Predictably, Raymond’s Times took the most measured approach. At the outset, it declared the Harpers Ferry raid a “Negro Insurrection” and a “desperate” act by a “notorious” man long associated with “scenes of violence.” But with his eyes open to the public’s insatiable appetite for news from the scene of John Brown’s ill-fated adventure, Raymond also dispatched a special correspondent to the adjacent village of Charles Town to provide detailed coverage of Brown’s trial and hanging. The Times journalist soon reported melodramatically—and with a hint of sympathy—on Brown’s final hours, which included an emotional last meeting with his distraught wife.35 Raymond’s paper never quite decided whether John Brown was a terrorist or a martyr.
Careful to remind readers that “the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through discussion . . . humanity and justice,” the New York Tribune condemned the outbreak, too, speculating that it was “the work of a madman,” yet significantly withholding outright condemnation of the raiders. “They dared and died for what they felt to be the right,” Greeley editorialized, “though in a manner which seems to us fatally wrong. Let their epitaphs remain unwritten until the not distant day when no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello or by the graves of Mount Vernon.”36
Greeley’s mixed message, combining mild rebuke with florid eulogy, incensed editors in the South as well as Democratic journals in the North eager to lump the Tribune and Brown’s raiders together as part of a broader conspiracy to encourage violence. “The Tribune considers the act of Brown as the act of a patriot, which future ages will admire and extol,” fumed the Charleston Mercury. “To become a hero and a martyr, in the Tribune’s estimation, is to go to the South and excite the slaves to rise and cut the throats of their white masters.” Claiming it had canvassed the more restrained Southern papers, the Mercury further reported that the alleged outrages by both Brown and Greeley had ignited secession fever even in the conservative Old Dominion: “The boast of her presses that ‘there are no disunionists in Virginia,’ if true six months ago, we trust is now a thing of history,” reported the fire-eating Charleston daily, “never again to be asserted, until the South is safe and free in the Union, or independent out of it.”37 Indeed, the Richmond Enquirer reported near Christmas Day that the “Harper’s Ferry invasion . . . has revived, with ten fold strength, the desire of a Southern confederacy.”38
Southern papers were not alone in condemning both Brown and Greeley, or using the episode as a means to hike circulation and damage Republicans. The Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer, for one, offered its opinion that the raid revealed the “danger of having a Republican-Abolition President” in the future.39 Typically, the ever-provocative Bennett had it both ways. A year earlier, he had openly boasted that his was “about the only National journal that has unfailingly vindicated the Constitutional rights of the South.” Now, while bitterly denouncing Brown, he too simultaneously sent correspondents down to Harpers Ferry to file breathless daily reports on Brown’s trial and execution. Bennett calmly dispatched another of his first-rate writers to the residence of the wealthy upstate New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, one of the Secret Six who had unapologetically helped finance the raid. The resulting story, uniquely conversational in tone, proved not only a sensational exclusive, it marked what most historians of journalism acknowledge as the birth of the “interview,” yet another milestone coup for the Herald. In October, the paper exclusively published the transcript of an interrogation of Brown by Virginia senator James M. Mason, in which Brown maintained (no doubt to Bennett’s disappointment): “No man sent me here, it was my own prompting, or that of the Devil, whichever you please to ascribe it to.”40
Bennett was never prone to let a torrid story go cold, or to miss a chance to use raging controversies to smear rival editors. Seizing on the additional, irresistible opportunity the John Brown affair offered to isolate Greeley and his defenders as dangerous radicals, Bennett accompanied his news reports with editorials damning his antislavery press rivals, adorning these rebukes with invective rare even by Herald standards. “This misguided fanatic,” declared the Herald of John Brown, “so dangerous to the peace of society, has passed off the stage of existence by the ignominious death due to his crimes. But his sympathizers are not willing to let his memory die. On the contrary, they are determined to ‘keep it green in their souls,’ and to make political capital out of his execution on the gallows, and thus to render him more formidable in death than he was in life . . . a saint, a martyr, a hero, a demi-god.” Chiefly complicit, Bennett implied, was Greeley himself. “So depraved, so lost to public virtue have the republican journals become, that they glory in their shame, and endorse revolution and bloodshed, and the dismemberment of this great republic.” At least, Bennett concluded his diatribe, John Brown himself could be given credit for “pluck,” and “in that respect he deserves admiration as compared with the sneaking cowards who have hounded him on to his doom, and now make political capital out of an exploit for which they had not sufficient courage themselves.”41 Still pouring on his angry commentary two weeks after Brown’s martyrdom—or his richly deserved execution, depending on one’s point of view—Bennett labeled the “insurgent and traitor” the direct product of “the Republican party” and the Tribune “the leading organ of the revolutionists.”42
