Unlike Bennett, Greeley, Raymond, or Douglass, the ideally situated John Hay owned no newspaper. Yet Hay managed to function throughout the war as the closest thing to an official press spokesman in Lincoln’s employ. While serving on the White House staff, Hay avidly continued his journalistic career, posting feature stories for the St. Louis papers and, until it became a Copperhead sheet, the New York World. His dispatches extolled administration policy and occasionally offered forthright criticism of the press corps. Thus Hay may have been speaking for the White House when he observed: “There has never been an age so completely enthralled by newspapers as this. They have begun to be taken as the absolute reflex of the will of the people and the earnest thought of a nation.” To Hay, “their utterances meet with an attention absurdly out of proportion to their importance.”103 Savvy as he was about the newspaper business, Hay and his fellow White House secretaries never quite pierced the armor of either partisan journalism or the deeply personal rivalry that had kept New York City’s three principal editors at each other’s throats for more than a decade.
Moreover, Lincoln and other press watchers in the administration remained unsure about the extent to which the big New York dailies reflected national, or at least Northern, public opinion. “We in Washington have so little faith in the New-York newspapers, as indices of the real public feeling,” William Stoddard complained in one of his own anonymous press reports in 1862, “that we are at a loss what the people really think.” As Stoddard lamented of Gotham’s editors, “they can neither understand nor appreciate an honest man who is in earnest.”104 But they had to be cultivated.
Even from his perch in Philadelphia, John Russell Young seemed aware that the New York relationships were far more complex than Stoddard comprehended. The real explanation for the three editors’ inconsistent attitudes toward the president, he suggested, had more to do with their own bitter rivalry than with administration policy. Each of New York’s three reigning press lords, Young believed, hated each other far more than they ever cared about Lincoln: Bennett, still the “sinister . . . lawless, eccentric influence . . . breathing wrath upon all who would not bow down and worship”; Greeley, the “resolute, brilliant, capable, irresponsible, intolerant” idealist convinced that “disputation was the higher duty of man”; and Raymond, who relished “the joy of a fight,” yet possessed “no skill in discussing . . . moral consequences.” Raymond himself came close to agreeing with this assessment when he admitted that, however vehemently the press might criticize politicians, the newspaper trade was designed not to reform society but to earn money. “There is nothing,” he maintained, “of less consequence to a public man than what the papers printed about him yesterday,—nothing of more consequence than what they may print about him to-morrow.”105
In this remark, Raymond may have sold himself and his accomplishments short. Although he was no match for Bennett when it came to conniving, or for Greeley when it came to crusading, Henry Raymond retained an instinct for political power that his competitors could never match. Not for nothing was Raymond dubbed Lincoln’s “Lieutenant-General in politics.”
• • •
As surely as Washington morphed into a military fortress during wartime, it also became a well-supplied center of incoming and outgoing news. “There is probably no city in the Union,” Noah Brooks marveled in mid-1863, “where the daily newspaper pabulum of the people is so varied as in Washington. From dusky morn till dusky eve we have a fresh relay of printer’s ink, and a continuous and strident cry from the newsboys salutes each waking ear.” Even so, Brooks dismissed Seaton and Welling’s staid Intelligencer as “an ancient fossil,” and Forney’s newer Chronicle as a “Greek chorus” that automatically cheered all of Lincoln’s “intentions or opinions . . . as the height of wisdom, skill, and ability.”106
Forney continued to ride high until his hiatus in Europe, but on the last day of 1864, Seaton ended his decades-long ownership of the Intelligencer and sold the paper to the firm of Allen, Coyle, and Snow, who then converted it into an overtly pro-administration daily. James Welling promptly departed from the staff as tongues wagged over the sudden transition. But Washington became a consummate newspaper town not only because of its own array of morning and afternoon papers. As residents of the political and military center of gravity, its civilians, soldiers, public officials, and lobbyists consumed imported, out-of-town newspapers as avidly as they devoured their food and liquor at local hotels. As early as 1842, Greeley had promised that the Tribune would be “delivered each morning” to Washington subscribers, and he had kept his word, in peace and war.107 Early each day, newsboys crowded the city’s railroad depot to await trains bearing the incoming Baltimore and Philadelphia dailies, then rushed copies to eager readers on Capitol Hill and at Willard’s hotel. By afternoon, when the New York papers arrived, the newsboys again grasped for bundles and began racing through the streets shouting the “savage whoop” of “New York Erald, Times, Tribune, and Wurruld!”108
