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

by Harold Holzer

  Soon enough, such public scrapes practically became part of the Herald editor’s daily routine. Outraged readers, along with those insulted by his coverage, periodically attacked him on the streets as well. When Peter Townsend of the Evening Star struck him in the face one day on Wall Street—“a decent chastisement for his impudence,” crowed the Sun’s Ben Day—Bennett challenged his assailant to a duel. The two newspapermen then met across the river at Hoboken, where Bennett fired the first shot but missed; fortunately for the Herald editor, his opponent’s aim was no better. On yet another occasion, Bennett escaped serious injury from a letter bomb only because black powder leaking from the otherwise innocent-looking parcel aroused suspicion before it was opened. Rather than shrink from danger, the editor proudly reported every dustup in the Herald, invariably noting after each fight that he had given more than he got. The ensuing publicity made Bennett more prominent still, and his paper ever more popular with readers.

  James Watson Webb, duel-happy editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer.

  Frustrated competitors ultimately took to inventing less violent schemes to destroy him. In 1844, they launched a so-called moral war against the Herald, charging in print that Bennett was “notorious for daily habits of blasphemy, obscenity and falsehood.” Particularly eager for revenge, James Watson Webb took to the effort enthusiastically, labeling Bennett a “disgusting obscenity” and a “moral pestilence.” Charging, with a touch of the obscene, that common prostitutes viewed the Herald as their “special organ,” Webb urged decent New Yorkers: “purchase not, read not, touch not.”92

  Initially, Bennett replied by suggesting in print that “Field Marshal Webb”—the Courier and Enquirer editor often called himself “Colonel”—should take holy orders. But when the Herald’s circulation began to erode under the onslaught from the Courier and Enquirer, Bennett devised the most ingenious counterattack yet. Although Webb had earlier suggested that a man would as soon choose a bride from a brothel as wed a woman who read the vile Herald, Bennett brazenly appealed for public sympathy by doing just that: taking a bride himself. He further shocked his enemies (and even some of his admirers) by announcing the event in his own paper under the brazen headline: “Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to Be Married.” In his usual bemused tone, he boasted: “I must fulfill the awful destiny which the Almighty Father has written in broad letters of my life against the wall of Heaven. I must give the world a pattern of happy wedded life.”93 Exasperated rivals resorted to lobbying Congress to enact a law banning the shipment of newspapers in bulk, a system that advantaged the efficiently bundled Herald. The proposal failed. Bennett celebrated its defeat by making the paper even bigger, and installing a new steam-driven press capable of printing five thousand copies an hour.

  Rivals simply loathed him. Webb called him the “lowest species of humanity,” and even his ex-employer Noah referred to him as a “polluter of the press.” Typical of the criticism that found its way into print was this description from an 1842 edition of the short-lived New York Aurora: “A reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh or fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth; a creature, hated by his nearest intimates, and bearing the consciousness thereof upon his distorted features, and upon his despicable soul; one whom good men avoid as a blot to his nature—whom all despise, and whom, no one blesses—all this is James Gordon Bennett.” The author of the piece was a young writer named Walt Whitman. “It would be incorrect to call him a liar,” another of Bennett’s enemies later railed, “because he is wanting in that sense of truth by which a man makes himself a liar. . . . That region of the kind where conviction, the sense of truth and honor, public spirit, and patriotism have their sphere, is in this man mere vacancy.” Yet raging against Bennett only frustrated his enemies, since the editor relished each and every attack. “He has been horse-whipped, kicked, trodden under foot, spat upon, and degraded in every possible way; but all this he courts, because it brings money,” lamented British-born writer Frederick Marryatt. “Horse-whip him, and he will bend his back to the lash and thank you; for every blow is worth so many dollars. Kick him, and he will remove his coat-tails, that you may have a better mark. Spit upon him, and he prizes it as precious ointment.”94

  In desperation, Bennett’s enemies sunk to secretly backing publication of an anonymous, sixty-four-page-long 1844 pamphlet, The Life and Writings of James Gordon Bennett, complete with an engraved caricature depicting the editor as a scrawny, hawk-nosed, cross-eyed blackmailer in tasteless check-patterned pants, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Herald offices playing a bagpipe—a mocking reference to his heritage. Describing Bennett as “exceedingly violent and profane in his language, to those in his employ, treating them habitually with the most vulgar abuse,” the booklet added: “As would naturally be expected, he is soft, servile, and cringing in his manners to those whose wealth or position place them beyond his power.”95 Ordinarily, such charges might have soured the community on Bennett, but the authors made the fatal mistake of padding their publication with “choice extracts” from the Herald’s most sordid stories in an effort to horrify readers with reminders of its founder’s wickedness. These had precisely the opposite of their intended effect. Readers clamored for copies of the pamphlet, apparently delighted to have their favorite Herald articles collected in a new format.

