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

by Harold Holzer

  One way to prod public opinion, he discovered, was to write newspaper copy himself, and electoral defeat notwithstanding, Lincoln now became a regular, if anonymous, contributor of partisan, occasionally intemperate articles to the Sangamo Journal. As editor Francis published all such screeds unsigned, or over a pseudonym, there is no way to know for certain how many of these uncredited pieces Lincoln submitted over the years.38 But as New Salem post office clerk James Matheny remembered, “Lincoln used to write Editorials as far back as 1834 or 5 for Francis.” Matheny claimed he personally “took hundreds of such Editorials from Lincoln to the Journal office.”39

  On occasion, eager to see his views in print, “Honest Abe” may even have abused his privileges during his days as a postal employee in order to speed his editorials through the mail at no cost. As village postmaster, Lincoln enjoyed the franking privilege—merely signing his name atop a folded letter that formed a self-envelope was enough to secure its free delivery—but technically he was entitled to use it only for official material, a category into which his essays decidedly did not fit. Otherwise recipients of mail, not senders, paid for postage. With the price set by law at a forbidding six cents per sheet, the impoverished Lincoln may have concluded that if his editorial contributions arrived postage due, the newspaper might decline them unopened.

  By whatever means they were dispatched, these hortatory and sometimes defamatory articles by authors identified only as “A Looker-On,” “Sampson’s Ghost,” and “Kentucky Volunteer” were likely all the work of Abraham Lincoln, partisan journalist. The unattributed columns inspired one Democratic editor to fume that he had nothing but contempt for “anonymous scribblers . . . who, without the courage to appear unmasked, vindictively and falsely assail the characters and actions of public men.”40 Later, the local Democratic paper was more specific, alleging: “The writers of the Journal have had a late acquisition—a chap rather famous not only for throwing filth, but for swallowing it afterwards,” leaving no doubt that its charge referred specifically to the “jester and mountebank” Lincoln.41 One of Lincoln’s ripostes, as neighbor Caleb Carman remembered, was so truculent that even Simeon Francis would not print it. Determined to see it published somewhere, the rejected editorial writer instead sent it to the nearby Beardstown Chronicle.42 Broadening his reach was also a sign of Lincoln’s growth. He now regularly read not only the Springfield paper but also the Louisville Journal and Missouri Democrat. By 1834, however, Lincoln assumed a new title reflecting his ongoing, primary connection to the newspaper that remained crucial to his future political success: he became New Salem’s official local agent for the Sangamo Journal.43

  • • •

  Half a continent away, the eleven daily newspapers serving New York City devoted only cursory coverage to the Black Hawk War in distant Illinois, and of course none at all to the obscure races there for its state legislature. Far more urgent and compelling stories vied for their attention and ink. An epidemic of plague in 1831 took the lives of more than 3,500 New Yorkers. The metropolis continued its struggle to recover from a sustained national financial downturn. Most intoxicating of all, the 1832 presidential election was fast approaching, and when Jackson won nomination in May for a second term, with Clay his opponent running as a National Republican, the anti-Democratic papers unleashed renewed warnings of dictatorship. The national political contest may not have engaged specialty publications like Greeley’s Spirit of the Times, but here in the nation’s commercial hub, it elicited regular coverage on the pages of the leading dailies.

  As of 1832, the city’s major newspapers were oversized six-cent broadsheets. By tradition, copies were hawked on the streets by newspaper carriers employed directly by the publishers, or sold to customers who came calling at the newspapers’ home offices in lower Manhattan’s overcrowded financial district. The remainder went off to subscribers by mail (though many recipients did not pay). The most widely read publications included James Watson Webb’s pro-Whig Courier and David Hale and Gerard Hallock’s elite and pro-Democratic Journal of Commerce, along with papers bearing such forbidding names as the Mercantile Advertiser, the Journal and Advertiser, the Mechanics’ Advertiser, and the Gazette and General Advertiser. As their titles accurately suggested, these publications were designed primarily for men who engaged in trade and supposedly thought of little else. Yet ironically the narrow editorial focus of these so-called gentlemen’s papers served to limit the trade in newspapers themselves.44 In a city whose population was approaching 250,000, only 45,000 were said to read one daily paper or another, and most frustrated publishers believed the rapidly growing market remained largely untapped. The average daily circulation of these cumbersome “blanket sheets” was stuck at around 1,700.45

