Ben Perley Poore recalled that Lincoln was “always ready” to be helpful to “those correspondents in whom he had confidence.”80 One morning, as Lincoln was adjourning a cabinet meeting devoted to discussing a recent military victory, the president cheerfully called out to the waiting reporters, “Walk in, walk in; be seated, take seats.” As they filed into his office, one of the correspondents attempted to pose a question. “I know what you have come for,” Lincoln good-naturedly interrupted him, “you want to hear more about the good news. I know you do. You gentlemen are keen of scent, and always wide awake.”
“You have hit the matter precisely, Mr. President: that’s exactly what we want—the news.”
Leaning back in his armchair and stretching his long legs onto the top of his cabinet table, Lincoln declared to his visitors: “I’ve already told this story half a dozen times, but I’ll tell it again, as you haven’t heard it.” Then, as the scribes recorded his words, Lincoln related the latest news from the front. He seemed “more than ordinarily cheerful” that day, one of the journalists recalled. “He was happy” when he was able to communicate positive stories.81
One journalist who seemed to make Lincoln happier than most was Noah Brooks, a thirty-two year-old Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union. Brooks became a presidential favorite following his arrival in the capital in late 1862. Writing under the nom de plume “Castine”—the name of his Maine birthplace—Brooks’s sympathetic reports quickly caught the president’s attention. The following year, the correspondent was rewarded with a coveted extra job as a clerk in the House of Representatives. By late 1864, Brooks had become such a regular presence at the White House that—at least according to his own reckoning—Lincoln began entertaining the idea of naming him his new private secretary should he win a second term.82 Both Nicolay and Hay, exhausted from years of grinding toil and sick of constant squabbles with Mary Lincoln, were eager for other assignments, while Stoddard, in ill health, headed west that September to become a federal marshal in Arkansas.
Brooks, who eventually filed more than two hundred “Castine” dispatches for the Sacramento Union, was shocked when he caught his initial glimpse of the president in church—the first time he had cast eyes on him since encountering him at Springfield years earlier. “The change in his personal appearance was marked and sorrowful,” Brooks noted. “ . . . His eyes were almost deathly in their gloomy depths, and on his visage was an air of profound sadness. His face was colorless and drawn.” To Brooks’s surprise, Lincoln almost immediately summoned him to the White House. “Do you suppose I ever forget an old acquaintance?” the president happily exclaimed when they shook hands. “I reckon not.”83
Brooks claimed he went on to see Lincoln privately once or twice a week for the next two and a half years—perhaps an exaggeration, though many of his “Castine” reports do show that he was often in the right place at the right time to observe the president. Of course he unfailingly supported administration policy. He endorsed black recruitment and applauded conscription, going so far as to remind readers that the much hated $300 buyout clause would at least fatten the federal Treasury. In April 1863, Brooks got to accompany Lincoln, his “able and noble” wife, and their son Tad on a morale-boosting visit to General Hooker’s military headquarters in Virginia. In October, he was among the first to float the notion that Lincoln hoped for—and deserved—a second term. And in November, Brooks published a surprisingly intimate view of life inside the White House. It offered a novel peek at how the president conducted business in his private office, as well as glimpses into what Brooks claimed was an entirely happy private life in the family quarters. In perhaps the first public hint that he coveted Nicolay’s job, Brooks dismissed the incumbent secretaries as “snobby and unpopular,” and lavished further praise on his chief advocate, Mary Lincoln, calling her “the best and truest lady in our beloved land.”84
Naturally, Brooks had plenty to say about how the president dealt with rival newspapers—on both the wholesale and retail levels. Not only did he comment on Lincoln’s ongoing attempts to influence Washington’s more unsympathetic correspondents, he reported a particularly amusing 1863 incident in which the president asked his Irish coachman to “go out and get the morning newspaper.” When the servant failed to return, “the anxious President went out himself and invested five cents in a Morning Chronicle.” It was later revealed that the coachman thought it beneath his dignity to run errands. Lincoln’s response came the following morning. Though he said nothing, he repaid his driver’s “hauteur” by ordering up the presidential carriage at 6 A.M. and assigning another servant to ride down Pennsylvania Avenue in the passenger seat to buy a newspaper while the “mortified coachman” sat in the driver’s box.85
Noah Brooks, Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union under the nom de plume “Castine,” and aspirant to become the president’s next private secretary.
Lincoln also shared deeply personal thoughts with Brooks—or so the correspondent later maintained. It was to the journalist that the increasingly religious president allegedly confided: “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” Later Lincoln added: “I should be the veriest shallow and self-conceited blockhead upon the footstool if, in my discharge of the duties which are put upon me in this place, I should hope to get along without the wisdom which comes from God and not from men.”86 These revelations Brooks saved for his post-assassination articles and memoirs, undoubtedly embellishing them with florid language the plainspoken Lincoln likely never used.
