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

by Harold Holzer

  Greeley confronts a Southerner—or vice versa—in an incident captured by a New York Illustrated News artist inside the crowded lobby of Willard’s hotel during the tense days leading up to Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration.

  At one point, a Southerner approached Greeley inside the hotel and loudly berated him, charging that the Tribune had become “an engine of great mischief” and its editor “a Northern fire-eater, and an abolition bloodsucker.” According to the Illustrated News correspondent who witnessed this scene, “our good Horace” was left with “his face full of smiling benevolence, and his hands in his great coat pockets—evidently tickled with the lecture, and not at all abashed. Our artist,” the report ended, “who saw the whole thing, put it into pencil, and we have put it into engraving, and hope the public will like it.”

  Greeley’s presence did not escape the gaze of visiting Southern journalists, either. On inauguration day, the Charleston Mercury reported yet another Greeley sighting at Willard’s, but far less sympathetically. “His broad-brimmed hat was set back on his head, his cravat twisted to one side and above his collar, and his bosom exposed. As he slouched along in his ungainly rhinoceros way, a half drunken New Yorker stopped him.” Greeley, stouter than in his early days, but still “thinskinned and smooth and fair as a baby,” was fresh from “his last interview with Old Abe,” at which, the Mercury reporter conjectured, the editor had made a final attempt to influence Lincoln in the still unresolved questions regarding the cabinet. Just moments later, the correspondent watched the inaugural parade begin along Pennsylvania Avenue. The Mercury reporter claimed to notice a “rickety Jersey wagon . . . much adorned with flags, and I observed that one of them was torn, so that all the stars remained while some of the stripes were missing. . . . This is ominous.”68

  Unlike the Illustrated News, New York’s other picture weeklies took suspicious note of Greeley’s apparently renewed influence on the incoming administration. Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun portrayed him in one cartoon as a liveried White House doorkeeper, forcibly keeping Seward out of the mansion by declaring, “so many of our customers don’t like you!” In contrast, but no less critically, Vanity Fair portrayed Seward and Thurlow Weed comfortably ensconced inside the president’s office, urging Lincoln to beware of “sharpers,” while a frustrated Greeley struggles to break past the chained door to gain entrance. On the eve of the inauguration, the Budget of Fun attempted to explain Lincoln’s safe arrival in Washington from Baltimore by showing him entering the White House crouched inside a steel safe, protected by soldiers, Wide-Awake marchers, and Horace Greeley, uncharacteristically brandishing an upthrust sword and carrying a pistol in his belt. For months, cartoons and caricatures that assailed Lincoln for wasting his precious time on patronage placed Horace Greeley at the head of the line of hungry aspirants for “Government Pap.”69

  • • •

  On March 4, 1861, luxuriantly bearded, Lincoln delivered his long-awaited inaugural address before a crowd of thousands massed on the plaza outside the east front of the U.S. Capitol. Whether or not Greeley had read and commented on the oration in advance is not known. But several others had, including incoming secretary of state William Seward and Lincoln’s longtime political rival, Stephen Douglas. Both men had urged the president-elect to be as conciliatory as possible, and in the days before the swearing-in, Lincoln had obligingly toned down his more defiant original language. Nonetheless, he vowed unmistakably in his speech “to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” To Southerners who had insisted since December that the federal government must abandon Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, that remark alone amounted to a declaration of war, even if Lincoln ended the oration with an eloquent plea for peace: “We are not enemies, but friends—We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”70

  Good nature seldom found its way into the party newspapers. When it came to reporting and analyzing the inaugural address, it was political business as usual—but with the volume ratcheted up to a new intensity, and with sectional pride and racial divisions now inflecting the commentary. Bitterly condemning the new president for offering to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in return for the abandonment of secession, Frederick Douglass, for example, called the pledge “revolting,” adding: “It was . . . weak, uncalled for and useless for Mr. Lincoln to begin his Inaugural Address by thus at the outset prostrating himself before the foul and withering curse of slavery.”71 By contrast hailing the speech for its “moral vigor” and “calm firmness,” the ever loyal New York Times insisted: “Mr. Lincoln’s Inaugural Address must command the cordial approval of the great body of the American people.” Praising it for “a sagacity as striking as its courage,” the Tribune agreed: “The Address can not fail to exercise a happy influence upon the country. The tone of almost tenderness with which the South is called upon to return to her allegiance, can not fail to convince even those who differ from Mr. Lincoln that he earnestly and seriously desires to avoid all difficulties and disturbance.”72

  Of course no such approval came from the South—or even from Democratic papers in the North. Lamenting the “crude performance” for a “careless bonhomie” and “resolve to procrastinate,” Bennett’s Herald lacerated Lincoln’s address as “neither candid nor statesmanlike,” and lacking “in dignity or patriotism.” In Bennett’s analysis: “It would have caused Washington to mourn, and would have inspired Jefferson, Madison, or Jackson with contempt. . . . It would have been almost as instructive if President Lincoln had contented himself with telling his audience . . . a funny story and let them go. His inaugural is but a paraphrase of the vague generalities contained in his pilgrimage speeches, and shows clearly, either that he has not made up his mind respecting his future course, or else that he desires, for the present, to keep his intentions to himself.”

