That is not to say that every ambitious pro-Republican journalist received immediate or automatic spoils from Lincoln. One example was the twenty-five-year-old newspaperman William Stoddard, who later claimed distinction as the first editor to endorse Lincoln for the presidency—disputed by some historians since—in the Central Illinois Gazette in May 1859, just a month following Lincoln’s informal first visit to his office. After the election, Stoddard worked assiduously to win a job on the future president’s staff, visiting Lincoln in Springfield to press his case, and then, when he heard nothing further about an appointment, writing in frustration to the president-elect’s law partner, William Herndon: “Should he honor me with his confidence I will set about the duties of my office with a degree of enthusiastic pride in their performance. . . . I have reason to fear that I shall really need some position—you know how lucrative a business editing a country weekly is.” Admitting that his request was “bold, even presumptuous,” Stoddard offered “to begin” the job “ ‘on trial,’ as the Dutchman took his wife.”29 Still, Stoddard did not secure a Washington post until July 1861—and then had to settle for appointment to the staff of the Interior Department, though on permanent loan to the executive mansion to sign presidential land patents. The White House budget would not allow for three private secretaries. (Eventually Stoddard took charge of the president’s correspondence, and went on to write a shelf of books about his experiences as Lincoln’s so-called third secretary.)
Lincoln also balked when the Illinois State Journal’s Edward L. Baker recommended their “mutual friend” Harrison Fitzhugh as commissioner of public buildings. It was not only that Fitzhugh hailed from Springfield, which in the president-elect’s view needed no further representation in Washington, but because Lincoln suspected that his wife, Mary, who would have to work closely with the next commissioner on White House maintenance matters, might “object” to the appointment (in fact she favored someone else). As a matter of fairness, Lincoln generally showed a reluctance to award fellow Illinoisans. So much so that by January 1861 the Chicago Tribune’s Joseph Medill angrily predicted that “there will not be one original Lincoln man in the cabinet,” only “competitors and enemies.” The embittered editor, who had expected to wield more influence on the incoming chief executive, wrote to his partners: “Thank heaven we own and control the Tribune. We made Abe and by G—we can unmake him.”30
• • •
Before departing from Springfield to assume the presidency, Lincoln secluded himself in a second-floor storeroom above his brother-in-law’s dry goods shop on Springfield’s Capitol Square, and there began hammering out a draft of his forthcoming inaugural address—a speech that had assumed enormous importance in part owing to Lincoln’s protracted pre-inaugural silence. The date he began writing was February 4, 1861.
His self-imposed isolation proved impossible to sustain. On the very same day he began turning his attention to what he knew would be the most widely scrutinized oration of his career, the “Old Gentlemen’s” Peace Convention formally gaveled into order in Washington to propose its own set of Union-preserving compromises before Lincoln could take office. Halfway across the country, meanwhile, representatives from the six of the first seven seceded states convened in Montgomery, Alabama, to create the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis as its first president. Lincoln could not help but take serious notice of both developments, as they were breathlessly reported the following morning in the Springfield and Chicago newspapers.
Real distraction arrived the next day, February 5, when Horace Greeley barreled into Springfield, ostensibly to deliver a previously scheduled nonpolitical lecture, “America West of the Mississippi.” The town seemed to hold its collective breath in anticipation of fireworks likely to ignite at the onetime Edward Bates delegate’s inevitable reunion with Lincoln. The tension only increased when the editor failed to present himself as expected at the president-elect’s headquarters. A standoff ensued. “He stood on his dignity and awaited the approach of Mr. Lincoln, instead of approaching,” Henry Villard acidly observed in a Herald article entitled “The Tribune Philosopher in Springfield.” As Villard reported: “During the entire morning and a portion of the afternoon . . . Horace sat in his room in patient expectation of seeing the gaunt Presidential form loom up in his door.”31
Never a stickler for protocol, Lincoln broke the impasse at around 4 P.M. and strolled over to call on the editor at his hotel. “What a sight the meeting of these two awkward and homely, but remarkable personages, must have afforded,” Villard speculated. “What a treat to have listened to their exchange of advice and opinion, unrestrained as that must have been, from their common, characteristic, frank bluntness.” In a more serious vein, even without access to the summit, Villard reported that “Greeley urged a strict adherence to an anti-compromise policy and is said to have received gratifying assurances. His opinion as to Cabinet and other appointments were freely solicited.” All that Greeley’s own New York Tribune ever provided its readers about the summit was a brief item coyly reporting: “A friend who has just had a prolonged and confidential interview with Mr. Lincoln, at Springfield, writes us that Mr. L. is invariably opposed to all Compromises, no matter in what sense.”32 Whether Greeley or Lincoln also addressed the renewed whispers that Greeley indeed wanted a place in the cabinet, perhaps as postmaster general, no one knows.
