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

by Harold Holzer

  This was all too much for Raymond, who replied with his own scathing indictment of Greeley in the New York Times. Mocking his rival editor for attempting “to be the historian of his own exploits,” Raymond sarcastically charged that by displaying “the generosity which belongs to his nature, and which a feeling not unlike remorse may have stimulated into unwonted activity, he awards to others the credit which belongs transcendently to himself”—that is, for defeating Seward at Chicago. “Mr. Greeley had special qualifications, as well as a special love, for this task,” Raymond editorialized, “to which none of the others could lay claim. For twenty years he had been sustaining the political principles and vindicating the political conduct of Mr. Seward through the columns of the most influential political newspaper in the country. He had infused into the popular mind, especially throughout the Western States, the most profound and thorough devotion to the anti-slavery sentiments which had given character to Mr. Seward’s public career.” Once in Chicago, however, Greeley had “labored personally with delegates as they arrived” to warn them of Republican defeat in November should Seward be nominated. And then Raymond unleashed a true bombshell: none of this treachery surprised the New York delegation, he charged, because Greeley had been secretly plotting against Seward since 1854.

  “Being thus stimulated by a hatred he had secretly cherished for years, protected by the forbearance of those whom he assailed and strong in the confidence of those upon whom he had sought to operate,” Raymond continued, “it is not strange that Mr. Greeley’s efforts should have been crowned with success.” To Greeley alone, Raymond concluded with a flourish, belonged “full credit for the main result of the Chicago convention, because his own modesty will prevent his claiming it,—at all events until the new Republican administration shall be in position to distribute its rewards.”7

  At first, a stunned Greeley responded feebly to the attack, counter-charging that by visiting Springfield and then Auburn (to console Seward), his Times rival had not only been “paying court alike, to the rising and the setting sun,” but that he had returned to New York displaying “his constitutional addiction to crooked ways.”8 But Raymond’s sensational charge that Greeley had dedicated himself to destroying Seward years earlier would not fade away. When New Yorkers began clamoring for the evidence, Seward himself provided it, returning the dispositive six-year-old letter to its beleaguered author. Greeley had little choice but to make public the damning proof himself. On June 14, the Tribune published the full text of the private missive he had sent to Seward back in 1854 “dissolving” their so-called “partnership.” Greeley tried to cushion himself from the expected outcry by accompanying it with the claim that in the years since he had “uttered more praise with less blame” for Seward over the years “than of any other living statesman.”9

  The press had a field day. The latest Raymond-Greeley-Weed feud inspired a barrage of newspaper comments around the country, and many of their derogatory barbs were aimed at Greeley. The Philadelphia Pennsylvanian called it “a deep disgrace that the newspaper profession should present such instances of venality, ingratitude, and shamelessness.” The Cleveland Herald clucked that “Ambition for personal political office has ruined many an editor,” while the Cincinnati Enquirer tried reminding readers that Greeley was a “positive power in this country, more potent than all the Republican politicians put together.”10

  The debate only intensified. In another long and venomous column, Raymond skewered Greeley yet again, reminding Times readers that the “Philosopher” had based his 1854 grudge not on a dispute over doctrinal issues, but over the expectation of naked political reward and financial benefit for his newspaper. Greeley had lusted for the office of lieutenant governor that year, Raymond pointed out, not because “he thought himself peculiarly well-fitted for it, but because ‘he wanted to have all his enemies on him at once, as he was tired of fighting them piecemeal,’ and because his running would have . . . ‘helped his paper.’ ” Pillorying his longtime adversary with undisguised relish, Raymond added attacks on Greeley’s character, his personal habits, and his editorial style alike:

  We would be the last to underrate the services which Mr. Greeley has rendered to his party. But we cannot quite agree with him in thinking that any party is bound to require such service by running a candidate . . . merely for the sake of bringing his enemies into compact shape and “helping his paper.” This is more of a sacrifice than any political party can fairly be expected to make—a good deal more than Mr. Seward’s friends demanded on his behalf at Chicago.

