Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion
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Everett had tried for a different result. He had arranged early distribution for his speech because he still believed, as he had once put it, that the “newspaper press of the United States is, for good or evil, the most powerful influence that acts upon the public mind.”156 In two hours or two minutes, Lincoln could not have expressed it better himself.
• • •
The year 1863 came to a close with the usual press clamor for advance texts of another address, Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress, still considered the most important presidential “speech” of any season. “We are very anxious to have an early Copy,” John Wein Forney began his own annual message to John Nicolay, “ . . . but I would not, for the world, embarrass the President, or lay him open to the charge of partiality. Do the best you can, and this will oblige.157
Lincoln stubbornly kept the text secret until its delivery date, but, in a move that stunned journalists and legislators alike, accompanied the official message with a proposed Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, offering rebellious states a path to armistice if they embraced black freedom. Then he added the vow: “While I remain in my present position, I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation.” The president concluded by dedicating his message to the armed forces, including black soldiers—“the gallant men, from commander to sentinel . . . to whom, more than to others, the world must stand indebted for the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged, and perpetuated.”158
Partisan press analysis followed, as always. Greeley’s Tribune saluted Lincoln’s “wise humanity and generous impulses.”159 John Nicolay, who witnessed the reading on Capitol Hill, reported that Congress responded to the message “as if the millennium, had come.” But the Richmond Examiner predictably labeled its author “a Yankee monster of inhumanity and falsehood.”160
“The rebel borders are pressed still further back,” Lincoln reported of the war effort that day. “ . . . The crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.”161 But the crisis atmosphere that perennially divided the Northern press remained unresolved, still simmering, and destined to reignite during the election year of 1864.
Two weeks before the end of the year 1863, the New York World’s increasingly anti-emancipation, anti-Lincoln editor, Manton Marble, told Horace Greeley he could “expect nothing from the Tribune’s fairness, justice or generosity towards me or the paper of which I am the editor.” Greeley would not have disagreed; as the country lurched toward a presidential election year, the New York papers geared up for the editorial battle of the century. Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune spoke for many Republican papers when he bravely predicted in December: “Mr. Lincoln is in no sort of danger from rivals. . . . Let him push forward the war on an anti-slavery basis and the people will give him more time to finish up his job.”162
Not if Marble and the Democratic press had anything to do with it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No Time to Read Any Papers
The Civil War generated an endless supply of news, but not all of the nation’s newspapers thrived—or even survived. This proved particularly so in the South. There, a once robust two-party political culture vanished. With President Jefferson Davis set to serve his six-year term unchallenged until 1867, and with no intervening national election campaigns to arouse the reading public, regional newspapers built on political values understandably lost not only readers, but their very reason for existing. Of course, the dramatically shifting Confederate political landscape was not the only reason for their decline. Economic hardship played perhaps the biggest role of all.
Ultimately, the South’s once thriving newspaper industry became a casualty of the Civil War, but its decline occurred not for lack of eager readers, but rather due to a dearth of manpower and resources. One problem was near-universal white conscription, which deprived many Confederate papers of their editors, writers, and compositors—for “printing,” a veteran of the Richmond Inquirer explained unselfconsciously in 1864, “is one of the few mechanical arts practiced [only] by free white men in the South, it requiring a greater degree of education than is permitted to slaves.” Another problem was paper itself—that is, the lack of it, or when obtainable, its sometimes comical inconsistency. Even the perennially optimistic Confederate States Almanac admitted midway through the war that a Southern newspaper might be “short enough for a pocket handkerchief one day, and big enough for a paper tablecloth another.”1
The South boasted only a fraction of the nation’s paper mills before the war began, and fewer still once Union forces began occupying significant portions of its territory. Eventually, the paper supply dwindled to a trickle. The ever-scarcer stock grew expensive and inferior—made from rags or straw and stubbornly resistant to ink. As one Savannah editor lamented, “we are reduced to printing on paper, which, half the time, nobody can read.” Most journals had no choice but to curtail their frequency and proportions, sometimes publishing on slips “little larger than lawyer’s foolscap.” In the wake of such shortages, many papers closed down altogether. A Baton Rouge editor, forced to suspend publication in 1862, used his final issue to promote himself for a new career: “The editor of this paper being now out of employment, owing to a temporary suspension of the same is anxious and willing to do something for a livelihood . . . [and] has no objection to serving as a deck-hand on a flat-boat, selling ice-cream, or acting as paymaster to the militia.”2
