Painting of the Lincoln-Douglas debate at Charleston showing newspaper stenographers—Robert Hitt of the Chicago Press and Tribune and Henry Binmore of the Chicago Times—on either side of Lincoln transcribing as the Republican candidate orates.
Performing “phonographic” work for the Democrats was Henry Binmore, a twenty-five-year-old Englishman who had worked earlier for the St. Louis Republican—a Democratic organ despite its name (appropriately enough, the Missouri Democrat tilted Republican). Binmore’s flattering early coverage of Douglas’s pre-debate stump speeches attracted the attention of the Chicago Times. Aiding Binmore was James B. Sheridan, who had been employed at the Philadelphia Press, one of Douglas’s strongest press advocates in the East.
These experts all ranked as reliable professionals gamely struggling to record everything they heard, but as a result of their own idiosyncratic methods, their political biases, and their partisan publishers’ penchant for generous editing, the debate reprints featured in their respective newspapers differed markedly. Republican papers recast Lincoln’s sometimes meandering impromptu style into cogent paragraphs and did little to burnish Douglas’s often overheated prose. Democratic journals softened Douglas’s occasional racist tirades, altering his persistent use of the word “nigger,” for example, to “negro,” while claiming they left Lincoln’s incoherent speeches alone. Each stenographer invariably imagined cheers and applause apparently inaudible to his counterpart. Although few Democrats read the Republican papers, and few Republicans saw the Democratic journals, the stark differences in the results soon triggered a campaign debate of its own. Both sides furiously accused the other of intentional inaccuracy, triggering a controversy nearly as entertaining as the joint meetings themselves.
When, for instance, Republican editors complained that Lincoln’s remarks seemed incomprehensible as printed in the Democratic Chicago Times, the paper shot back that the Tribune was guilty of publishing cogent “paragraphs of which Lincoln’s tongue was innocent.” Republicans, the Times alleged, “were ashamed of his poor abilities and wanted to divert attention from them, under the cry of mutilation and fraud.” In his defense, stenographer Hitt steadfastly denied that “Mr. Lincoln’s speeches were doctored and almost re-written before they were printed . . . as was often charged at that time in the fury of partisan warfare.”61
For its part, the Chicago Times similarly insisted that its transcripts were not only faithful, but that there was “no orator in America more correct in rhetoric, more clear in ideas, more direct in purpose, in all his public addresses, than Stephen A. Douglas.” If Republicans objected to the paper’s version of Lincoln’s performance at the first debate, it was only because “they dare not allow Lincoln to go into print in his own dress, and abuse us, the TIMES, for reporting him literally.” Anyone who “has ever heard Lincoln speak,” the paper concluded its scathing analysis, “ . . . must know that he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in a row.”62
Rising to the challenge, Chicago’s Republican Press and Tribune condemned the rival Times for undertaking a libelous campaign “to blunt the keen edge of Mr. Lincoln’s wit, to mar the beauty of his most eloquent passages, and to make him look like a booby, a half-witted numbskull.” Democrats, the Tribune charged, had specifically instructed stenographer Sheridan “to garble the speeches of Mr. Lincoln and amend and elaborate those of Mr. Douglas.” Sheridan’s malicious transcriptions left Lincoln’s words “so shamefully and outrageously . . . emasculated” that if doctoring prose became a crime, “the scamp whom Douglas hires to report Lincoln’s speeches would be a ripe subject for the Penitentiary.”63 Tribune headlines announced throughout the campaign: “Mutilation of Lincoln’s Speech,” “Mr. Lincoln—the Times’ Slanders,” and “Garbling Lincoln’s Speeches.”64 Meanwhile its own stenographers, the Tribune maintained, were neither “hired puffers nor paid libelers.” Three days before the opponents met for their final debate at Alton, the Times attempted to have the last word by accusing the Tribune not only of mauling Douglas’s stirring speeches, but “rewriting and polishing the speeches of . . . poor Lincoln,” who “requires some such advantage.”65
Neither Lincoln nor Douglas themselves ever admitted to countenancing, much less ordering, either the enhancement of their debate performances or the mutilation of their opponent’s. In fact, Lincoln later insisted rather piously that he had never revised his own remarks, while Douglas “had two hired reporters traveling with him, and probably revised their manuscripts before they went to press; while I had no reporter of my own, but depended on a very excellent one sent by the Press & Tribune; but who never waited to show me his notes or manuscripts; so that the first I saw of my speeches, after delivering them, was in the Press & Tribune.”66 For his part, all Douglas would ever concede was that the debates had been conducted “in the open air to immense crowds of people, and in some instances, in stormy and boisterous weather, when it was impossible for the reporters to hear distinctly and report literally.”67 Of course, both papers, and all the stenographers, were in a sense equally guilty as charged.
