Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion

by Harold Holzer

  The task of introducing Lincoln at Cooper Union fell to none other than the extravagantly bearded elder statesman among the city’s antislavery editors, the Evening Post’s William Cullen Bryant (Lincoln confided that it was “worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man”).54 Bryant took the stage and hailed the speaker of the evening as “a gallant soldier of the political campaign of 1858” and a “great champion” of the Republican cause in Illinois.”55

  William Cullen Bryant, antislavery poet and longtime editor of the New York Evening Post who introduced Lincoln at Cooper Union. They had never met before.

  Lincoln more than lived up to the old poet’s warm introduction, firing off a ringing, two-hour-long disquisition that alternately impressed, amused, and ultimately roused the “large and brilliant” audience.56 Opening with a precisely argued rebuttal to Douglas’s Harper’s article, in which he identified Republicans with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln shifted gears mid-speech to address Southern concerns over supposed Republican extremism, assuring slaveholders that he and the party posed no threat to the institution where it already existed, and distancing Republicans from radical abolitionism. “John Brown was no Republican,” he insisted, “and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.” In words that must have warmed Greeley’s heart, he thundered: “You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.”57

  Then shifting tone yet again, Lincoln devoted the third, final, and most earnest section of his address to arguing the righteousness of the antislavery cause and advocating fearless and tireless support for freedom. “Never let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” he concluded, ending by consciously or unknowingly paraphrasing Frederick Douglass—but using all-capital letters perhaps to remind himself to shout: “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”58

  Lincoln’s triumph at Cooper Union owed something to modest advance expectations and of course a great deal to his stellar performance onstage, a situation neatly bookmarked in press that preceded and followed his career-altering journey. On the day he left Springfield to head east, his hometown nemesis, the pro-Douglas State Register, bade him a caustic and deflating adieu by noting: “The Honorable Abraham Lincoln departs for Brooklyn under an engagement to deliver a lecture before the Young Men’s Association of that city, in Beecher’s Church. Subject, not known. Consideration, $200 and expenses. Object, presidential capital. Effect, disappointment.” Now, just five days later, the once unenthusiastic New York Tribune declared, as if in direct response: “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.” Greeley judged Lincoln’s “unsurpassed” performance “the very best political address to which I ever listened—and I have heard some of Webster’s best.” At long last, the Tribune editor had seen and appreciated the mature Lincoln in action—not the awkward, joke-slinging freshman congressman he had first encountered in Washington more than a decade earlier, and not the frontier debater he had doubted and then praised, but never personally observed, during the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Now Lincoln suddenly seemed “one of Nature’s orators, using his rare powers . . . to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well.”59

  Few of Lincoln’s speeches ever won such widespread praise so quickly, but the press had as much to do with building and burnishing its reputation as did the orator. The transformational reputation of the Cooper Union address owed a major debt to the New York newspapers that reported and praised it—Greeley’s in particular, for the Tribune not only promoted and covered the event, but gave Lincoln the opportunity to edit his remarks before they went into print, then offered fulsome praise for the results. Lincoln helped his own cause by bringing down the house at Cooper Union. But fully aware that many times the number of people filling its Great Hall on February 27 might read his speech in newspaper reprints on February 28, Lincoln not only crafted an oration that enthralled his hearing audience on the evening of its delivery, but made certain that the text was faithfully reproduced for the vastly wider reading public the following day.

  Just hours before making his New York City oratorical debut at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln poses for photographer Mathew Brady.

  After a celebratory supper in his honor at a nearby private club, the undoubtedly exhausted Lincoln nonetheless limped to the offices of the New York Tribune—his brand-new boots pinched his aching feet—where he personally proofread the newly typeset version of his Cooper Union address not once but twice before clearing it to appear in the paper. Printing the final sentence in all capital letters was probably Lincoln’s own idea, meant to reflect the passion and volume with which he delivered it.

  This fact-checking expedition had almost certainly been arranged in advance with the Tribune, although there is no evidence that Greeley was on hand in his newsroom for what must have seemed to him a commonplace occurrence. As for Lincoln, still smarting from his missed opportunity to check his “House Divided” address before it was mangled in his hometown paper two years earlier, he undoubtedly asked this time for the personal opportunity to shepherd the most important speech of his career into flawless permanence for New York readers. Clearly, some sort of pool arrangement prevailed that evening as well, for the transcripts that appeared in four major dailies the following day—the morning Tribune, Times, and Herald, as well as the Post that afternoon—were precisely alike, with Bennett’s Herald as usual adding its own flourishes by providing a valuable record of audience interruptions for laughter, applause, and cheering where they occurred.

