I believe him. Still, his feeling constantly manifests itself in his paper, which, being so extensively read in Illinois, is, and will continue to be, a drag upon us.”
35 This was a new Lincoln. The old version might have tried to eviscerate foes by taunting them on the stump or mocking them in unsigned editorials. Where fellow Republicans were concerned, the politically seasoned Lincoln now preferred malice toward none, the better to corral their support later. And Lincoln by this time probably sensed that, if his luck held, he would remain politically entangled with Greeley forever after.
Lincoln did not allow himself to dwell on Greeley’s lack of enthusiasm. Instead he and his supporters worked hard behind the scenes to convince state Republicans to endorse his Senate candidacy, in part to counter the official Douglas designation by the Democrats, and in part to neutralize Greeley’s flirtation with the opposition. Just as he hoped, on June 16 the party convention resolved that “Hon. Abraham Lincoln is our first and only choice for United States Senator.”36
That very evening, Lincoln mounted the platform in a familiar venue, the assembly chamber of Springfield’s State Capitol, to formally accept the unprecedented “nomination.” What followed was his most important oration to date: the speech that became known as the “House Divided” address. Few of Lincoln’s supporters believed he should deliver it, certainly not after he read it aloud to a select group in advance. One of those in attendance colorfully advised Lincoln that it was a “d——d fool utterance.” In its biblical insistence that “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln seemed to be charting a radical course that allowed for no future compromise on the slavery issue. But as Lincoln calmly insisted after his rehearsal: “The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then . . . let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right.”37
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 24