When Greeley’s onetime Whig colleague, James Watson Webb of the New York Courier and Enquirer, tried shifting the conversation by branding the Herald, not the Tribune, as the “chief agitator” of sectional discord, and excoriating its editor as “a reckless and unprincipled foreigner, who has nothing in common with our people and our country,” Bennett eagerly returned the salvo by savaging the “invincible military chieftain, the Chevalier Webb” with even more brutality than he had heaped on Greeley. After all, Webb had once horsewhipped Bennett on the streets, and it was never too late for revenge. Even in the process of naming Webb “ ‘the chief’ of slavery and disunion agitators,” however, Bennett made certain to take another swipe at the more powerful Tribune and its vaster readership: “We charge that all hands concerned in this conspiracy, endorsers and subscribers, are guilty of moral treason, and are among the most dangerous disorganizers of these critical times. The Chevalier Webb would doubtless have figured with his republican collaborators, Weed and Greeley. . . . We know that ‘birds of a feather flock together,’ and we know that when a general conspiracy is projected against the South . . . we are doing the work of patriotism in exposing the perilous position of the Union.” Greeley would surely be “subpoenaed in due time,” Bennett crowed on December 29. “This is as it ought to be.”43
Greeley never did face prosecution over the John Brown affair. The evidence of his complicity simply did not exist. But Bennett had it indisputably right on one account: the Union was now in a more perilous position than ever. And newspapermen were no longer immune to questions not just about their politics, but about their patriotism. Before the new year, the inexhaustible Herald was calling on a newly organized U.S. Senate investigative committee to look into William Seward’s and Frederick Douglass’s alleged roles in covertly supporting John Brown. Bennett interpreted their absence from the country at the time of the raid as dispositive proof of their foreknowledge of the “invasion.”
Actually, Seward was then in the midst of a kind of proactive valedictory: an ill-timed world tour designed to burnish his international reputation preparatory to what he and his supporters felt confident would be a coronation as the 1860 Republican presidential nominee. Douglass had far more reason to worry about such threats to his liberty. Although friends had raised the funds to purchase his freedom, he had indeed known, befriended, and encouraged Brown’s militancy in the past, though in fact he had strongly advised him not to undertake the attack on Harpers Ferry, believing it was doomed to failure. Nonetheless, encouraged by Bennett’s Herald—which called for Douglass’s scalp with headlines such as “Fred Douglass a
nd Other Abolitionists and Republicans Implicated”—the state of Virginia issued a warrant for the Rochester editor’s arrest for “the crime of murder.” Douglass had no other option but to leave the country.
“The black Douglass having some experience in his early life of the pleasures of Southern society had no desire to trust himself again even on the borders of the Potomac,” Bennett sneered in a particularly ugly update.44 Douglass traveled first to Canada, then on to Great Britain, returning only when word reached him of the death of his daughter. But not before he published one more powerful editorial in Douglass’ Monthly, defending Brown for striking “a blow” that might “prove to be worth its mighty cost.” Besides, as Douglass pointed out: “Slavery is a system of brute force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must be met with its own weapons.”45
It is impossible to know whether Abraham Lincoln read this particular turn of phrase, or indeed, ever saw any issue of Douglass’s abolitionist paper. To admit so in 1859 would have been, as far as most mainstream voters of the day were concerned, tantamount to confessing to reading pornography. But in just three months, Lincoln would make an unforgettable “right” and “might” statement of his own in New York City. It may very well be that he got the idea for the phrase he went on to make famous at Cooper Union from the self-exiled and, like him, self-educated Frederick Douglass.