Not content with conveying the Greeley sighting straightforwardly, the Herald followed up a few days later with an editorial crowing that the “Spruce street philosopher” was to be “left out in the cold” in his quest for influence. “The other day,” Bennett snarled, “Greeley resolved to combine business with pleasure, and pick up a few dollars by a lecture in St. Louis. He started for that city, but, hearing that it was probable the Missourians would mob him, he turned tail and commenced running for dear life with the old white coat streaming out behind. . . . Where he is now we cannot say—probably he has not yet stopped in his ‘wild career.’ ”33
None of these reports conveyed what surely weighed most heavily on Greeley’s mind during his visit: the latest humiliation in the editor’s long and fruitless quest to achieve high office. It was no wonder that he had locked himself in his hotel room. On the very day he arrived in Springfield, the New York state legislature convened in Albany to choose a successor to Senator William Seward, who had signaled his willingness to become Lincoln’s secretary of state. And Greeley knew by the time he arrived in Springfield that absent a last-minute political miracle, he seemed destined for defeat yet again. Declining to lobby legislators personally, Greeley insisted: “I have expressed no wish but that the best man shall be put forward,” even though he knew that the man he judged “best”—himself—was unlikely to prevail.34
For weeks, Greeley had inspired serious consideration in the race for Seward’s seat, though he might have accurately assessed his slim chances by confiding that his candidacy worried “the Fire-Eaters who have been taught to believe me a decidedly vicious and dangerous Negro.”35 In fact, the decision turned on politics, not principle. Regarding Greeley’s election with no less dread than did the South, Thurlow Weed and his supporters plotted to repay him for his disloyalty to Seward by promoting antislavery attorney William M. Evarts for the seat (while claiming “without doubt” that Weed “could have been elected himself” had he chosen to enter the race).36
Lincoln, who wanted no part of this latest reopening of the long-running Seward-Greeley feud, tried staying aloof from the process. Then, a Westchester County legislator named Benjamin F. Camp (who happened to be a Tribune stockholder) began whispering, after returning east from his own visit to Lincoln in Springfield, that the president-elect in fact preferred Greeley for the Senate and, what was more, wanted the editor to take control of all federal patronage in the Empire State. A livid Weed promptly wrote to Lincoln to complain that Camp was misrepresenting him “abominably,” and that his “falsehoods” would almost certainly fool “some
who are sharp for office & credulous.” Weed simultaneously warned Lincoln advisor David Davis: “If Greeley gets into the Senate it will be because members are made to believe that Mr Lincoln desires it!” Davis in turn urged the president-elect “to set yourself right in this matter” and dispatch a message to Weed confirming his neutrality. Striving to keep all of New York state’s leading Republican editors at bay, Lincoln wrote Weed on February 4 to confess that he had indeed expressed “kindness towards Mr. Greely” to Camp, “which I really feel, but with an express protest that my name must not be used in the Senatorial election, in favor of, or against any one. Any other representation of me, is a misrepresentation.”37
By the time the message reached Weed, New York state’s 115 Republican legislators had already caucused to consider a Senate nominee. For all the opposition mounted against him, Greeley came agonizingly close to victory. On the first three ballots taken on February 2, he and Evarts took turns leading the pack of candidates (with Henry Raymond earning one or two symbolic protest votes on each round). By the fourth roll call, Greeley took a slight lead, 43–41, with the jowly Albany jurist Ira Harris suddenly emerging from the pack of also-rans with 22 supporters. But the Tribune editor failed to win an outright majority on ballot six, and again began trading leads with Evarts on subsequent roll calls. Greeley’s widest margin opened after the eighth inconclusive ballot: 47 votes for the editor, to 39 for Evarts and 19 for Harris—still no majority for any candidate.