  Unfortunately, Lincoln departed the Tribune newsroom that night without his original handwritten manuscript, and it has never come to light since. Presumably he left it behind to be swept away with the other handwritten material set in type for the February 28 edition—for such was the tradition at busy newspapers nationwide. Besides, Lincoln never cared much about archival records for their own sake, and had yet to begin gauging the potential monetary or historic value of his writings—that knowledge would come only during the Civil War, when charitable organizations commenced clamoring for autograph documents that could be sold to raise funds for the benefit of wounded soldiers. His primary mission on the night of February 27, 1860, was to speed a correct version of his painstakingly prepared speech to as many readers as possible, as accurately as his own concentration could guarantee, and as promptly as technology would allow. Lincoln’s exhausting attention to detail produced not only the kind of press attention that would later be termed “blanket” coverage, but also a meticulously perfect transcription. Within days, newspapers in Chicago, Washington, Detroit, and other major cities reprinted the speech for their own readers.

  Greeley was not the only major New York editor to heap adulation on the oration. Bryant’s Post hailed Lincoln’s “certain mastery of clear and impressive statement.” Even Raymond’s pro-Seward Times conceded that the address had inspired “three rousing cheers . . . for the orator and the sentiments to which he had given utterance.” But the Tribune proved the most effusive of all in its praise for the man they had so long resisted. In Greeley’s estimation, “The Speech of ABRAHAM LINCOLN at the Cooper Institute last evening was one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City.”60

  Not unexpectedly, the address attracted its share of detractors as well, from political and press opponents who had never before taken Lincoln seriously enough to assail him. The new, pro-Democratic New York Daily News, for example, owned and operated by the brother of the city’s pro-Southern mayor, bristled that Lincoln and his fellow Republicans “have no weight nor influence against the simple fact that the Constitution does not give th
e [slavery prohibition] power to the Congress.” And the Herald weighed in predictably by railing against Lincoln’s attempt to recruit the nation’s founders as antislavery allies. “It is idle to quote the fathers of the Republic, including Washington and Jefferson in favor of the present Republican crusade against slavery,” Bennett bristled two days after Lincoln’s speech. “It is true that Jefferson for a time became tainted with the French revolutionary leveling notions about negro slavery, and other things; but he afterwards changed these opinions.”61

  In point of fact, such condemnation exerted far less influence than the praise. At the time of the speech, the only significant political battle under way was the struggle for the Republican presidential nomination scheduled to be decided only three months hence, and this fight would be waged exclusively among Republican editors and their readers. Snide remarks by Bennett and other Democratic-leaning newspapermen would have little impact until the general election campaign in autumn. And after Cooper Union, as far as Joseph Medill and Charles Ray’s Chicago Tribune viewed their candidate’s prospects: “If the States of the Northwest shall unite upon him, and present his name to the Chicago convention, there is a strong probability that he will receive the nomination, and as certain as he is nominated he will be president.”62

  Aiding his own cause, Lincoln hastened north on February 28 for a well-covered speaking tour in neighboring New England. In stop after stop, he largely reiterated his Cooper Union message, struggling to freshen it enough at each location to sustain the interest of audiences who had already read the original in papers like the Tribune. “I have been unable to escape this toil,” the fatigued orator complained to his wife from his son Robert’s boarding school at Exeter, New Hampshire. “ . . . The speech at New-York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well, and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences, who have already seen all my ideas in print.”63 The prospect of delivering a tenth speech, however, proved one too many. When his original Cooper Union hosts asked him to deliver yet another oration, Lincoln drew the line. Refusing the additional invitation, Lincoln suggested a worthy substitute: “Mr. Greeley.”64

  Within a week, Greeley contributed further to Lincoln’s Cooper Union momentum by publishing a Tribune Tract booklet edition of the February 27 speech, offering it for sale at the paper’s headquarters at four cents a copy, and by mail at ten dollars per thousand to feed bulk demands from Republican clubs.65 More reprints quickly rolled off presses in other cities. “Pamphlet copies of my late speech at Cooper Institute, N.Y., can be had at the office of the N.Y. Tribune; at the Republican Club Room at Washington, and at the office of the Illinois State Journal at this place,” a clearly well-informed Lincoln wrote a friend from back in Springfield in early April. “At which place they are the cheapest, I do not certainly know.”66

  In its initial analysis, the Tribune conceded that even “a very full and accurate report” could never evoke “the tones, the gestures, the kindling eye and the mirth-provoking look” that Lincoln had evinced at Cooper Union. These defied “the reporter’s skill.” But such personal quirks, however captivating, did not much matter in the speech’s aftermath. Lincoln’s New York success was assured and extended not in person but in print, not through gestures and glances, but through republication and mass distribution.

  • • •

  Even before leaving for New York, Lincoln accomplished something else of significance designed to ensure his continued, strong presence in the medium of print. Two years earlier, he had resisted the repeated invitations from the Chicago Tribune to provide an autobiographical sketch focusing on his personal story. But now Lincoln penned just such a text, perhaps briefer than expected, after his friend, former and future newspaperman Jesse W. Fell, secretary of the Illinois Republican State Committee, requested one that might be used to introduce the presidential aspirant to Eastern readers, most of whom still knew almost nothing about him. “There is not much of it,” Lincoln jocularly wrote Fell of the enclosed two-and-a-half-page document, completed around December 1859, “for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” He had no objection if others wanted to use it, but sensitive to potential criticism over self-promotion, he cautioned, “it must not appear to have been written by myself.”67

