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

by Harold Holzer

  Such alliances were often inspired by motives other than a shared philosophy of government. To maintain loyalty among friendly journalists, those holding political office routinely doled out such incentives as paid advertising, lucrative printing orders, and publicly financed subscriptions, not to mention well-paid nourishment from the patronage trough and choice seats at the tables of power. Publishers in turn provided the officials whom they favored with unlimited news space and unbridled political support. The inviolable line that today separates politics from the print press—at least as an ideal—had yet to be drawn. Rather, the worlds of politics and the press functioned in tandem, within a system of widely accepted mutual interdependence in which each fueled the success of the other, sought the destruction of the opposition, and often encouraged practitioners to occupy both professional spheres at once.

  Functioning as more than merchants of information, journalists became part of well-lubricated political operations that disseminated opinion-laced government and campaign news and organized the party apparatus to pull voters to the polls on Election Day. In the process, the newspaper business, once a mere trade, blossomed into a major American industry, although, importantly, never a truly national one.21 As one early historian of the press put it, the notion of a “[news]paper despotism”—the rule of a “[London] Times Jupiter in America”—remained inconceivable in a nation of disparate state and regional interests and locally managed political organizations.22

  It comes as no surprise that on one of his visits to America, British writer Anthony Trollope found himself appalled by what he read in this country’s newspapers. They were not only “ill-written, ill-printed, ill-arranged, and in fact . . . unreadable,” he lamented, but also unreliable. “Justice and right judgment, are out of the question with them. A political party end is always in view, and political party warfare in America admits of any weapons.”23 A German visitor named Ludwig Gall experienced a similar shock when he sought an understanding of the raging debate over Governor DeWitt Clinton’s proposed Erie Canal. One evening, he overheard New Yorkers arguing about the project, and left the debate hoping that the next day’s press would provide clarity. At a “municipal bourse” the following morning, Gall eagerly “paged the New York newspapers,” but to no avail. “To my amazement,” he confessed, “I found for Clinton in the New-York Columbian and against Clinton in the National Advocate,” and in “the same language my dinner companions had used.” Gall remained perplexed until he ran into a French acquaintance who cautioned him: “Believe nothing a newspaper . . . says that in any way might support a party or a person.”24

  These English, German, and French visitors were on to something important: American politicians and publishers had by then settled on a journalistic dynamic that stressed opinion over news, and party over public interest. The antique values of political independence and journalistic impartiality, if they ever really existed, vanished with the rise of political parties and the development of steam-driven Napier printing presses fast enough to produce some five thousand printed pages every hour. Nothing comparable to this rapid, rancid brand of journalism would ever be seen again—until the era of undisguised television advocacy as exemplified in the twenty-first century by Fox News and MSNBC (which despite their own blaring partisanship inspire no more than 50 percent turnouts in presidential elections and an ever-decreasing number of voters willing to align with the Democrats or Republicans—the opposite of the stimulating effect the press exerted on voters and voting a century and a half ago).

  By the 1850s, the era that welcomed so-called Lightning Presses capable of four times the hourly production of the Napier machines, almost no independent voters were left in America, only Democrats and Whigs (most of whom later became Republicans), and nearly all of them avid readers of newspapers. Kept in a perpetual state of political arousal by journalism, and further stimulated by election cycles that drew voters to the polls several times each year, not just on the first Tuesdays of November, the overwhelming majority regarded politics with a fervor that approached religious awakening, evoking interest characteristic of modern sports or entertainment. With only a few notable exceptions, few unaligned newspapers prospered.

  Nor were their readers’ increasingly rigid political affiliations hard to decipher. There was no such thing as a true secret ballot during this period of our history. Until 1849, for example, voters in Lincoln’s Illinois chose their candidates by voice votes fully audible to their neighbors. Later, adult white men—by and large the only citizens eligible to participate in elections (women remained disenfranchised and black voting rights, rare and impermanent)—made their Election Day choices by openly depositing preprinted, often gaudily colored, paper ballots, clearly labeled for one party or another, into transparent glass bowls. Another important mark of political belief was visibly conveyed by the newspaper one took by mail, or toted through the streets. If, say, a New York reader of the 1860s carried the Tribune around town, he was clearly a progressive Republican. If he bundled the Daily News in his arms, he was a conservative Democrat. In Chicago, a subscription to that city’s Tribune similarly identified one as a Republican; taking the Times meant you favored the Democrats. Voters embraced their newspapers to tout their convictions in much the same way they wore campaign ferrotypes and medals on their coats—or today affix bumper stickers to their vehicles. As historian Elizabeth R. Varon has put it: “The function of antebellum newspapers, which were organs of political parties, was to make partisanship seem essential” to men’s lives and identities.25

