Lincoln certainly won the war of campaign “lives,” an image-making battle he needed to dominate since he was far less known to the public than Douglas. By and large these efforts represented the work of newspapermen, not professional historians or biographers. In June, David W. Bartlett, a Washington correspondent for both the New York Independent and Bryant’s New York Evening Post who had written a campaign biography of Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont four years earlier, produced the first cloth-bound Lincoln life story.28 It quoted the “Unanimous Commendations of the Press” in response to Lincoln’s nomination (certainly based on highly selective research), and featured some two hundred pages of the candidate’s speeches. Just three weeks after the Republican convention, Harper’s Weekly carried an advertisement for the Bartlett book, calling it “ ‘Honest Old Abe,’ First in the Field,” and the most “reliable and authentic” of the “many ‘Lives of Lincoln’ ” already in circulation. Gilt-edged editions were offered for one dollar.29 The Cincinnati Daily Gazette’s Joseph H. Barrett published a Lincoln biography, too, and from the hand of Ichabod Codding, a radical abolitionist clergyman and editor of the American Freeman, came another life story that timid moderate Republicans did little to promote.30
That same year, a then unknown twenty-three-year-old reporter for the Ohio Journal produced one more campaign biography entitled The Life and Public Services of Hon. Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, and Hon. Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine (Lincoln’s running mate). It proved the first of 103 books that its young author, William Dean Howells, went on to publish during his long literary career. Its historical importance, however, arose from the fact that Lincoln himself scrupulously read the text in advance, and offered handwritten corrections—all of them minor—before publication. True to the traditions of the period, Lincoln never publicly acknowledged his cooperation with any of the newspapermen who introduced him to the public through the medium of the campaign biography, especially Howells. To so admit would have betrayed an unseemly ambition for high office. At one point, the candidate declared that he had “scarcely been so much astounded at anything” as by the “public announcement” by Howells’s publisher that the work was “authorized by me.” Lincoln had not objected to interviews and editing, he conceded. “But at the same time, I made myself tiresome, if not hoarse, with repeating . . . that I authorized nothing—would be responsible for nothing.”31 For his part, Howells soon complained: “I never had any report of the book’s sales, but I believe my Life of Lincoln sold very well in the West, though in the East it was forestalled by the books of writers better known.”32
Not to be outdone in the press world’s effort to introduce the candidate (and generate revenue thereby), Thurlow Weed saw to the publication of a 278-page collection of speeches by Lincoln, Seward, and other prominent Republicans.33 And in addition to the Tribune Tract by Scripps, Horace Greeley published what he called a “convenient” and “indispensable” Political Text-Book, a guide to the 1860 race bulging with election statistics and speeches by the presidential and vice presidential candidates, all of it supposedly free of “partisan bias,” but not surprisingly testifying to the justice of the Republican cause. Priced at one dollar per copy, and relentlessly promoted in a series of daily page-one advertisements in the newspaper, the guidebook went through eleven editions before Election Day.34 Greeley also issued a Tribune Almanac and Political Register, filled with useful political data alongside benign advertisements for “porous plasters” and pianofortes.35 Greeley profited handsomely from this publishing boom, not only from his own work, but from a slew of paid advertisements that publishers of rival biographies placed in the weekly and semiweekly editions of the Tribune, eager to reach Greeley’s vast Republican audience.
By campaign’s end, some 200,000 copies of various Lincoln biographies were in circulation in at least two languages, English and German. Lincoln’s future private secretary, John Nicolay, firmly believed the “copious pamphlet and newspaper biographies in which people read the story of his humble beginnings, and how he had risen, by dint of simple, earnest work and native genius, through privation and difficulty . . . play[ed] no small part in a political revolution of which the people at large were not as yet even dreaming.”36
• • •
Lincoln’s one major concession to the increased burdens that came with his new political status was the hiring of his very first personal staff—of one. Shortly after his nomination, the candidate invited the twenty-eight-year-old, German-born John Nicolay to serve as his secretary. The slender Nicolay, whose frown of a mustache and pointy little beard did little to disguise his youth, agreed to a monthly salary of seventy-five dollars, to be paid by the Republican State Committee.