Then, just before the ninth roll call, Weed dramatically instructed his loyalists to switch candidates, and Harris suddenly surged into the lead over Greeley 49–46, with all but 12 legislators abandoning Evarts in a blatant effort to stop the Tribune editor. The move succeeded. On the tenth and decisive ballot, Judge Harris won an absolute majority—60 votes to Greeley’s 49—and the caucus moved to make his selection unanimous. Since Republicans held an absolute majority in the State Assembly and Senate and planned to vote for senator as a bloc, the caucus results all but guaranteed that Harris would be chosen by the full legislature when the formal election took place on February 5. Calling the outcome “patriotic,” Raymond crowed that while many Republican legislators “cherished feelings for a favorite editor,” they “disapproved of his secession sentiments, and were unwilling to trust him with a seat in the United States Senate.”38
Putting a brave face on its editor’s defeat, the Tribune hailed Harris (while Greeley remained on the road) as “an uncompromising friend of the principles which triumphed in the recent Presidential contest.” The New York Times, on the other hand, bluntly reported that “friends of the State are consoled that Mr. Greeley was not nominated,” predicting that the “Tribune will discover, in our opinion, ere long, that while the Republicans of the State appreciate fully the zeal and fervor which it brings to the advocacy of Republican principles, they are not prepared to join in its denunciations of Gov. Seward or its exultations over Mr. Weed.”39
Rubbing salt into the defeated candidate’s stinging wounds, the Herald editorialized: “Alas! poor Greeley, after all he has done and suffered for the republican party, is thrown overboard in the republican caucus at Albany. This is most ungrateful. No man has contributed so much to the party’s success. He has turned his old white coat inside out and outside in half a dozen times to serve it.” Labeling the unresolved Greeley-Weed rift as “The Irrepressible Conflict in the Black Republican Party,” Bennett reported that Greeley was “so angry at his defeat for the Senatorship that he has made up his mind to ‘devote his paper to the amiable purpose of breaking up the republican party or of turning it into an abolition party’ ”—a charge meant to further isolate Greeley as a radical. At least acknowledging the challenge facing “Old Abe” due to “rows among his friends and the machinations of his enemies,” Bennett described the president-elect as “about the most unfortunate individual out of jail on the face of the earth.”40 By then, Lincoln must have agreed.
Undeterred by his latest rebuke, Greeley managed to compose a detailed three-page letter to Lincoln the very day after their Springfield meeting, declaring afresh that he wanted “nothing for myself,” but insisting that the “anti Weed Republicans” of New York simply had to be satisfied in the matter of federal jobs, especially “in view of Mr. Seward’s position in the cabinet.” With breathtaking arrogance, Greeley proposed that the incoming president actually make a list of all “the offices local to New York and of such share of the Foreign and Washington appointments as may be fairly apportioned to our state,” and then indicate which jobs he wanted to assign of his “own volition.” The remainder would then be chosen alternately by Greeley and Weed factions one by one “till the list is completed.” And then, Greeley promised, “you may dispose of New York at a single sitting and avoid the bitter heart burnings which are likely to follow any presumption that one side or the other has the dispensing of Federal patronage in our State.”
To this scheme Greeley added a postscript identifying several favorites—including his indiscreet ally Benjamin Camp of Westchester—whom he wanted rewarded even before the “list” was prepared. In a final stroke of audacity, Greeley offered a self-serving account of recent political history by reminding Lincoln that in his view, “we took the course which led to your nomination.”41 Even so, Greeley continued to insist: “There is no office in the gift of the Government or of the People which I either hope, wish, or expect ever to hold.”42 It was finally possible to believe that Horace Greeley’s own political ambitions were dead at last.