  Mr. Greeley’s letter suggests sundry other topics of discourse, upon which, however, we forbear to enter. In regard to his own profession, for example, we presume he has learned effectually,—though at some personal cost,—that even “milk and water” is a more palatable daily beverage for the average public taste than aquafortis [nitric acid]. . . . Readers of newspapers are human beings after all, and prefer being treated with some degree of respect, even when they do not happen to concur in sentiment with an Editor, who, even if he not be an office-seeker, may possibly have personal reasons of his own for seeking to dragoon them into conformity. It is a very bad matter to coerce a whole community, and the attempt indicates quite as little wisdom, as it generally secures of success.11

  Always a hard man to shame, the resilient Greeley responded by ignoring the uproar and taking up the Lincoln banner as if he had been waving it for years. Somehow, in the space of just a week and a half, Greeley miraculously transformed himself from Seward spoiler to Bates delegate to Lincoln enthusiast, with hardly a word to justify his conversions. A young New York artist named Thomas Hicks, commissioned to travel to Springfield to paint a portrait of the newly minted nominee, happened to be visiting the Tribune office when the editor burst in from the Republican convention still “stained with the dust and grime of travel.” When the staff gathered around begging for firsthand reports of the drama in Chicago, Hicks remembered, Greeley seized from his coat pocket a daublike woodcut depicting what the painter described as “a very plain man”—the latest portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Holding it aloft “with an air of triumph” as if “Honest Abe” had been his first and only choice for president, Greeley unselfconsciously declared: “There, I say, that is a good head to go before the people.”12

  By autumn, Greeley was touting Lincoln’s candidacy as if he had invented it—and as if the nominee not only supported, but exemplified, the ideals that the editor had been advocating for decades. “Abraham Lincoln illustrates our position and enforces our argument,” the Tribune declared in October. “His career proves our doctrine sound. He is Republicanism embodied and exemplified. . . . That he split rails is of itself nothing; that a man who at twenty was splitting rails for a bare living is at fifty the chosen head of the greatest and most intelligent party in the land, soon to be the head also of the nation—this is much, everything.” Bravely, if unrealistically, Greeley even urged pro-Union Southerners to dare to vote Republican. If those with the “manly courage” to do so found themselves menaced at the polls, or permitted to cast their ballots only to see them “refused” or “destroyed,” Uncle Horace assured them, “your duty is performed.”13

  Not every antislavery editor experienced such a swift conversion. Although Frederick Douglass’s upstate abolitionist monthly still boasted far fewer readers than the widely circulated New York City dailies, no editor came closer to comprehending the truth about the 1860 convention results than this uninhibited freedom fighter, who, unlike white editors, advocated for abolition without any thought of personal or political reward. Writing in June, Douglass lavished praise on Seward and echoed the almost universal surprise at the choice of Lincoln. But he went on to describe the Republican candidate as “a man of unblemished private character” with “a cool, well-balanced head” and “great firmness of will.” Lincoln could yet boast no great “literary culture”—here, Douglass underestimated him—yet he was admirably “industrious,” “frank,” and
“honest.” Douglass accurately concluded that Lincoln’s “friends cannot yet claim for him a place in the front rank of statesmanship, whatever their faith in his latent capacities. His political life is thus far to his credit, but it is a political life of fair promise rather than one of rich fruitage.”14 Lincoln, who took no visible part in the New York newspaper kerfuffle over Greeley’s schemes or his own qualifications, simply waited in Springfield for the Republican East Coast editors to finish letting off steam so they could return to what he regarded as their principal mission: that of ending Democratic rule in Washington by publishing propaganda aimed at boosting his own candidacy.

  • • •

  Stephen Douglas experienced far more frustration than his longtime Republican rival in uniting his party—and its press—behind his presidential aspirations.

