34 New York World, May 6, 1863.
35 Carl M. Becker and Ritchie Thomas, eds., Hearth and Knapsack: The Ladley Letters, 1857–1880 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 124, 167.
36 Ex parte Vallandigham, 68 U.S., 243, 244 (1864). For an incisive analysis of the case, see Frank J. Williams, “Civil Liberties in Wartime New York,” in Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln and New York (New York: New-York Historical Society and Philip Wilson, 2009), esp. 172–75.
37 New York Herald, June 12, 1863.
38 Reed W. Smith, Samuel Medary and the Crisis: Testing the Limits of Press Freedom (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 109, 130, 137–39. For the case of Captain Benjamin F. Sells, see Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 59.
39 Albany Atlas & Argus, May 18, 1863; Erastus Corning to Lincoln, with enclosed resolutions, May 15, 1863, ALPLC.
40 OR, series 1, vol. 23, part 2: 381.
41 For a thorough, dramatic overview, see Craig D. Tenney, “To Suppress or Not to Suppress: Abraham Lincoln and the Chicago Times,” Civil War History 27 (September 1981): 248–59.
42 Union League of Chicago to Lincoln, June 6, 1863, ALPLC.
43 Mark W. Delahay to Lincoln, June 19, 1863, ALPLC.
44 Isaac N. Arnold and Lyman Trumbull to Lincoln, June 3, 1861; resolutions of the Illinois House of Representatives, June 4, 1863; J. Young Scammon and William Kelsey Reed (Chicago Union League) to Lincoln, June 6, 1863; Arnold to Lincoln, June 9, 1863. Even the German Union League, a pro-Lincoln organization, broke with their English-speaking counterparts and condemned the suppression. See German Union League to Isaac N. Arnold, June 5, 1863, all ALPLC.
45 New York Herald, June 4, 1863.
46 Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, June 4, 1863, CW, 6:148; OR, series 3, vol. 3: 252.
47 Lincoln to Isaac N. Arnold, May 25, 1864, CW, 7:361. It took a sympathetic newspaper summary to stimulate a coda; New York Times, June 13, 1863.
48 New York Times, June 12, 1863. Another group of Democrats met at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to denounce emancipation, arbitrary arrests, and press suppression. See New York Times, June 12, 1863.
49 The editors were identified by name in “The Rights of the Press,” clipping sent to Lincoln by Elon Comstock, editor of the New York Argus, June 11, 1863, ALPLC.
50 New York Tribune, June 9, 1863.
51 New York Evening Post, June 9, 1863.
52 Elon Comstock to Lincoln, June 11, 1863.
53 Letter to “Editor of the Chronicle,” June 6, 1863, CW 6:251–52.
54 Reply to Erastus Corning and others, [June 12], 1863, CW, 6:263.
55 Ibid., 6:263, 267, 268–69. Lincoln took special note of the case of one particular New Orleans journalist named Louiallier, pointing out that he had defiantly “published a denunciatory newspaper article . . . Gen. Jackson arrested him. A lawyer . . . procured the U.S. Judge [Dominick] Hall to order a writ of Habeas Corpus to release Mr. Louiallier. Gen. Jackson arrested both the lawyer and the judge.”
56 Tribune Co. to John G. Nicolay, June 16, 1863, John Wein Forney to Lincoln, June 14, 1863; Horace Greeley to Nicolay, June 24, 1863, all ALPLC.
57 New York Herald, June 16, 1863.
58 New York World, June 16, 1863.
59 Erastus Corning and others to Lincoln, July 3, 1863, enclosing a printed copy of their June 30 rejoinder to Lincoln’s June 12 letter.
60 See, for example, President Lincoln’s Views. An Important Letter on the Principles Involved in the Vallandigham Case . . . (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1863), and President Lincoln on Vallandigham, The Tribune War Tracts, No. 5 (New York: The Tribune Co., 1863). The newly established pro-Democratic Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, led by anti-emancipationist Samuel F. B. Morse, published Corning’s rejoinder.