  • • •

  To the modern reader, the notion of Abraham Lincoln as publisher of a foreign language weekly that he was unable to read fluently has a slightly absurd ring to it, more in line with his legendary sense of humor than with his seldom acknowledged aspiration to control the press. In fact, much as he yearned to communicate with crucially important foreign-born voters, Lincoln was no linguist. In one hapless effort to boost his appeal to the most important voting bloc in his region, he actually enrolled briefly in a German course in Springfield. But according to a dentist who attended class with him, “Lincoln told so many stories that we laughed at them instead of studying the lessons.”26

  German instruction may have been a laughing matter to Lincoln, but German voting power, and the ability of the German language press to reach this crucial and expanding electorate, was deadly serious business. By 1860, Lincoln’s new publishing partner, Theodore Canisius, estimated that sixty-seven daily and weekly German language newspapers already existed in the Northwest.27 Their cultivation was but one aspect of the broader goal of befriending politically compatible publishers in outposts across the nation, wherever voters could be converted and coaxed to the polls by an editorial call to arms or, conversely, inspired to angry retribution by a scathing attack on the opposition. In this atmosphere, traditional salesmanship and manipulation—what today we call public relations or marketing—was but one weapon in a smart politician’s arsenal.

  As noted, the business deal that turned politician Lincoln into publisher Lincoln was far from unique, however assiduously he shielded it from public view. Some of his contemporaries boasted equally strong, and far more visible, connections to individual newspapers. Some, like former congressman Caleb Blood Smith of Indiana and Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, both of whom later became members of Lincoln’s presidential cabinet, had served as influential editors years before they held public office. (Cameron actually won his U.S. Senate seat by defeating another newspaperman destined to work closely with President Lincoln: John Wein Forney.) Maryland leader Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s future postmaster general, could trace his political roots to a journalist father who operated the pro-Jackson Washington Globe. Wartime minister to Russia Cassius Marcellus Clay served early in his career as both a Kentucky state legislator and as publisher of a local antislavery newspaper called the True American—more than once enduring mob attacks for daring to advocate freedom in a slave state. An
d Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, commenced his professional life as a compositor for a newspaper in Maine.28 While Lincoln became known as “The Rail Splitter” for his early labors with an ax, Hamlin earned a title of his own that proudly reflected his youthful origins in publishing: “The Type Sticker.”

  Unlike Smith, Cameron, and Hamlin, all of whom quit journalism for politics, as well as Lincoln, who concealed his own late involvement in publishing, a number of publishers who craved elective or appointed office never entirely abandoned their newspaper careers merely because they held down government jobs. Instead, they played the roles of publisher and politician concurrently, to little surprise, much less outrage, from a public that largely perceived no conflict in such arrangements. The powerful New York Republican chairman Thurlow Weed, for one, controlled Empire State politics for years while—or as some said, by—running an influential Albany daily. Horace Greeley sought or served in elective office several times while publishing his New York Tribune—even though he later unctuously termed it “impossible for a journalist to reconcile independence in his profession with office-holding.”29 Greeley’s journalistic competitor, Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, functioned as both an elected and a party leader without ever relinquishing editorial duties at his newspaper. Then there was the tangled case of Fernando Wood, the Democratic mayor of New York at the outbreak of the Civil War, who responded to the secession crisis by proposing that his city quit the Union, too, the better to preserve its profitable trade with the South. Wood owned no newspaper of his own to ballyhoo his treacherous proposals—at least not technically. Formal title to the daily that most vigorously cheered his call for municipal independence, the anti-Lincoln New York Daily News,I resided officially with Benjamin Wood—the mayor’s brother, who later sought and won election as a congressman (as did Fernando as well, after losing his bid for another term in the mayoralty). However corrupt such combinations may seem by modern standards, the system seldom aroused questions, much less challenges, in the Lincoln era—except, of course, from the opposition press.

  As these crossover relationships demonstrate, politicians of the nineteenth century did far more than court the press, and the press in turn did more than merely report on politics and politicians. The development of America’s two-party system brought with it the birth of the one-party newspaper. Their intertwined, mutually enriching, potentially conflicted relationships dominated, indeed defined, both politics and the press for more than a century. That the system also encouraged crucial debate on freedom and slavery, nationalism and state rights, and ultimately spawned breathtaking reforms in American life, remains one of the marvels of nineteenth-century history. For in many ways, the absence of an independent, national American press—or even a monolithic regional press—also increased sectionalism and hastened disunion, war, and ultimately, a new nationalism predicated on a new definition of freedom.

  By the time of the secession crisis, the institutions of politics and the press had become almost indistinguishable—having joined forces in open and impassioned collaboration. It took no less existential an event than the Civil War itself to unravel this incestuous partnership. Secession and rebellion upended tradition, but not before unleashing convulsive repercussions—including a widespread appetite for censorship and repression—that threatened the future of the free press itself. In one perhaps inevitable result of this longtime collusion, once the war of words exploded into a war of bullets, newspapers, once employed as weapons, instead became targets.

