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

by Harold Holzer

  “Long ABRAHAM LINCOLN a Little Longer”—artist Frank Bellew’s tribute to the president’s reelection—appeared in Harper’s Weekly on November 26, 1864.

  Later that month, Harper’s Weekly published a deceptively simple, wordlessly eloquent cartoon showing the rustic-looking, hyper-attenuated figure of Lincoln gazing at the viewer from a narrow, column-wide panel, one hand characteristically tucked inside his lapel, the other clutching the presidential election results. The caption spoke volumes: after another furious political battle waged in and by the press, it was to be “Long Abraham Lincoln a Little Longer.”114

  A few evenings after his triumph at the polls, Lincoln appeared in the second-story window of the White House to acknowledge a victory serenade. It was a celebratory occasion, but the president had something serious to say. “We can not have free government without elections,” he told the festive crowd, no doubt proud not only of his victory but also of the license he had extended to the opposition press during the campaign, “and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” To a relieved Lincoln, the “undesirable strife” of the political campaign so relentlessly waged in the press had been worth the pain. “It has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war.” Thinking perhaps of the newspapermen who had vilified him during the campaign, he closed by asking “those who have not differed with me, to join with me, in this same spirit towards those who have.”115

  But the fiercely partisan struggle had taken its toll on the weary president. “It is a little singular,” he remarked sadly to John Hay as he waited for the results on Election Day, “that I who am not a vindictive man, should have always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their bitterness.”116

  Lincoln had passed the three months between his first election and his inaugural journey in unbreakable solitude and calculated silence. But much had changed in four years. This time there would be no transition of power, no obligation to defer to a lame-duck incumbent, no need for silence. His policies vindicated, Lincoln remained visibly in charge, appearing frequently before the public and the press in the weeks leading up to his second swearing-in.

  Surprisingly, though the hotly partisan political campaign had ended with success for Lincoln, federal forces now resumed menacing opposition newspapers in war zones. Union troops suppressed the Louisville True Presbyterian in December, banishing its editor, Reverend Stuart Robinson, to Canada. The preacher wrote to the president in December to protest the “foolish” shutdown of what he insisted was “a purely ecclesiastical journal.” As Robinson conceded in the next breath, “I have not sustained your administration.” But he added, “neither do I wish to be driven into opposition to it, as a political writer, in defence of freedom of the press & religion.”117 When Lincoln failed to acknowledge the plea, the exiled minister published a long, scathing, open letter to the president, charging that “a large part of the people regard your administration as signalized, beyond all constitutional governments of modern times, for its tyrannical contempt for personal liberty, freedom of speech, and of the press, liberty of conscience and freedom of religion.” But Robinson’s public plea fell on resolutely deaf ears. In something of a validation of the army’s actions against the minister, a southern Indiana Presbyterian synod sought to ban its members from reading Robinson’s newspaper.118

  • • •

  Although Horace Greeley’s Canada peace mission had ended in confusion and humiliation in 1864, Lincoln now turned his attention to an ambitious mission of his own that must have seemed to some observers no more plausible, and no less perilous, than Greeley’s: convincing the lame-duck House of Representatives to consider the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery—and, crucially, to do so before the Confederate army was subdued, or could initiate an attractive new proposal for peace without freedom.

  Lincoln had several reasons to advocate for the amendment sooner rather than later. For one thing, the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to states engaged in rebellion against the federal government. Slavery therefore remained legal in most of the Border Slave States, and would remain so, Lincoln feared, if the war ended without a final, fatal attack on the institution. Maryland voters had narrowly voted to outlaw slavery in 1864, but its future in Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky remained murky. If the Confederacy capitulated or sued for peace before slavery could be eradicated, the House might prove disinclined to advance a constitutional solution. However, should Lincoln convince dubious congressmen that vanquishing the rebellion depended upon destroying its root cause, he might yet accomplish peace and freedom together. Finally, Lincoln remained acutely aware that the power he had invoked to issue the proclamation had yet to be tested in the courts. “Nobody was more quick to perceive or more frank to admit the legal weakness and insufficiency of the Emancipation Proclamation than Mr. Lincoln,” observed journalist James Welling.119 A constitutional amendment would render the question moot. It would be “a king’s cure for all evils,” as Lincoln put it. “It winds the whole thing up.”120

  The raw politics, however, tilted against success. Had Lincoln been able to wait longer, he might have enjoyed a far easier time ushering the freedom amendment through Congress. The Senate had passed the measure quickly enough, but in late 1864 an initial House vote fell a few votes short of the two-thirds majority required to send it on to the states for ratification. The next House, swept into office on the coattails of the Lincoln landslide, would boast major gains for the president’s party when it next gaveled into order in December 1865—or sooner, should Lincoln call the new Congress back into special session after his reinauguration—and would be so overwhelmingly Republican that the amendment was certain to sail through. Copperheads like Fernando Wood of New York had lost their bids for reelection and would not be returning to Washington. Victorious loyalists like Henry Raymond would be heading to the capital to support the administration. Still, with the end of the war now in sight, Lincoln convinced himself that he must push another floor vote during the lame-duck session, even if it meant that resistant outgoing Democrats were again compelled to participate.

