Lincoln never replied to this tortured missive, and certainly never told Greeley “what to do.” If he ever shared the letter with his cabinet, as its author advised, no evidence survives.115 Instead, Lincoln sealed it with a piece of red ribbon and filed it away in his desk, telling not a soul about its existence. Hidden or not, it surely had the immediate impact of reducing Lincoln’s confidence in Greeley. Not only was the editor’s loyalty now in question; so was his stability.
Not for another three years did the president disclose the letter’s contents to anyone. When he finally did so it was in April 1864, when Lincoln came “loafing” into his White House office late one night expressing gratitude to Greeley for a useful bit of recent editorial praise. Something in it suddenly reminded the president of the editor’s three-year-old diatribe, and as his secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, looked on, Lincoln fished it out of his pigeonhole desk, untied it, and challenged his aides to “decipher” Greeley’s infamous scrawl—a “discursive cryptograph,” according to one contemporary. After Hay staggered his way through the message, reading aloud, he looked up in astonishment and declared it “the most insane specimen of pusillanimity that I have ever read.” Then Nicolay added that if it was ever published it would ruin Greeley, predicting: “Bennett w[oul]d. willingly give $10,000.00 for that.” As he retied the tape round the papers, Lincoln glanced up and replied almost wistfully: “I need $10,000 very much but he could not have it for many times that.”116
Horace Greeley may have been ready to surrender in 1861, but Abraham Lincoln was not; not even when federal forces endured another humiliating defeat at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, on October 21. Only forty-nine Union men died in the fighting, but among the casualties was Lincoln’s close friend Colonel Edward Dickinson Baker, for whom the future president had named his late son, Eddy. Overcome with grief, Lincoln ordered a White House funeral for Baker, but the family’s only public expression of mourning came from his precocious ten-year-old son, Willie Lincoln, who composed what the boy called “my first attempt at poetry,” a tribute (probably sent along by his father) published in the administration organ, the National Republican: “There was no patriot like Baker, / So noble and so true; / He fell as a soldier on the field, / His face to the sky of blue.117
• • •
In late August 1861, news reached Washington that another famous military figure, Union general John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, had taken the extraordinary initiative of banning slavery in Missouri—without notifying, much less seeking authorization from, the president. Like everyone else in the capital, Lincoln learned the startling news from the press. The general’s action cheered antislavery advocates, but posed a major challenge to the president’s cautious approach to the slavery issue, not to mention his prerogatives as commander-in-chief. The Times, Herald, and Tribune had expressed few misgivings over General Benjamin F. Butler’s earlier declaration that slaves fleeing into Union lines should be considered “contraband of war—that is, property subject to seizure and protection by the army.” But to Lincoln’s mind, Frémont had taken a dangerous, not to mention unauthorized, step forward.118
The dashing Frémont was a national celebrity in his own right: an explorer known as the “Pathfinder of the West,” a former U.S. senator from California, and the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate back in 1856. But Frémont was proving something of a disappointment as a commander of the sprawling and volatile territory he was assigned to supervise at the outset of the war. Critics blamed him for the Union loss at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10, placing his reputation in jeopardy. Frémont responded on August 30 by ordering the confiscation of all Rebel property in Missouri—including slaves, whom he unilaterally declared “free men.”119
Fearful that Frémont’s proclamation would “alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us,” particularly in crucial Kentucky, Lincoln responded by asking the general to “modify” his order to apply only to those residents actively engaged in supporting the Confederacy. The politically insensitive Frémont resisted, forcing the president to revoke the order publicly. As Lincoln explained to Orville Browning: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland.120 When Frémont failed to go on the offensive militarily, Lincoln felt he had no choice but to relieve him of his command.