By then, many prominent out-of-town newspapers had established news bureaus in the brick buildings near the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue, and north along Fourteenth Street. The area around Willard’s abounded with satellite offices representing the nation’s major dailies. Washington headquarters for the Times, Tribune, World, and Boston Advertiser clustered in structures usefully adjacent to the Western Union office. Their boldly lettered signs transformed the once sleepy neighborhood into a humming nerve center for political journalism. Here was more of an authentic “Newspaper Row” than existed even in Manhattan. The invigorating atmosphere inspired journalists Henry Villard, Horace White, and Adams Hill to establish a “Washington standpoint” of their own opposite Willard’s: a new, independent feature service to supply stories to newspapers that lacked their own capital bureaus.109 Calling their new press agency “the beginning in this country of the news syndicates,” Villard quickly signed on as subscribers the Chicago Tribune, Missouri Democrat, Cincinnati Commercial, and Boston Advertiser to the tune of fifteen dollars a week each.110 But in mid-1864, the three correspondents almost paid for their enterprise with their liberty.
The crisis that nearly destroyed Villard, White, and Hill in Washington began in New York, and originally involved two entirely different journalists, one of them the outspoken voice of the Copperhead Democrats, Manton Marble, the twenty-seven-year-old editor of the New York World. Marble had learned his craft at the Boston Journal before moving to New York to work for the antislavery Evening Post. He landed a job as night editor of the then-pro-administration World soon after it acquired the Courier and Enquirer. When the World faltered in April 1862, Marble borrowed money to buy it. He kept the paper in print, but by September his note came due, and he scoured the town in search of investors to keep it afloat. By one account, Marble first tried wooing conservative Republicans, perhaps even Thurlow Weed. When these efforts foundered, Marble agreed to sell shares to a group of anti-Lincoln Democrats, including ex-mayor Fernando Wood, Democratic National Committee Chairman August Belmont, and Samuel L. M. Barlow, a pro-slavery lawyer and longtime friend of presidential aspirant George McClellan. Marble sealed the deal by agreeing to support Democrat Horatio Seymour for New York governor in 1862. Several New York World staff members quit in protest.111
Marble’s expedient political conversion transformed him almost overnight into New York’s loudest anti-administration voice. He proved far abler than the raving editors at fringe papers like the Daily News and far harder to muzzle, though he predicted soon after rebranding the World that if he continued publishing anti-Lincoln editorials, “it will be at our peril.”112
At the outset, the recapitalized paper supported prosecuting the war, as long as it meant “holding on to the Constitution with the same unyielding persistence,” meaning opposition to administration initiatives to free slaves.113 Eleven days after issuing that warning, Marble was shocked to learn that Lincoln had announced his Emancipation Proclamation, “for the Constitutio
n confers on the federal government no power to change the domestic institutions of the States.”114 The expanded suspension of habeas corpus triggered further denunciation—particularly after investor Belmont founded the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge in February 1863, and Marble began helping the anti-Lincoln organization draft an outpouring of hotly partisan pamphlets. The Vallandigham arrest that year Marble regarded as “a high handed assumption of despotic powers.”115 A month later, Marble learned from Democratic Ohio congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox that General Burnside had banned the World from his military district. Cox told Marble that vendors were giving copies away “as waste paper.”116 Marble responded by intensifying his vitriolic attacks on Lincoln.
When the ax finally fell a year later, Marble’s splenetic editorials ironically had nothing to do with the crackdown. In the predawn hours of May 18, 1864, an Associated Press messenger delivered to all its subscriber newspapers in New York—including the World—copies of the president’s latest proclamation. Or so it appeared. The authentic-looking document urged a national day of “fasting, humiliation and prayer,” hinted darkly about “the general state of the country,” and called for a breathtaking 400,000 new volunteers.117 With Ulysses S. Grant enduring a bloodbath of casualties in a struggle to subdue Robert E. Lee in Virginia, the proclamation seemed a cry of desperation—an admission that to prevail, the Union required both divine intervention and a huge infusion of fresh troops. It was major news.