• • •
Somehow, Lincoln found time amid this latest political brawl to finish what he proudly called the “First Edition” of his inaugural speech. Then he quietly brought his handwritten manuscript to the offices of the Illinois State Journal and there asked general manager William Bailhache to do what he had done so often over the years (with varying degrees of accuracy): to typeset his speech so it could be read easily in public. The editor printed twenty copies, one each for “the gentlemen Lincoln had selected as members of his Cabinet,” and others for his “Presidential advisers.”43 Bailhache proved his usefulness in other ways as well. At around this time, he complained editorially that the sectional conflict was worsening because so few Southern readers enjoyed access to Northern newspapers. “The people of the South do not know us,” the Journal pointed out. “They are not allowed to read Republican papers down there.”44 The implication—insupportable, of course—was that if exposed to their news columns, Southerners might actually relent on secession. The next best thing to exerting influence, perhaps, was serving as official presidential typesetter and printer of the inaugural message.
Aside from Bailhache, Lincoln told only his private secretary about the secret endeavor. It was John Nicolay who testified that Bailhache gave “a trusty compositor” a “case of type, locked himself in a room of the Journal office, and remained there until the document was set up, the necessary proofs taken, and the form secure in the office safe until Mr. Lincoln could correct and revise the proofs.”45 Lincoln proceeded to review the first result, make corrections, and return it to Bailhache for a second printing, repeating the process one more time, and finally leaving the office with a third edition, eight printed pages long. Lincoln asked Bailhache to run off about a dozen copies so he could distribute texts to friends for their comments.46
“Perfect secrecy was maintained,” Nicolay proudly remembered, “perfect faith was kept. Only the persons authorized knew that the work was being done.” After Lincoln left the sparely furnished, perpetually cluttered newspaper office—for the last time in his life—with inaugural address in hand, employees emptied the type racks containing his inaugural speech, leaving no record of their effort. With that, Lincoln’s lifelong relationship with the Journal finally ended, just as his greatest challenge, from political, military, and journalistic forces alike, was set to begin.
On February 9, Henry Villard reported that Lincoln would be departing his hometown for Washington within “
three times twenty-four hours.” The Herald’s wise and hardworking young Springfield correspondent summed up Lincoln’s future this way: “A more enviable, but at the same time more delicate and hazardous lot than that accorded to Abraham Lincoln never fell to any member of this nation. The path he is about to walk on may lead to success, glory, immortality, but also to failure, humiliation, and curses upon his memory.”47
• • •
“Mr. Lincoln leaves for Washington this morning for the purpose of assuming the position of President of the United States.” So the Illinois State Journal reported with uncharacteristic restraint in a brief item published on February 11, 1861. After covering Abraham Lincoln’s farewell remarks at the Springfield railroad station at eight o’clock that morning, the paper added more expansively: “We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us as full of simple and touching eloquence, so exactly adopted to the occasion, so worthy of the man and the hour.”48
Ironically Lincoln’s impromptu parting words—punctuated by his closing lamentation, “Friends, one and all, I must now bid you an affectionate farewell”—might never have achieved their reputation for sublimity had the Journal version of the address, transcribed on the platform in a cold drizzle and rushed into print for the next day’s edition, endured as the sole record of his remarks. It very nearly did. Astonishingly, after all his years of attentiveness to reporters, Lincoln failed on that historic morning to alert the correspondents scheduled to travel with him to Washington that he intended to speak publicly before his departure. A day earlier, in fact, he had specifically notified them that he would say “nothing warranting their attention” when he left town.49 So it happened that before the president-elect boarded his special train, the largest pack of journalists ever to cover an inaugural journey crowded into their assigned seats early to get out of the rain, unaware that Lincoln would pause outside the caboose, doff his hat, and address some final thoughts to his neighbors after all—out of their hearing.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 38