Lincoln sometimes behaved otherwise as the war dragged on. He may have given up reading newspapers on a daily basis, but was almost certain to react strongly when well-meaning or malignant correspondents sent him offensive clippings through the mails. One such backlog of critical editorials came to the president’s attention, after Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, acting in his new capacity as an editor of the New York Independent, began sounding what Carpenter called “editorial . . . bugle blasts” against the administration. Criticism from that progressive weekly was nothing new. Just a few weeks before the dedicatory ceremonies at Gettysburg, the paper’s principal editor, Theodore Tilton, had sent Lincoln “an abusive editorial in the Independent & a letter stating he meant it in no unkindliness.”52
Although Lincoln resisted the temptation to follow the weekly paper’s latest denunciatory series as it appeared in print, a package eventually arrived at the White House overflowing with sample clippings. “One Sunday,” artist Carpenter observed, “Lincoln took them from his drawer, and read through them to the very last word.” When he finished, his face “flushed up with indignation,” and he hurled the pile of papers to the floor, quoting the Book of Kings to exclaim of Beecher: “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” Within seconds, however, Lincoln’s dark mood evaporated, “leaving no trace behind of ill-will toward Mr. Beecher.”53 The New York Tribune’s Albert Richardson confirmed Lincoln’s forgiving nature. “Ignorant of etiquette and conventionalities, without the graces of form or of manner,” as he described him after his 1863 visit, the President showed a “great reluctance to give pain” and evidenced “a beautiful regard for the feelings of others”—even newspapermen.54
The “wiry, sallow, silent-stepping” Lawrence Gobright of the Associated Press, whom William Stoddard dubbed “the censor of all war rumors,” was one journalist who enjoyed frequent access to the president, although not always productively.55 Gobright thought Lincoln “generally courteous,” but “sometimes distrustful of newspaper people.” Wary of leaks, “whenever he did impart any item of news, especially relating to events of the war,” Gobright recalled, Lincoln was “extremely cautious in his narration.” Yet the president was occasionally himself guilty of whispering important news too soon. Even in those cases, according to Gobright, Lincoln always seemed “astonished to find the keen-scented correspondents publishing important matters in advance of the time designated by himself.”56
Hard as he tried to be circumspect, the ever-friendly Lincoln often caught himself in the midst of revealing too much to reporters. With Albert Richardson and the New York Times’s James Winchell he was convivially chatting about military affairs one day when he suddenly stopped short and exclaimed: “I am talking again! Of course, you will remember that I speak to you only as friends; that none of this must be put in print!”57 Journalists seldom violated such admonitions, even if the unspoken rules of the profession required that interview subjects declare their comments to be off the record before, not after, confiding them.
In August 1863, Gobright implored the president to provide him with an advance copy of the remarks he was preparing for the upcoming mass meeting in Springfield. Lincoln had decided to mail the text home with the instruction that his old friend James C. Conkling read it aloud at the rally.58 Gobright immediately sensed its newsworthiness. But Lincoln refused to comply with his request, insisting: “I can’t do it, for I have found that documents given to the press in advance are always prematurely published.” (To another journalist on the same scent, Lincoln reiterated that he found “the practice of furnishing advance copies to newspapers to be a source of endless mischief.”) Somewhat offended, Gobright protested that his agency had never issued official documents “before their proper time.”59
“I can’t help that,” Lincoln waved him away. “I have always found what I say to be true.”
“Well, Mr. President,” came Gobright’s indignant reply, “it is your property, and you have a right to dispose of it as you choose. Good day.”
The following morning, Gobright discovered to his dismay that extracts from the message had been published in John Wein Forney’s Washington Chronicle, one of the journals, the Associated Press manager fumed, “to which the President was in the habit of first turning his attention,” and in this instance involving “the same letter which he was so fearful of being published prematurely!” Gobright stormed back to the White House and demanded that one of the staff secretaries explain the slight. It was meekly explained that some “enterprising editor” had somehow obtained a copy of the message and released it without authorization. While Gobright seethed over the slight, Forney endured a tongue-lashing from the president for leaking the message, and in turn attempted to cover his tracks by blaming Gobright, informing Lincoln that the Chronicle’s version of the text had come directly from the Associated Press. Typically, Forney offered to make up for the lapse by promising: “To-morrow we will republish it, accompanied by a strong editorial endorsement.” (Lincoln was probably not overly disappointed when the loquacious Forney decided to embark on a long, health-restoring visit to Europe the following summer, although he declined Forney’s request that he supply him with letters of introduction to European friends; he had none, the president explained.60)
Lawrence Gobright, wartime Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press.