Lincoln had known the young newspaperman for several years; he had earlier recommended him to Horace Greeley for a job with the New York Tribune (a request Greeley ignored). More recently, Nicolay had been working for one of Lincoln’s close political allies as Clerk of the Illinois secretary of state’s office, a gathering place for many Republican political professionals that was located in the same State Capitol building where Lincoln began occupying a temporary office after his nomination. The secretary of state himself proposed his trusted employee to Lincoln, and with no one else in mind, the nominee agreed.
While Lincoln and his new secretary appeared to have little in common, they in fact shared many interests. For one thing, both men liked (and wrote) maudlin poetry. Nicolay had scribbled in an unpublished verse in 1851: “There comes an hour of sadness / In which I feel alone; When life appears but madness, / When I feel that joy has flown.” The lines bore eerie similarity to a nostalgic ode Lincoln had penned some five years earlier, entitled, “My Childhood Home I See Again,” which spoke of the “lone survivors” of his former prairie community, including one old acquaintance who had gone mad: “A human-form, with reason fled, / While wretched life remains.” Just one year after writing his poem, Nicolay obtained a patent for “a device for improvement of Printing Presses.” Lincoln, too, held a patent. They became the only politician and chief aide to share that distinction.37
More important to Lincoln was the fact that Nicolay boasted journalistic experience and could handle newspaper correspondence in his behalf. Nicolay had served during the 1850s as editor of the Pittsfield, Illinois, Pike County Free Press. By 1857 he was working as an “authorized correspondent and business agent” for St. Louis’s Republican paper, the Missouri Democrat. Two years later, one influential friend urged Nicolay to launch “another daily in Springfield,” arguing in a slap at the Illinois State Journal that “there is no competent paper at here at present.” The approaching presidential election seemed “the most fitting occasion to get up a new establishment which can deal blows” to the opposition. With Nicolay at the helm as “one of the Editors of the new concern,” and the proposed paper striving to be “racy, sensible, and pertinent,” his admirer predicted that it would attract “many thousand subscribers.”38 Nicolay rejected the offer, but his recently acquired job with Lincoln did not inhibit him from continuing to submit freelance articles to various other newspapers. Only a few weeks before joining the campaign, Nicolay had drafted an editorial calling for Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency. “He maintains the faith of the fathers of the Republic,” read the endorsement. “ . . . In his hands, the Union would be safe.”39 It was the closest thing to a perfect job application any journalist could ever have submitted. Nicolay had also attended the Chicago convention as a political correspondent for the Missouri Democrat.40
The once and future journalists who served as Lincoln’s private secretaries beginning with the 1860 campaign (from left to right): John G. Nicolay, John M. Hay, and William O. Stoddard.
As the candidate probably knew, Nicolay had been “greatly disappointed” when he was not invited to write the Lincoln biography assigned to the equally untested William Dean Howells, although Nicolay later generously admitted that Howells had “performed his task
much more worthily than I could have done.”41 As consolation and more, the fiercely loyal Nicolay now found himself in control of Lincoln’s calendar and correspondence, eventually handling visitors who ranged from well-known pre-convention favorites like Bates and Chase searching for cabinet posts, to influential journalists seeking influence, to rustic strangers content merely to shake hands with the once impoverished country youth who had now risen so high. Lincoln soon found he could depend on Nicolay not only to handle this influx of guests but also to pick out important letters from his growing daily mailbag and when necessary draft adroit responses, especially to the screeds that came pouring in from important Republicans eager to offer advice or request favors.
In short order, the burden of managing Lincoln’s visitors and mail grew too great for even the tireless Nicolay to handle alone. The campaign then added an assistant secretary to the staff: the delicately handsome and profoundly gifted John M. Hay, only twenty-two. A relative of one of the candidate’s longtime Springfield friends, Hay had no comparable journalistic experience—he was a Brown-educated aspiring lawyer—but boasted personal charm to spare and a genuine flair for writing. At the suggestion of one of his professors, Hay had sent the Providence Journal a firsthand report on Lincoln’s activities in Springfield during the convention.42 Soon he was not only helping Nicolay answer correspondence, but submitting fresh newspaper pieces under the rather precious nom de plume, “Ecarte,” a coy play on a voguish two-man card game called écarté. Thus, Nicolay and Hay not only functioned respectively as office manager and correspondence clerk; they served also as official, if anonymous, propagandists, the equivalents of what today would be called campaign press secretaries.
