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

by Harold Holzer

  Others wrote a great deal about it, though not all the responses pleased Lincoln—perhaps explaining his eagerness to infer praise from Weed. Greeley thought Lincoln’s majestic second inaugural lacked the “politic” and “humane” spirit of his first, worrying that its Old Testament–style brimstone (which preceded its pacific peroration) dangerously hinted at vengeance on the conquered Southern states (“This Haman shall hang on the gallows he erected for Mordecai,” Greeley worried, quoting the Old Testament himself). Oblivious to Lincoln’s soon-to-be-immortal closing lines, Greeley declared he would have preferred “manifestations of generosity, clemency, magnanimity.” For his part criticizing its “glittering generalities,” Bennett complained that Lincoln’s speech furnished “no information as to his future policy.” Like Greeley, he insisted that “a fresh, unequivocal exhibition of the spirit which impelled the former Inaugural would have been politic and humane” and moreover “quickened and deepened the disintegration of the Rebel forces.”134 Among New York’s big three, only Raymond hailed the “calmness” and “modesty” of Lincoln’s oration, adding a comment that almost seemed meant as a warning to his hypercritical fellow editors: “We have a President who will be faithful to the end, let what betide. Let him be sustained with the same fidelity.”135 Just four days after the inaugural, Raymond asked for his expected rewards: he resumed peppering Lincoln with requests for federal jobs for those who had done “the greatest possible service during the last canvas[s].”136 For the editor turned biographer turned party chairman, it was back to political business as usual.

  • • •

  Lincoln spent most of the early spring on something of a vacation at the Virginia military front, far from newspapers and newspapermen, following the army in the field and consulting with General Grant at his headquarters at City Point. Before departing Washington, however, the president enjoyed a relaxing visit from Henry Raymond, regaling the serious-minded editor at the White House with dialect stories he read aloud from a newly published book by the Toledo pro-Republican journalist David R. Locke—who doubled as a humorist under the pen name Petroleum V. Nasby. Lincoln simply adored his comic work.137

  Just a few days later, on March 27, artist Albert Hunt caught a glimpse of Lincoln sitting cross-legged at a Virginia wharf, a copy of the Richmond Dispatch spread across his lap. Hunt hastily sketched the president, and handed the result to him as a souvenir. As it showed, here on the road, separated from the War Department telegraph and his secretaries’ daily gossip about what the press was reporting, Lincoln had returned to his old habit of reading original newspapers himself.

  Within a week the Confederate capital fell, and while Lincoln remained in Virginia, hundreds of New York Herald newsboys rushed through the streets of Washington “as fleet of foot and as breathless with enthusiasm as Malice with his fiery cross,” hawking extra editions sped to the city from New York. Buried in the Herald’s April 3 issue was the more alarming news that against the cautionary advice of Secretary of War Stanton and others, Lincoln had “designed going himself to Richmond, and may have done so before now.”138

  Last portrait of Lincoln from life—sketched by Albert Hunt at Union army headquarters, City Point, Virginia, March 27, 1865—showed the president reading a Richmond newspaper.

  As it transpired, just as Stanton feared, the president did indeed make a stunning, unannounced entrance into the smoldering city the following day. Only hours had passed since Jefferson Davis and his government had fled and ordered its warehouses torched, after which Union forces marched in unopposed to occupy the capital. Now nearly in ruins, Richmond overflowed with angry Confederate deserters, along with anxious white civilians unsure of their future and a large black slave population suddenly, officially liberated under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s bodyguard later admitted of Lincoln’s visit: “It seems to me nothing short of miraculous that some attempt on his life was not made.”139

