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

by Harold Holzer

  Raymond’s political career proved less rewarding. Not long after taking his seat in Congress in December 1865, he became embroiled in the toxic debate over the impeachment of Lincoln’s White House successor, Andrew Johnson. Ever the loyal organization man, Raymond aligned himself with the small group of conservative House Republicans who refused to abandon the accidental president accused of thwarting Lincoln’s plans to extend African-American rights. Even though the full House voted to impeach and the Senate acquitted Johnson after a trial, Raymond found himself ostracized by the progressive wing of his party, serving on in Washington with diminished influence, his command of the Times notwithstanding. He refused renomination for a second term, returned to his newspaper full-time, and in 1867 declined President Johnson’s grateful offer of the job of minister to Austria.

  When Raymond began experiencing “a paralytic tendency in the muscles of his right hand and wrist” the following year, the hardworking editor ignored the symptoms. On June 18, 1869, just a few hours after holding a pair of late-night meetings—one, appropriately enough, devoted to politics, the other to the paper—Raymond collapsed in the hallway of his Manhattan home, the victim of what was described as an attack of “apoplexy.” He died early the following morning, only forty-nine years old. “It is beyond our power to estimate how greatly his editorial labors have influenced public opinion,” his grieving wartime correspondent John Swinton declared in an obituary rushed into print the day after Raymond’s death, “ . . . but we believe that the scope and measure of his influence, as well as its beneficent character and results, have been worthy of journalism in the most exalted view of its purpose.” Writing in the Independent thirty-one years later, Swinton reappraised Raymond as “a man of many talents rather than of special genius.” Genius or not, the editor left a formidable estate valued at $450,000.2

  • • •

  Among the wartime big three, James Gordon Bennett of the pro-Democratic New York Herald alone remained maddeningly independent from, yet at the same time enormously influential on, organized politics. He never regretted his decision to refuse Lincoln’s 1865 offer to send—or, as some saw it, to banish—him overseas as American minister to France. But within months of the assassination, he lost his appetite for running the daily paper he had created, and in 1866 turned over its reins to his playboy son James Jr., and retired to his upper Manhattan mansion. On occasion, he paid a sentimental visit to his newsroom or contributed an editorial, perhaps aware that his anointed heir had no intention of devoting the kind of single-minded energy to the enterprise that its founder had. Inevitably, the Herald began a slow but irreversible decline. Uncertain that his hard-won legacy would endure, the elder Bennett died of a stroke at his Washington Heights home on June 1, 1872, at the age of seventy-six. His longtime adversary Horace Greeley served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

  “The Herald was his creation,” Bennett’s paper noted in tribute at his death, “the embodiment of his long cherished idea of justice, owing allegiance to no party and laboring singly for the advancement and happiness of the people.” Left unmentioned was the founding editor’s long opposition to emancipation, black equality, and nearly all Republicans. Even the Tribune acknowledged: “He had no aim other than to make a great and lucrative newspaper.”3 That Bennett’s enterprise had proven lucrative neither Democrats nor Republicans could doubt. He died the wealthiest of the New York big three.

  • • •

  The Tribune’s Greeley never found—and likely never sought—cures for either his lust for political office or his attraction to lost causes. In 1867, in one of the last and most famous instances of his obsession with ill-advised crusades, he joined twenty other prominent men who signed a $100,000 bail bond to free the imprisoned symbol of slavery and disunion: former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Long a staple in caricatures as the quintessential progressive abolitionist, Greeley now found his name featured on the mass-produced Bail Bond of Mr. Jefferson Davis . . . With all the Signatures Thereto, a best-selling print in the South that helped elevate the leader of the onetime “slaveocracy” to the status of Lost Cause icon.4 Pouncing on an opportunity to humble their suddenly vulnerable rival, fellow journalists unleashed a fresh torrent of criticism. Greeley now seemed, at least to some, nothing less than a traitor, and Tribune subscriptions plummeted. Undaunted, Greeley published his autobiography in 1868—an excellent account of his early life that offered only a cursory exploration of the Civil War years or his complex relationship with Abraham Lincoln. Beginning in 1870, Greeley gave employment to Lincoln’s gifted onetime assistant secretary (and unofficial press aide) John Hay.

