If other Northern editors felt any bond with these hideously persecuted fellow professionals, they rarely expressed solidarity. In fact, the Republican press continued applauding such crackdowns, at least the official ones. Just weeks after predicting that the press would not “regard in silence or obsequiously applaud” the administration, but would instead act “the school master, exposing and commenting upon every act that does not come up to . . . the standard which competency demands,” the Times judged the New York Journal of Commerce “guilty of exciting a riot in our streets and apologizing for the mob.” No “right of the Press,” the Times reiterated, “should shield” it “from the penalty of a crime against society.”67 Branding the Daily News “that most pestilent of secession sheets,” the New York World (still a Republican paper) added that “every newspaper that” approved of secession “be regarded as the accomplices of treason.” And the Chicago Tribune questioned the very concept of “absolute freedom of the press” during a rebellion. “Until the war is over,” it argued, “we must be content to accept whatever the altered conditions of the times and the country may demand as a requisite of national salvation.”68
The tarring and feathering of Massachusetts Democratic editor Ambrose Kimball—a cause célèbre given national exposure when it was portrayed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on August 31, 1861.
Many Democratic journalists fell silent once the crackdowns began in earnest, surely fearful of reprisals. The most notable exception was George Wilkes, whose New York sporting paper, Spirit of the Times, remained critical of Lincoln without censure. Wilkes may have simply been too inconsequential to persecute: he was popular around town, but given his paper’s focus on horseracing, not particularly influential. His ability to escape the 1861 press dragnet suggests that it was never systematic or comprehensive—rather the result of sporadic outbursts of ill will. To William Howard Russell, it was a distinction without a difference. The English correspondent expressed shock that so many “leading statesmen” of America seemed to consider that “Liberty of the Press was a nuisance carried to its present extent, that universal suffrage demanded limitations & had outgrown the bounds set to it by the fathers of the country.”69 But even the world-famous Russell dared not express these sentiments in print; he merely shared them in a private letter to his London editor.
Had the country—loyal Republican journalists especially—risen up immediately to oppose or merely question unchecked newspaper suppression, the outbreak might have ended aborning, or become less widespread, indiscriminate, and acceptable. An outcry might have inspired legislative or executive remedies designed to establish boundaries on free expression that differentiated dissent from sedition and specified penalties for violation. Instead, in the shock and humiliation that followed Bull Run, the idea took hold in the North that any paper encouraging disunion or discouraging enlistment deserved to be silenced by whatever means might be at hand—even if the sentiment encouraged gangs of ex-soldiers, often fueled by liquor, to try atoning for their failures on the battlefield by striking out against hometown editors who supposedly dishonored their service. Raymond of the Times spoke for many unconcerned publishers when he argued: “The temporary surrender of these rights is a small price to pay for their permanent and perpetual enjoyment.”70 For a time, those rights nearly evaporated, while the leaders of the newspaper profession looked the other way or overtly defended the new constraints.
Their overall lack of indignation constituted either the most masochistic period in American press history, or a sign of genuine consensus that without some level of oversight—up to and including the constant threat of suppression—the country itself might not survive the war. Even censorship hawk Henry Raymond never signaled an eagerness to surrender constitutional protections, only a willingness “to waive those rights for a time, in order to save the Constitution and the Government.” Raymond insisted that there was “no danger to freedom or to personal liberty from this. When the exigency which compels their suppression has passed away, the people will demand their restoration.”71
It may also be argued that the Lincoln administration exercised less newspaper control than it might have imposed during so widespread a civil war. The government never attempted to impose formal limits on dissent, or to suggest precisely where criticism ended and treason began. In one sense, the administration’s overheated but disorganized response to newspaper dissent unleashed what might be called the “Salem Witch” hunt of the Civil War: a summer-long hysteria that spread wildly before healers knew quite how to control either the cause or effect of the panic. Even at its fever pitch, however, early Civil War–era press suppression was marked by a series of uncoordinated, case-by-case outbreaks, as evidenced by how many different federal agencies had their hands in the 1861 crackdowns: the Post Office (to secure the ban on mailing antiwar papers), the State Department (which held official responsibility for domestic security until February 1862), Treasury (called on occasionally to intervene), Interior (to enforce postal bans), and the War Department (along with the army), not to mention the courts. Everyone seemed partially in charge of the issue, yet no one seemed to be in full control. It comes as little surprise that Lincoln learned of Cameron’s “suspension of the Baltimore newspapers” indirectly from Seward—and only after they occurred.72 At first, save for new Post Office and telegraph strictures, no overarching policy or authority formally governed questions of freedom of the press, beyond the broad “war power” Lincoln had ascribed to himself in his July Message to Congress.