The president’s mood did not improve when he discovered that the text on which he had labored for so many weeks had come out mangled in the initial reports that appeared in the newspapers. “I am mortified this morning to find the letter to you, botched up, in the Eastern papers, telegraphed from Chicago,” Lincoln angrily wired James Conkling. “How did this happen?” Conkling, who unconvincingly claimed that he received this disturbing telegram in the midst of the very event at which he was preparing to read the president’s remarks, replied sheepishly that he was “mortified” as well. He admitted that while he had indeed sent the text to the Western Press Association in Chicago before the event, he had left “strict injunctions not to permit it to be published before the meeting.” He hoped at least that “no prejudicial results have been experienced as the whole letter was published the next day.”61
Indeed, Lincoln soon reveled in the attention the letter generated through subsequent newspaper reprints punctuated by editorial praise in Republican papers nationwide.62 His most passionate defense of black recruitment, the message climaxed with Lincoln’s vivid warning to his former neighbors that when peace returned, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”63
“It hits, as his written efforts always do, the very heart of his subject,” Henry Raymond, no particular friend of black recruitment, applauded in the New York Times. “ . . . Those of us who favor the war are bound to consent to all available means for its effective prosecution, and to form their judgment by the military judgment solely.” Added Raymond of Lincoln: “The very best proof of his fitness for his recent weighty responsibilities is to be found in the fact that he has a soul possessed of this magnanimity, and a mind capable of these conceptions of patriotic duty.” In an unusual show of unity, Horace Greeley concurred, editorializing: “The most consummate rhetorician never used language more put to the purpose.”64 Lincoln was never more successful in controlling the newspapers than when he wrote newspaper copy himself.
• • •
Despite his inability to read the press as closely as he had before entering the White House, Lincoln still occasionally looked to newspapers for information he was unable to obtain through official channels. “You probably wonder what interest I can find in talking to a newspaper correspondent,” Lincoln told New York Times reporter George Forrester Williams. As the president explained: “I am always seeking
information, and you newspapermen are so often behind the scenes at the front, I am frequently able to get ideas from you which no one else can give me.”65 Such proved precisely the case when young New York Tribune correspondent Henry E. Wing somehow made his way past enemy lines in Virginia and walked seventy-five miles to Washington to update Lincoln on Ulysses S. Grant’s progress at the Wilderness—where communication lines had been severed. When the two were alone, Wing reported to the president: “General Grant told me to tell you, from him, that whatever happens, there is to be no turning back.” Lincoln was so overcome with gratitude at this report that he embraced Wing with his “great strong arms” and planted a kiss on the reporter’s brow.66
Lincoln proved only slightly less grateful for good political news, especially from distant areas. Around the time he issued his “Conkling letter,” Lincoln anxiously wired the Republican Cincinnati Gazette: “Please send me your present posting as to Kentucky election.” Editor Richard Smith replied with the reassuring report: “The union state ticket is elected by a very large majority.” Even the anti-administration Louisville Journal had so conceded, Smith added, though the opposition paper claimed “of course that the democrats were intimidated.”67
Knowing that well-connected journalists like Smith occasionally received news before he did, especially late at night, Lincoln often proved willing to receive Washington “scribblers” at all hours. On one such occasion, a pair of correspondents got word that the Union had captured Charleston. Although it was past 11 P.M., they rushed to the White House in search of confirmation, but on arriving learned from the doorkeeper that Lincoln had gone to bed. The visitors insisted that he be interrupted, assuring the guard that the president would want to hear the report they had for him. The doorkeeper reluctantly headed upstairs to check, then returned to tell the reporters they could indeed proceed to the private quarters—provided they understood “they would see the President in a style of costume in which no other visitors had ever seen him.”
Entering his bedroom, they found the uninhibited commander-in-chief “with no clothing on excepting his shirt. He invited his guests to be seated, and he himself took a chair. He inquired as to the date of their news; and on being informed, said he had three days later intelligence,” and that their news was incorrect. The visitors fumbled their apologies, and as they withdrew, solemnly asked Lincoln to excuse them for “disturbing his slumber.” The president insisted “it made no difference and good-humoredly bade them good night, with a profound bow.” At this gesture, the mortified journalists fled, remembering Lincoln’s appearance “as not only novel but ludicrous.”68
Gobright glimpsed a quite different side of Lincoln when he knocked at the president’s office door one evening during the 1863 Vicksburg siege. “I have nothing new,” Lincoln at first muttered impatiently. Then he looked up at his visitor and confessed: “I can’t sleep to-night without hearing something; come, go with me to the War Department, perhaps Stanton has something.” Together, the two walked over to the nearby telegraph office, where Gobright looked on with fascination as the operator handed Lincoln the latest dispatch from the front. The president looked “nervous;” his hands and legs “shook violently” as he grasped the wire, his face turning “ghastly” pale. Lincoln strained to make out the report in the “imperfect” gaslight, and then moaned, “Bad news, bad news,” quickly adding: “Don’t say anything about this—don’t mention it.” As it turned out, the disheartening report proved inaccurate; no disaster had befallen Union troops at Vicksburg after all. As relieved as he was to receive the correction, Lincoln now grew agitated that his earlier distress might inspire a disobliging story of its own. Turning to Gobright, he urgently reiterated, “don’t say anything about this.”69
Lincoln intentionally said a great deal to Albert G. Hodges, editor of Kentucky’s influential Frankfort Commonwealth. On April 26, 1864, Hodges visited the White House to express disapproval over the growing deployment of black troops in his home state, where slavery remained legal and racial prejudice strong. According to Orville Browning, who also attended the meeting, Lincoln began the session in much the same way he had launched his meeting two years earlier with the African-American freedmen: by asking if he could “make a little speech.” This time, however, his guests were “much pleased” with what they heard. Hodges asked for a copy of the remarks so he could publish them. The president casually replied that he had not found the time to write them down, but advised Hodges “to go home and he would write him a letter in which he would give, as nearly as he could all that he had said to them orally.”70 A few days later, Lincoln composed and dispatched to Hodges what Senator Browning at once recognized as a “well written and excellent paper.”