  During these years, Greeley unsuccessfully sought Republican nominations for Congress and governor, and although he secured the party’s nod to run for New York State comptroller in 1869, he lost the election to an incumbent Democrat. Three years later, in 1872, opposed as ever to second terms for presidents, the editor broke with the country’s greatest living war hero, President Ulysses S. Grant, and challenged him for the White House as the candidate of a new Liberal Republican Party. In so doing, Greeley accepted as well the endorsement of the Democrats whose policies he had opposed for three decades. A mass-produced campaign print of the day showed the Greek philosopher Diogenes discovering in Greeley his long-sought honest man—actually a precise, unacknowledged copy of a decades-old design that had earlier shown Diogenes discovering Honest Abe Lincoln. Such tributes did little to help the Tribune editor against the popular Grant. The electorate rejected Greeley by a wide margin, 56–44 percent; he lost his home state of New York by more than fifty thousand votes.

  Crushed by the stinging defeat, and overwhelmed by the sudden death of his beloved wife just before Election Day, Greeley described himself as “the most utter, hopelessly wretched and undone of all who ever lived.”5 Shortly after writing those agonized words, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a Pleasantville, New York, sanitarium. There he died just a few weeks later at age sixty-one. He thus became the first and only White House candidate who failed to live until the electoral votes in his contest were officially cast. As a result, also uniquely, he earned not a single electoral ballot in his race for president. It marked a bizarre and tragic end for the eternally independent and unpredictable “philosopher” whose sudden demise was, in a way, no less surprising than his extended period of fame, success, and political influence.

  “Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley were the most thorough[ly] American of all our leading characters in this generation,” the celebrated minister Theodore Cuyler reminded readers after the editor’s death. “Both sprang from obscurity; both were cradled in poverty; both worked their way up by sheer brain-work; both were excessively simple, democratic, and homespun in their manners and dress; both were awkward in gait; both abounded in quaint dry humor.” Cuyler noted, too, a “sad resemblance in the tragic end of the two great patriots and philanthropists. The brain of one was pierced by a pistol ball; the brain of the other was pierced by an acute and deadly grief that killed as surely as any bullet ever fired. . . . We shall not soon see again the like of the great president and the great journalist.”6 Joining assorted dignitaries at Greeley’s funeral were surviving newspaper contemporaries like Manton Marble of the World, George Jones, Henry Raymond’s founding partner at the Times, and even Greeley’s onetime mentor and longtime adversary, Thurlow Weed.

  Shortly before his final breakdown, Greeley scrawled a last will transferring his $30,000 worth of shares in his paper along with other assets to his daughter. The Tribune Association then awarded controlling interest in the daily to staff editor Whitelaw Reid, and the paper continued to publish for nearly a half century more.

  Today, two seated bronze statues of Horace Greeley still greet passersby in neighborhoods where the Tribune once flexed its journalistic muscle: John Quincy Adams Ward’s sculpture in City Hall Park just north of what used to be Newspaper Row, dedicated in 1916; and Alexander Doyle’s 1894 statue for the n
eighborhood where his paper moved after the Tribune founder’s death—but which ironically came to be known as Herald Square.

  • • •

  With a few exceptions, most of the other editors who made their mark during the age of Lincoln maintained their expectations of lifelong political reward before fading into obscurity, beginning with both the friendly and hostile editors from his own hometown.

  Until five years after the assassination, Lincoln’s very first press supporter, Simeon Francis, founding editor of the Illinois State Journal, clung to the patronage job with which Lincoln had rewarded him for his political loyalty early in the war: army paymaster for Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. Francis finally retired in 1870 with a handsome half-salary pension. He died two years later in Oregon in his seventy-sixth year.