  Another crucial factor contributed to these modest numbers in New York and elsewhere. On the one hand, newspapers of the day enjoyed “privileged” status from the U.S. postal system, which meant they were not only cheap to send, but also earned priority treatment for delivery. While this policy helped broaden their reach, it worked to limit their profitability, because subscribers very often shared them. The mails sped papers to distant subscribers in as few as seven days, making the news each delivery brought breathtakingly “fresh”—that is, only a week old. But when readers were done examining them, many forwarded the papers by post to friends and relatives at the same favorable mailing rates. By the 1830s, Americans had learned to communicate as frequently through the exchange of used newspapers as through personal letters. That was because until 1845, the cost of sending a one-page letter by mail was many times higher than that of mailing an entire newspaper. Struggling families separated by hundreds of miles but determined to maintain contact with their distant kin found it more economical to repurpose their local papers than to post original notes. Sometimes correspondents added family news by scribbling personal messages in the margins alongside the printed columns.

  Sensing it was losing vast amounts of postal revenue because of these “transient” papers, Congress ultimately banned handwritten messages from reposted journals. Clever correspondents evaded the new regulations by hiding personal greetings in hard-to-spot places, or ingeniously connecting words, or blacking out, circling, and highlighting letters of the alphabet within news articles to form coded messages. In 1830 alone, some sixteen million newspapers arrived through the U.S. Post. In just one three-month period in the 1840s, as historian David Henkin discovered, a single small Alabama town received 6,829 newspapers in the mail—seven for each of its residents.46 Yet within New York City, local readership still lagged behind population growth. As late as the 1830s, the best-selling morning newspaper in town counted only 4,500 readers, the most popular evening journal but three thousand.47 The secret of how successfully to circulate newspapers on its crowded streets remained elusive.

  • • •

  The immediacy, reach, and breathtaking power of the daily press in New York—a commercial metropolis emerging even then as the publishing center of the nation—grew exponentially in 1833, not long after Andrew Jackson began his second term. Early that September, a twenty-three-year-old former Journal and Advertiser compositor named Benjamin H. Day, now proprietor of his own modest printing establishment, decided to launch a new paper. A “man made of granite,” according to his admiring grandson, Clarence—who earned quite a literary reputation of his own decades later—Ben Day was, unlike most of his newspaper contemporaries, no political crusader.48 He had a surpassingly practical reason for launching his enterprise: he wanted to keep his otherwise idle presses fully engaged. Day called his new daily the Sun and designed it to be much smaller than the broadsheets—a precursor of the twentieth-century tabloids. Pledging “to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY” (perhaps a coy play on his name), the publisher priced his paper at only a penny, a fraction of the cost of the established six-cent dailies.49

  Ben Day, founder of the New York Sun and inventor of the “pen
ny press.”

  The enterprise was out to create a new paradigm for publishing success. Ever since the establishment of the first major American daily, the Pennsylvania Packet, back in 1784, most newspapers, not only New York’s, had catered to business-minded readers by offering them information they needed to make money, and relying for income on advertisements, not paid circulation. Day upended this model, first by feeding a public starving for reports of exciting events, however obscure or titillating. “Give us one of your real Moscow fires, or your Waterloo battlefields,” the paper declared, “let a Napoleon be dashing with his legions throughout the world, overturning the thrones of a thousand years and deluging the world with blood and tears; and then we of the types are in our glory.”50 The Sun emphasized sensational crime news, theater reviews, municipal gossip, and human interest stories on subjects ranging from pets to drunks to duelists—which it termed “useful knowledge among the operative classes of society.” Before long, it boasted three thousand daily readers, principally among “those who cannot well afford to incur the expense of subscribing to a ‘blanket sheet’ and paying ten dollars per annum.”51 This was a paper for the literate poor.