• • •
Abraham Lincoln agreed to deliver his maiden speech in the nation’s largest commercial city at the invitation of a group of young New York Republicans opposed to their own senator’s presidential ambitions. In mid-1859, this anti-Seward coalition, which included a number of prominent local journalists, determined on a plan to showcase alternative Westerners in a series of well-promoted local lectures. It was not just that the group disliked and distrusted Seward, which they did. Its members also sincerely believed that any Eastern presidential candidate, particularly one, like Seward, who had recently warned provocatively of an “irrepressible conflict” with the South, faced the likely prospect of voter rejection in the conservative Western states, and would thus lose the White House just as Frémont had done in 1856. On the other hand, they reasoned, a Western candidate would have little trouble winning the dependably Republican bastions of New England and New York, and would put up a much stronger fight in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The Young Men’s Central Republican Union boasted its share of youthful members hooked on politics, but tellingly its senior advisors included powerful Republican editors Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the meeting at which their organization agreed to pay Lincoln an irresistible honorarium to lure him to town took place at the offices of Bryant’s Evening Post. Greeley was by this time privately, if not publicly, committed to scuttling Seward’s White House dreams by whatever means required.
The group’s original October 1859 invitation summoned Lincoln to speak not at Cooper Union, but at Brooklyn’s iconic Plymouth Church. Its presiding minister, Lincoln well knew, was Henry Ward Beecher, not only the nation’s most celebrated preacher, but also a brother of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a contributing editor to the antislavery New York Independent. As a political opportunity, this was not a venture—or a venue—to be taken lightly. What was more, the hosts offered a fee of $200 plus expenses. Fortunately for him, as it turned out, Lincoln successfully contrived to delay his trip until late February 1860, perhaps determined to become the final speaker in the church series or, more likely, uncertain at first about precisely what to say on a stage as important as Beecher’s pulpit.
Inspiration struck after Lincoln’s archrival, Stephen Douglas, caused a national stir with an audacious article in the otherwise reliably progressive Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The senator’s nineteen-page piece, entitled “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” took direct aim at Lincoln’s all-free or all-slave “House Divided” philosophy. There could be “no truce in the sectional strife,” Douglas warned, until antislavery Republicans like Lincoln accepted the Union as the founders made it: “divided into free and slave States, with the right on the part of each to retain slavery so long as it chooses, and to abolish it whenever it pleases.” In defense of “the great principle of self-government in the Territories,” Douglas cited extensive but somewhat specious research—conducted in part with the help of the distinguished historian George Bancroft, an admirer—to argue that the founding fathers had expected individual states to decide for themselves whether slavery would be permitted within their borders in the future, precisely as he had legislated in the controversial 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.46 Douglas was so pleased with the resulting article that he ordered twenty-five hundred pamphlet reprints. He proudly called the finished product “the finest specimen of the Printing art that I have ever seen.”47
Publication of the Douglas tract spurred Lincoln to conduct a laborious research project of his own (which he conducted with no help at all), aimed at showing that the founders—by his convenient definition the signers of the Constitution—had demonstrated through subsequent votes, speeches, and writings that they in fact fully embraced the idea of using federal authority in the future to regulate slavery in the territories. Lincoln’s paradigm was no more authoritative than Douglas’s: he might as easily have investigated the signers of the earlier Declaration of Independence, in which case his tabulations would have yielded far less satisfying results. Instead he chose a methodology that would most easily prove his own thesis, and even so he may have exaggerated his conclusions. Among his most reliable primary sources were the back issues of the New York Tribune’s national edition stacked in Springfield’s state library.