  Accompanied only by his young son Tad and a small detachment of sailors, and fortuitously joined on the shore by a small knot of journalists who had just reached the city to report on its occupation, Lincoln strolled unexpectedly into town from the riverfront on April 4. What happened next was described by some eyewitnesses as a spontaneous outpouring of reverence—though the spontaneity may have been fueled by the reporters, eager to stoke a human interest story, who may have taken it upon themselves to alert the nearest African Americans that their “messiah” had arrived. Whether his admirers recognized Lincoln on their own or with the encouragement of the correspondents, first one, then a few more, and ultimately hundreds of freed slaves soon came pouring from the wharf to greet the man they regarded as their deliverer. As Admiral David Dixon Porter, who walked Richmond’s streets with Lincoln that day, reported, “the colored race . . . seemed to spring from the earth. They came, tumbling and shouting, from over the hills and from the water-side.”140

  Overwhelmed by the frenzied welcome, Lincoln stopped in his tracks, not quite certain how to respond. As he stood frozen in place, worshipful African-American admirers reached for his hand or attempted to kiss the hem of his coat. One elderly man, as Porter remembered, “fell upon his knees before the President, and kissed his feet,” prompting Lincoln to plead, “don’t kneel to me. . . . That is not right. You must kneel only to God and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.”141 Charles C. Coffin, who published one of the only accounts of the visit to appear in Lincoln’s lifetime, never mentioned such an exchange. Whether it really occurred or not died with David Dixon Porter. Whether or not any words were exchanged, only with the greatest difficulty did Lincoln and his party inch along the thronged streets toward Union military headquarters at the onetime Confederate “White House.”

  Ignoring the riotous greeting, the New York Herald correspondent on the scene inexplicably focused instead on the humiliation of the “collapsed capital” and the president’s visit to the Davis mansion, where he reported Lincoln nervously swiveling on his Confederate counterpart’s chair and “running his hands frequently through his hair.” The New York Tribune’s Richmond correspondent could not help commenting irreverently: “It is not known whether the occasion reminded Mr. Lincoln ‘of a little story,’ but it is to be presumed that it did.”142 As at Gettysburg, the New York journalists had again missed a story for the ages.

  Word of Lincoln’s self-effacing but triumphal entry into Richmond spread anyway. Thomas Morris Chester, an African-American correspondent working at the scene for Forney’s Philadelphia Press on a story about Richmond’s notorious, now abandoned slave pens, witnessed at least part of the spontaneous demonstration, and later reported that “one enthusiastic negro woman” greeted the president by exclaiming: “I know that I am free, for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.”143 The Boston Journal’s Coffin observed yet another highly emotional scene: “An old negro, removing his hat to him with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.” In response, “The President removed his hat and bowed in silence.” That small but momentous gesture, Coffin at once recognized, “upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries.”144

  Returning to City Point, Lincoln hoped to remain in Virginia long enough to witness the end of the war, but instead, visibly buoyed by his trip to Richmond, returned to his own capital to prepare for peace and Reconstruction. A few days later, on April 9, a chorus of church bells and cannon fire announced to Washington the news of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. In New York, diarist George Templeton Strong read the papers and happily observed: “Even the World and Daily News say that Secessia is now conquered, crushed, subjugated, and under our feet.”145

  The following evening a jubilant crowd swarmed to the White House, called for Lincoln, and pleaded for a speech. As the National Intelligencer reported, “bands played, the howitzers belched forth their thunder, and the people cheered.”146 Haggard but exhilarated, the president eventually appeared at his usual perch inside the mansion’s second-story windo
w, but offered only a few words. He “would not say anything more,” he teased one correspondent on the scene, “lest the reporters should fail to quote him right in the country.”147 In truth Lincoln wanted time to prepare a serious public address on Reconstruction. He would speak more formally, he vowed to the crowd, the following evening, and from the same spot. Lincoln’s appearance had been so unexpected, his comments so terse, that the Herald managed to record and print only a portion of his remarks.