61 New York Republican Roscoe Conkling offered the 500,000 circulation number, quoted in Mark E. Neely, Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 280. See also the King & Baird edition cited in the previous note.
62 Lincoln to Arnold, May 25, 1864, ALPLC.
63 New York Times, June 21, 1863.
64 Sidney T. Matthews, “Control of the Baltimore Press During the Civil War,” Maryland Historical Magazine 36 (June 1941): 159–60. Like many such newspapers that took their names decades earlier, the Baltimore Republican was a Democratic paper.
65 Chicago Times, July 23, 1863, reprinted in New York Herald, July 26, 1863. Under the most bitterly disputed terms of the first Conscription Act, draftees were permitted to identify substitutes who were willing to serve in their place, or “purchase” one for $300. The figure was supposedly set to prevent bidding wars, but impoverished draft-age men in urban areas who seldom earned more than $300 a year protested that the system proved that Lincoln had made the conflict into a “rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight”—and worst of all, many white conscripts complained, to free African Americans.
66 New York Times, June 14, 1863.
67 New York Herald, June 9, 1863.
68 Jos. C. G. Kennedy to “Pond,” July 25, 186, undated clipping in the Lincoln Museum Collection, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Kennedy wrote: “The paper, it is generally known became embarrassed by the entire loss of its large southern circulation, consequent on the rebellion which loss has been followed now by the withdrawal of the official advertisements of the govt Departments, which they have hitherto enjoyed under almost every administration, thus cutting off resources by which they have managed to meet their expenditures.”
69 Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, July 2, 1863, CW, 6:313.
70 Washington Chronicle, May 13, 1863; Lincoln to John W. Forney, May 13, 1863, CW, 6:214; Lincoln to William Cullen Bryant, May 14, 1863, CW, 6:216. For more on the reaction to the death of “Stonewall” Jackson, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 109.
71 “Extracts from the Journal of Henry J. Raymond,” Scribner’s Magazine 19 (March 1880), 705.
72 Joseph Hooker to Lincoln, June 26, 1863, ALPLC; Lincoln to Hooker, June 27, 1863, CW, 6:297.
73 Grand jury records are in Record Group 21, Records of the Court of the District of Columbia, Entry 45, Case Papers, Appearances, Trials, Judicials, etc., 1831–1863, National Archives. Harding’s father, Jesper Harding, had founded the paper in 1829 as a pro–Andrew Jackson organ, later converted it into a Whig paper, and turned it over to his son in 1859.
74 Confederate General Campbell Brown, quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 98.
75 Historian Allen C. Guelzo has convincingly redefined the Gettysburg campaign. See ibid.
76 OR, series 1, vol. 36, part 3: 751.
77 James G. Smart, ed., A Radical View: The “Agate” Dispatches of Whitelaw Reid, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1976), 2:68. Lincoln acknowledged his own disappointment in a highly critical July 14 letter to Meade despairing of his failure to follow up his victory, but never sent it. See CW, 327–28.
78 Joan Wenner and Andy Waske, “General Meade’s Press Warfare,” Pennsylvania Heritage 36 (Fall 2010): 10.
79 Steven J. Ramold, Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 25.
80 New York Times, July 6, 1863.
81 Vicksburg Daily Citizen, July 4, 1863 (wallpaper edition); Richmond Examiner, July 8, July 15, 1863.
82 New York Times, July 6, 1863.
83 OR, series 1, vol. 36, part 3: 670; George Meade, [Jr.], The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade Major General United States Army, ed. George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 2:203. Meade devoted a good part of the appendix to his memoir to recounting several examples he had endured of unfair press criticism. The puni
shment took place on June 14, 1864.
84 Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War . . . (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 215–16.
85 William T. Sherman to John Sherman, April 22, 1862, Ellen Sherman to John Sherman, May 7, 1862, William T. Sherman Papers, Library of Congress.