“I am naturally anti-slavery,” it memorably began. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” And yet, Lincoln went on, he fully understood that the presidency never gave him the constitutional authority to “act upon this judgment and feeling.” That is, until civil war forced him to choose whether “to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution.”
In Lincoln’s homespun view: “By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” Under this theory, he argued, emancipation became “an indispensable necessity”—as did “arming the blacks”—to save the life of the nation. Finally, Lincoln introduced one of his most famous justifications for his revolutionary policies: a higher power had animated his decisions. “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” he insisted. And if God now willed that the country remove the “great wrong” of slavery, “impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”71
That Lincoln had grown determined that these words quickly reach Kentucky’s newspaper readers became apparent when, eighteen days later, with no response yet in hand, he impatiently telegraphed Hodges to inquire: “Did you receive my letter?”72 Lincoln need not have worried. The text soon appeared in Hodges’s daily, and quickly thereafter in papers nationwide. Horace Greeley lauded the president’s “rare quality, the ability to make a statement which appeals at once, and irresistibly, to the popular apprehension.” Much pleased, Lincoln endorsed the Tribune editorial in a bold hand, “Greeley on the Hodges Letter,” and kept it in his files.73 While James Gordon Bennett reprinted it without comment, Henry Raymond cheered: “The letter of President Lincoln to the editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth is a new and admirable specimen of his ingenious character, and of his remarkable aptness in stating the truth.”74
The newspapers’ version of “the truth” often evoked frustration and fatalism from Lincoln, but sometimes laughter as well. John Hay recalled the president entering his office one Sunday, picking up a stray paper, and reading “the Richmond Examiner’s recent attack on Jeff. Davis. It amused him. ‘Why,’ said he ‘the Examiner seems ab[ou]t. as fond of Jeff as the [New York] World is of me.’ ”75 Lincoln often used humor to vent his frustrations with opposition papers. When he overheard Frank Carpenter telling Mary Jane Welles, wife of the secretary of the navy, that newspapers were not always reliable, the pun-loving president interjected: “That is to say, Mrs. Welles, they ‘lie,’ and then they ‘re-lie’!” On another occasion, a delegation tried to interest Lincoln in a newfangled repeating gun that functioned without the escape of gas. After a successful demonstration, Lincoln remarked, “Well, I believe this really does what it is represented to do. Now have any of you heard of any machine, or invention, for preventing the escape of ‘gas’ from newspaper establishments?”76 One especially “violent” newspaper attack merely reminded the president of a story about an immigrant “fresh from the ‘Emerald Isle.’ ” Filled with terror at the loud but harmless sound of “a grand chorus of bull-frogs,” the Irishman was consoled by his friend: “And sure, Jamie! it is my opinion it’s nothing but a �
�noise’!”77 So, he implied, was newspaper criticism.
Lincoln never held a formal news conference, and save for the 1862 White House visit by Nathaniel Hawthorne, granted journalists no major interviews. Instead, he left instructions that when reporters called at the White House, their cards or messages be brought into his office even if he was in session with the cabinet. He occasionally interrupted meetings to invite correspondents inside for quick private chats, as eager to receive news as to share it. Or he sent word that the press visitors should wait until he could receive them. When he was simply unable to admit reporters, he often scrawled replies on the backs of their notes or visiting cards. William Stoddard believed that Lincoln felt it his duty to consider reporters’ questions “with extreme courtesy,” and to set them right “as a duty” when they made errors in print. But he seldom warned correspondents in advance of any “news-error” they might be “falling into.”78 Much had changed. For years, Lincoln had devoted his time to visiting journalists at newspaper offices throughout Illinois, eager for their attention and friendship. Now newspapermen were coming in droves to his office, seeking attention from him.
Among Lincoln’s 1864 White House press visitors was Theodore Tilton of the Independent, who brought with him a legendary guest: no less than the father of abolitionist journalism, William Lloyd Garrison. It was a significant milestone. No previous president had ever received the fifty-eight-year-old founder of The Liberator, and Tilton later reported: “His reception of Mr. Garrison was an equal honor to host and guest.” When the antislavery hero reported that, en route through Baltimore, he had been unable to locate a Baltimore jail where he was once confined, Lincoln smiled: “Well, Mr. Garrison, when you first went to Baltimore you couldn’t get out; but the second time you couldn’t get in!”79
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 63