The outcome might have been far worse for antiwar journals. Had Lincoln and his counselors sat down around the cabinet table to explore a government-wide response to press dissent—and there is no evidence they ever did—they might perhaps have aimed for the total destruction of the antagonistic Democratic Party press, once and for all. Instead, it was “Wanted: A Policy” all over again—or perhaps evidence of a good deal more restraint than Lincoln is often given credit for.
Because of the absence of any organized pogrom against press freedom, the Democratic press eventually recovered from the censorship panic of 1861, in time to exert significant influence over the vigorously contested off-year elections of 1862, and then to report—and, some charged, provoke—the anti-draft riots of 1863. Many shuttered newspapers reappeared. Although military and postal authorities tried for a time to prevent the West Chester, Pennsylvania, Jeffersonian from reopening after it was sacked, a federal court in Philadelphia ruled by October that the paper had committed no outright treason and could resume publication. In January 1862 the court relaxed the postal ban that kept the paper from its subscribers, and the Jeffersonian resumed its caustic criticism of the Lincoln administration. The following year, it won a judgment of more than $500 for damage to its property during the attack, despite complaints by the local Republican paper that “had the government listened to the counsels of such presses as The Jeffersonian, Jeff Davis would now occupy the capitol at Washington and the rebel flag would float over the Keystone state.”73
Even in bitterly contested Missouri, pro-Confederate journals rebounded. Several of the papers shut down in August 1861 resumed publication not long thereafter. As many as six anti-administration journals continued to operate unchallenged during and after the first wave of suppression. Meanwhile Confederate forces operating in Missouri began systematically sacking pro-Union papers, hauling off the printing press of one such journal all the way to Arkansas. That October in Tennessee, antislavery editor William “Parson” Brownlow closed down his Knoxville Whig one step ahead of arrest by the Confederate army. If nothing else, newspapers were targeted by both sides in the conflict.74
Press censorship and suppression—though they would continue, off and on, throughout the war—never again approached the witch-hunt peak reached in the summer of 1861, when some two hundred newspapers and their editors were identified, menaced, arrested, imprisoned, humiliated, bankrupted, mobbed, or sacked. That the panic of 1861 did not e
scalate into the permanent elimination of a free press in the United States was something of a miracle. In fact, many newspapers flourished during the Civil War, vastly increasing their coverage, circulation, and influence, and in some cases earning huge profits in the bargain. Inquisitive reporters still turned up everywhere—both in Washington and at the front—asking inconvenient questions, attempting to file unauthorized dispatches, testing the scrutiny of official censors, and competing to secure unsanctioned scoops. There was no escaping them. Rather than kill the press during the Civil War, the conflict and the Lincoln administration in effect gave it new life—especially if its practitioners were pro-Union and pro-Republican.