  In the end, nothing could dent the paper’s wild popularity. Bennett’s abiding secret was simple: unscrupulous, unpredictable, and unlovable he may have been as a man, but as an editor he understood precisely what people yearned to know. As one of his later competitors ruefully admitted: “It would be worth my while . . . to give a million dollars, if the Devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the people of New York would like to read about next morning.” The admirer’s name was Henry Jarvis Raymond, and in due time he would launch a New York newspaper of his own, but like Greeley, with the goal of reforming government, not belittling it.

  James Gordon Bennett’s flair for self aggrandizement, charisma, and infuriatingly sarcastic style—combined with an undeniable genius for business and promotion—earned him a fortune and made him prominent, but ironically limited his influence in American political life. By choosing not to make the New York Herald a party newspaper, he may have maintained his political independence, but he also reduced his ability to influence official policy and promote friends, much less himself, for appointive office.

  Though he grew into an inescapable presence and an authentic celebrity, he remained very much an outsider: volatile, belligerent, sensationalistic, sacrilegious, suspiciously foreign, irritatingly flippant, and so immensely successful he provoked not only envy but also outrage—not to mention ridicule and occasional violence.96 Bennett became and remained rich and powerful primarily because his readership and advertising base grew gargantuan—and kept expanding. Not even his jealous competitors could deny that Bennett’s vigorous prose earned him something more valuable than admirers: customers. For better or worse, he became the father of modern tabloid journalism. In politics, however, James Gordon Bennett was courted and feared, but never quite respected—or even respectable.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not Like Any Other Thunder

  Throughout the 1830s, serious, reform-minded journalism aroused far more admiration than the scandalous penny press or the hotly divisive political organs. But the reformers also provoked a deadly animus of their own. This was particularly so when the reforms they advocated included the abolition of slavery, still an appallingly radical notion to most white Americans, even in the North.

  To express their hostility, the opponents of abolition did more than cancel subscriptions. In an all too typical response that occurred on July 30, 1836, an enraged mob broke into the headquarters of the Philanthropist, an abolition journal in Cincinnati, “scattered the type into the streets, tore down the presses, and completely dismantled the offi
ce.” Then the rioters triumphantly dragged the damaged press toward the riverbank, shattered it to pieces, and threw them into the river before launching an indiscriminate attack on “the residence of some blacks.”1

  A similarly motivated outbreak of vigilantism in Lincoln’s own home state ignited an even more violent outcome the following year. The victim, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a Maine-born antislavery minister and previously the editor of the anti-Jackson St. Louis Observer, was no stranger to such attacks. After criticizing a Missouri judge for failing to indict white men suspected of lynching a free black, a mob had seized and destroyed Lovejoy’s printing press. Refusing to be silenced, the editor defiantly set up a new abolitionist paper, the Alton Observer, across the Mississippi River in the free state of Illinois, funded by the state’s Presbyterian synod. But the townspeople of Alton, many of whom had migrated from the South, proved no less sympathetic to slavery, and no more welcoming to an abolitionist newspaper, than the residents of St. Louis. They stoned Lovejoy’s office and sacked three of his printing presses.

  On November 2, 1837, Lovejoy dismissed the escalating resentment in an impassioned but provocative speech. Denying he was insensitive to local sensibilities, he contended he had “published sentiments contrary to those generally held in this community . . . because I fear God.” Lovejoy admitted he was likely to be tarred and feathered, but vowed he would not be driven out again. “If I leave here and go elsewhere, violence may overtake me in my retreat,” he declared. But “if I am not safe at Alton, I shall not be safe any where.”2

  Five days later, after Lovejoy narrowly escaped an attack on his home, another angry mob descended on the riverfront warehouse where he had secured his newest printing press, demanding that he surrender it. When he refused, his assailants began pelting the building with rocks. From inside, the besieged editor and his supporters next took, and then returned, a volley of gunfire, leaving one of the attackers dead in the street. The mob’s fury grew. Shouting “Burn them out,” attackers threw ladders against the warehouse walls and tried climbing to the top armed with torches, meaning to set fire to the roof. When Lovejoy bravely threw open the front door in order to shove one ladder away, a shotgun blast from somewhere in the crowd ripped into his chest, abdomen, and legs. Minutes later, the editor lay dead.3

  The 1837 attack on the Alton, Illinois, structure housing abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy’s printing press.

  Not yet satisfied, the mob stormed past Lovejoy’s lifeless body and into the warehouse, hurled his printing press out the window onto the riverbank below, and in a frenzy smashed what remained of it and hurled the fragments into the Mississippi. No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes.4 But in death, Lovejoy became a symbol for abolitionists and free press advocates in many parts of the North. Decrying mob violence as “an enemy to freedom,” Horace Greeley hailed Lovejoy as “a martyr to public liberty.”5 Even though the opposition to Jacksonian Democracy had by then coalesced into a formidable new Whig Party, most Whig newspapers in Illinois remained strangely silent, perhaps fearful of inciting further violence and certainly not yet prepared to commit against slavery itself. Unlike many of his moderate Whig contemporaries, however, Abraham Lincoln decided to speak out.

  • • •

  Although he became almost chronically reluctant to address contentious issues quickly, only three months after the Alton atrocity Lincoln took on the Lovejoy issue in an oration at a Springfield church. This was not the same Lincoln who had failed in his amateurish maiden race for public office just a few years before.