  He had begun the campaign season as the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination. Writing in 1859, author Mary J. Windle spoke for many when she described Douglas as an inevitable “future President, with the White House . . . as much his future as the Tuileries that of the Imperial infant, or Windsor Castle that of the Prince of Wales.”15 But Southern Democrats were not quite ready to grant Douglas the deed to the Executive Mansion. Seething that the party platform failed to include a plank protecting slavery in the new territories, and blaming Douglas’s Popular Sovereignty for inhibiting slavery’s expansion, they refused to rally behind the Little Giant. When the Democrats convened in Charleston in April 1860 to select their standard-bearer, delegates endured fifty-seven inconclusive roll calls in a futile effort to choose a nominee. Douglas led on every round of balloting, but never mustered the two-thirds majority the Democratic Party then required to anoint national candidates. (Bennett stubbornly—and unsuccessfully—supported Buchanan for a second term, inspiring a series of cartoon attacks, one of which showed the editor as a barber lathering the president’s hair into the shape of a dunce cap.)

  With the delegates hopelessly deadlocked, Douglas men called for an adjournment and proposed reconvening at Baltimore in June—a strategy that temporarily salvaged Douglas’s presidential hopes but as a consequence wrecked the Democratic Party. In Baltimore, Douglas finally won nomination, but Southern extremists stormed out of the hall and called for a convention of their own. There they chose John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky to stand for the White House on a separate Southern Democratic ticket. Further complicating the already muddled race was yet another convention in Baltimore, which brought together a coalition of former Know-Nothings and conservative old-line Whigs unprepared to rally behind the antislavery Republicans. Calling themselves the Constitutional Union Party, they awarded their own presidential nod to former U.S. senator and cabinet officer John Bell of Tennessee.

  The breakup of the Democratic Party—“secession” by the Southerners, wags called it—gave many Republicans confidence from the start that they could not be beaten in November. His feud with Greeley temporarily at bay, Henry Raymond not only predicted a Lincoln triumph but added: “We think it not at all unlikely that Mr. Douglas himself fully shares this opinion.” By the end of June, Chicago Tribune editor Charles Ray wrote Lincoln to exult: “It is early yet; but it will do you no harm to begin to consider what shall be the quality and cut of your inaugural suit. It does not seem to me that you have anything else to do in the campaign.”16 William Cullen Bryant, describing himself as “an old campaigner, who has been engaged in political controversies for more than a third of a century,” was more practical, advising Lincoln that “the vast majority of your friends . . . want you to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises, nor even give any of those kind words which men are apt to interpret into promises.”17

  Lincoln followed this advice and did nothing at all to advance his candidacy—at least publicly—for the next six months. While “Wide-Awake” clubs marched in support of his candidacy throughout the North, the Republican nominee waged his entire campaign by allowing political surrogates and copacetic editors to speak in his behalf, sending occasional political instructions to supporters around the country, posing for new photographs and paintings designed to introduce him to the national electorate, chatting amiably with the occasional visiting journalist (relatively few correspondents ventured to remote Springfield), and monitoring both the newspapers and his constantly increasing volume of mail. The Republican press did its full share. Supporters introduced a new special weekly called The Rail Splitter, whose first edition introduced the lyrics to a rousing new campaign song called “Lincoln and Liberty,” and featured a rough but appealing sketch of the self-made nominee, dressed in homespun clothing, wielding an ax to chop wood.18 The presentation proved a harbinger of messages to come: party organs would strive to emphasize Lincoln’s log cabin origins and frontier upbringing, and discuss the divisive slavery issue as seldom as possible. Whatever wire-pulling the candidate did was conducted behind the scenes.