Many decades later, when an old man, reporter Horace White confessed that in preparing Hitt’s transcripts for publication in the Press and Tribune he had perhaps yielded to “the temptation to italicise a few passages in Mr. Lincoln’s speeches, where his manner of delivery had been especially emphatic.” What was more, in those “few cases where confusion on the platform, or the blowing of the wind, had caused some slight hiatus or evident mistake in catching the speaker’s words,” White had authorized occasional improvisations. But he never admitted to either the wholesale rewriting of Lincoln’s performances, or the intentional desecration of Douglas’s. White conceded only that the Times simply “took more care with Mr. Douglas’s speeches,” just as the Tribune did with Lincoln’s. Errors and gaps had been “straightened out” by friendly reporters on both sides.68
Friendly press, however, proved insufficient to propel Lincoln to the Senate. On Election Day, the popular vote split, with a slight edge going to the Republicans. But in the all-important battles for local legislative seats, Douglas’s party emerged with more than enough support to reelect the senator to a third term. Lincoln would not go back to Washington after all. Even before the state legislature met to make Douglas’s reelection official, Greeley’s Tribune conceded “the triumph” to the incumbent.69
Lincoln’s attorney friend Henry Clay Whitney maintained that “nobody except Lincoln, supposed the speeches would even be preserved, but that they would suffer the fate of all newspaper literature.” But before the legislature convened in January to crown Douglas with his third term, Lincoln hatched a plan to make brilliant new use of the record of his defeat, flawed or not. Not long after recommending a loyal young German-born Republican journalist named John G. Nicolay to Horace Greeley—“He wishes an arrangement to correspond for your paper,” Lincoln wrote, “and, so far as I am capable of judging, [is] altogether competent for such a situation”70—Lincoln informed Charles Ray that he desired “to preserve a Set of the late debates (if they may be called so) between Douglas and myself.” The unsuccessful candidate asked Ray to ship him two copies of each of the seven issues that featured debate transcripts—three separate whenever the reprints had been published back-to-back. Lincoln explained that he intended to keep one full set of newspapers intact, while cutting articles from the others to assemble a “Scrap-book” of the encounters. If Ray was still depressed over the outcome of the election, as widely reported, Lincoln offered this encouragement: “Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming.”71 Ray would have found it hard to imagine that the next “blow-up” would be stimulated in part by his own back issues.
By December 1858, Lincoln had collected the necessary old newspapers, including copies of the Chicago Times reports of Douglas’s speeches. Showing them one day to an old friend “with great satisfaction,” he reported that “he had got a book binder to paste the speeches, in consecutive order,
in a blank book, very neatly.” On Christmas Day, Lincoln would update Henry Clay Whitney: “There is some probability that my Scrap-book will be reprinted.”72 By the following March a number of publishers were expressing interest in the project. And in the fall of 1859, Lincoln engaged the Columbus, Ohio, firm of Follett, Foster & Co. to bring out a book edition of the complete debates and sent Nicolay to carry his scrapbook to the publisher. It proved nothing less than the most brilliant publishing venture Lincoln ever initiated. Although the contest for the White House was still a year away, Ohio’s Republican chairman recognized from the outset that the new volume promised to become “essential . . . to the cause.”73 Even the Richmond Enquirer had characterized the debates as “the great battle of the Presidential election.”74
In masterminding their republication, Lincoln emerged from the project—and from his failed quest for the Senate—as a national leader willing to be judged by his words, even in what had turned out to be a losing cause. It was an inspired strategic move, showcasing Lincoln’s genius for both politics and public relations. “Our government rests in public opinion,” Lincoln had declared a few years earlier. “Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”75 He had said much the same thing during the first debate at Ottawa: “In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”76 Lincoln was finally on his way to doing both.
The book version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates succeeded beyond even Lincoln’s wildest imaginings. Eventually, the volume became a best-seller, boasting more than thirty thousand copies in print by the presidential election year of 1860. Since proper presidential candidates of the day were expected to remain publicly silent during campaigns, the book became for Lincoln a vehicle to convey his political views without speaking anew. Countless visitors who made their way to Springfield in the summer and fall of 1860 to visit the Republican candidate for the White House came away with a gift from Lincoln’s own hands—a copy of the Political Debates Between Hon., Abraham Lincoln and Hon., Stephen A. Douglas in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois—often autographed by the man who appeared, after ingeniously shepherding newspaper transcriptions into book reprints, almost to have won by losing that “celebrated campaign.”
But lose Lincoln did. “Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy,” the Register’s Charles Lanphier exulted to the senator in reporting the official legislative vote in early January 1859. “Douglas 54 Lincoln 46. . . . Town wild with excitement.” Replied the vindicated senator when he heard the news: “Let the voice of the people rule.”77 In New York, Bennett’s Herald, which had earlier demonized Douglas for breaking with President Buchanan over Kansas, wickedly expressed the hope that the senator’s close call would prove a “wet blanket” to his national ambitions and “restore him again into full communion in the democratic church.” But as Bennett predicted: “From all the indications of the day he will do no such thing; and the elusive victory which he has just achieved will only mislead him and his followers to destruction.”78
Eager to reinvigorate his rivalry with the Tribune, Bennett charged that Greeley had wanted his “friend” Douglas to win all along to embarrass Buchanan, whom the Herald supported. “Hon. Massa Greeley went for him, old white coat and all,” he editorialized, “because he was supposed to be ‘a little of color’ on the nigger question, and a little is better than nothing for the Tribune philosophers.”79
Publicly, Greeley interpreted the result otherwise—a defeat for Lincoln, to be sure, but a good showing for the party. He was still not quite sold on the Illinois Republican. “Mr. Lincoln’s speeches were doubtless more attractive to their hearers, far more readable by others, than they would have been had he devoted them mainly to the demolition of Mr. Douglas’s castle,” he editorialized. “ . . . While we think no man could have upborne the Republican standard more gallantly than Mr. Lincoln has done, it seems to us possible to have done so more skillfully—therefore more effectively. If this criticism seems unkind, we shall regret the misapprehension, not the frankness which impelled it.” By the same token, Greeley admitted that while “Republicans of Illinois” had “fought their late battle under serious disadvantages . . . the popular verdict, the popular intelligence, are clearly on their side. The Future is theirs.”80 Greeley was not yet ready to concede—or remained so blind he could not see—that the future of Lincoln and the party were now intertwined.
