Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion
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Young Lanphier followed his father’s sensible advice: he made himself increasingly “useful” and the Register continued to grow in circulation and influence. By 1837, William Walters was able to report that he had “prospered beyond all my expectations,” adding of his young second-in-command: “Charles is everything I wish him and if he continues to act as he has, which I believe he will, he must rise also when he comes to be a man, and shall, if my influence can make him.”14
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The paper’s strongest champion—who in turn became the principal beneficiary of its increasingly powerful advocacy—was the physically small but charismatic young Democratic politician Stephen Arnold Douglas. “Douglass,” as he was first known (he dropped the second “s” years later, some said, so as not to be confused with one of the objects of his white supremacist disdain: Frederick Douglass) had been born in Brandon, Vermont, in 1813. His father died young, and the impoverished family had resettled on an uncle’s farm a few miles away, where young Stephen, like so many of his struggling contemporaries, performed grueling field labor to earn his keep. More rewardingly, he spent a third of each year at school. Later, he attended a full-time academy in Canandaigua, New York. Until 1833, this soon-to-be-famous Westerner admitted that he had never “beheld a Prairie.”15
That fall, Douglas left home to make his own way in the world, settling at first in one of Illinois’s up-and-coming villages, Jacksonville, where fruitful employment eluded him. Too poor to stay long without work, he moved on to nearby Winchester to teach school for three dollars per student. “Here I am, as Jack Douning [sic] would say,” he cheerfully wrote to his brother-in-law that December. “I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings principles and interests and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption.” In these words Douglas revealed himself as an already faithful reader of the press, for “Major Jack Downing” was a fictional character, created by Maine journalist Seba Smith, whose humorous adventures appeared in many papers across the country (often “adapted” by other writers, and increasingly tending toward political satire).
Though still a schoolteacher, not a politician, Douglas was already immersed in the press. And very soon he would cross paths with Abraham Lincoln, who regularly read Jack Downing’s letters, too, though Lincoln had little else in common with the new arrival, either physically or politically.16
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From the start of their own intense rivalry, the two young newspapers in the state of Douglas’s “adoption” advocated Western principles of entirely opposite kinds.
The pro-Whig Sangamo Journal trumpeted the restoration of the Bank of the United States, a steep protective tariff on imported goods, and community-improving government investments in roads and canals. The Whig Party had initially attracted the country’s financial elite, but was now winning converts among ambitious people of more modest means. One of them was Lincoln, who equated the right to upward mobility with the central promise of the American founding. Conversely insisting that the Whigs remained the party of privilege, Democrats and their party organs rejected the idea of an all-controlling national financial system and opposed import duties they argued would inflate the price of goods at home. Warning against debt-inducing public works projects that would invariably cause tax hikes, they appealed primarily to workingmen and the poor. Neither of these mainstream parties as yet expended much energy on the slavery issue, though ultraliberal Northeastern Whigs were among the first to call for restricting, even abolishing the institution. Not for another decade and a half, however, would slavery come to dominate American political and press discourse.17
Reveling in their incompatible philosophies, the Journal and the Register went at each other tooth and nail from the first. They covered the same public meetings, lyceum speeches, political rallies, and legislative sessions. Yet a stranger arriving in town and innocently comparing their reports line by line would be hard pressed to understand how journalists reporting identical events could describe them so differently. In this regard, however, Springfield was no different than any other city. James Silk Buckingham, an Englishman who visited the United States in 1838, recognized the growing tendency toward partisan journalism everywhere in America, pronouncing himself appalled by what he called the “exaggerated pictures drawn by the writers on each side.” As he observed:
Everything is distorted to serve party views. If the largest meeting is got up on one side, the opposite party declares it to be a mere handful in numbers. If the parties are ever so wealthy and respectable, they are pronounced to be a set of needy vagabonds. If the talent of the speeches should be of the highest kind, they would call them mere drivellings; and if the order was disturbed for a single moment, they would describe it as a beer garden. . . . When a writer of the Whig party has to describe a meeting of their own side, however, he can find no terms sufficiently swelling and lofty in which to express himself. . . . Their “thunder” is not like any other thunder that was ever heard before, and the very globe seems to be shaken to its centre by their gigantic powers.18