Manton Marble, virulently anti-administration editor of the New York World, published a bogus presidential proclamation in 1864, igniting a new crackdown against the press.
Presidential proclamations always arrived at the city’s newspaper offices in the same routine manner. After their receipt at the New York AP over government-sanctioned telegraph wires, a clerk copied them using “manifold paper”—a recently perfected precursor to carbon paper. By inserting tissue-thin sheets of yellow paper between a manifold’s waxy leaves, a copyist could simultaneously produce multiple copies. Once finished, the office manager dispatched runners to transport the resulting “flimsies” to every newspaper at once. Something about this particular message, however—perhaps its baroque literary style, the lateness of the hour, or the fact that messengers seemed to vanish seconds after delivering them—aroused suspicion at most night desks. Nearly all the town’s papers opted not to publish the text before checking further with Washington—where officials instantly branded the proclamation a fraud. The Tribune, which had closed its editorial offices for the night by the time the “messenger” arrived, later chortled that the gullible Herald ran off twenty thousand copies of its morning edition with the proclamation featured before realizing its error, stopping the presses, and destroying the run.118
Two unlucky dailies, however, both of them allied with the antiwar Democrats—the World and the Journal of Commerce—fell for the hoax and printed the verbatim text in their May 18 issues. Though he later branded the forgery “an infamous outrage,” Journal of Commerce editor William Prime insisted that the proclamation was “a perfect imitation of Associated Press dispatches in the minutest details.”119 Whether its publication was an accident or an act of partisan malice did not matter to Richard Yates, governor of Illinois, who anxiously wired Lincoln: “Is the proclamation in New York World . . . a genuine document? Please answer immediately.” Lincoln quickly assured his old friend: “If any such proclamation has appeared, it is a forgery.”120 Yates’s concern was understandable. Only a year earlier, another call for troops had unleashed draft riots, not only in New York, but in towns across the North.
To his credit, when Manton Marble realized that he, too, had been duped, he quickly announced a reward of $500 to apprehend and prosecute the forger. The gesture proved too little, too late, to save either him or his newspaper. The very day the proclamation appeared, after a hasty emergency meeting at the War Department—during which Seward and Stanton both urged a strong response—Seward issued a statement “to the public” branding the purported proclamation “an absolute forgery.”121 Then Stanton drafted, and the president signed, the only direct order Lincoln ever issued to close down a newspaper or arrest an editor, and sent it to General John Adams Dix, the New York–based commander who had helped put down the city’s anti-draft disturbances in 1863:
Whereas, there has been wickedly and traitorously printed and published this morning, in the “New York World” and New York “Journal of Commerce,” newspapers printed and published in the city of New York—a false and spurious proclamation, purporting to be signed by the President . . . of a treasonable nature, designed to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States, and to the rebels now at war against the Government, and their aiders and abettors: you are therefore hereby commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command, the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers. . . . You will also take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the “New York World,” and “Journal of Commerce,” and hold the same until further order, and prevent any further publication therefrom.122
Although a flabbergasted Dix delayed executing the instructions—prompting several impatient reminders from Stanton in Washington—his troops finally seized and shuttered the two Democratic newspapers at ten o’clock that night, arresting both Marble and Prime, detaining them at army headquarters, and making plans to transport them by boat to the dreaded Fort Lafayette.