• • •
Union loyalty helped secure, but did not always guarantee, entrée for journalists. To be sure, some officers gave preferential treatment (along with access to useful information) to friendly reporters who could be relied upon to produce flattering coverage. These publicity-hungry aspiring heroes operated almost in the antique tradition in which politicians granted exclusives to loyal “organs.” In return, such officers expected their favorite reporters to “puff” their reputations in print. John Wein Forney, for example, introduced John Russell Young to General Nathaniel Banks in late 1861 as “a young man of brilliant abilities.” Forney did not bother mentioning that Young had successfully covered the Battle of Bull Run. Instead he stressed what seemed far more important: that he was “thoroughly devoted to the cause, and knows how to keep a secret.”75
Other commanders, especially those subjected to frequent criticism, made life for journalists uncomfortable, if not unbearable. For most battle-tested officers, reporters more often attracted suspicion than appreciation. Commanders worried that journalists might inadvertently put them in peril by reporting where they were encamped—or heading. Once published in the North, such seemingly banal information could easily be spirited to Richmond by Confederate sympathizers and then deployed to plan attacks. Reporters learned the hard way that not every general was willing to trade information for flattery.
In the fall of 1861, a newly assigned Cincinnati Commercial war correspondent named Florus B. Plympton discovered this painful lesson for himself when he approached one of the most press-wary military leaders of the entire war, William T. Sherman, at a railroad station north of Louisville. Plympton blithely handed the moody Union general his letters of introduction, one of them signed by Sherman’s own brother-in-law, Thomas Ewing, Jr.
Plympton probably did not know that Sherman had been nursing antipathy toward the press for years. Back in 1856, a local journal had published, from rooms just a few floors above Sherman’s own San Francisco banking office, what the future general considered “falsehood and malice” designed to injure local financial institutions. Sherman stormed upstairs, confronted the editor, told him “I could not tolerate his attempt to print and circulate slanders in our building,” and warned him that “if he repeated it, I would cause him and his press to be thrown out of the windows.” Sherman proudly remembered that the editor “took the hint” and relocated.76
Now, five years later, Sherman gave but a cursory glance to Plympton’s documents, and then made a theatrical show of checking the time on his pocket watch. Looking up to glare at the reporter, the general snarled: “It is eleven o’clock; the next train for Louisville goes at half past one; take that train; be sure you take it; don’t let me see you around here after it is gone.”
Staggered, Plympton tried reasoning: “But, General, the people are anxious and it’s not my business to tell anything but the truth of what I see here.”
To which Sherman shot back: “We do not want the enemy any better informed about what is going on here than he is. Make no mistake about the train.”77
Unfortunately for Sherman, Plympton’s paper had the last word. An opportunity for revenge arose in October, when the New York Tribune reported that during a military summit, Sherman had pleaded for 200,000 new men in order to hold Kentucky for the Union, a request his superiors considered irrational. The high command responded by transferring Sherman to St. Louis, feeding rumors that his mania for reenforcements had expanded into a full-scale nervous breakdown. This gave the Cincinnati Commercial the chance to get even. On November 16, describing Sherman as “a perfect monomaniac on the subject of journalism,” the paper openly questioned his mental fitness to lead troops. Sherman sank into a depression, prompting the New York Times to report that his “disorders” might render him ineligible for command, “perhaps permanently.” On December 11, the Commercial threw the harshest light yet on the commander’s emotional struggles by publishing a follow-up story under the blaring headline, “General William T. Sherman Insane.” Sherman, the paper reported, had gone “stark mad.” He had wildly overestimated opposition forces and irresponsibly suggested evacuating all Union troops from Kentucky. “It seems providential,” came the conclusion, “that the country has not to mourn the loss of an army through the loss of the mind of a general into whose hands was committed the vast responsibility of the command in Kentucky.”78
Since it was now winter, and the armies on both sides were idle, Sherman took the opportunity to exile himself to his home “to allow the storm to blow over somewhat.” But as he bitterly recalled, the “newspapers kept up their game as though instigated by malice.” Other Northern papers picked up the “insanity” story and spread it nationwide. When Sherman protested the persecution to Murat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, Halstead “cavalierly” replied that the general’s mental condition was “one of the news-items of the day,” and merited all the coverage it had provoked. If Sherman had a correction to offer, Halstead volunteered to print it—“as though I could deny such a malicious piece of scandal affecting myself,” the general seethed.79 Eventually, the press tired of the story on its own, but its impact haunted Sherman for months. In his own frank estimation, he did not regain his reputation until he helped Ulysses S. Grant achieve Union victory at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.