• • •
If candidate Lincoln passed the summer and fall rather quietly in Springfield, back in New York the national presidential campaign waged in his name came to resemble outright warfare. The canvass brought out both the best and the worst from the big three editors, who behaved predictably in print, only with more energy, and occasionally more venom, than ever. Republicans Greeley and Raymond outdid each other in heaping encomia on Lincoln, although the Times did temper its enthusiasm for a few weeks while its editor recovered from his shock and chagrin over Seward’s defeat. Meanwhile the supposedly independent but incurably racist Bennett, as scheming and unmanageable as ever, began issuing ominous warnings about what he increasingly regarded as a likely victory by the “Black Republicans.”
For the first time, or so the evidence suggests, Lincoln took a personal interest in getting Bennett on his side—or, at the very least, off his back. In mid-June, the candidate’s most powerful local newspaper ally, Chicago’s Joseph Medill, attempted, clearly with Lincoln’s blessing, to forge a neutrality deal with the volatile Herald publisher. Ostensibly in New York on a business trip, Medill somehow learned that Bennett was, as he put it, “not unwilling to ‘dicker’ terms” for muzzling his incessant criticism of the Republicans. As Medill sunnily alerted the nominee by mail, Bennett was said to believe Lincoln to be “the strongest man the Reps could have nominated . . . honest, capable, not dangerously ultra, thought you would make a good president.” Medill planned to rendezvous with Republican national committeeman from Illinois Norman Judd, also visiting New York at the time, and finalize a strategy for approaching the elusive Bennett.
Lincoln was no doubt intrigued (though if he ever replied to Medill in writing, the evidence has not survived). “I’ll have a preliminary meeting with his ‘Satanic Majesty’ before [Norman] Judd arrives,” Medill informed Lincoln on June 19, “and ascertain his state of mind &c. &c. We deem it highly important to spike that gun; his affirmative help is not of great consequence, but he is powerful for mischief. He can do us much harm if hostile. If neutralized a point is gained.” Moreover, Medill was sure he knew how to win Bennett over: with flattery. “We think his terms will not be immoderate. He is too rich to want money. Social position we suspect is what he wants. He wants to be in a position to be invited with his wife and son to dinner or tea at the white house, occasionally, and to be ‘made of,’ by the big men of the party. I think we can afford to do that much.”43
Medill went on to hold two meetings with Bennett, but the two men struck no deal. The editor told his visitor that he thought Lincoln was “a man of good and honest intentions and would try to do [his] duty faithfully.” But he feared he “would fall into the hands of bad advisors.” As Medill recalled Bennett’s crude words, “the first time . . . you caught a runaway nigger, and sent him back to slavery, you would raise the d—l in your party.” At this, Medill reported, “the old Satanic laughed loud and boisterously.” The Herald editor also worried aloud that Lincoln owed too large a political debt to Bennett’s nemesis, Horace Greeley (“I assured him that Greeley had not been for you, that you were no favorite of his”). The sessions ended with Bennett telling Medill, “we could beat your man Lincoln, if we would unite, but I think it would be better for the country to let him be elected. I’ll not be hard on him.”44 Breaking his word as usual, the editor soon began urging Douglas supporters to switch to Breckinridge in a last minute “fusion” effort to unite the “Democracy,” defeat Lincoln, and save both the Union and the commercial vitality of the city. Stepping up its attacks on “the radically revolutionary character of the black republican party and its Presidential candidate,” the Herald was soon likening “the public declarations of Lincoln” to “the bloody acts of John Brown” and, perhaps worst of all, to “the diatribes of Greeley.”45 It would not be the last time Abraham Lincoln or his surrogates tried and failed in their efforts to court James Gordon Bennett.