  If the president could somehow persuade enough lame ducks to support the amendment—if not through logic then with the promise of federal jobs once their terms ended—he believed he could change enough minds to secure the necessary “ayes.” To help secure the required votes, Lincoln turned to a lobbyist urged on him by the unlikeliest of sources: Horace Greeley. Former Nashville Gazette editor William N. Bilbo arrived in Washington bearing a letter of introduction from Greeley attesting that he was “ready to do good service to our national cause.” Lincoln put him to work trolling for congressional converts to the amendment, at one point getting the mysterious operative released from prison for what Bilbo called “the malicious or profoundly ignorant charge of being a Southern spy.”121 When floor debate opened, Greeley himself turned up in Washington in his role as presidential elector from New York, using his privileges as a former—albeit unelected—congressman to gain access to the House chamber, prompting anti-amendment Ohio Democrat Samuel “Sunset” Cox to pause in the midst of one floor speech to sarcastically welcome the “able and patriotic” visitor.122

  Then that nettlesome old Jacksonian editor, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., the former postmaster general’s father, undercut the momentum for freedom by reawakening the dormant effort for peace with the Confederacy. Lincoln bowed to the ex-journalist’s initiative and allowed the seventy-three-year-old to proceed to Richmond to talk armistice with Jefferson Davis. The president harbored ample reasons to expect another failure, but also knew from Greeley’s Canadian misadventure and Raymond’s summertime jitters that too many otherwise reliably antislavery men remained willing to sacrifice emancipation for armistice if a cease-fire could save lives. Though the press at first learned little about Blair’s trip, his initiative c
ame close to sinking the Thirteenth Amendment. Although he reported nothing to Lincoln during his mission, Blair did confide in Horace Greeley, assuring him, “my faith is strong that we shall have a happy deliverance, and that soon,” adding a few days later that “nothing can defeat an early peace unless technicalities or points of honor be employed by the selfish & unpatriotic in the South.”123

  As the House debate proceeded, accompanied by furious behind-the-scenes arm-twisting and almost breathless press coverage, Blair returned to Washington and informed the president that a new trio of authorized Confederate emissaries—this time including Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, the president’s onetime Whig colleague in Congress—was heading to Washington to negotiate peace. Fearing that their arrival might convince wavering House Democrats that the war could be brought to a close with slavery intact after all, Lincoln cannily ordered the army to detain the commissioners at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and keep them there. Rumors of the emissaries’ journey toward the capital reached the House floor anyway, prompting outcries for an explanation. Lincoln calmly responded, with perfect—if selective—honesty: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.”124 The floor debate on the Thirteenth Amendment resumed, and when the clerk called the question on January 31, the resolution sending it to the states passed the House with a handful of votes to spare. Within a day, Edward L. Baker, editor of Springfield’s Illinois State Journal, wired Lincoln the joyful news that before any other state could consider, much less ratify, the amendment, it had “just passed both branches of our Legislature with great hurrah.”125

  In New York, Henry Raymond exulted, “The Southern people, with all their errors and delusions, do not longer imagine that slavery can be saved.” Even Bennett declared himself “gratified at the success of this great measure.” Of course he also claimed personal credit for its passage, “considering the earnest support which it has received through our editorial columns,” and took an inevitable swipe at the administration by asserting that the amendment would at last end the confusion “resulting from the tinkering, illegal, and incongruous emancipation experiments of President Lincoln.” Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment at least represented “progress in some direction,” Bennett acknowledged, ominously adding: “Time will tell whether it is forward or backwards.”126

  The press had not only covered the House debate intently, but played a behind-the-scenes role in the sometimes questionable campaign for “ayes”—by not reporting the campaign for votes. Only later did journalist Whitelaw Reid claim that lobbyists hired to persuade lame-duck Democrats to vote for the amendment—presumably including ex-journalist Bilbo—had spent up to $50,000 on bribes. One House member whom Greeley lobbied personally was outgoing Connecticut Democrat James E. English, who had voted against the resolution in 1864. Now, about to depart Congress, English dreamed of a comeback as his party’s nominee for governor. After Greeley intervened, English ended up supporting the resolution. The Tribune promptly hailed his support for “that most righteous Amendment” and urged grateful supporters “to vote for English this Spring.”127 Unforgiving Democrats denied their former congressman the gubernatorial nomination anyway.

  A few days after the House vote, Lincoln hastened to Hampton Roads and there personally delivered the news to the three peace commissioners: slavery was on the path to certain destruction, and no deal for peace could be considered without black freedom recognized. No one made a record of the talks, but at one point Lincoln supposedly dangled the idea of compensating rebellious states for slaves already freed under the proclamation; and at another, responding to a lecture about parallels in the English Civil War, chuckled that all he could recall was that Charles I had lost his head. If the president indeed shared these thoughts, they came right out of comments previously made by journalists: Greeley’s overgenerous terms for the Niagara Falls peace conference, and Manton Marble’s threatening allusions to King Charles after reopening the New York World. To the end, Lincoln unashamedly got some of his best talking points from newspapermen. Perhaps he even took inspiration from the advice that came from the Chicago Tribune’s Joseph Medill: “Don’t be in too much hurry for Peace. Don’t coax the rebel chiefs, but pound them a little more.”128

  As far as coverage of the peace conference was concerned, a tight press blackout reigned, in the wake of which, Times, Tribune, and Herald correspondents outdid themselves in unsubstantiated speculation. Lincoln had always tried to oversee the dissemination of information about any peace negotiations even as he was conducting them.

