55 List of “Political Prisoners at Fort Lafayette,” New York Times, September 24, 1861; OR, series 2, vol. 2: 802. McMaster gained his release after taking the oath of allegiance on October 23, 1861.
56 Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 124.
57 OR, series 2, vol. 2: 771–72. Wall served twenty days; he was released on September 24 after taking the oath of allegiance.
58 Potsdam-based U.S. attorney William A. Dart had complained to Secretary of State Seward that Flanders continued to publish incendiary anti-Union editorials after the Post Office tried banning the paper from the mails. See OR, series 2, vol. 2: 938, 941.
59 New York Times, September 26, 1861.
60 For a year, Van Evrie continued to seek relief so he could publish freely. See Van Evrie Horton & Co. to William H. Seward, January 23, 1862, ALPLC.
61 Brooklyn Eagle, September 7, 1861.
62 American Annual Cyclopaedia . . . 1861, 330.
63 Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), 301–2. Cincinnati Gazette report quoted in Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 224–25.
64 OR, series 2, vol. 2: 377.
65 Quoted in Richmond Daily Dispatch, August 22, 1861. See also Manber and Dahlstrom, Lincoln’s Wrath, 119–21. The Manber-Dahlstrom book is generally an overheated, one-sided condemnation of Lincoln’s “dictatorial” policies on many fronts; but the writers evidenced careful research even if they reached extreme and generally indefensible conclusions. See also Bangor Democrat, April 18, 1861, in Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him, 257; New Hampshire account published in the Brooklyn Eagle, August 13, 1861; Marcellus Emory letter to the Brooklyn Eagle, August 16, 1861.
66 New York Times, August 20, 1861; Michael J. Connolly, “Irresistible Outbreaks Against Tories and Traitors: The Suppression of New England Antiwar Sentiment in 1861,” in The Battlefield and Beyond: Essays on the American Civil War, ed. Clayton E. Jewett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).
67 New York Times, August 4, August 27, 1861.
68 See Jeffrey A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131.
69 William Howard Russell to John T. Delane, March 26, 1861, in Martin Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 24.
70 New York Times, September 8, 1861; Smith, War and Press Freedom, 131.
71 New York Times, September 8, 1861.
72 OR, series 2, vol. 2, 221, order of February 14, 1862; William H. Seward to Lincoln, April 22, 1861, ALPLC. Seward reported that Cameron’s order had been “rescinded, for the present,” before the suspensions had “become public.” For an example of Interior Department enforcement intervention, see Albany Evening Journal, August 26, 1861.
73 Abrams, “The Jeffersonian,” 272–75.
74 Swindler, “The Southern in Missouri, 1861–1864,” 400.
75 John Wein Forney to Nathaniel Banks, October 14, 1861, copy in John Russell Young Papers, Library of Congress.
76 William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, orig. pub. 1885 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 138.
77 Murat Halstead, “Recollections and Letters of General Sherman,” The Independent 51 (June 15, 1889): 1611–12. This episode is grippingly retold by John F. Marszalek in Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press, orig. pub. 1981 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 37–38.
78 Cincinnati Commercial, December 11, 1861. Sherman’s wife sent the undated New York Times clipping to her brother-in-law, Senator John Sherman, on December 10, 1861. See also Marszalek, Sherman’s Other War, 78–79.
79 Sherman, Memoirs, 234–35.
80 Henry W. Halleck to William T. Sherman, December 18, 1861, in ibid., 234–35.
81 Murat Halstead, “Some Reminiscences of Mr. Villard,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews 23 (January 1901): 62–63.
82 George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story: The War for the Union . . . (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887), 198.
83 George B. McClellan to Simon Cameron, December 9, 1861, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 142.
84 Henry J. Raymond to Simon Cameron, December 13, 1861, copy in Henry J. Raymond Papers, New York Public Library.
85 Quintus C. Wilson, “Voluntary Press Censorship during the Civil War,” Journalism Quarterly 19 (September 1942): 251–61; Michael Hussey, “The Great Censorship Debate,” in Discovering the Civil War (n.a., Washington: Foundation for the National Archives, 2010), 136. The other papers included the Cincinnati Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Journal, and the Washington Evening Star.
86 Testimony by Lawrence Gobright, January 24, 1862, and Adams S. Hill, January 22, 1862, before the House Judiciary Committee, National Archives.
87 George B. McClellan to Chief of Staff Randolph B. Marcy, January 29, 1862, in Sears, ed., Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 160; Robert E. Lee to Mary Lee, October 7, 1861, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), 80.
88 For the best account of the Trent Affair, see Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 71–97.
89 New York Times, December 8, 1861.
90 A wonderfully vivid account of the crisis, with an emphasis on the ping-ponging debates in London and Washington, can be found in Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010), esp. 172–98. Duke of Newcastle, the secretary of state for the colonies, quoted on p. 180.
