Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion

by Harold Holzer

  Even though Lincoln had never bowed to Bennett’s 1860 plea for social recognition in return for editorial neutrality, the president did appreciate the editor’s post-Sumter show of patriotic ardor, and as the reelection campaign headed into the home stretch, refused to give up on the goal of winning the crafty editor’s endorsement, or at least the softening his strident hostility. According to one of the president’s closest Illinois allies, Bennett genuinely “wanted to support him” in 1864, and yearned only “to be noticed by Lincoln.” One of the editor’s friends pleaded that if Lincoln merely invited Bennett to the White House to “chat,” then “his paper would be all right.” It seemed a tiny price to pay, but still Lincoln resisted. “I understand . . . Bennett has made a great deal of money, some say not very properly,” he mused, and “now he wants me to make him respectable.” Though Lincoln had earlier opened the White House to another of his wife’s half-sisters—this one the widow of a Confederate general, no less—he simply could not bring himself to extend an invitation to Bennett, a mark of the editor’s outcast social status. Stubbornly, Lincoln agreed to receive him “if he came,” as he would welcome any caller during public office hours.96 But when in July Bennett unleashed a new torrent of criticism against both Greeley and Lincoln over the Niagara Falls fiasco, Lincoln decided to go courting after all, armed with a new approach designed to neutralize the Herald editor without formally receiving him.

  As an intermediary, Lincoln chose the “affable” but wildly ambitious New York City postmaster, Abram Wakeman, the former Customs House aspirant who enjoyed close political ties to Raymond, Weed, and Seward. Wakeman, whose Manhattan home had been burned by arsonists during the 1863 anti-draft riots, had proven his loyalty to the administration by working to prevent postponement of the Republican convention, a scheme Greeley and other Lincoln doubters had devised to bolster the chances of potential last-minute entries like Grant. In late July 1864, Lincoln sent Wakeman an expansive policy letter, pointing out that while the Confederacy’s Niagara Falls delegates had never been empowered to negotiate on behalf of the Richmond government, they had indeed been encouraged by others to play a role in abetting Lincoln’s antiwar political opponents. “Thus the present presidential contest,” Lincoln concluded, “will almost certainly be no other than a contest between a Union and a Disunion candidate, disunion certainly following the success of the latter. The issue is a mighty one for all people and all time; and whoever aids the right, will be appreciated and remembered.”97

  Here was no ordinary explanation to a local postmaster, but rather a meticulously worded political message clearly meant for other eyes. In fact, Lincoln intended the statement—highlighted by the overt offer of “appreciation” in return for support—for none other than James Gordon Bennett, with whom it was soon shared. Three weeks later, Wakeman reported back to the president: “I have read it with proper explanation to Mr. B. He said, after some moments of silence, that so far as it related to him, ‘It did not amount to much.’ ” Apparently, the editor expected a more “specific” promise of future reward. Now the game was on. Senator James Harlan of Iowa—an intimate whose daughter would soon become engaged to Lincoln’s son Robert—told John Hay that “Bennett’s support is so important especially considered as to its bearing on the soldier vote that it would pay to offer him a foreign mission for it.” Although Lincoln hesitated, even Bennett’s longtime enemy, Horace Greeley, trying to work his way back into the president’s good graces even as he continued plotting to sabotage him, suggested to Bennett’s friend, journalist William O. Bartlett, on August 30 that an overt deal was desirable. As Greeley viewed matters, “if the President should see the way clear to tend to the Editor of the Herald some important diplomatic post in recognition of his services to the country in sustaining the Union at all hazards, but especially in upholding the Draft, I think a very good and extensive influence would thereby be exerted.”98