  His successor, scandal-plagued William Bailhache, sold his interest in the Illinois State Journal during the war and later relocated to New Mexico. Undaunted by the scandal that dogged him during the Lincoln years, he resumed his quest for political patronage. President Chester Alan Arthur named him a receiver of public moneys in 1881, but Bailhache left that post in 1885 and later headed farther west, eventually to San Diego, where he returned to the newspaper business. Remaining at Springfield, his onetime partner, Edward L. Baker, maintained his post at the Journal until his retirement from the paper in 1880, and then became U.S. consul at Buenos Aires. Baker died in 1897, Bailhache in 1905.

  It was probably just a coincidence that five days after Lincoln delivered his canonical Gettysburg Address, his chief Springfield newspaper critic, Charles Lanphier of the Illinois State Register, announced that he would “leave the position which I have held for many years only from a desire to engage in other pursuits less conflicting and laborious. To my democratic hosts,” he added, “I bid adieu in an editorial capacity to join them as a private Co-worker” in the battle “for peace, prosperity, and re-union under the Constititution.” In other words, Lanphier left the newspaper business to become a full-time politician. Beginning in 1864, he served two terms as the elected clerk of the Sangamon County Circuit Court, but in 1872 lost a race to become Illinois state treasurer. Lanphier retired that year, but lived on to see the new century, dying in 1903 at the age of eighty-three.7

  In 1974, dramatically changing economic circumstances compelled the two long-opposed independent Springfield dailies to merge into one paper. That year the State Journal-Register debuted, featuring on its new logo a prewar drawing of the man one of its halves had so long touted, and the other had so consistently opposed.8 The paper has published ever since.

  Henry Villard, the onetime Illinois correspondent for German newspapers who later filed such memorable stories about President-elect Lincoln for the New York Herald, and went on to cover the Civil War as a battlefield correspondent for Greeley’s Tribune, afterward became the Washington reporter, then a foreign correspondent for Horace White’s Chicago Tribune. In the 1870s he invested wisely in railroads, and became a wealthy business tycoon. Villard returned to journalism in 1881, buying the New York Evening Post and hiring his onetime boss Horace White as an editor. Villard died at his country estate at Dobbs Ferry in 1900 at the age of sixty-five. His Madison Avenue mansion, designed by the architects McKim, Mead and White before his business empire began to unravel, is today a New York City landmark, part of it the home of the Municipal Art Society. Villard’s superb multivolume memoirs appeared posthumously.

  Chicago newspaper veteran White, who had covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates, broke with his partners at the Chicago Tribune over the 1872 presidential election; White supported Horace Greeley. Following Greeley’s defeat and death, White joined Villard in New York to help run the Evening Post, becoming editor-in-chief in 1899. After retiring four years later, White served on a New York state financial commission. He died at age eighty-two in 1916 after being run down by an automobile.

  White’s onetime Tribune colleague Dr. Charles H. Ray left the Windy City Republican paper in 1864 and the following year ran afoul of Union military authorities when he tried to open a potentially profitable trade with captured Southern cities in “calico, women’s shoes, stationery & the like,” and was compelled to petition Lincoln to provide authorization. Just two months before his death, the president reluctantly gave Ray permission to trade in noncontraband items, providing he obtained “the approval in writing of the Department commanders . . . and not without.”9 Ray later helped found the Chicago Historical Society. After failing in another business enterprise, he became editor and co-owner of the Chicago Evening Post in 1869, but died the following year at age fifty-nine.10

  The third partner in the Chicago Tribune triumvirate, Joseph Medill, a Grant backer, resumed his role as publisher of the paper after White’s ouster, serving in the post until his death in 1899 at age seventy-five. The founder of one of America’s most enduring newspaper dynasties, two of his grandsons, Joseph “Medill” McCormick and Robert R. McCormick, succeeded him at the Tribune, while another grandson, Joseph Medill Patterson, founded a successful tabloid in New York City, adopting for it the name of that wartime Copperhead journal, the Daily News. Medill’s great-granddaughter, Alicia Patterson, became a newspaper publisher in her own right at Long Island’s Newsday. For years, most of the family newspapers continued their editorial support for the Republican Party.