  Fell forwarded the result to a rather obscure Pennsylvania reporter named Joseph J. Lewis, who then used it as the basis for a highly flattering profile that first appeared on the front page of the Chester County Times on February 11, 1860. As Lincoln and Fell hoped, the modest biography quickly inspired reprints in Republican journals around the country. Here, based on Lincoln’s own descriptions, appeared for the first time in print some of the key elements of what evolved into a mythic life story: his antecedents had been “un distinguished.” His grandfather had been “killed by indians.” He had grown up in “a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.” Education had been scarce, with “no qualification . . . ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three.” As to his growing fame, Lincoln modestly reported only that he had been “losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.”68

  In the end, what Lincoln had “done since”—even at Cooper Union—proved insufficient as far as Horace Greeley was concerned. Although increasingly convinced that the Republicans had a strong chance to win the White House in 1860, he still did not believe Lincoln was the man to lead the effort—or the country. Animated principally by his hatred for Seward, the editor determined “to fix on the proper candidate for President,” as if the task of anointing the winner belonged to him alone. Greeley’s ultimate choice shocked almost everyone: former congressman Edward Bates of the slaveholding state of Missouri. The venerable onetime jurist was a Westerner, all right, but also a former anti-immigrant Know-Nothing who had little sympathy for Greeley’s political agenda. Bates had not even bothered to announce his opposition to the extension of slavery into the West, the central rallying cry of the Republican organization. The most conservative of all of the Republicans spoken of for the presidency, he alone had yet to join the party. And at age sixty-six, he was the oldest contender in the field, the only one born in the eighteenth century. Aside from fulfilling Greeley’s convoluted sense of political expediency, Bates’s only possible claim to the editor’s favor was the memory of the Missourian’s brief service thirteen years earlier as chairman of the 1847 Chicago River and Harbor Convention, which the editor (and Lincoln) had attended.

  Nonetheless, Greeley convinced himself, and attempted to convince his readers, that Bates alone was capable of stopping Seward at the convention. Years later Greeley insisted that he had sincerely believed Bates was also best positioned to win a multi-sectional victory for the party. “If not the only Republican whose election would not suffice as a pretext for civil war,” he insisted, “he seemed to me that one most likely to repress the threatened insurrection, or, at the worst, to crush it. I did not hesitate to avow my preference, though I may have withheld some of my reasons for it.”69 Incredulous, Frederick Douglass wrote that “Mr. Greeley has the greatest passion for making political nominations from the ranks of his enemies of any man in America.” But not even the unpredictable Greeley, Douglass lamented, had ever summoned such a “frog” out of the “pro-slavery mud.”70 Connecticut editor Isaac Hill Bromley, who went on to cover the May 1860 Republican convention in Chicago, came to believe that the New York Tribune editor was “inopportune,” even “ill-balanced,” concluding that Greeley had no excuse for supporting Bates save for bitterness over his own, thwarted “political ambition,” for which he stubbornly held Seward responsible.71

  Greeley hastened to the Chicago convention, too, and quickly became an official voting delegate, filling a vacancy that arose from, of all places, Oregon. Among the other influential editors who poured into town
was Seward’s chief backer, Thurlow Weed, the publisher who two decades earlier had given Greeley his start in political journalism and now probably regretted it. A few months earlier, an old Ohio friend had warned Weed about “Mr. Bryant, Mr. Greeley, and others,” who were all said to be “hard at work” accumulating alternative candidates to undermine Seward. Though long aware of Greeley’s hostility, Weed bravely insisted: “I think there is no danger of that.” As Weed rosily viewed the convention landscape, “something more than their opposition will be required to accomplish the defeat of a man upon whom the people have set their hearts.” Not long afterward, that same prescient Ohio politician encountered Greeley himself in a public corridor of New York’s swank Astor House hotel, and listened as the editor hissed at him: “We shan’t nominate Seward, we’ll take some more conservative man.” When the Ohioan hastened upstairs to warn Seward, who happened to be staying at the hotel, the senator calmly replied that Weed had only just brought Greeley to his room to see him personally. The Ohioan was unnecessarily worried, Seward chirped. Greeley was “all right.” No, the visitor insisted, “Greeley is cheating you. He will go to Chicago and work against you.” And so Greeley did.72

  Making an appearance in Chicago as well was Henry Raymond, undisputed star of the first Republican National Convention four years earlier, and now fresh from a rejuvenating trip to Europe and equally confident of Seward’s imminent success. Duel-happy James Watson Webb journeyed west to represent the Courier and Enquirer. Young Murat Halstead, who also covered the Democratic convention at Charleston for the Cincinnati Commercial, now arrived in Chicago to report on the opposition, as did the enterprising German immigrant Henry Villard, whose articles appeared in the New York Herald. Joining them was George William Curtis, who had launched his career on Greeley’s Tribune before striking out on his own as editor of Putnam’s Magazine. And Francis Preston Blair, Jr., scion of a powerful political dynasty and editor of the pro-Republican Missouri Democrat, arrived in town to place the name of favorite son Edward Bates in nomination.73