Bennett shamelessly played class and race cards in his autumn 1860 effort to demonize the Republicans. Lincoln’s election, the Herald prophesied in one such outburst, would result in bankruptcy for local hotels, theater owners, and wagon makers dependent on Southern patronage, and cause financial ruin to tailors, shoemakers, and milliners reliant on slave-harvested cotton (“will you risk the bread you eat for the negro and his worshippers?”). On Election Day itself, Bennett published a hysterical fusillade of items designed to inflame white voters. In one, the Herald reported that an African American had recently dared to eat chestnuts on a public streetcar, refusing orders for his ouster and telling the conductor when he disembarked in his own good time that “after the 6th of November they’d show white folks how to treat colored people.” Warned Bennett: “There is not the slightest doubt of it; and if the black republicans only keep on they will have no difficulty in establishing the long mooted question that a white man is really as good as a nigger.”46
In the very same edition, Bennett predicted that Lincoln’s election would lead to black suffrage. “Already,” the paper reported, “the waiters and whitewashers and bootblacks have grown impudent in anticipation of the bright prospect before them.” Bennett asked whether any “decent white man” would “vote himself down to the level of the negro race?” Not yet finished with its last-minute outburst, the Herald warned Irish- and German-born laborers that if Lincoln won, “you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.” Bennett could not have been clearer in issuing these warnings: “Let every man who has a vote to cast,” he brayed, “cast it against Lincoln, and for the Union—against disorder, and the destruction of all our commercial relations.” In the most bizarre of his Election Day stunts, Bennett actually announced that a “special trance medium” had assured the paper that George Washington himself had come back from the dead to warn New York voters to “put down sectionalism and to crush out fanaticism.” That the séance he described had not produced an outright endorsement of Breckinridge was perhaps the only truly surprising aspect of the report.47
For all his hostility, Bennett was never one to let his biases stand in the way of providing his readers with the best news coverage. The Herald spared no expense in covering the campaign. At one point the paper attached a reporter to William Seward’s extensive late September speaking
tour, following the New York senator all the way to Springfield to cover his eagerly anticipated meeting with Lincoln (who struck the Herald correspondent who glimpsed him for the first time as less “repulsive looking” than his recent portraits). After interviewing the Republican nominee, more importantly, the reporter suggested that Lincoln had “a good, strong mind, and an honest intellect.”48 By summer, the Herald began providing readers with occasional feature stories about Lincoln, filed from Springfield—the kind of coverage neither the pro-Lincoln Times nor the Tribune ever bankrolled.
Not that editorial hostility toward Lincoln ever subsided at the Herald’s New York headquarters, and on one particular occasion it caused the nominee considerable embarrassment. The episode unfolded three weeks after his nomination, when a restless Lincoln found himself intrigued by an invitation from Kentucky politician Samuel Haycraft that he make a campaign appearance in the hostile Southern state that the nominee nostalgically referred to as “the place of my nativity.” Lincoln responded to the idea by joking: “Would not the people Lynch me?” Then he ill-advisedly shared his witticism with a reporter from the Herald. To Lincoln’s dismay, the correspondent pounced on the story on August 8, rather malignantly interpreting Lincoln’s remark as evidence that he genuinely feared “the invitation was a trap laid by some designing person to inveigle him into a slave State for the purpose of doing him harm.”49
Soon Stephen Douglas and the Democrats took up the attack. Lincoln had been careless in this rare instance, speaking on the record when he should have kept his own counsel. What was more, he proved unusually thin-skinned when criticized. But he was no coward, and he knew that attacks on a candidate’s manhood could cause significant political damage. So he quickly dashed off several indignant but surprisingly clumsy letters insisting on a retraction—precisely the kind of overwrought response Bennett no doubt hoped to incite. To Samuel Haycraft, Lincoln wrote: “Thinking this Herald correspondence might fall under your eye, I think it due to myself to enter my protest against the correctness of this part of it. I scarcely think the correspondent was malicious; but rather that he misunderstood what was said.”
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 34