  Lincoln had his inaugural address typeset by the Illinois State Journal before leaving Springfield, later adding handwritten changes, including this new ending, indicated by an artfully drawn pointing finger.

  Most Southern newspapers, however, insisted they understood Lincoln perfectly. The usually moderate Richmond Whig objected to the speech’s “coercive” tone, predicting: “Let Lincoln carry out the policy indicated in his Inaugural, and civil war will be inaugurated forthwith throughout the length and breadth of the land.” Condemning the address even more fiercely for reflecting “an impulse that hastens to the precipice,” the Charleston Mercury branded its author “King Lincoln” and “the Orang-Outang at the White House,” and decried the praise the speech earned in most Northern journals. “The Abolition-Republican papers are delighted with the Inaugural,” complained the Mercury. “With cruel admiration, they call it a ‘State Paper.’ ” To the Mercury it was more like “the tocsin of battle, but the signal for our freedom.” The headline for its March 9 report bristled with indignant resolve: “Waiting for War to Begin.”73

  Henry Raymond spoke for many Republican editors when he took that dare. Expressing “the strongest and most confident hopes of the wisdom and success of the new Administration,” Raymond ended his editorial by praising Lincoln’s inaugural address with what turned out to be an equally ominous warning: “If the Union cannot be saved on this basis and consistently with these principles, then it is better that it should not be saved at all.”74

  President Abraham Lincoln holding one of his favorite and most consistently supportive newspapers, the Washington Chronicle, photograph by Alexander Gardner, Sunday, August 9, 1863.

  PART TWO

  UNCIVIL WARS

  Chapter Ten

  Wanted: A Leader

  If the new president ever enjoyed a “honeymoon” period free from press criticism, it ended almost as s
oon as it began. Within weeks of the inauguration, Washington correspondents began besieging the administration with complaints about lack of access to official information and worse, occasional interference by the government in their pursuit of news. The friction prompted the Associated Press to call for a meeting to demand “good manners and common sense” from administration officials.1 In response, the War Department insisted it simply wanted reports of its activities kept out of any Northern dailies that Southern officials might get hold of. There was reason for concern. When the new Confederate secretary of war, LeRoy Walker, urged his region’s own newspapers to “forbear from the transmission and publication” of “intelligence . . . detrimental to our great cause,” he let slip that his office had indeed obtained “valuable information” from the “medium of the enterprising journals of the North.”2

  The New York Times, which ignored the AP invitation, lost patience with Lincoln for its own, entirely political, reason, and barely a month after the president took office. In a withering April 3 editorial headlined “Wanted—A Policy,” Henry Raymond charged that “our Government has done absolutely nothing, towards carrying the country through the tremendous crisis which is so rapidly and so steadily settling down upon us. It allows everything to drift.” Lincoln, Raymond demanded, “must go up to a higher level than he has yet reached,” stop wasting “time and strength in feeding rapacious and selfish partisans,” and “adopt a policy of action” before people “lost heart” and confidence. “In a great crisis like this,” the lecture concluded, “there is no policy so fatal as that of having no policy at all.”3

  It was no coincidence that just two days earlier, Secretary of State Seward had presented Lincoln with a breathtakingly presumptuous memorandum complaining in almost identical language that the administration was “yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.” Seward then added, as if to nominate himself as savior, “Either the President must do it himself,” or “devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” A conspiracy was afoot. Not only had Seward and Raymond obviously coordinated their private and public criticism of the president, but Raymond now rushed to Washington at Seward’s request to be present at his anticipated coronation as a kind of de facto prime minister. Once in the capital, the editor hoped to be ideally positioned to telegraph a detailed exclusive announcing Seward’s new powers. Arriving at midnight, Raymond spent the next four hours conferring with the secretary of state at his home while anxiously awaiting Lincoln’s response. At one point, the editor summoned his Washington correspondent to the Seward mansion and confidently instructed him to draft a front-page report on Seward’s elevation and to leave ample room for an enthusiastic editorial once the president, as expected, blinked.4