  In yet another innovation, copies were not merely mailed or sold at the publication office. At first Day hired the usual squad of eager newsboys, many homeless, to peddle the Sun on Manhattan’s busy streets, paying them two dollars a week and requiring each to work until every one of his papers was sold.52 Soon enough, Day improved on that model. Adopting a distribution system pioneered in London, he began selling bulk copies to profit-minded news dealers at two-thirds the cover price—67 cents for bundles of a hundred—giving these middlemen the financial incentive to broaden circulation by having their newsboys hawk them on the streets at the full retail price. Such innovations helped the Sun reach eight thousand New Yorkers a day by 1834. Within another year, it initiated a further industry revolution by replacing its one-cylinder flatbed printing machine with a rapid-acting cylinder press, which made it possible to print more papers, more quickly, than ever. Daily circulation of the Sun soon approached an astounding twenty thousand.53

  Inevitably, imitators soon flooded the market with penny papers of their own. One called itself The True Sun in a blatant effort to lure readers away from Day’s original. It failed. Another pretender, the Morning Star, appeared around the same time—founded by a compositor at the Courier about whom nothing else is known except his name: Lincoln. Like his namesake in the West, this Lincoln, it was reported, “could write paragraphs with some ability.”54 Unlike the other Lincoln, of whose existence New York publishers still remained entirely ignorant, he soon vanished from history.

  Within this hotly competitive atmosphere, even the most high-minded papers soon began replicating Day’s business plan—and mimicking some of his emotionalism as well. No blanket sheet of the period, for example, reached more readers than the progressive New York Evening Post—founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, and by the early 1830s dominating the afternoon market with a daily run of three thousand copies. Certainly no editor in the nation seemed more distinguished than the Post’s William Cullen Bryant, famous since 1817 for beloved poems like “Thanatopsis.” At first he had been reluctant to take on the kind of full-time newspaper job that was increasingly a realm occupied by professional printers, not writers. Twisting the knife, broadsheet rival James Watson Webb sneered that Bryant “had embarked in a pursuit not suited to his genius.” Literary critics sadly concurred, one complaining in 1831 that “what he is [now] writing, is as little like poetry, as Gen. Jackson is like Apollo.”55

  Bryant surprised the doubters by throwing himself into political journalism, and coming quickly to speak eloquently for the city’s progressives. Ultimately, however, even a poet could become infected with the competitive virus gripping New York journalism. One day, in full view of startled spectators outside City Hall, Bryant took a cowhide whip to the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, William Leete Stone. Flabbergasted onlookers struggled to separate the enraged combatants on the street. Even the most staid of publications seemed to be rising—or sinking—to a new level of fierce rivalry whose potential for inciting outright violence lurked just beneath the surface.

  Bryant himself sheepishly admitted to the bad reputation increasingly attached to professional newspapermen, himself perhaps included: “Contempt is too harsh a word for it, perhaps, but it is far below respect.”56 Other New Yorkers had already become so accustomed to street brawls between journalists that when the blasé man-about-town Philip Hone spied the Bryant-Stone squabble from his window as it unfolded, the incident did not seem unusual enough to interrupt his shaving.57 It was not that Hone lacked for strong views of his own when it came to New York’s daily press—it was just that these opinions were universally negative. Suspicious of friends who claimed they never read the scandalous penny papers, Hone suggested in his diary that “every man who blames his neighbor for setting so bad an example occasionally puts one in his pocket to carry home to his family for their and his own edification.”58

  Most readers of the penny press were uninhibited about revealing their affinity for one penny daily or another. “These papers are to be found in every street, lane, and alley, in every counting-house, shop, etc.,” a Philadelphia journal reported after a visit to New York. “Almost every porter and drayman, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands.”59 And yet some aspiring publishers believed there were not enough choices yet.

  • • •

  The most widely read, most financially successful—and, some later complained, most outrageous and disreputable—New York newspaper of them all would now make its sensational debut. Tucked away in one of the Sun’s editions from 1834—between reports of a man accused of stealing a ham, and another noting the tragic death of a girl tempted to “drink a pint of rum on a wager”—was the following seemingly routine item: “James G. Bennett has become sole proprietor and editor of the Philadelphia Courier.”60 As it turned out, the report was incorrect. James Gordon Bennett was destined for a far larger field.