Writing a decade later, Greeley refused to apologize for his lack of enthusiasm for Lincoln in 1858. “It seemed to me,” he insisted, “that not only magnanimity, but policy, dictated to the Republicans of Illinois that they should promptly and heartily render their support to Mr. Douglas.” Acknowledging that the hearts of Illinois Republicans “were set on . . . their own special favorite and champion, Abraham Lincoln, who, though the country at large scarcely knew him,” Greeley admitted that Western Republicans “did not, for a while, incline to forgive me for the suggestion that it would have been wiser and better not to have opposed Mr. Douglas’s return.” But he hastened to add: “I still abide in that conviction.”81
Disappointed as he was, Lincoln had no choice but to look ahead. “The fight must go on,” he advised one supporter. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even a hundred defeats.”82
• • •
In 1858, the Illinois State Journal congratulated itself on twenty-seven years of continuous publication by issuing a prospectus inviting new subscribers to sample its daily, tri-weekly, and weekly editions, and offering anyone who brought in ten subscribers or fifteen dollars in advertising “an extra copy for his trouble.” Although the leaflet maintained rather unconvincingly that the Journal had been an “impartial newspaper”—“never sacrificing the interests of one class of its readers for the benefit of any other class”—publishers Bailhache and Baker left no doubt where its political loyalty still resided. “It will continue faithfully to support the principles of the Republican party,” the Journal boasted. “Against the slavery-extension policy of the mis-named Democratic party, the JOURNAL will make increasing and unrelenting warfare.”83
The following May, Lincoln introduced a new weapon into the ongoing press wars with his decision to become a publisher himself: he bought into the new German-language Springfield weekly. His partner in the venture was a thirty-three-year-old, Westphalia-born physician-turned-journalist named Heinrich Theodor Canisius—later Americanized into “Theodore.” Like many so-called Forty-Eighters—Germans who migrated to the United States after the failed European revolutions of 1848—Canisius became a liberal antislavery man, and joined the Republicans. At the time Lincoln invested in his newspaper, the doctor had been an American citizen for just four years.
An ardent Lincoln supporter during the recent Senate race, Canisius impressed the candidate by working to ensure that none of his fellow émigrés would be, as Lincoln put it, “cheated in their ballots”—denied the right to vote by having their citizenship questioned. This trick Lincoln believed Democrats “sometimes practiced on the German” to inhibit reliably Republican turnout.84 Casting his eyes on the future, Lincoln sensed that the growing German vote in the West would assume added significance. Perhaps with proper cultivation it might even tip the balance to the Republicans in several key swing states.
Working toward the same goal, Canisius had undertaken an effort of his own to increase Republican influence among local Germans. Early in 1858, just in time to support Lincoln’s ill-fated campaign against Douglas, Canisius bravely established a paper called the Freie Presse in overwhelmingly Democratic Alton at the southern end of the state—a town where, two decades earlier, progressive-style journalism had aroused mob violence and murder. It was a doomed initiative from the start. The paper attracted few readers in the pro-slavery bastion. After just a few months of struggle, Ca
nisius abandoned it, turning over the publication to a fellow German who somehow kept it limping along for another year.85
In March 1859, the doctor resurfaced farther north—in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield. There he determined to launch a new German paper in Illinois’s more hospitable state capital.86 Some historians have claimed that Canisius commenced publishing by May, but there is no evidence that such was the case. That month, more likely, he was still trolling for investors.
Meanwhile, Canisius made a foray into political organizing. He rallied local German Americans in denouncing a proposed new anti-immigration initiative in Massachusetts. The amendment sought to deny the vote to all foreign-born residents until two years after their naturalization.87 From New York, Horace Greeley warned that its adoption “would work enormous mischief, especially throughout the Free West,” and might even “defeat the election of a Republican President in 1860” by reducing German voting strength in bellwether states.88 German-language papers in Iowa and Indiana took up the fight and sounded similar alarms. As another German-born newspaperman, Henry Villard, explained: “There was not an intelligent politician in the Northwest that was ignorant of the importance of his ‘German friends.’ ” German journalists, in turn, “worked with the peculiar zeal, earnestness, and indefatigableness with which the German mind is wont to make propaganda for its convictions.”89
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 26