  James W. Sheahan, late of the pro-Douglas Chicago Times, soldiered on at the Democratic Chicago Post until the month of Lincoln’s death, when surprisingly he joined the paper he had spent years noisily contradicting: the Chicago Tribune. Sheahan went on to publish an 1868 history of Chicago, and several years later produced one of the first books about the 1871 fire. In 1883, not long after co-authoring a pamphlet about Chicago with his old press rival and current employer, Joseph Medill, Sheahan died at age fifty-nine.11

  Sheahan’s pistol-packing, Civil War–era Chicago Times successor, Copperhead editor Wilbur Storey, continued for a decade and a half to run the paper that Lincoln’s army had briefly shut down in 1863, selling his interest only when failing health forced his retirement in 1877. The following year, he suffered a crippling stroke, and spent the last years of his life an invalid. Storey died at age sixty-four in 1884.

  • • •

  As for the other reigning New York editors of the Civil War period, William Cullen Bryant proved one of the few who walked away voluntarily from the newspaper business with his passion for political journalism subdued and his literary reputation intact. After serving for half a century as editor and part-owner of the Evening Post, the graybeard poet retired from the paper in 1878—but not before returning to his first love and publishing new free verse translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. During a Central Park ceremony that same year honoring the Italian journalist-hero Giuseppe Mazzini, however, Bryant slipped and fell. He died of complications a few weeks later at the age of eighty-three. His New York Post, which has been continuously published since its founding by Alexander Hamilton in 1803, is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who ironically bears far more resemblance in political philosophy and journalistic style to James Gordon Bennett than to William Cullen Bryant.

  Albany editor and political boss Thurlow Weed, who owned nothing in New York City, it was mockingly said, except Henry Raymond, retired from both journalism and politics in 1867. Like Raymond, Weed’s political influence had plummeted after his resistance to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. He spent his last five years living quietly in Manhattan, where he died in 1882 at the age of eighty-five. His autobiography, edited by his daughter and a valuable source for scholars, appeared two years later.12

  Just after announcing his support for Samuel J. Tilden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1876, Manton Marble abruptly sold the declining New York World to William Henry Hurlbut, a onetime Henry Raymond protégé, and retired from journalism in May—one step away from bankruptcy.13 That same year, Marble was widely mentioned as a candidate for governor of New York, but failed to secure the De
mocratic nomination. His name resurfaced in 1885 as a potential nominee for U.S. secretary of the treasury after the Democrats returned to power under Grover Cleveland. When that prize eluded him, too, Marble was considered for a prime consular post, but again the former editor was passed over. Marble ultimately relaunched himself as a “publicist” in London, dying there in 1917 at the age of eighty-two.14

  James Watson Webb, the hot-tempered former editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, continued serving as U.S. minister to Brazil, the post to which Lincoln had appointed him, until 1869. Webb then returned to New York, dying there in 1884 at the age of eighty-two, convinced to the end that the North would have won the Civil War sooner had Lincoln made him a major general when the fighting first broke out.

  Copperhead editor William Prime continued to operate his once virulently anti-Lincoln New York Journal of Commerce until 1893, when he sold the paper to William Dodsworth. Under the new name of The Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, the paper returned to its business roots and published without interruption into the 1990s.

  The equally anti-Lincoln editor-politician Benjamin Wood, who, like James Gordon Bennett broke with General George McClellan in 1864 over the Democratic Party’s peace platform, left the House of Representatives after three terms in 1865, served briefly in the New York State Senate, and returned for another two-year term in Congress in 1881. All the while, he continued at the helm of the New York Daily News until his death in 1900 at the age of eighty. The original Daily News went out of business shortly thereafter.