  In 1834, he had made a second try for the State Assembly, and this time won. Two years later, in 1836, he declared his candidacy for reelection with another lively letter to the Sangamo Journal. “In your paper of last Saturday,” it began, “I see a communication over the signature of ‘Many Voters,’ in which the candidates who are announced in the Journal, are called upon to show their hands.’ Agreed. Here’s mine!” His platform was simple: “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females.)” His nimble appeal ended as wittily as it began—with a declaration of Whig loyalty couched in Lincolnian modesty: “If alive on the first Monday in November, I shall vote for Hugh L. White for President.”6 As a politician and writer, Lincoln’s growth was apparent. Springfield had grown, too—larger and, like Lincoln, more prominent. By 1837 it had become the state capital, as well as the young legislator’s permanent new home.

  Now accepting an invitation to address the town’s Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln responded on January 27, 1838, with a long speech best remembered for its advocacy of “cold, calculating reason” in the face of extremist emotionalism. It was Lincoln’s first major public address outside the legislature, and while his style was not yet as lean—as “Lincolnesque”—as in his later, more famous orations, the issue of press violence had clearly inspired in him an almost uncharacteristic display of passion, even if its principal message was the rejection of passion. Lincoln never once mentioned Lovejoy by name—it would be “tedious, as well as useless,” he asserted, to recount specific “horrors.” But the editor’s death was surely on his mind—and those of his listeners—when he assailed what he called “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”7

  “Whenever this effect shall be produced among us,” Lincoln warned, “whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors [emphasis added], and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.” Insisting that there could be “no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” Lincoln urged that “reverence for the laws” become “the political religion of the nation.”8

  The speech, which was dutifully printed in full by the Sangamo Journal a week later—no doubt at Lincoln’s instruction—did little to inhibit the assaults that increasingly targeted progressive editors and their presses. But it did serve to elevate Lincoln’s local reputation for political moderation, moral character, and oratorical talent. It also marked his first official acknowledgment that freedom of the press—and the security of its editors—was crucial to preserving democracy itself. Not for another twenty-five years would Lincoln come to question that belief.

  • • •

  Springfield was anything but unanimous in applauding its increasingly influential Whig politician. A new pro-Democratic newspaper had begun appearing in central Illinois, with a rapidly rising new political personality as its chief object of attention and affection. In 1836, a Delaware-born, Washington-based professional printer named William Walters had launched the State Register in the then state capital of Vandalia.

  There was never a doubt about the editor’s political loyalties. Democratic Party leaders themselves had recruited him for the task. Walters had been working as a newsroom foreman at Washington’s influential Daily Intelligencer, but unlike its Whig proprietors, tended personally toward Jacksonian Democracy. At one point he impressed the Illinois Democrats then serving in Congress by taking on influential Washington editor Duff Green in a typographers’ labor dispute. One of these congressmen, former governor John Reynolds, who longed to see a thriving pro-Jackson organ operating in his home state, concluded that Walters was just the man to create such a paper. Eager for a challenge, Walters agreed to head west to Illinois. Once in Vandalia, he bought a used press and type and issued the first edition of the new Illinois Register and Vandalia Republican on February 12, 1836—ironically enough, the twenty-seventh birthday of the man whom the paper would spend the next quarter century relentlessly excoriating: Abraham Li
ncoln. By June, Walters’s endeavor had attracted a thousand subscribers, more readers than the entire population of Illinois’s tiny capital city.9

  William Walters, founding editor of the pro-Democratic Illinois State Register.

  The new enterprise received an early boost when Democrats in the state legislature voted Walters the lucrative job of official state printer for the 1836–1837 session, a reward that political majorities routinely and unashamedly earmarked for their newspaper supporters to ensure further loyalty. This guaranteed that Walters would receive enough well-paid orders for legal notices and printed legislative proceedings to subsidize his fledgling weekly. Two years later, in 1839, Walters relocated the Register10 to the new state capital, where the Francis brothers’ Journal quickly greeted their new rival by editorializing that its debut issue “contained such a tissue of fabrications and misrepresentations that many of the patrons of the paper complained of it. Indeed, we doubt if any of the Loco FocosI, who had not been dipped in brimstone, would undertake to justify its publication.”11 By this time, Walters’s teenage brother-in-law was working alongside him at the paper, learning the trade from the bottom up. The young man’s name was Charles Henry Lanphier—Charlie to his friends.12

  Born in 1820 in Alexandria, Virginia, and reared in downtown Washington opposite a boardinghouse typically crowded with newsworthy politicians, Charlie enjoyed life in the national capital. But he happily agreed to migrate to Springfield for a job as a printer’s devil with his brother-in-law when Walters returned briefly to Washington in 1836 to gather his family and take them west. Lanphier’s father usefully advised him that “to become an Editor you must acquaint yourself” with the enterprise, work on bookkeeping and penmanship skills, and “read when ever y[ou]r business admits (not novels and trash) usefull [sic] books and publications.”13