Within hours, in a repetition of the bipartisan outrage expressed after the 1863 shutdown of the Chicago Times, several New York papers rallied to Marble’s and Prime’s defense. Early on May 19, Sydney Gay of the Tribune, Erastus Brooks of the Express, and Frederic Hudson of the Herald telegraphed Lincoln jointly to argue that the hoax could easily have “succeeded in any daily newspaper establishment in this city,” and that Marble and Prime “were innocent of any knowledge of wrong.” Now that all editors, publishers, and news agents had placed themselves on high alert, Gay and his colleagues added, future hoaxes were unlikely. Their urgent recommendation was that the president “rescind the order under which the World and the Journal of Commerce were suppressed.”123
Democratic papers nationwide rushed to express outrage, with the Boston Commonwealth snickering that Lincoln would surely “be punished in the ‘World’ to come.” Even Republican editor William Cullen Bryant called the suppression “a violation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press.” Not everyone agreed. Henry Raymond maintained that Marble and Prime remained culpable regardless of whether they had fallen for the hoax out of “malice or neglect,” arguing: “How does liberty of discussion involve the name of forging the name of the President of the United States? Such a forgery has been committed. The two papers named have given currency to it.”124
Marble and Prime barely avoided deportation to the American Bastille, but not until Saturday, May 21, were they allowed to reopen their newspapers. Since neither issued Sunday editions, they did not resume publication until Monday the 23rd. Fortunately for the beleaguered Democratic editors, two days earlier General Dix had identified the author of the counterfeit proclamation as Joseph Howard, Jr., the same onetime New York Times correspondent who three years earlier had invented the libel that Lincoln wore a Scotch cap disguise to slip through Baltimore. Now employed as an associate editor by the Brooklyn Eagle, Howard had apparently devised the scheme for an entirely apolitical reason: to make a financial killing. He believed that news of a massive troop call-up would signal military desperation and cause the stock market to plummet. Then Howard could move in and buy gold, whose price was sure to soar in the resulting panic. Before the hoax came to light and prices plummeted, he could sell at a profit.
Gideon Welles leaped to the conclusion that the culprit was one “of a pestiferous class of reckless sensation-writers for an unscrupulous set of journalists who inform the public mind.” The navy secretary had little good to say about any member of the
Fourth Estate. “Scarcely one of them,” he fumed, “has regard for truth, and nearly all make sure of their positions to subserve selfish, mercenary ends. This forger and falsifier Howard is a specimen of the miserable tribe.”125 Nonetheless, Welles regretted that Lincoln moved so harshly against the two New York papers, blaming Seward and Stanton for exciting him into overwrought retaliation. “The seizure of the office of the World and Journal of Commerce,” he confided to his diary, “was hasty, rash, inconsiderate, and wrong, and cannot be defended. They are mischievous and pernicious, working assiduously against the Union and the Government and giving countenance and encouragement to the Rebellion, but were in this instance the dupes, perhaps the willing dupes, of a knave and wretch.” Welles was hardly the only government official to object. At least two congressmen introduced resolutions of inquiry, and even Nicolay and Hay later admitted that the shutdowns were indefensible. Welles glumly predicted that the arrests would “weaken the Administration and strengthen its enemies.”126
Especially if Marble had anything to say about it. Once he regained his freedom and his presses, the vengeful editor took the first opportunity to issue a long, denunciatory protest—using Lincoln’s own “public letter” format to vilify him. Published under the bold, stacked headline, “Popular Rebuke of the Military Raid on the Press. THE ‘WORLD’ MOVING AGAIN,” Marble’s message to the president began with a methodical defense of the actions he had taken once he realized his night staff had been duped into typesetting the fake proclamation. Later, “printers and pressmen” were “brought from their homes and beds to put in type and publish the news of our misfortune.” The sale of morning editions was promptly halted, he insisted, and a boat bound for Nova Scotia en route to Europe to distribute the May 18 issue was detained at the docks—though the War Department believed that Marble actually intended to dispatch the shipment even though he knew the proclamation was bogus. “But to characterize the proceedings as unprecedented,” Marble lectured Lincoln, “would be to forget the past history of your administration; and to characterize them as shocking to every mind, would be to disregard the principle of human nature from which it arises . . . do not imagine that the people of this city or state, or country have ceased to love their liberties, or do not know how to protect their rights. It would be fatal to a tyrant to commit that error here and now.” To Marble, Lincoln was no better than King Charles I, who was “doubtless advised to, and applauded for, the crimes by which he lost his crown and life.”127
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 65