91 Russell to John T. Delane, January 27, 1862, Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 221.
92 New York Times, November 25, 1861
93 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 2, 1861.
94 Harriet A. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 2:616.
95 Quoted in Hussey, “The Great Censorship Debate,” 136.
96 Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas, General Orders No. 10, February 4, 1862, OR, series 3, vol. 1: 879.
97 Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War with the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 1–2.
98 OR series 2, vol. 2: 787–88. See also Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 28. Edwin Stanton to General John Wool, June 30, 1862, National Archives Record Group 197, M473 Reel 79. I am grateful to Walter Stahr for bringing the handwritten order to my attention. See also, “The Arrest of C. C. Fulton,” New York Times, July 2, 1862.
99 Louis Prang and others, “Petition to Congress to secure the freedom of the Press,” dated in endorsement December 24, 1861, and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, National Archives.
100 The American Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1862 . . . (New York: D. Appleton, 1863), 480; Michael Hussey, “The Great Censorship Debate,” in Discovering the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for the National Archives, 2010), 136–38.
101 Testimony by S. P. Hanscom, February 17, 1862, “Allegations of Government Censorship of Telegraphic News Reports During the Civil War.” Record of the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, 1862, original documents in the National Archives, LexisNexis copies of the originals at the Columbia University Library.
102 Testimony by Adams Hill, January 22, 1862, and by D. W. Bartlett, February 19, 1862, ibid.
103 Testimony by Samuel Wilkeson, January 24, 1862, ibid.
104 Testimony by William Mackellar [sic], June 17, 1862, ibid.
105 Testimony by Lawrence Gobright, February 5, 1862, ibid.
106 Testimony by Frederick W. Seward, February 19, 1862, ibid.
107 Lincoln’s Annu
al Message to Congress, December 3, 1861, CW, 5:53.
108 John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1881), 1:366. Forney asserted that Wikoff had first proven his influence with the Herald by improving the paper’s relationship for a time with former president Buchanan.
109 James Gordon Bennett to Lincoln, October 22, 1862, ALPLC.
110 Diary entry, November 3, 1861, in Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 162; second entry in William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954), 567.
111 Henry Wikoff to Lincoln, December 3, 1861, ALPLC. It is not impossible to imagine that the clever Wikoff wrote this letter after the fact, dating it December 3, to provide him with an alibi should he be accused of purloining the Annual Message in advance.
112 Ben: Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1886), 2:143.
113 Michael Burlingame discovered previously unknown manuscript sources mentioned here (including an 1864 note from New York Tribune assistant editor Sydney Howard Gay), as well as the long-suppressed entry from Orville Browning’s original diary (the sanitized edition was edited by Theodore Calvin Pease and published in two volumes in 1927), to reach the conclusion that Mary sold the 1861 Annual Message. Given Mary’s gullible reaction to a range of flatterers, it seems entirely plausible that she was indeed responsible for facilitating its leak. Whether or not she actually received a financial payoff cannot be proven. See Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2:273–77. Mary Lincoln’s biographers have not accepted her complicity. See, for example, Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 166–67.
114 Lincoln to James Gordon Bennett, September 28, 1861, CW, 4:539.
115 Mary Lincoln to James Gordon Bennett, October 25, 1861, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 110–11.
116 Anthony Trollope, North America, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), 2:427.
117 Samuel Wilkeson testimony, January 24, 1862, National Archives.
118 Quoted in Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 323.
119 Final Report of the House Committee, House Report No. 64, 37th Congress, 2nd Session, National Archives; Record Group 233; see also Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1863).
120 American Annual Cyclopaedia for 1862 . . . 480–81.
121 OR, series 2, 2: 246. See also Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 154–55.
122 Stanton letter and endorsed reply, January 24, 1862, in Edwin M. Stanton Papers, Library of Congress, and CW, 5:110.
123 American Cyclopaedia for 1862, 480.
124 Ben: Perley Poore recollection in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed,. Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing, Co., 1886), 227.
TWELVE: SLAVERY MUST GO TO THE WALL
1 William A. Croffut, “Lincoln’s Washington: Recollections of a Journalist Who Knew Everybody,” Atlantic Monthly 145 (January 1930): 56–58. The founder of the organizing entity for the lecture series was none other than Lewis Clephane, editor of the administration’s official organ, the National Republican. Other speakers were to include Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. See also Croffut, An American Procession, 1855–1914: A Personal Memoir of Famous Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 56–64. Croffut also held an administration patronage post as a Treasury Department stenographer.
2 Ibid., 58.
3 Clipping in the John Hay scrapbook, John Hay Library, Brown University (photocopy in author’s collection).
4 James R. Gilmore, “Lincoln: Personal Reminiscences of Him by James R. Gilmore,” New York Times, October 8, 1898. The new magazine was to be edited by Charles Godfrey Leland.