Far easier to believe was Brooks’s recollection that Lincoln had an almost childlike habit of regaling visitors with any “sharp saying” he had uttered during the day, taking “simple-hearted pleasure in considering some of his best ‘hits.’ ” Once, in December 1864, Lincoln began proudly telling Brooks what he had just said to two insistent visitors seeking pardons for their husbands, Confederate prisoners of war confined at Johnson’s Island, Ohio. At each of their interviews, Lincoln remembered, the ladies testified that their husbands were religious men. Lincoln ultimately gave in and ordered their release, but not without offering the wives a lecture. It was at this point in the story that the president interrupted himself and decided to commit the incident to writing in the third person, scribbling on a piece of stiff boxwood he balanced on his knees as Brooks looked on. Signing it and handing the finished manuscript to his guest, he declared: “Here is one speech of mine which has never been printed, and I think it worth printing.”
THE PRESIDENT’S LAST, SHORTEST, AND BEST SPEECH.
On thursday of last week two ladies from Tennessee came before the President asking the release of their husbands held as prisoners of war at Johnson’s Island. They were put off till friday, when they came again; and were again put off to saturday. At each of the interviews one of the ladies urged that her husband was a religious man. On Saturday the President ordered the release of the prisoners, and then said to this lady “You say your husband is a religious man; tell him when you meet him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that, in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven!”87
Brooks did not seem to realize that the germ behind this epistle was in fact seven years old, originated by Lincoln during his final debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Since it was the closest thing to a press release Lincoln had ever issued, Brooks made sure it was published in the Washington Chronicle the following morning.88 A few months later, Lincoln would repurpose the sentiments yet again for his second inaugural address.
On still another visit to the president’s private office, Brooks found himself staring in wonder at Lincoln’s cluttered desk, whose pigeonholes bulged with alphabetized files labeled with imp
ortant names, including those of several generals and, not unexpectedly, Horace Greeley. Brooks noticed one curiously identified compartment. “I see you looking at my ‘W. & W.,’ ” Lincoln finally said. “Can you guess what that stands for?” When Brooks failed to come up with an answer, Lincoln explained “with a merry twinkle of the eye, ‘that’s Weed and Wood—Thurlow and Fernandy.’ Then he added with an indescribable chuckle, ‘That’s a pair of ’em!’ ”89
As that comment reminded Brooks, Lincoln always had the most difficulty with—and the most time for—the New York editors, particularly Manhattan’s big three. Welcoming a visiting reporter from the New York Herald once, the president declared: “You gentlemen of the press seem to be pretty much like the soldiers, who have to go wherever sent, whatever may be the dangers or difficulties in the way. God forbid I should by any rudeness of speech or manner, make your duties any harder than they are. . . . If I am not afraid of you, it is because I feel you are trustworthy.”90 As Lincoln boasted that day, doubtless hoping that his reassuring words would reach James Gordon Bennett himself: “The press has no better friend than I am—no one who is more ready to acknowledge . . . its tremendous power for both good and evil.”91
The fragile administration truce with the pro-war, but anti-emancipation, Herald was frequently put to the test. In the fall of 1863, Bennett profoundly embarrassed the White House by puffing the story that Lincoln had sent his garrulous Jewish chiropodist, Isachar Zacharie, on a mission to Richmond to explore an armistice. Though in truth it was no more than an expedition to measure Union loyalty among the Confederate capital’s Jews, the anti-Semitic Bennett made Lincoln’s trust in Zacharie seem odious. The doctor, who loved publicity and knew Bennett well enough to remember the last time he encountered him, was at least partially responsible for the leak, though he expressed shock at seeing the story in print. “I was amazed on reading the Herald News-paper to find the article,” he disingenuously assured his most famous medical patient. “I pledge to you that I have not lisped a word respecting this matter. . . . I have not seen Mr. Bennett or any one connected with the Herald for the last six months.”92
That same year, the celebrated Shakespearean actor James Hackett made public a letter from Lincoln in which the Shakespeare-loving president uninhibitedly identified his favorites among the Bard’s plays and soliloquies. Perhaps aware that Hackett was a longtime friend of his rival Henry Raymond, Bennett pounced on the letter, editorializing: “Mr. Lincoln’s genius is wonderfully versatile. No department of human knowledge seems to be unexplored by him. He is equally at home whether discussing divinity with political preachers, debating plans of campaigns with military heroes, [and] illustrating the Pope’s bull against the comet to a pleasure party from Chicago. . . . It only remained for him to cap the climax of popular astonishment and admiration by showing himself to be a dramatic critic of the first order, and the greatest and most profound of the army of Shakespearean commentators.” When Hackett wrote Lincoln to apologize for inadvertently giving the Herald an opportunity to taunt him, Lincoln assured him he need not worry. Shrugging off his long years of experience as a target of newspaper mockery, Lincoln sighed: “I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”93
Among the major New York editors, Henry Raymond remained the most steadfast supporter of the administration. Greeley’s Tribune may have been “the most widely read Republican journal of the country,” newspaperman A. K. McClure acknowledged, but Raymond was the only “leading journalist of New York” on whom Lincoln could consistently “rely for positive support.”94 In turn, the Times owner felt free to besiege Lincoln with repeated recommendations that he find jobs for his friends and his friends’ friends.95 Their relationship was also social. At William Seward’s urging, Lincoln welcomed Raymond to the White House at Christmas 1863.96 And the following May, when Secretary of War Stanton refused to approve a pass for Times correspondent Edward A. Paul to cover the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln intervened by reminding Stanton: “The Times I believe is always true to the Union, and therefore should be treated at least as well as any.”97