Not surprisingly, the Frémont affair provoked an outcry from many of Lincoln’s closest pro-freedom press supporters. The Chicago Tribune’s Joseph Medill, for one, complained privately that his old friend’s decision “cast a funereal gloom over our patriotic city,” adding: “It comes upon us like a killing June frost—which destroys the comming [sic] harvest. It is a step backwards.”121 In a rare show of unity, both the Missouri Democrat and the Missouri Republican expressed support for Frémont’s initiative, as did Greeley, Raymond, and even Bennett. The New York Anglo-African protested in especially heartbreaking terms that “the reverse at Bull Run was a slight affair compared with the letter of Abraham Lincoln, which hurls back into the hell of slavery the thousands in Missouri rightfully set free by the proclamation of Gen. Fremont.”122 Greeley glumly urged his Washington editor, Samuel Wilkeson, to assure Lincoln that he would support the administration “by silence whenever I cannot do it by words, because I believe its fall would involve that of the government. . . . If I can stand such letters as Lincoln’s to Fremont, they need not fear my breaking with them on any personal ground whatever.”123
Still, Lincoln held his ground, even if he privately agreed with the assessment that soon appeared in the New York Times: “The proclamation of Gen. Fremont brings us to a new chapter in the war of rebellion.”124 That chapter as yet had no clear ending.
• • •
William Howard Russell returned to Washington in September, ready to report on further military action, but his English colleague, the London Spectator’s Edward Dicey, elected to return home. Dicey had seen enough of America—just enough, in fact, to inspire a book about his experiences here. Unlike Russell, however, he had come to believe that the American press was “a tolerably fair—probably the fairest—exponent of American opinion.” Dicey cautioned only that the unceasing competition, particularly among New York’s newspapers, offered “proof of the absence of high mental culture in the United States.”
“Day after day,” Dicey noted with dismay, “there is a sort of triangular duel between the editors of the Herald, the Tribune, and the Times, in which personalities, or what in any other papers would be considered gross libels, are freely bandied to and fro.” Worst of all, “in this warfare, the Herald being utterly, instead of only partially, unscrupulous, comes off an easy victor.” Dicey conceded that Bennett was unethical and reckless, but added: “The real cause . . . of the Herald’s permanent success, I believe to be very simple. It gives the most copious, if not the most accurate, news of any American journal. It is conducted with more energy, and probably more capital; and . . . written with as rough common sense, which often reminds me of the [London] Times. It has too, to use a French word, the flaire of journalism.” As Dicey marveled, “I have seen two people reading the Herald for one I have observed reading any other newspaper.”125
“Of course, if I chose,” Dicey hastened to add, “I could pick out hosts of eccentricities, and what we should call absurdities, in American journalism. The larger and, I hold, the truer view is, to look upon the American press as a vast engine of national education, not overdelicate in its machinery, but still working out its object. As such, it is, indeed, the press of a great and free people.”126
Those freedoms were about to be subjected to their greatest challenge ever.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Freedom of the Press Stricken Down
Although he restrained himself from saying so at the time, and was, in fact, nearly hysterical for peace, Horace Greeley later maintained: “Mr. Lincoln did not fully r
ealize that we were to have a great civil war till the Bull Run disaster. I cannot otherwise explain what seemed to many of us his amazing tameness.”1
If Lincoln’s so-called timidity ever really existed, it vanished quite soon after that battle—at least toward a new foe he judged to be nearly as dangerous as armed Rebels: antiwar, anti-administration, anti-recruitment newspaper editors. Against these foes, the Union government commenced an additional war, which Greeley eventually came to support almost as ardently as the fight to restore the Union. Months earlier, Lincoln may have assured delegates to the Washington peace conference that even in the wake of secession, he still believed a free press “necessary to a free government.”2 But outright rebellion altered his thinking on the subject, especially after the July battle that was supposed to end the Civil War in a single afternoon. For his part, Greeley may have believed that, following the Bull Run defeat, Lincoln “still clung to the delusion that forbearance, and patience, and moderation, and soft words would yet obviate all necessity for deadly strife.”3 But the record suggests otherwise. Following Bull Run, the administration turned its attention not only to forging weaponry and raising more troops, but also to quelling home-front newspaper criticism that the president, his cabinet advisors, and, more surprisingly, many Northern newspaper editors, believed was morphing from tolerable dissent into nation-threatening treason.