At the time, however, Sherman’s anger and shame were not enough to convince his superior officers to punish the offending journal, whose editor, Halstead, it was no doubt pointed out, was reliably pro-Republican and pro-Lincoln: as far as censorship was concerned, an untouchable. “The newspaper reports are certainly shameless and scandalous,” General Henry W. Halleck consoled Sherman in December, “but I cannot agree with you, that they have us in their power ‘to destroy us as they please.’ I certainly get my share of abuse, but it will not disturb me.”80 It disturbed Sherman, however, and his hatred of reporters only intensified. As Halstead later put it, in quite an understatement, Sherman “was not one of those generals who cultivated the press.” And when he expressed his hostility, Halstead noted, he “had a way of stating things that stung and stuck.”81
• • •
In late autumn 1861, stung by recent battlefield defeats and feeling exhausted and beleaguered after five decades in military service, Winfield Scott retired to West Point. To succeed him as general-in-chief, Lincoln appointed a man less than half Scott’s age: George B. McClellan, a vainglorious popinjay who had been scheming to force out Old Fuss and Feathers for months. McClellan immodestly described his task as nothing less than “converting the unorganized, defeated, and dispirited remains of McDowell’s Bull Run command into the Army of the Potomac . . . ab infinito—out of nothing.”82
Ill-advisedly, McClellan directed one of his first offensives not against the Confederacy but against the New York Times, shockingly accusing Henry Raymond of treason. In a December 1861 letter to Secretary of War Cameron, the general charged that in recently publishing “a map of our works on the other side of the Potomac, & a statement of the composition of the Divisions in that same locality,” the Times was “clearly giving aid and comfort and information to the enemy.” McClellan called it “a case of treasonable action, as clear as any that can be found.” In his view, “the interests of our arms, require the suppression of this treasonable
sheet, & urgently recommend that the necessary steps to suppress the paper may be taken at once.”83
Cameron had no choice but to forward the outrageous complaint to Raymond for his comment, but made sure to add in a conciliatory cover note: “Feeling assured that no such motives as those indicated in his letter, dictated the publication I have taken this mode of advising you of the importance and necessity of avoiding a similar inadvertency in future.” An indignant Raymond fired off a reply to the secretary, sneering that there had been no “inadvertency” at all: the map in question had been copied from a lithograph sold openly at Willard’s Hotel, and the rest of the so-called secret information gleaned from reports published in other newspapers. “I repel in the strongest terms every intimation contained in Gen. McClellan’s letter,” Raymond protested, that the Times had published any of this material “with any treasonable intent, or with any design, purpose or thought of either aiding the enemy or embarrassing the army under his command.”84 Not surprisingly, the Times went unpunished. George McClellan had lost his first battle.
Not one to abandon his aspiration to control the press, McClellan had proposed an all-new system of voluntary press censorship. Grandly summoning the press corps to his headquarters on August 2, he convinced representatives of the Tribune, Herald, and nine other papers to agree to “refrain from publishing, either as editorial or correspondence . . . any matter that may furnish aid and comfort to the enemy”—that catch-basin phrase again. In return, McClellan offered “facilities for obtaining and immediately transmitting all information suitable for publication”—in other words, better access to telegraph wires during and after battles.85
Lawrence Gobright of the Associated Press, one of the correspondents who met with the general that day, willingly signed the document. “It agreed that all the correspondents of the press would carefully abstain from publishing all news concerning army movements,” he explained, while the army promised to “furnish every facility to the press to procure correct information.” Adams Hill of the Chicago Tribune initially believed the journalists had agreed “to cooperate with the censor of the press. . . . We were to publish nothing in relation to military movements, but might publish everything in relation to battles.” But when Union forces suffered another humiliating defeat on October 21 at Ball’s Bluff, Hill complained that his dispatches were “not allowed to go over the wires until two or three days afterward.”86 The press thereafter considered the contract with McClellan breached.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 48