5 James R. Gilmore [Edmund Kirke], Among the Pines; or, The South in Secession-time (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1862).
6 James R. Gilmore [Edmund Kirke], Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1898), 42–46.
7 Ibid.
8 Croffut, “Lincoln’s Washington,” 63.
9 Joel Benton, ed., Greeley on Lincoln . . . (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1893), 75.
10 Paraphrased highlights of Greeley’s lecture appeared in the Washington Evening Star and the New York Times, January 4, 1862. For the second part of the quote (no full and reliable transcript survives), see Michael F. Conlin, “The Smithsonian Abolition Lecture Controversy: The Clash of Antislavery Politics with American Science in Wartime Washington,” Civil War History 46 (December 2000): 305–10.
11 Croffut, “Lincoln’s Washington,” 59.
12 James E. Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947); New York Herald, February 5, 1862.
13 Julian quoted in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 60; Lincoln’s remark to Byington in Harry J. Maihafer, The General and the Journalists: Ulysses S. Grant, Horace Greely, and Charles Dana (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1998), 129.
14 Russell to Mowbray Morris, March 15, 1862, in Martin Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 230.
15 Russell to John T. Delane, January 16, 1862, Russell to Mowbray Morris, February 16, in ibid., 218, 224, 229.
16 Mowbray Morris to William Howard Russell, March 15, 1862, in ibid., xlv.
17 William Howard Russell to Mowbray Morris, April 4, 1862, in ibid., 237; Elihu Washburne to Lincoln, June 20, 1861, ALPLC. Russell’s letter to Stanton is in Crawford, ed. William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 235. Amanda Foreman asserted that Russell had written to Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and “four generals . . . all without success,” in A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010), 235. No letters from Russell survive in the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.
18 Ben: Perley Poore recollection in Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 229.
19 Russell to Charles Sumner, August 31, 1861; “innumerable Senators” quoted in Foreman, A World on Fire, 235; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1863), 600; Lincoln to Seward, December 19, 1861, CW, 5:73.
20 Russell to John T. Delane, December 13, 1861, in Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 204. See also William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1863).
21 Ward quoted in Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1959–1971), 2:3n2.
22 Special Message to Congress, March 6, 1862, CW, 5:144–45.
23 Nicolay journal entry, March 9, 1862, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 73.
24 Ibid.
25 Lincoln to Henry J. Raymond, March 9, 1862, CW, 5:152–53.
26 Henry Raymond to Lincoln, March 15, 1862, ALPLC.
27 New York Tribune, March 8, 1862.
28 Lincoln to Horace Greeley, March 24, 1862, CW, 5:169; Greeley to Lincoln, March 24 [?], 1862, ALPLC.
29 Greeley to Lincoln, March 24 [?], 1862, ALPLC.
30 Douglass’ Monthly, April 1862.
31 Greeley to Lincoln, May 24 [?], 1862, ALPLC.
32 Raymond wrote to the president on New York State Assembly Chamber letterhead in the early days of the session to ask a “personal favor” in behalf of a “personal fr
iend” who hoped to continue in his role as an army surgeon even though he had reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-two. See Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, January 16, 1862, ALPLC.
33 George A. Townsend, unpublished scrapbook entry, cited in J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 208; Townsend, Rustics in Rebellion: A Yankee Reporter on the Road to Richmond, 1861–65, orig. pub. 1866 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 114–15.
34 New York Times, May 16, 1862.
35 For McClellan correspondence, see OR, series 1, vol. 11, part 3: 194, 214; New York Times, June 1, 1862.
36 Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1862.
37 New York Herald, August 25, 1862.
38 Henry J. Raymond, “Excerpts from the Journal of Henry J. Raymond,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (January 1880): 419–20. The story also appears in Harold Holzer and Craig L. Symonds, eds., The New York Times Complete Civil War (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2010), 13. The author is grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Craig Symonds on the research and writing of this story in our 2010 book.
39 New York Times, August 13, 1861.
40 “A Peaceable Man” [Nathaniel Hawthorne], “Chiefly About War-Matters,” Atlantic Monthly 10 (July 1862): 47, 58. In the suppressed section of his article, Hawthorne described Lincoln’s entrance this way: “In lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom, (as being about the homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable,) it was impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe.” See Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Thomas Woodson, Claude M. Simpson, and L. Neal Smith, Vol. 22 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994): 410–15. Hawthorne had served as consul to both Liverpool and Manchester during the Pierce administration.
41 Quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Random House, 2004), 350.
42 Southern Illustrated News, December 13, 1862; New York Times, May 31, 1862.
43 Lloyd Dunlap, “President Lincoln and Editor Greeley,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 5 (June 1948): 108.
44 Horace Greeley to Samuel Wilkeson, April 8, 1862, Rabb Collection archive.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 85