In this one unusual case, however, the prickly Stanton got his back up and refused to follow orders. “The Times is treated by this Department precisely as other papers are treated,” he bristled. “No pass is granted . . . to any paper except upon the permission of General Grant or General Meade. Repeated applications by Mr Forney and by other editors have been refused on the same ground as the Times until the correspondent is approved by the Commanding General. This is the regulation of all the armies and the Secretary of War declines to do for the Times what is not done for other papers.” Paul in turn protested that Stanton had entirely missed the point: Meade had already granted him a pass, yet Stanton not only declined to endorse it, but upbraided Paul “in stronger language than is necessary to repeat” for going over his head to the president. Raymond then took the case to John Nicolay, insisting that the Times was experiencing continuous difficulty “getting any correspondents into the field . . . while special pains seem to have been taken to give the World, Herald, &c. all possible facilities. Mr. Stanton’s treatment of me in this matter is perfectly inexplicable. . . . I am not aware of having ever given him cause for the resentment & hostility he seems to feel toward the Times.” Precisely how Lincoln won the skirmish over E. A. Paul’s credentials remains unknown, but within a few months the correspondent was successfully filing reports to the Times from the front in the Shenandoah Valley. Notwithstanding Stanton’s politically tone-deaf hostility, Raymond cemented his position as Lincoln’s most loyal New York press advocate—and before long, his latest biographer.98
The curious case of war correspondent E. A. Paul: Lincoln instructs Secretary of War Stanton to treat the New York Times cordially, but Stanton refuses to grant the Times reporter a pass to cover the army. The test of wills played out entirely on the back of Paul’s original letter to the president.
Nonetheless, Lincoln did not always do as Raymond advised, either. In August 1864, the editor joined Thurlow Weed and New York senator Edwin Morgan to petition for the release of one Louis A. Welton, recently imprisoned at Fort Delaware. Raymond, who had read and believed Welton’s protests of innocence, insisted that “his pardon would be an act of justice.” After looking into the matter, Lincoln reported back that the prisoner in question had in fact entered Union lines “with a contract to furnish large supplies to the rebels” and “was arrested with the contract in his possession.” Now Welton was obviously trying “to escape by telling a very absurd and improbable story.” Cleverly turning final judgment over to his New York correspondents, Lincoln concluded: “Now, if Senator Morgan, and Mr. Weed, and Mr. Raymond, will not argue with me that I ought to discharge this man, but will . . . simply request me to do it, I will do it solely in deference to their wishes.” Two weeks later, speaking for the gullible trio, Morgan withdrew the request for clemency.99
Horace Greeley was in some ways tougher to manage than even Bennett. Though he and Lincoln shared many values and had known each other for parts of three decades, Greeley remained the hardest of the editors to predict and the most difficult to please. The editor vacillated endlessly between advocating aggressive war and demanding speedy peace, all the while maintaining his unwavering hatred of slavery and unquenchable lust for patronage power and high office. Although Indiana congressman George Julian maintained that Lincoln had “the most profound personal respect for Mr. Greeley, and placed the highest estimate upon his services as an independent writer and thinker,” Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher probably came closer to the truth when he remembered that the “complaints and criticisms” that filled the pages of the Tribune “very much annoyed” the president.100
Yet Greeley was also capable of coming to Lincoln’s defense when his help was least expected. In March 1864, the Tribune reported that Mary Lincoln’s pro-Southern half-sister,
Martha Todd White, had abused a presidential pass by smuggling medicines and other contraband into the Confederacy. The paper added fuel to the fire by asserting that “the chuckling of the Rebel press over her safe transit with Rebel uniforms and buttons of gold was founded in truth.” The embarrassing story prompted John Nicolay to alert Greeley that out of respect for the editor’s “authority the Copperhead newspapers” were now circulating the story, which the president’s chief of staff insisted was false. Submitting a correction, Nicolay asked: “Will you be so kind as to publish the enclosed, or its equivalent, in the editorial columns of The Tribune?” Nicolay’s version of the story maintained that Mrs. White’s presidential pass had not exempted her from the “usual” baggage inspection, and that in fact her luggage had been searched and no contraband discovered. While Greeley had by then determined to fight against Lincoln’s renomination, he replied, “I shall of course publish the enclosure. . . . Though I am an earnest one-term man, I want to publish all the truth I can get and as few falsehoods as possible.”101
Frederick Douglass recalled that Lincoln “seemed to feel very keenly the reproaches” that Greeley “heaped upon him for not bringing the war to a speedy conclusion.” Although Douglass was by this time the leading spokesman for the nation’s African Americans, he was in another sense one more of the elite newspapermen who enjoyed access to the president, certainly the only editor of color. Lincoln invited him to the White House to discuss black recruitment and the sensitive topic of equal pay for “colored” troops. “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass later testified, “I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”102
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 64