In the wake of this tightened oversight, some Democratic war opponents tried arguing that constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press must remain absolute no matter what the danger of an armed revolt. Even Lincoln’s friend Edward Baker, in one of his final speeches in the U.S. Senate before accepting his fateful military commission, insisted that neither the eradication of slavery nor the preservation of the union justified threats to “the liberty of the press.”4 Critics pointed out that the First Amendment unequivocally guaranteed: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” And Congress never did. This did not inhibit the administration from determining that in an unprecedented case of rebellion, and under the powers the president had claimed in order to crush it, military necessity superseded constitutional protection, and contingency trumped the organic assurances of freedom of expression within the Bill of Rights.
Based on this argument, the administration began conducting—or, when it occurred spontaneously, tolerating—repressive actions against opposition newspapers. At their most unobjectionable level, the safeguards were initially meant to keep secret military information off the telegraph wires and out of the press. But in other early cases, censors also prevented the publication of pro-secession sentiments that might encourage Border States out of the Union. In an anonymous dispatch for the New York Examiner, presidential clerk William Stoddard probably spoke for the White House in complaining that, cut off from their usual sources, “the legion of daily newspaper reporters” roamed “the streets and camps . . . pouncing, with hawk-like avidity, upon every poor little stray item which, in their palmier days, they would have scorned to notice.”5 And some of those “items,” the administration believed, should remain secret.
Eventually the military and the government began punishing editorial opposition to the war itself. Authorities banned pro-peace newspapers from the U.S. mails, shut down newspaper offices, and confiscated printing materials. They intimidated, and sometimes imprisoned, reporters, editors, and publishers who sympathized with the South or objected to armed struggle to restore the Union. For the first year of the war, Lincoln left no trail of documents attesting to any personal conviction that dissenting newspapers ought to be muzzled. But neither did he say anything to control or contradict such efforts when they were undertaken, however haphazardly, by his cabinet officers or military commanders. Lincoln did not initiate press suppression, and remained ambivalent about its execution, but seldom intervened to prevent it.
Did press dissent really pose an existential threat to national security? Probably not, certainly not in the free, loyal Northern states. But a frightened Northern public and most pro-Republican editors not only failed to object to the more paranoid view, they encouraged it, even when it triggered outright violence against newspapers. Perhaps, for these supportive editors, the additional appeal of reducing the Democratic competition seemed irresistible.
The military laid the foundation for press censorship well before Bull Run. Unable to read, much less censor, every newspaper published in the country, it acted promptly to control both the source and distribution points for news. Soon after the April attack on Fort Sumter, it cut the telegraph wires between Washington and Richmond. Then the administration banned the use of the postal service and other exchange routes in and out of the rebellious states. National papers with large circulations in the South—particularly the Herald—suffered considerably as their Southern readership dwindled. Soon all of Washington’s telegraph wires, the standard medium for transmitting news from city to city, fell under military control—as Henry Raymond had learned to his consternation after Bull Run. In the aftermath of the federal defeat there, a season of official crackdowns on individual newspapers commenced. The cascading hostility toward pro-peace, pro-slavery journals made the angry crowd that menaced the Herald offices after Sumter seem like a band of carolers by comparison.