Lincoln worked tirelessly to make his upcoming lecture a success, despite many distractions, including criticism from Chicago Times editor James Sheahan over the pending publication of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, which Sheahan and other Democrats worried had been edited to improve Lincoln’s speeches at the expense of Douglas.48 In another brilliant stroke, to make certain that he would arrive in the East as the principal Republican voice of the West—or at least of Illinois—Lincoln meanwhile deftly conducted significant behind-the-scenes wire-pulling aimed at earning himself the crucial pre-journey endorsement he most craved. Writing to his political ally Norman Judd two weeks before his scheduled departure for New York, Lincoln confided: “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket,” he wrote, “but I am where it would hurt some for me not to get the Illinois delegates. . . . Can you not help me a little in this matter, in your end of the vineyard?”49
Judd knew precisely what Lincoln’s almost tortured flurry of double negatives meant: he desired the blessing of the Republican press—at once. Just one week later, the Chicago Tribune obliged with an editorial calling for “the nomination of Lincoln for the first place on the National Republican ticket.” Heading into a make-or-break journey to the newspaper capital of the nation, the former one-term congressman from Springfield was now his state’s favorite son Republican candidate for president of the United States. Judd proudly fired off a letter to ask the newly anointed man: “You saw what the Tribune said about you. Was it satisfactory?” Perhaps Judd, like Lincoln, already knew the answer to that question.50 What Chicago’s Tribune wrote, New York’s Tribune was sure to read.
What the New York Tribune reported next, however, both surprised and further challenged Abraham Lincoln. Arriving in New York after an exhausting cross-country rail journey, he found notices of his upcoming address gratifyingly printed in Greeley’s paper. But as the report made clear, his speech was not to take place at Beecher’s Brooklyn church after all, but rather at entrepreneur Peter Cooper’s newly opened co-educational college in Manhattan. To add to the pressure, the Tribune urged “earnest Republicans to induce their friends and neighbors of adverse views to accompany them, to this lecture.”51
Suddenly aware that he would be speaking before a secular,
not a church, audience, Lincoln was forced to spend considerable time during his first two days in New York recasting his lengthy oration to suit its new venue. Though he made an all but obligatory appearance for Sunday worship services at Plymouth Church on February 26, Lincoln politely declined a luncheon invitation from Henry Bowen, editor of the Independent, a paper to which he subscribed back home, so he could return to his hotel room, lock the door, and further rework his text. The influential Bowen was already anxious about this odd-looking Westerner’s New York debut. The day before, Lincoln had turned up unexpectedly at the Independent’s Ann Street headquarters to introduce himself to Bowen and ask if he might be briefed on the details of the Monday speaking engagement. When the editor agreed to oblige, Lincoln flopped his huge frame onto the office couch to listen. Studying his gargantuan star speaker as he sprawled on his sofa, Bowen remembered feeling so “sick at heart” at the sight of his “travel-stained” clothes and “woe-begone” appearance that “there came to me the disheartening and appalling thought of the great throng which I had been so instrumental in inducing to come and hear Lincoln.” Bowen’s publisher, Joseph H. Richards, who had put up the money to fund Lincoln’s appearance, was equally horrified. Richards later admitted that “when I saw the awkward manner, long legs and arms of this man I could not help having serious forebodings concerning the financial outcome of the venture.”52
Bowen and Richards need not have worried. By February 27, fully aware of the stakes, Lincoln was more than ready. And although the crowd that night did not quite fill Cooper Union’s capacious Great Hall, the throng still approached fifteen hundred, and included a healthy smattering of recognizable Republican leaders. The press certainly turned out in full force. As one of the official hosts, Bowen was of course in the house, along with co-organizer and Independent writer Theodore Tilton. Both Horace Greeley and Samuel Sinclair of the New York Tribune appeared, at last showing interest in the politician the paper had so long ignored or slighted. Prominent for his absence was Henry Raymond of the New York Times. A year earlier, the Times had conceded that “some of ‘Old Abe’s’ friends look still higher for him.”53 But more recently, Raymond had left his readers little doubt that no Western orator could convince his paper to advocate for anyone for the presidency but his ally William Seward.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 30