That newspapers might have retained significant influence was widely understood at the time. Recognizing their morale-boosting power, federal forces often made sure to oust pro-Confederate editors from whatever towns they seized, and to encourage the establishment of pro-Union papers in their place.3 By 1862, Henry Raymond noted with pride the appearance of Unionist dailies in the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. “These presses undoubtedly are doing, and will continue to do, a great deal of good,” he declared. “It was by the falsehoods of the rebel Press that the rebellion was stimulated . . . and it must be largely through the efforts of a loyal Press that the power and love of the Union will be restored.”4
Although supply shortages and military setbacks caused many established Southern newspapers to still their presses, a few stubbornly held on. Papers published in the Confederate capital managed to survive, although some Richmond dailies were eventually reduced to publishing on single sheets. Ironically, because they operated so near to Washington, copies often found their way into the White House. “Here are some newspapers from Richmond, just received,” William Seward wrote Lincoln in a note accompanying one such bundle in late 1862. “I have marked an article in the Enquirer about ‘Straggling.’ ”5
In May 1863, Lincoln acknowledged the reliability—or at least the availability—of the Confederate capital’s journals by asking General Hooker: “Have you Richmond papers of this morning? If so, what news?”6 Around the same time, reports from embattled Vicksburg arrived at the White House courtesy of the Richmond Dispatch.7 But Lincoln knew better than to trust everything he read in the Confederate press. It was believed that many of them intentionally distorted news both to keep morale high in the South and in the expectation that Yankee papers would reprint the falsehoods and demoralize Northern readers. As Grant closed in on “the Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” General Sherman complained that “the conductors of the Press of the Northern States as now conducted, are as much the Enemies of our Common Country as the Armed Rebels whose sentinels now walk in bold and manly defiance on the opposing heights of Vicksburg.” As usual when it came to press matters, Sherman missed the point. Lincoln was far more concerned when the Richmond Sentinel exaggerated the strength of Confederate resistance there, and reported that Sherman had been seriously wounded. When General Daniel Butterfield shared with Lincoln the latest reports holding that Union forces were “demoralized,” Lincoln astutely replied: “The news you send me from
the Richmond Sentinel of the 3d must be greatly if not wholly incorrect.”8 The president knew that newspaper accounts must not only be studied, but occasionally refuted.
A few Deep South papers stubbornly held on. In South Carolina, it took what it called a “horrible and brutal” hundred-day Union siege to force the Charleston Courier to suspend publication. Somehow the paper soon reopened with a smaller format. Even when the city prepared to surrender, the Courier mustered the professional discipline to declare: “As journalists . . . we are called upon to restrain our feelings.”9
Remarkably, several new periodicals actually opened for business in the Confederacy during the war—and remained in operation at least for a time. A new Confederate Press Association also came into existence, even as Union forces progressively destroyed the telegraph lines vital for their transmissions. The association offered news at particularly generous discount prices to sympathetic Border State papers that relocated to the Confederacy after fleeing from their home cities in the wake of Union crackdowns. In 1863 the association even elected refugee Memphis editor Benjamin Dill to its board of directors.10
Back in Richmond, publishers E. W. Ayres and W. H. Wade debuted the Southern Illustrated News in 1862, optimistically calling it “Not a luxury, but a necessity.” The paper managed to celebrate a succession of Confederate military heroes, making no secret of its own crushing obstacles by regularly advertising for artists and supplies. When both these resources evaporated, the News began to appear irregularly, its final edition reaching readers in early 1864. A newspaper that in peacetime might have competed for prestige with New York pictorial newspapers like Harper’s and Leslie’s, instead perished for want of the essentials any newspaper needed to sustain itself: paper, ink, and staff.11
Desperate but resourceful, some Southern newspaper publishers took to issuing one-sided editions printed on any material their proprietors could secure—including wallpaper. Even amid such humiliating deprivation, one crippled paper that had once advocated strongly for secession and rebellion now refused to offer an “apology for the . . . color and quality of the paper.” Its rainbow variety, it proudly maintained, merely reflected “the hardships of war.”12
None of these “wallpaper editions” earned more enduring fame than those published in Vicksburg during the 1863 siege. For two months beginning in May, the federal fleet, operating under the overall command of Ulysses S. Grant, shelled the “Hill City” day and night. The bombardment drove starving citizens underground, where they took up residence in caves. Cave dwellers hardly constituted the most reliable newspaper customers—they had other necessities foremost on their minds—but one local journal somehow continued to survive: the Vicksburg Daily Citizen. Publisher J. M. Swords consumed his ordinary paper stock by early June, but on five occasions during the final days of the siege managed to publish single-sheet editions on the backs of wallpaper fragments. Some of the wallpaper boasted rose-and-purple brocade designs, others pink-and-red floral patterns. Swords used what he could get.