  Lincoln devoted no further letters to the sensitive subject, but continued to send emissaries to Bennett to discuss an arrangement, even as he contended simultaneously with Greeley’s subterfuge and Raymond’s sudden doubts. On one of her own 1864 trips to New York, Mary Lincoln herself paid what was surely a carefully planned social call on Bennett and his wife. Later, Mary wrote directly to Wakeman, who had become one of her confidants, to urge him to step up the courtship of the Herald editor. “A little notice of them would strengthen us very much I think,” she advised, demonstrating that she was in on the effort to win Bennett’s support. As Mary coyly put it, her husband “appreciates a kind expression of Mr B’s very much.” When “the World dares to insinuate against us,” she noted in contrast, “the public should take them in hand.”99

  Bennett’s friend Bartlett soon began reporting secretly to the White House in person on the editor’s evolving attitudes—and in turn working in New York to press Lincoln’s case for reelection on Bennett. Finally, Bartlett broached the specific offer of a plum diplomatic post in return for peace with the Herald. (“I am from Washington, fresh from the bosom of Father Abraham,” Bartlett declared to Bennett on November 4, adding carefully that Lincoln “expected to do that thing as much as he expected to live.”)100 Lincoln had sent word that he was prepared to name Bennett as minister to France, one of the choicest foreign assignments at his disposal.

  Almost an ambassador: James Gordon Bennett, as he looked in 1865, the year Lincoln offered him the post of U.S. minister to France.

  Yet in the end it was the Democratic platform that influenced Bennett more than the gratifying promise of an overseas appointment. Its peace plank—demanding that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities”—infuriated the reborn Unionist, and as soon as the Democratic convention adjourned the exclusively anti-Lincoln tone of Herald campaign editorials began shifting.101 As summer yielded to fall, the paper began condemning appeasers and emphasizing its support for total Union victory. Though it never actually endorsed Lincoln, as some historians have erroneously contended, the Herald at least began lobbing equal doses of criticism at both presidential nominees, making a point of declaring with wholly uncharacteristic equivocation that the ultimate choice belonged to voters, not editors.102

  Such benign posturing did not prevent “His Satanic Majesty” from spewing his pent-up bile at his newspaper rivals. Always particularly eager to ridicule his Tribune counterpart, Bennett gloated on September 23 that the “leading men of the republican party” had all “eaten humble pie, and are now making speeches for Lincoln,” including Greeley, “in spite of his Tribune articles” (indeed Greeley was by then on an upstate political tour in Lincoln’s behalf). In October, Bennett aimed his wrath at Democratic chairman August Belmont, charging that his work as New York agent for the Rothschilds had made him “rich as a Jew.” (As the anti-Semitic Bennett well knew, Belmont himself was Jewish-born.) But when, in an act of desperation, Jefferson Davis proposed offering freedom to slaves who enlisted in the Confederate army, Bennett dropped his own long-standing opposition to black enlistment by conceding: “When such propositions come from Richmond, the negro soldier policy pursued by President Lincoln ceases to be a debatable question. He is vindicated by the Rebels themselves.” Dutchess County, New York, Democrat Albert C. Ramsey—a onetime newspaper editor—still hoped Bennett might yet play a pivotal role in George McClellan’s behalf in the final days of the campaign. Though Ramsey lobbied the editor and reported that “an excellent feeling now exists in the Herald office,” he conceded that “Mr. Bennett doubts if we can succeed in November,” as he frankly told McClellan weeks before the election. Ramsey well understood that the usually “impulsive” editor had become “very shy of committing his paper,” but tried to talk McClellan into believing that the Herald’s refusal to endorse him could still prove helpful. “So far,” Ramsey argued unconvincingly, “the apparent neutral course of the paper has aided us more than the most decided support of our side. This to be sure was accidental, but the most knowing of our opponents c
all it ‘adroitness.’ ” Others probably agreed that Bennett’s neutrality indeed helped—but Lincoln’s Republicans, not McClellan’s Democrats.103