  • • •

  As promised, the president returned to the same window to deliver his formal address on the night of April 11. When he finished the oration, Lincoln turned and thanked Noah Brooks for holding a candle aloft so he could read his lengthy manuscript in the darkness. “That was a pretty fair speech, I think,” he chuckled afterward, “but you threw some light on it.” Brooks, who reported that the crowd greeted Lincoln with “cheer upon cheer, wave after wave of applause,” was surprised that the president’s oration was “longer and of a different character from what most people had expected,” but thought “it was well received.”148 That Brooks stood in for John Nicolay on this occasion surprised none of the wags who whispered that the journalist would soon replace the Teutonic “Cerberus” who had guarded Lincoln’s gate for four years. Nicolay was away on assignment—and about to miss the most cataclysmic news story of the entire war.

  Lawrence Gobright of the Associated Press witnessed the April 11 speech, too. “A large crowd gathered at the White House,” he reported. When Lincoln appeared, “he was greeted with repeated cheers. . . . I had never seen him so quietly happy, as he complacently surveyed the throng before him. It seemed that his tall form had received an additional foot of stature.”149 One last time, the Democratic journalists responded negatively. Typically, the New York World criticized the presidential address for its “vagueness, indecision, and . . . emptiness.” But not every foe in the audience that night would have agreed that the president’s proposals seemed vague. Among the crowd that heard Lincoln call for extending the “elective franchise . . . to the colored man”—that is “the very intelligent,” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers”—was the incurably racist, pro-Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth. “Now, by God, I will put him through.” Booth seethed to a companion at the scene. “That will be the last speech he will ever make.”150

  • • •

  Three nights later, on Good Friday, April 14, Gobright was sitting alone in his office, “having filed, as I thought, my last dispatch,” when shortly after 10 P.M. he heard the sound of rapid footsteps on the stairs, followed by a loud pounding on the door. Suddenly a breathless friend burst in, gasping the unimaginable news: he had been sitting in the audience watching a play at nearby Ford’s Theatre when an assassin attacked the president. A shot was heard. A woman—perhaps Mrs. Lincoln—had screamed. John Wilkes Booth had leapt from the box to the stage, proclaiming revenge. And then the lifeless body of Lincoln had been borne outside and into a house across the street.

  Hours later, when someone explored the contents of the stricken president’s pockets, a wallet was found, stuffed with worthless Confederate currency—souvenirs, no doubt, from his recent triumphant visit to Richmond. Discovered, too, were relics Lincoln had obviously valued just as much: nine carefully cut newspaper clippings, several of which showered him with the kind of press acclaim for which he had battled his entire political life. “There is a general feeling,” the often critical Henry Ward Beecher had said of Lincoln in one of the articles the president so carefully preserved, “that after a term of war he is entitled to a term of peace.”151

  Abraham Lincoln had this favorable clipping in his wallet when he was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

  Gobright rushed to the telegraph office to send off “a short ‘special,’ ” then raced with his friend to the theater a few blocks away. The building was now dark and empty, but the two made their way inside, upstairs, around the balcony, and into the flag-festooned private box where Lincoln had been enjoying a comedy barely an hour earlier. “When we reached the box,” Gobright remembered, “we saw the chair in which the President sat at the time of the assassination; and, although the gas had for the greater part been turned off, we discovered blood”—not to mention the actual gun John Wilkes Booth had used to shoot the president. Gobright next tried to gain access to the house where Lincoln now lay dying, but was refused entry. Instead, as if living a nightmare, the Associated Press bureau chief stumbled back to his office to begin “writing a full account of that night’s dread occurrences.” Though his fingers were “nervous and trembling,” he had a job to do. “I can never forget,” Gobright later admitted, “the alarm, and horror of that night.”152 Gobright’s report appeared the next day as the lead item in the National Intelligencer—the same paper whose attention Lincoln had so vainly sought during his first years in Washington as a congressman.