  That summer, after several failures and false starts, this foreign-born, thirty-nine-year-old veteran journalist instead traveled to New York and sought a job interview with none other than Ben Day. Overflowing with self-assurance, Bennett arrived armed with new ideas for further hiking the Sun’s already robust circulation. Day was intrigued, but his business partner took one look at Bennett and concluded he would be too costly and untamable an employee to add to the staff. The Sun would pay dearly for this rebuke.

  By 1837, financial panic sharply reduced circulation among the Sun’s principal audience: the city’s poorest residents who suddenly had no disposable pennies to squander on mere newspapers. The following year, Day would sell his interest in the struggling enterprise and vanish prematurely from the New York publishing scene he had done so much to transform. The genre he introduced, however, thrived and expanded—thanks to the indefatigable promoter he so ill-advisedly turned away. On May 6, 1835, James Gordon Bennett opened a paper of his own in the dank basement of a small building on Wall Street. He called it the New York Herald.

  Born in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1795, and growing up with what he rosily described as “a taste for poetry,” Jamie Bennett had studied for a time at seminary but felt no calling for the priesthood.61 Instead he left home, just as Greeley would, at age twenty. He then spent four fruitless years in search of career opportunities in Glasgow and Aberdeen before sailing to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1819. There, and later in Maine, he briefly and discontentedly taught school. His next job, however, was as a proofreader in Boston, and though he disliked the tedious work, he was taken with what he called “the charms of a printing and publishing house.”62 By 1822, Bennett was dwelling in South Carolina, employed at the Charleston Courier, where he specialized in translating the South American news from the Spanish language newspapers that arrived each morning by ship.63 He was learning the newspaper business,
such as it was, from the bottom up.

  Increasingly restless and ambitious as he neared age thirty, Bennett remained frustratingly unfulfilled. Then he moved for the first time to New York. Judging the press there to be “wretched,” he decided to quit journalism for good and open some sort of commercial school.64 Unable to attract investors, however, Bennett soon abandoned this scheme. Instead, he began writing articles for the Sunday Courier on a freelance basis and briefly considered buying the paper himself until he concluded it would never earn a profit. Perhaps put off by his irritating Scottish burr and his saturnine appearance—Philip Hone described him as a “serpent” and an “ill-looking, squinting man”—the proprietors of other papers in town, including the Commercial Advertiser and the American, turned Bennett away when he applied for staff jobs.65 But Bennett had “studied” the town’s leading editors and “gathered from their conduct . . . the true temper of the men he aspired to rival and excel.”66 He was hardly ready to admit inadequacy, much less failure.

  Showcasing his versatility, a tireless Bennett began contributing economic analyses to the Mercantile Advertiser and exposés of financial fraud to the National Advocate—sometimes simultaneously. In 1827, still a freelancer, he reinvented himself as a humorist for the pro-Jackson New York Morning Enquirer, a paper edited by a colorful Jewish playwright, diplomat, and early Zionist named Mordecai Manuel Noah.67 The contrast between these two flamboyant characters must have approached the theatrical: one a Sephardic Jew from Philadelphia, the other a Scot who spoke with a pronounced burr. But both were talented professionals who needed each other, and Bennett’s contributions for the Morning Enquirer made it a livelier paper. One of his earliest essays for Noah tweaked “our national propensity to shake hands,” offering example after rib-tickling example of different salutations as practiced around the world. This and subsequent comic turns caused a minor sensation around town and increased the Enquirer’s circulation, though critics accused editor Noah of lowering his standards to publish “froth.”68 The notoriety was enough to earn Bennett a promotion to a full-time job as associate editor, though Noah never quite took to the ambitious Scotsman, perhaps sensing his deep and incurable anti-Semitism. When the paper’s Washington correspondent lost his life in a duel, the editor dispatched Bennett to the national capital as a replacement, in all likelihood happy to see him leave the New York office.