86 William T. Sherman to Lt. Gov. Benjamin Stanton, June 10, 1862, William T. Sherman Papers, Library of Congress.
87 Thomas H. Baker, “Refugee Newspaper: The Memphis Daily Appeal, 1862–1865,” The Journal of Southern History 29 (August 1963): 326.
88 George Sisler, “The Arrest of a Memphis Daily Appeal War Correspondent on Charges of Treason,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers II (1957): 76–92.
89 See John F. Marszalek, Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press, orig. pub. 1981 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 118–19, 132.
90 Ibid., 135. Another useful summary of the Knox case can be found in John B. Spore, “Sherman and the Press,” Infantry Journal 63 (October 1948): 28–35.
91 Ramold, Across the Divide, 24.
92 Thomas W. Knox to William T. Sherman, OR, series 1, vol. 17: 580.
93 OR, series 1, vol. 24: 234.
94 Albert D. Richardson, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1865), 317; for Richardson’s letters to Gay, especially January 3, 1863, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University.
95 Richardson, The Secret Service, 319–20.
96 Ibid., 320–21.
97 Lincoln’s “Whom it may concern” letter, March 20, 1863, CW, 6:142–43.
98 Ulysses S. Grant to Thomas W. Knox, OR, series 1, vol. 17, part 2: 893.
99 William T. Sherman to Thomas W. Knox, April 7, 1863, OR, series 1, vol. 17, part 2, 894–95.
100 Thomas W. Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field . . . (New York: Blelock & Co., 1865), 256, 260.
101 In addition to Richardson, see Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines . . . (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case & Co., 1865), esp. Chapters 33–46. An excellent recent book is Peter Carlson, Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
102 Richardson, The Secret Service, 362, 369.
103 See Sydney Howard Gay to Lincoln (“friends are exceedingly anxious for their safety”), May 29, 1863, ALPLC; Lincoln to Colonel William H. Ludlow (“ascertain why they are detained”), June 1, 1863, CW, 6:241.
104 Circular, May 20, 1864, OR, series 1, vol. 38, part 4: 272.
105 OR, series 1, vol. 17, part 2: 895–97; Sherman quoted in OR, series 1, vol. 38, part 4: 272.
106 William T. Sherman to the editors of the Memphis Bulletin, October 27, October 28, 1863, in Marszalek, Sherman’s Other War, 171.
107 Lincoln to John M. Schofield, May 27, 1863, CW, 6:234.
108 See James O. Broadhead to Lincoln, July 14, 1863, and Henry T. Blow to Lincoln, July 13, 1863, ALPLC.
109 Lincoln to General John M. Schofield, [July 13, 1863] and July 20, 1863, CW, 6:326, 338. For Schofield’s report to Lincoln, July 14, 1863, see OR, series 1, vol. 22, part 2: 373–74.
110 CW, 6:326, 234
111 Lincoln to John M. Schofield, October 1, 1863, CW, 6:492.
112 Lincoln to Robert T. Lincoln, July 14, 1863, CW, 6:327.
113 Joseph Medill to Horace White, March 5, 1863, ALPLC. The letter was officially written to White, but Medill encouraged his reporter to bring it to Lincoln’s attention. White evidently did so, for the original was later found in Lincoln’s White House files.
114 New York Daily News, July 11, 1863. Newspaper and Seymour quotes from Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker, 2005), 26–27.
115 New York Herald, July 9, July 13, 1863.
116 Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work, 154.
117 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 3:336, 338, 340.
118 James R. Gilmore [Edmund Kirke], Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1898), 170.
119 Charles T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880), 250; Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work, 153–55.
120 Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist, 249; Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, 175–76.
121 Ibid., 249.
122 New York Tribune, July 15, 1863; New York Times, July 16, 1863.
123 Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, 193–95.
124 Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 1:113.
125 Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work, 168.
126 Jerome survived the riots. His daughter Jennie went on to marry an Englishman and give birth to Winston Churchill.
127 New York Times, July 14, 1863; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 635.
128 Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years (Hartford, Conn.: A. S. Hale & Co., 1870), 164–65; New York Times, July 15, 1863.