  Although Bennett put a scare into Republicans by receiving McClellan at his Manhattan estate late in the campaign (at Ramsey’s urging), the editor dealt a crushing blow to Democratic hopes some two weeks before Election Day by demanding that the general further repudiate his party’s peace plank. McClellan’s expected refusal, as William Bartlett explained to Lincoln, was needed to pave the way for Bennett’s “distinctly accepting you as satisfactory.” Bartlett proudly rushed a copy of the paper’s ambiguous next edition to Lincoln, describing “the Herald of this date” as “a model paper for our side,” and adding that “Mr. Bennett told me yesterday that he had accomplished more for you than he could have done any other way, because he has carried his readers with him.”104

  In other words, there was to be no direct announcement of support for Lincoln. In fact, even while stepping up his criticism of “peace at any price” Democrats, Bennett continued to rail against what he called “Lincoln’s misrule.” And the Herald devoted considerable space to further attacks on the “baser instincts and passions of the party press” itself, pointing out that any voter making his choice based on the “scurrilous abuse” to which both candidates had been subjected would think McClellan a “double dealing traitor” and Lincoln “the most methodical and skillful demagogue in the United States.” Bennett even praised Greeley for becoming less “savage and rampant” in his recent editorials—the result of the “moral suasion of the Herald,” of course—but added that the pro-McClellan World remained guilty of “shocking depravity.” On the eve of the election, the ambivalent Bennett aimed one final riposte at his old Republican foes, mocking Greeley as “a non-combatant on principle” who “cannot bear the report of a pistol without exhibiting every symptom of fright.” Was Lincoln a tyrant and a “swindler” as the World charged—or was McClellan a traitor, as the Tribune maintained? In the end, Bennett admitted, “we have no hope of Paradise regained with this election. We have no fears of the destruction of the country with the success of Lincoln or McClellan. Each is a failure. . . . The choice, Old Abe or Little Mac, is rather a choice of evils than a choice of excellences.”105

  After so many years of outright hostility, Bennett’s final “pox on all their houses” election eve editorial was perhaps viewed by the administration to be very nearly an endorsement. As Pennsylvania journalist A. K. McClure recalled: “Lincoln knew how important it was to have the support of the Herald, and he carefully studied how to bring its editor into close touch with himself.” McClure hailed the effort—which he maintained included the “confidential tender of the French mission”—as “one of the shrewdest of Lincoln’s great political schemes,” even if McClure erred in recalling that it resulted in outright “support” from James Gordon Bennett.106 In fact, one of the final New York Herald headlines before the day of political reckoning proclaimed: “The Only Hope of the Country Is the Election of McClellan.”107 If Lincoln traded Bennett a presidential appointment in return for a “cessation of hostilities,” he got precious little in the bargain.

  Whatever their final terms, Lincoln remained publicly “shut pan” about any patronage offer to Bennett, not even confiding it to cabinet officials like William Seward, who was bound to object to the appointment after enduring years of criticism from the Herald over both local and foreign policy issues. No wonder that in March 1865, when Gideon Welles admitted that a “rumor is prevalent and very generally believed that the French mission has been offered Bennett,” he confidently added: “I discredit it.”108 Little did Welles know that, a month earlier, Lincoln had written secretly to Bennett to “propose, at some convenient and not distant day, to nominate you to the United States’ Senate as Minister to France.” Knowing that Congress was about to adjourn, and would need time to advise and consent on what might prove a controversial nomination, Lincoln waited anxiously for a reply. Finally, on March 6, in a letter carried to the White House by Bartlett, the editor turned down the job. Thanking the president for “so distinguished an honor,” Bennett confessed “that at my age I am afraid of assuming the labors and responsibilities of such an important position,” adding that “in the present relations of France and the United States, I am of the decided opinion that I can be of more service to the country in the present position I occupy.”109