On July 1, the publisher began preparing what turned out to be his final issue. The isolated Swords was by then so out of touch that he featured long-outdated news of General Lee’s “brilliant and successful” triumph against Hooker at Chancellorsville two months earlier. Three days later—on Independence Day—with the ranks of the city’s defenders eroding due to disease and starvation, the Confederates surrendered Vicksburg to General Grant. In that final edition, Swords had mocked “the great Ulysses—the Yankee Generalissimo” for expressing “his intention of dining in Vicksburg . . . and celebrating the 4th of July with a grand dinner and so forth.” Taunted the Daily Citizen: “Ulysses must get into the city before he dines in it. The way to cook a rabbit is ‘first catch the rabbit.’ ”
Then catch “the rabbit” Grant did—making sure to feast on the Vicksburg Daily Citizen. Once, Grant had closed down opposition newspapers within command. This time, he made sure a hostile paper stayed open. Swords fled town ahead of the surrender, while the metal type was still in its racks for the latest and, as it turned out, last edition. Union conquerors not only seized the office, but with some former civilian printers apparently in their ranks, rewrote and reset one of its front-page stories before putting it on press. Rare surviving July 2 wallpaper editions of the Vicksburg Daily Citizen conclude with the following acerbic update—the Union conquerors’ last laugh on a once thriving local newspaper and its readers:
Two days bring about great changes. The banner of the Union floats over Vicksburg. Gen. Grant has “caught the rabbit”; he has dined in Vicksburg, and he did bring his dinner with him. The “Citizen” lives to see it. For the last time it appears on “Wall-paper.” No more will it eulogize the luxury of mule-meat and fricasseed kitten—urge Southerner warriors to such diet nevermore. This is the last wall-paper edition, and is, excepting this note, from the types as we found them. It will be valuable hereafter as a curiosity.13
Soldiers in the field, on both sides, thirsted for news throughout the conflict, and this was especially so for those who signed up for the longest enlistments, and stayed away from home for the lengthiest stretches. Many craved reports on home-front political wars even as they faced a deadly war of their own. Even prisoners could not do without news, and some took to creating “papers” of their own, even if they had to produce them laboriously by hand. In 1865, a group of Confederate officers confined to the Union prison at Fort Delaware produced four copies of a meticulously hand-lettered journal they entitled Prison Times. It featured advertisements for fellow captives who specialized in tailoring, shaves, and shoe repair “at reasonable rates,” along with notices about the prison musical association and debating society.14
Even—especially—when far from their families, most literate soldiers continued to yearn for occasional glimpses of their hometown papers. Demand never abated. Union Colonel Alfred McCalmont, a former newspaperman who commanded various Pennsylvania regiments during the war, remembered that when his men were stationed at camps along the Rappahannock River in Virginia, they would gather every afternoon to meet the train bearing “the morning papers of that day.” In September 1863, McCalmont wrote to his brother to thank him for sending an additional “puff” via mail. But the general thought the praiseworthy article “in bad taste, very much overdone and calculated to do a man more harm than good,” adding: “I do not care much for such things. . . . I am, almost indifferent to newspaper blame or approbation, because I helped to edit one a number of years, and know how little there is of true value in anything they say.”15 Most officers, however, yearned for such hometown praise.
Eastern-bred officers like McCalmont had an especially hard time keeping up with the press when they were stationed in the distant West. Embedded correspondents there were a common sight on campaign, but actual newspapers became rarities. “I received the two papers and was very glad to get them,” soldier Charles Edwin Cort wrote home from Kentucky in 1862. “We do not get much news. I would like to get the Republican once and a while and some of the Chicago papers. The Cincinnati papers are poor concerns, we can get them once a day for 5 cts. the same day they are dated.”16 For sailors, because they served on ships that often operated far from land, news became even scarcer, and if it somehow made its way aboard, staler. Yet when the paymaster on the USS Monitor received an outdated Chicago Tribune from his wife as a Christmas present in 1862, William Frederick Keeler exulted, “it was like meeting an old acquaintance.” Less than two weeks later, as the Tribune and other papers reported, the iconic Union ironclad went to the bottom off Cape Hatteras.17 Making news of their own, the paymaster and a few others miraculously managed to escape.
With an appreciation for news no less ardent than Keeler’s, a Union surgeon serving in Virginia who believed newspaper correspondents “a nuisance as a general thing” because “two thirds of their stories are untrue,” nevertheless looked forward to evenings, when he could “pull off my coat, creep under my blanket, read the New York
Herald . . . and then to sleep.”18 Expressing similar enthusiasm, Wisconsin private Guy Taylor wrote his wife from the Eastern Front in 1864: “There is now a noose boy that comes with papers everyday for 5 cents we can get a paper so the boys get more reading now than they did.” A surgeon from the 85th New York was equally grateful for the arrival of his newspaper so he could use it as an “improvised” tablecloth for a dinner beside a “cheerily-burning campfire.”19 Even those who could barely read and write somehow knew that the press served a purpose—like soldier Hillory Shifflet, who haltingly wrote to his wife from Chattanooga asking for “a par of yourn gloves,” adding, “the best way to send it is to do it up in a nusepaper.”20
Much as they thirsted for information, soldiers knew that their hometown papers, however rare their appearance in camp, sometimes brought with them an obnoxious point of view. Even on campaign, soldiers remembered which editors they most loathed—and most blamed for their own situations. Writing from Tennessee, one Indiana soldier told his wife that the only way for the Union to win the war was to drive the Rebels “into the Gulf of Mexico and the Negroes into hell.” Then he added, “and if that won’t do it we will have to hang old Greeley and a few more of the Abolitionists.”21 An equally pro-Democratic soldier, David Meyers, complained to his brother: “I suppose you have seen how they tried to stop the Chicago Times from coming into military Distribution. The reason of that was simply because it tells the truth.”22 In an eerie reflection of civilian newspaper strife, Ohio captain Benjamin F. Sells found himself arrested in 1863 for distributing copies of the Copperhead Columbus Crisis to his troops.23