Suppression fever flared up first in an area of Northern Virginia that fell quickly under Union control. Once again it was a “desecrated” flag that stimulated the eruption. On May 24, a young Lincoln protégé, the dashing Zouave colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, marched his colorfully attired men into Alexandria determined to tear down an offending Confederate flag from atop one of the town’s seedier hotels. Ellsworth captured the banner, but paid with his life when the innkeeper blew open his chest with a shotgun as the colonel descended the hotel staircase. As the first Union officer killed in the Civil War, Ellsworth became an instant martyr—his “memory . . . revered, his name respected,” mourned the New York Times.6
With the rallying cry “Avenge Ellsworth” on their lips, Federal troops soon occupied the entire Washington suburb. Union colonel Orlando Willcox then ordered the Alexandria Gazette to publish a proclamation declaring martial law. Rather than comply, editor Edgar Snowden shut down the paper, whereupon Union soldiers seized the office, smashed property, and allegedly stole valuables. A precedent had been established. Snowden lay low until October, when he launched a new journal called the Alexandria Local News, vowing that the venture would focus on “the truth, as far as that can be reached.” Union forces kept their eye on Snowden, and his comeback proved fleeting. When, later that year, Union troops seized the rector of an Alexandria church merely for omitting the customary prayer for the president, Snowden denounced the arrest as an “outrage.” Soldiers responded by setting fire to the headquarters of the Local News. The beleaguered editor suspended operations yet again, only to reopen the old Gazette in 1862. Two years later he would be arrested himself.7
Situations like these became commonplace in most of the volatile Border Slave States where Union commanders struggled to prevent pro-slavery interests from mounting secession efforts. In Maryland, for example, Lincoln authorized each military commander “to arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety.”8 The broad order by no means exempted journalists. When, that summer, the pro-secession Baltimore Exchange editorialized that “the war of the South is a war of the people, supported by the people,” while the “war of the North” was “the war of a party . . . carried out by political schemers,” military authorities shut down the paper, arrested editors W. W. Glenn and Francis Key Howard—the latter, a grandson of the author of the National Anthem—and shipped them off to prison without trial. Howard’s surviving personal papers suggest that authorities may have acted prudently in his case: the records included secret resolutions in which Baltimore leaders pledged violent support for the Confederacy.9 He remained in detention, his case unr
esolved, for months, and for a time he was confined at Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor, the very installation whose bombardment half a century earlier had inspired his grandfather to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Howard also spent time at that most notorious of press dungeons, New York’s Fort Lafayette, and later wrote an unrepentant memoir about his lengthy confinement entitled Fourteen Months in American Bastilles.10
In short order, acting under instructions from Secretary of War Cameron, federal marshals suppressed four more of Baltimore’s anti-Union journals and imprisoned a number of their proprietors. “The secession organs in Richmond were not more unscrupulous or desperate in their attempts to undermine and overthrow the Government at Washington than these same in Baltimore,” the New York Times cheered. Henry Raymond’s only complaint was that it cost the federal government millions of dollars “to repair the mischief of the un-muzzled organs of treason in Baltimore.”11 That there was some truth to the suspicions of treason among local newspapermen was confirmed when onetime reporter J. B. Jones, making his way through the city en route to Richmond, reassuringly found Baltimore Sun editor Arunah Abell to be “an ardent secessionist.”12 In September, emboldened federal authorities arrested yet another Maryland editor, Daniel Deckart, for publishing a “disloyal sheet” in Hagerstown. Deckart ended up confined for more than a month at Washington’s dank Thirteenth Street prison.13
Inevitably, suppression fever, like the war itself, spread west, particularly to Missouri and Kentucky, two Border States where Union loyalty was decidedly a fragile sentiment. During the post–Bull Run summer, as strategically crucial Missouri teetered on the brink of secession—in the end it never left the Union but remained a fierce battleground—commanding general John C. Frémont moved under martial law to consolidate control over the press. In one early action, the army suppressed the pro-Confederate St. Louis State Journal and arrested its editor, Joseph W. Tucker. Back in New York, the Times again showed no sympathy for such brethren. Raymond pointed out that the “the chief Western organ of the Southern conspirators” had “given itself up to stimulating the mob of St. Louis to sedition and bloodshed, and inaugurating the reign of anarchy in the city and State.”14 Federal troops also sacked the Cape Girardeau Eagle, closed down the Hannibal Evening News, and padlocked newspapers in smaller Missouri outposts like Warrensburg, Platte City, Osceola, Oregon, and Washington.15
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 45