  Perhaps Bennett never really wanted to become minister to France. Very likely, Lincoln never really wanted to send him there, unless he believed it would at least usefully separate him from his printing presses. In the end, both men earned no more, and no less, than what they had originally sought in 1864: Lincoln secured from Bennett a kind of hostile neutrality, while Bennett at last earned his long-sought gesture of presidential respect. Neither of these wary combatants ever expected more. Lincoln eventually named another newspaperman as minister: John Bigelow, co-owner of the New York Evening Post. But Mary Lincoln objected strenuously when other papers derided the Bennett offer as “one of Mr. L’s ‘last jokes.’ . . . Lest he might consider, that it was intended as a jest,” she told Abram Wakeman, “do not fail to express my regrets to him.” Mrs. Lincoln, for one, was disappointed “that Mr B—did not accept.”110

  • • •

  On Election Day, November 8, 1864, New York City’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters again repudiated Lincoln—by a resounding two-to-one margin. The president narrowly retained the state’s crucial electoral votes only by attracting huge support upstate. Stung by the local results, Greeley borrowed a page from the Herald’s racist playbook by insisting that “the atrocious McClellan majorities uniformly rolled up in our City” had originated in “dens of debauchery, harlotry . . . crime” and “Irish grogshops.”111

  Party chairman Raymond, who telegraphed Lincoln at 9:40 P.M. on election night to concede, “Democratic majority in this city will be thirty four thousand,” could take consolation from the fact that he himself handily won election to Congress from the Sixth District, amassing a five-thousand-vote plurality against three opponents; this despite the fact that Lincoln had refused to use his influence to urge another Republican out of the four-way race. All through the night, Republican editors dutifully kept Lincoln informed of voting trends in their home states. As eagerly as they had supported him during the campaign, they now wanted to be among the first to inform him of “their” success. When John Wein Forney wired early from Philadelphia that “the State was sure for Lincoln,” and “by a decided majority,” the president remarked, looking more solemn than joyous: “As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the Union, they say.” At midnight, Horace Greeley telegraphed that New York would go to Lincoln “by about four thousand.” Edward Baker of Lincoln’s old Springfield mouthpiece, the Journal, sent word, “You have carried this state by at least twenty thousand.” And from William Fishback and William McKee of the long-supportive Missouri Democrat came word that their state was safe by “about ten thousand.” As more and more heartening results trickled in through the early hours of the morning, Lincoln finally allowed himself to say that “he felt relieved of suspense.” It was Noah Brooks, though denied access to Lincoln’s election night headquarters—perhaps by John Nicolay, aware by now that the Sacramento Daily Union correspondent was growing ever more ambitious for his job—who sent a hastily scrawled “table of election returns,” probably the first complete account of the vote to arrive at Lincoln’s desk.112

  Did the municipal tallies for president suggest that the Republican editors had lost influence in New York, or that Bennett’s pacification had failed to reduce Democratic hostility? Perhaps. But of far greater importance, on matters political, the three press titans had attempted to influence not just their Manhattan readers, but their national subscribers as well. And by trumpeting their preferences in the bellwether, undecided states, not just in their intractably Democratic home turf, Raymond, Greeley, and Bennett had all, in their way, helped Lincoln win a sec
ond term.

  Despite his continued unpopularity in New York City, the final nationwide tally gave Lincoln an unexpectedly easy reelection triumph: a healthy 55 percent of the popular vote, majorities in twenty-two of the twenty-five Northern and Border States, and a lopsided electoral vote advantage of 212–21. The victorious Republican chairman expressed no surprise at the result. “It simply is a verification of what we have steadily declared from the outset,” a jubilant Raymond concluded in the Times, “that the American people would stand by the Government as long as the Government stands by the flag.” To the recently mollified Herald, the result assured that “the rebellion shall be put down by force of arms; that there can and shall be no compromise with Jeff. Davis, and that the Union in its integrity shall be maintained.” Launching one final attack on the Democrats he had once supported, Bennett added: “Some of the over-credulous readers of the New York World . . . may be disappointed, but the knowing ones among the democracy knew that vain boastings and foolish promises would not carry the election.” Horace Greeley could only agree. “We hold that the People have just decided,” proclaimed the Tribune, that “the NATION SHALL LIVE AND THAT SLAVERY SHALL DIE—so much, and no more.”113