  Neither article ever saw the light of day, for Lincoln outmaneuvered them both. With cool agility, he deflated the coup attempt by welcoming Seward’s “advice,” but insisting that, where making policy was concerned, “I must do it.” The president managed not only to put the secretary of state firmly in his place but to humble the New York Times in the bargain. A disappointed Raymond sent a terse dispatch to New York conceding the scheme’s collapse. It read: “Nothing more.” If it was true, as rumored, that Raymond was tired of the newspaper grind and harbored hopes for a glamorous overseas appointment, perhaps as consul to Paris, the Seward imbroglio robbed him of his chance. Lincoln was no longer willing to reward him.5

  The real “tremendous crisis” came a few weeks later in Charleston, and it changed everything. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, tectonically altered not only relations between the Union and the seceded Southern states, but between the federal government and the Northern press—and also between these long-partisan newspapers and their suddenly, overwhelmingly patriotic readers. After enduring some thirty-four hours of bombardment from the shoreline, Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, lowered his tattered flag and surrendered the federal fort to the Confederacy on April 14. Then, to his good fortune, he led his garrison onto a ship bound for the nation’s newspaper capital: New York.

  There, just hours earlier, a local journalist-turned-poet first learned of the Sumter attack after leaving the opera around midnight and starting down Broadway on foot toward the Brooklyn-bound ferry slips. The stunning news arrived in the usual clamorous way. “I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys who came presently tearing and yelling up the street,” the eyewitness, Walt Whitman, testified. He snatched up a copy of one of the extras, and began devouring the Sumter report beneath street lamps flickering above a nearby hotel. Within minutes, thirty or forty people crowded around Whitman, imploring him to read the story aloud because the newsboys had run out of papers.6

  In Washington, acting boldly in response to the bombardment while Congress remained dispersed in its customary post–inaugural day recess, Lincoln made news of his own by calling for 75,000 volunteers to “re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union.” Four days later, he ordered a naval blockade of Confederate ports, and early the next month asked the states for yet another 42,000 soldiers and sailors for lengthier enlistments than required of the original ninety-day militia.7 Lincoln’s proclamations reassured his doubters in the North, but triggered waves of criticism in the Southern press, and helped propel Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina into the Confederacy. Calling for “vengeance on the tyrants who pollute the capital of the Republic,” the Richmond Whig predicted that Jefferson Davis would soon occupy the White House, urging Lincoln to be “in readiness to dislodge at a moment’s notice.” Some of Washington’s conservative editors might well have welcomed Davis there: both of the divided city’s onetime pro–Stephen Douglas dailies “raised the disunion standard” no less vehemently than their colleagues across the Potomac.8 In journalism, as in the country at large, a North-South fault line was emerging to supplant the Republican-Democratic divisions of years past.

  Leading the patriotic charge in the North was the temporarily placated New York Times, which boasted even as the first shells were raining on Sumter that its Charleston correspondent George H. C. Salter (who wrote under the name “Jasper”), had been arrested “as a Federal spy . . . imprisoned for twenty-four hours, and then sent out of the city . . . destitute of funds.”9 Energized by these events, Raymond predicted that Lincoln’s call for volunteers would send a “thrill like an electric shock throughout the land, and establish the fact that we have a Government.” The South would soon “learn that Northern people are not cowards.”10

  The once pacifistic Horace Greeley came to believe, at least he so maintained after the war, that Lincoln made a “grave mistake” only in “underestimating the spirit and power of the Rebellion.” Had the president “invited the people to assemble on a designated early day” in towns across the North rather than calling for a mere 75,000 volunteers, Greeley unrealistically maintained, “not less than One Million able-bodied men would have thus enrolled themselves.” Instead, “what should have been a short, sharp struggle was expanded into a long, desultory one.”11 At the time, Greeley kept his disappointment to himself. Privately, he wrote Lincoln to urge “that the war for the Union” be “prosecuted with emphatic vigor,” adding: “All are confident that the result will justify our fondest hopes.”12 Publicly, he joined the chorus for war with enthusiasm, calling on loyal Northerners to “unite on the common ground of resistance to treason” and assailing “imbecile apologists” for the slave system.13

  At first, James Gordon Bennett, who was almost certainly the “imbecile apologist” to whom Greeley referred, remained unmoved by all this saber-rattling, even though his own Southern correspondents had been menaced in the South, too (“I escaped with my life only by assuming a disguise,” Herald reporter Charles H. Farrell claimed after fleeing Pensacola).14 Learning that Lincoln was weighing the termination of mail service to the seceded states, Bennett complained that the move would cause “serious damage” not only to the South, but “to the North
also”—undoubtedly calculating his own potential circulation losses. Criticizing what he called a “causeless and senseless appeal to arms,” Bennett insisted that “the people of this metropolis owe it to themselves, to their material and political interests, to their social security and to the country at large, to make a solemn and imposing effort in behalf of peace.” But when he called for a public meeting to protest government “coercion,” the rival Times demanded to know: “Is there to be no limit to the Herald’s open advocacy of treason and rebellion?”15