  By contrast, facing abandonment by the bloc vote on which Democrats had long counted from Dixie, Douglas had little choice but to break precedent and take to the campaign trail in his own behalf. Anticipating charges that he was desperate for office, he set off on a long and circuitous trip through the South and up the Eastern seaboard by claiming he was off to reunite with his ailing mother—who actually lived in more directly accessible upstate New York. Naturally, wherever his trains paused to take on fuel, Douglas managed to deliver speeches to local supporters. Greeley branded him “Douglas the Wanderer,” and cartoonists had a field day mocking “Stephen in Search of His Mother,” depicting him in one particularly emasculating caricature as a dwarflike man-child enduring a spanking from the symbolic “mother” of the nation, “Columbia.”19 Douglas’s exertions did little to change the political equation North or South of the Mason-Dixon line and moreover exacted a heavy physical toll on the hard-drinking candidate.

  Of course, the Douglas team also pursued the more traditional campaign maneuvers long practiced by political parties and loyal journalists. His organization distributed pamphlets, speeches, and exclusive news through three official newspaper organs—the Springfield State Register, the Chicago Times, and the Washington States and Union—soliciting support, editorial and financial alike, from Democratic editors nationwide. Chicago editor James Sheahan issued a pro-Douglas campaign biography, which the New York publishers Harper & Brothers promoted as its “prominent spring book.”20 The efforts did little good. Although Douglas confidently instructed the Register’s Lanphier to “open the canvas with vigor and energy,”21 the candidate’s once solid Northern Democratic press support began crumbling in mid-campaign. As one supporter soon warned from New York: “The most influential papers here are against us, or what is worse, Janus-faced.”22

  Even worse news for the Little Giant came from Chicago, where in midsummer the long-loyal James Sheahan abruptly sold the Times to Cyrus McCormick. “The sheriff was at the door, & we had to sell or be sold,” Sheahan explained to his downstate colleague Charles Lanphier. It did not matter that the replacement editor was “an inflated ass,” and the new owners “against us on Doctrine, and for Breckinridge every where except in Illinois.” Douglas, who had supported Sheahan through political squabbles and financial setbacks alike, pouring his own money into the Times to keep it alive, was understandably furious. But an equally resentful Sheahan, vowing to bow out of politics forever, put much of the blame for the death of the Times on the senator’s shoulders, implying that whatever help Douglas had provided had been insufficient.

  “Douglas has been cruel in his conduct towards me,” Sheahan complained at one point to Lanphier, who summoned the beleaguered Chicagoan to Springfield at the end of August so he could “provide the assistance of his pen during the present canvas.”23 The downstate job did little to heal Sheahan’s resentments. “In the matter of the book of which I had hopes,” he maintained of Douglas, “he wantonly interfered to my injury. I owe him nothing in any way.”24 In the final cha
pter of his Douglas biography, Sheahan had barely hinted at these festering frustrations, acknowledging that his 528-page opus was “voluminous” but adding, “to do full justice” to the subject “would require four times the space.” The editor certainly turned out to be wrong in predicting that the “remarkable” Douglas was “the only man in his own party whose nomination for the Presidency is deemed equivalent to an election.”25

  Notwithstanding these seismic shifts, and aside from Douglas’s desperate personal journey eastward, the presidential campaign remained for the most part conducted in and by the press. Unlike their Democratic counterparts, however, Republican editors never wavered on Lincoln. Newspaperman John Locke Scripps produced the first extended (if sanitized) description of Lincoln’s personal virtues in a May 1860 profile for the Chicago Tribune (in which enterprise the writer now held a business interest). Scripps grandiosely described the Republican nominee as “a gentleman of modest means and simple tastes . . . a regular attendant upon religious worship” and “a scrupulous teller of truth.” Lincoln reportedly read and approved the text before publication and it was probably at his later request that its pamphlet edition omitted a tidbit about his once using an expletive to denounce a crooked political deal.26 The candidate subsequently provided Scripps with a long autobiographical sketch, which the journalist used as the basis for a pamphlet issued by the Chicago Tribune and co-published as a New York Tribune Tract by Horace Greeley.27