  Transported by extra editions sped nationwide, then rushed to the streets, the horrifying news reached distant cities, and even the remote countryside, within hours. In Ridgefield, Connecticut, Anna Marie Resseguie, a young woman who had heard Horace Greeley lecture in her hometown ten years earlier, now reported sorrowfully to her diary: “The Tribune comes clad in mourning, announcing the awful intelligence that our president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.”153 In upstate Canandaigua, New York, young Caroline Cowles Richards glanced out of her window just after breakfast on Saturday, April 15. “I . . . saw a group of men listening to the reading of a morning paper,” she recalled, “and I feared from their silent, motionless interest that something dreadful had happened, but I was not prepared to hear of the cowardly murder of our President.”154 And in Philadelphia, rumors of Lincoln’s death prompted Sidney George Fisher’s wife to rush out to purchase a paper. She returned home, Fisher remembered, “and read to me, half crying & in a tremulous voice, the sad & terrible story.” Fearing an outbreak of retribution against Lincoln’s critics, the city’s mayor called out the police to protect the city’s sole, surviving Copperhead paper, The Age, from the possibility of mob attack.155 From one end of the country to the other, North as well as South, Lincoln’s murder and the search for his assassins filled nearly every page of every newspaper. The tragic story would remain the focus of their reports and commentary for weeks. Admitting to the “overburdening grief” that had afflicted the country so soon after Lee’s surrender, even the long-hostile New York World admitted that the “splendor of our triumph is robbed of half its luster.”156

  For more than thirty years, Abraham Lincoln had labored to cultivate and captivate a succession of like-minded newspaper editors in a progression of ever larger cities. He had succeeded in securing their steadfast loyalty, yoking them to his own growing ambitions, and manipulating them on occasion to carry his message to a constantly widening sphere of readers. And for those same thirty years Lincoln had attracted the fierce enmity of opposition newspapermen from Springfield to Washington, all of them determined to thwart him. All the way up to the spring of 1865—even after the triumphant end of the bloodiest war in American history—their disapproving voices continued to fill as much newspaper space as the praise Lincoln had worked so hard all his life to secure.

  Only with the sudden, violent death of the journalists’ greatest subject and canniest manipulator did they finally speak with one voice.

  As Lincoln’s body returned to the White House to lie in state, the three major New York dailies that had covered Lincoln’s national political career so relentlessly—and sometimes, so critically—now adorned their front pages with mournful black trim, posting thickly inked headlines that seemed not only to echo the growing chorus of national lamentation, but to echo each other as well.

  “Our Loss. The Great National Calamity,” bannered the New York Herald.

  “The Great Calamity . . . The Nation’s Loss,” announced the New York Tribune.

  “Our Great Loss . . . The National Calamity,” headlined the New York Times, adding: “Party Di
fferences Forgotten in Public Grief.”157

  They had quarreled bitterly over politics, split on slavery and abolition, squabbled over emancipation and black recruitment, and dueled over issues of war, peace, and indeed, over Lincoln himself, somehow managing, for all their distracting competition, to write the invaluable first draft of Civil War–era history.

  Nothing before had ever truly reconciled them, much less inspired them to speak in one voice. But the war was over, slavery was dying, and Lincoln was dead, a martyr to union and freedom alike. Now, for the first time in so many years that no one seemed able to remember how long their feuds had lasted, James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, and Henry J. Raymond had finally found something about which they could all agree.

  EPILOGUE

  We Shall Not See Again the Like

  T he press survived the Civil War, and its major editors all outlived Abraham Lincoln—although in a few cases, not by much. After a brief period devoted to mourning the assassinated president, they resumed their decades-long quest to assassinate each other.

  Of the three principal New York press titans of the age of Lincoln, Henry Raymond of the New York Times was the first to depart the scene. But not before he enjoyed an enormous literary success in the wake of the president’s assassination. In just ninety days, Raymond updated his 1864 Lincoln campaign biography and republished it under a new title; the repurposed book sold 65,000 copies in just six months. Mary Lincoln, who faulted Raymond for opposing her campaign for a widow’s pension, nonetheless judged the book “the most correct history . . . that has ever been written.”1