  Then in March, John Wein Forney, back from Europe and again at the helm of the Washington Chronicle, published his own predictions about the peace negotiations. The competition howled, angry at being scooped and, in some cases, worried that the president might give away too much to achieve peace at Hampton Roads. Even Noah Brooks, no less privy to official policy than Forney, complained. “At this time,” he noted in the Sacramento Daily Union, “when the public, with a few factious exceptions, was resting confidently in the belief that Lincoln’s wonderful sagacity and discretion would bring the country and himself out all right, the Washington Chronicle, in a series of double-leaded, sensational leaders, ablaze with all of the clap-trap of typographical ingenuity, showed that the editor, J. W. Forney, in his eagerness to be considered as the oracle of the President (rushing to the conclusion that Lincoln was going to obtain peace by compromise), had deliberately gone to work to prepare the public for the sacrifice of something vaguely dreadful, and dreadfully vague. These articles . . . were telegraphed all over the country, indorsed by Greeley . . . read by astonished and indignant thousands.”129

  Brooks need not have worried. The Hampton Roads conference ended without an agreement and the war entered its final days. Admitting to his readers that he had always believed in “an early Peace,” Greeley, coming full circle from his negotiating days at Niagara Falls, now insisted that Union forces resume the fight “with energy and enthusiasm.” In a similar vein, characterizing the peace conference as “wholly and utterly fruitless,” Henry Raymond’s New York Times reported after the Confederate envoys left Hampton Roads: “It is now fully realized that an energetic prosecution of the war opens the only path through which peace can be obtained.” Bennett, too, saluted Lincoln for conducting the talks with a “frank manner” and “equal firmness,” while as expected the New York Daily News condemned the president and his “faction of destructives” for refusing to trade armistice for recognition of Southern independence. Adding that the Confederate diplomats had abandoned their quest for peace out of resentment over Lincoln’s “threats and insults,” a Richmond newspaper vowed: “Our people will rise up behind him everywhere, more defiant and unbsubdued than ever.”130

  • • •

  By the time Lincoln made his way down Pennsylvania Avenue on the brisk, cloud-filled morning of March 4 to take the presidential oath of office for the second time, the only remaining question was, not whether, but when the Confederacy would submit. The Thirteenth Amendment was already on its way to ratification: in less than two months, eighteen of the twenty-seven required state legislatures had already voted to ratify. Although Lincoln had ample justification to claim credit for the approaching transformation of American society, he planned to display no conqueror’s bravado that inaugural day. He would propose no specific vision for the national future beyond freedom and reunion, repentance and forgiveness.

  The speech was shorter this time—750 words in all, the briefest inaugural address since Washington’s second. Lincoln devoted much of it to describing how the war had unavoidably engulfed the continent, arguing that slavery had been its one and only cause, and that the entire country, North and South, must accept blame for its sinful existence—and endure the devastating judgments of a justifiably angry God. Then the national preacher abruptly softened his tone to conclude on an achingly beautiful note of compassion—pleading for “malice toward none” and “charity for
all.”131

  Later that momentous day, onetime newspaper editor Frederick Douglass attended a post-inaugural reception at the White House—although, not surprisingly, he had to force his way in past guards who did their best to prevent him from entering; at one point they hurled him out of a first-floor window to get rid of him. When the president later spied him in the crowd, he called out in a voice, the abolitionist icon remembered, “heard all around” the East Room: “Here comes my friend Douglass.” As Douglass approached, the president heartily added: “Douglass, I saw you in the crowd to-day listening to my inaugural address. There is no man’s opinion that I value more than yours; what do you think of it?” More to the point, the president perhaps wondered, what would Douglass say or write about the speech?

  Douglass’s reply no doubt delighted him: “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort.” Then, as Douglass disappeared into the throng, the president called after him: “I am glad you liked it.” It was, as Douglass remembered it, “the last time I saw him to speak with him.”132

  Hungry as ever for press accolades, Lincoln allowed his eagerness for newspaper praise to get the better of him when it came to Thurlow Weed—misinterpreting another of Weed’s letters, just as he had when the presidential race was first getting under way a year earlier. This time, in a note posted the day of the inauguration, Weed had written to commend Lincoln for an entirely different speech: his reply to the congressional committee that had officially informed him of his reelection four months before. It was “not only the neatest but the most pregnant and effective use to which the English language was ever put,” Weed gushed. “Everyone likes a compliment,” Lincoln gratefully replied on March 10. “Thank you for yours on my little notification speech, and on the recent Inaugeral [sic] Address. I expect the latter to wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” In this analysis, Lincoln proved correct. But Thurlow Weed had not written a word about the inaugural address.133