129 New York Times, July 14, 1863; New York Herald, July 16, 1863; New York Tribune, July 16, 1863.
130 Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863.
131 Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1863.
132 Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863.
133 Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, 199.
134 I was inspired to this conclusion in part by an article about the twenty-first-century trend, as practiced by modern politicians, of bypassing the press and going directly to the people via the Internet. See Frank Bruni, “Who Needs Reporters?,” New York Times (Review section), June 2, 2013.
135 David Wills to Lincoln, November 2, 1863, ALPLC.
136 For the July 7, 1863, impromptu speech, see CW 6:319–20; the three New York papers published slightly different versions in their editions of July 8. For the first draft of the final Gettysburg Address, see CW, 7:17–18.
137 Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: The Century Co., 1895), 285–86.
138 For the August 9, 1863, photographs, see Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs; An Album of Every Known Pose (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 132. For a superb print, see the collection of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, the revered collectors emporium in Chicago. The sitting was arranged not because Lincoln thought he should provide his admirers with a portrait to accompany his upcoming speech at Gettysburg, but because sculptor Sarah Fisher Ames had requested the photographs for use as models in accomplishing her bust portrait of the president. See Harold Holzer, “Seldom Twice Alike: The Changing Faces of Lincoln,” in Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, eds., 1863: Lincoln’s Pivotal Year (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 160–65.
139 This and the continued recollections of John Hay are in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 112–13. For the text of Lincoln’s impromptu remarks at Gettysburg on November 18, 1863, see New York Times, November 20, 1863, CW, 7:16–17.
140 Michael Burlingame, “John Hay Reports on the Events at Gettysburg,” For the People: A Newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association 15 (Fall 2013): 1.
141 Mary D. Russell Young, ed., Men and Memories: Personal Reminiscences by John Russell Young (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), 2.
142 Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865, ed. Dorothy Lamon (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1895), 174. Lamon’s reminiscences, edited by his daughter, are often regarded by historians as inauthentic, or at least shaped to make Lamon look especially influential and close to Lincoln.
143 Ibid.,
173–74. Gabor Boritt searched Lamon’s original manuscript at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and discovered that criticism that the president’s friend originally made himself were reattributed by his daughter to Lincoln for the published edition See Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 178, 354n.
144 Joseph Ignatius Gilbert, “Lincoln in 1861; Lincoln in 1863; Lincoln at Washington; the Assassination,” Nineteenth Annual Convention, National Shorthand Reporters’ Association, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (La Porte, Ind.: Chase & Shepherd, 1971), 134, reprinted in Gilbert, “I Reported the Gettysburg Address,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1978. The author is grateful to AP veteran Richard Pyle for sharing “A Meeting at Gettysburg,” his original typescript for a 2010 article on Gilbert. See Pyle, “Dateline Gettysburg,” America’s Civil War (November 2010): 30–37.
145 The Gilbert text is in CW, 7:19–20. Young added a memorable phrase at the end. He had heard Lincoln say “this nation under God,” and though it is possible he did not find the phrase in the president’s manuscript—precisely which manuscript Lincoln read from remains unknown—Gilbert placed it in his dispatch. It was subsequently accepted in all standard printings of the speech—including copies later written out by Lincoln himself.
146 Burlingame, “John Hay Reports on the Events at Gettysburg,” 5.
147 Quoted in Harold Holzer, “ ‘Thrilling Words’ or ‘Silly Remarks’: What the Press Said About the Gettysburg Address,” Lincoln Herald 90 (Winter 1988): 145.
148 Ibid., 144.
149 Entry in John Hay’s diary, November 8, 1863, in Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House, 110.
150 Quoted in Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, 142. For an excellent new account of press reaction to the Gettysburg Address, see Jared Peatman, The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), Chapter 2, “ ‘The Luckless Sallies of That Poor President Lincoln’: Responses to the Gettysburg Address, 1863,” 32–71.
151 Richmond Enquirer, November 27, 1863, reprinted in Peatman, The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 32.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 87