  • • •

  What this book proposes to explore is how the leading characters of the most divisive era in American history, political and journalistic alike, used (and in turn were used by) the increasingly popular and influential press to define and occasionally distort political debate, to make and break political careers, and ultimately to revolutionize American society. It aims to show how the leading figures in the intractably linked worlds of politics and the press waged a vigorous, often vicious, competition to determine which political belief system would emerge with more popular support and thus shape the national future.

  In a sense, the saga is too big to be told in a single volume, for at its most robust the industry involved thousands of editors and politicians nationwide, hundreds of thousands of readers, and millions of pages of newsprint. This is decidedly not another book about the so-called Bohemian Brigade—the band of battlefield correspondents who fanned out to cover the battles and leaders of the Civil War, a worthy subject amply covered by other authors.30 Nor is it a book only about how newspapers treated Abraham Lincoln. Instead, this work seeks to explore the broader story of nineteenth-century political journalism through a much more focused lens: by tracking the chief political and journalistic personalities of the day to weave together two specific, ongoing, and historically vital competitions. The first percolated for more than a generation between a pair of rival politicians of the era, and the second raged for decades among three extraordinary journalists who covered them—and of course attempted variously to cheer, vilify, and influence them (and each other) as well.

  The political focus will fall on the twenty-year-long political battle between fellow Illinoisans Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. The Whig-turned-Republican Lincoln and the lifelong Democrat Douglas emerged as the two most prominent leaders in the most contentious era in American history, opposed each other at crucial moments for major offices, filled the press with their oratory, and earned both praise and criticism in newspaper accounts published not only in their home state, but from New York all the way to the national capital.

  A concentration on Lincoln and Douglas is justifiable not only historically—they ended up running against each other for the U.S. Senate in 1858 and for the presidency in 1860—but also statistically. A research survey conducted for this book in the comprehensive newspaper holdings of the American Antiquarian Society more than vindicates this emphasis. Year after year, beginning in the 1850s, Lincoln and Douglas ranked among the most widely covered leaders of their age. From the time they first attracted notice, through their battles for the Senate and presidency, and on through Douglas’s sudden death in 1861, the names of these longtime opponents appeared in print more often than any of their political contemporaries: 6,500 stories for Lincoln, and an equally impressive six thousand for Douglas. And these statistics come from an archive that is representative, but in no way complete.31

  While placing Lincoln and Douglas at the core of the political story from the 1830s through the 1860s, the book will construct the parallel press story around three of the most successful and influential newspaper publishers of the Lincoln-Douglas era: the aforementioned Horace Greeley and Henry Raymond, fellow Whigs who eventually turned Republican, but starkly different around the edges of their basic principles, personalities, loyalties, and methods of operation; and alongside them, their flamboyant and ruthless competitor James Gordon Bennett, owner of the sensationalistic, deeply conservative New York Herald, which nearly always tilted Democratic. Unlike the Tribune and the Times, indeed most of the leading politically aligned papers of the day, the Herald made a virtue of its supposed political independence—although Bennett never disguised his deep suspicion of the antislavery movement or his rancid hatred of black people, Jews, and Catholics—even as he revolutionized journalistic taste, news-gathering techniques, printing technologies, and advertising, in the process attracting the largest readership of any American newspaper. The unpredictable Bennett flirted with but ultimately opposed the Whigs and, later, the Republicans (including Lincoln) often enough to make political comparisons with Greeley and Raymond endlessly fascinating. One thing is certain: the three became and remained the most widely read and most famous journalists of their age, national celebrities in their own right who invented their newspapers and made them bold reflections of their own oversized personalities.32

  To be sure, many of the colorful contemporaries of these three newspaper titans, and the political
ly motivated exploits of their publications, will also make appearances on these pages. In addition to acknowledging other leading editors in New York, the book will explore parallel journalistic rivalries in Springfield, Chicago, and, of course, Washington, in all of which Lincoln and Douglas competed for newspaper space as their own political aspirations expanded beyond Illinois. The thriving weekly press will be addressed along with the daily, as will the abolitionist and black press (and the overtly white supremacist papers as well). The editors of pro-secession and Confederate journals will appear, as will the creators of the new pictorial weeklies. As Lincoln’s years as a “German publisher” demonstrate, the foreign press played an important part in this history as well. But the focus will remain fixed on the trio of extraordinary New Yorkers and their profound influence on the American press and politics.

  The rationale is simple: perhaps New York was never representative of the entire country, either culturally or politically, but no editors anywhere amassed or deployed more truly national editorial power from the 1840s through the 1860s than Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett. None maintained their influence longer—cast it wider—or proved more essential to the crusades to preserve the Union and destroy slavery, either in support or in significant opposition, and sometimes a bit of both—than did these three flawed giants. From a purely dramatic point of view, no competitors spent so much time conducting warfare of the most personal kind, in the words of one contemporary, “constantly hammering away at each other,” as if their own rivalry supplanted those of the leaders whom they covered.33