Buckingham made these perceptive comments about a particular, unnamed Whig newspaper, but his observations applied to Democratic ones as well, and by extension to both of the party publications in Springfield. In fact, the Journal and Register were equally prone to exaggeration—and, occasionally, outright deceit—to advance their respective causes and candidates. And politicians were expected to reciprocate with tangible demonstrations of gratitude when they could. The Democratic legislative majority, as noted, subsidized Walters’s Register. By contrast out of power and financially strapped, Lincoln at least made sure his law firm regularly placed legal notices in the Sangamo Journal throughout 1842, 1843, and 1844. Simeon Francis’s surviving advertising records show that each of these multiple insertions brought the struggling paper—and cost Lincoln—the significant sum of five dollars, not much less than what the attorney might be expected to receive at the time for pleading a case for a poor client and enough to help keep a friendly journal in print.19
In this fiercely competitive atmosphere, the naturally pugnacious Stephen Douglas rose swiftly within Illinois’s Democratic political hierarchy, first as state’s attorney, then as a legislator, register of the federal land office, Illinois secretary of state, judge of the State Supreme Court, and later as a congressman. As he advanced through the ranks, Douglas came increasingly to expect (and often revel in) unsparing criticism from Simeon Francis’s pro-Whig Journal, and lavish praise from William Walters’s pro-Democratic Register. These newspapers were more than reporters, even advocates. They became integral cogs in their party’s organizational machinery, operating as journalists from inside their party structures looking out, not outside the organizations looking in. This proved especially the case during the bitterly contested presidential campaign of 1840, when editors and politicians virtually organized themselves into opposing armies in the battle for the White House. In an era in which presidential candidates did no public campaigning of their own—tradition forbade it, and the country was yet too vast and unconnected to permit it—the printed word became the chief weapon in battles for the presidency.
That year, incumbent Martin Van Buren faced a serious challenge from Whig war hero William Henry Harrison. Having learned valuable lessons from Clay’s recent defeats, Harrison forces wisely downplayed potentially divisive issues. In the country’s first “log cabin and hard cider” campaign, the Whigs instead focused on the general’s inspiring personal résumé, particularly his humble origins. Democrats in turn strove to transform Van Buren’s reputation for craftiness into a political virtue. Lincoln actively electioneered for Harrison, Douglas for Van Buren—both often emphasizing superficial and emotional subjects that might sway undecided voters. For their parts, Douglas and Lincoln bridged the gap completely, while nationally many politicians with strong ties to local newspapers of their own did likewise. It was hard for a time to know which profession—politics or jou
rnalism—was originating party dogma, and which was merely advocating it.
Lincoln and Douglas did both. In addition to campaigning, they worked directly for newly launched campaign newspapers—“extras,” as they were known at the time. When, that year, a new, temporary Democratic newspaper called Old Hickory in Jackson’s honor began rolling off the presses at Springfield, Douglas saw no conflict in playing the concurrent roles of editor, letter writer, advocate, and, of course, political leader.
In February 1840, the Old Hickory published an article charging that Harrison had earned the Whig presidential nod only because timid supporters feared that perennial favorite Henry Clay would again prove unelectable. Knowing this claim was sure to irk longtime Clay admirer Lincoln, who in fact felt understandable guilt over switching his allegiance to Harrison, Douglas and other members of the Democratic State Committee made a show of calling personally at the hostile Journal office with screed in hand, proposing that the entire text now be republished in Simeon Francis’s Whig paper.
While Francis refused the demand, to no one’s surprise the pro-Douglas Register printed the piece in full just a few days later. Omitted from Douglas’s ostensibly forthright request to the Journal, however (the text of which editor Walters featured along with the reprint), were the full details of the elaborate alliance that had inspired creation of the new Democratic extra in the first place. Readers of the time knew that Douglas was a prominent Van Buren man, but most probably did not know he was also one of the leading but unnamed “Democratic Citizens” responsible for founding and editing the Old Hickory, whose birth as a campaign organ had been promoted in—of course—the Register.20
Not that Lincoln was above embracing such overtly partisan press ventures. At the time, he was not only a member of the state’s Whig State Central Committee, but also one of the principal backers of his party’s own campaign extra: the Old Soldier. Named in tribute to Harrison, the paper openly aimed to energize the party faithful “into ‘battle array’ ” for the approaching election. At first, Whigs hoped to keep publication plans secret for as long as possible in order to spring the new paper on a complacent opposition. The Register, however, got hold of a confidential circular detailing their plan, and gleefully reprinted it on January 31. Openly promising that its new publication would “be devoted exclusively to the great cause in which we are engaged,” the notice urged that “every Whig in the State MUST take it,” adding: “YOU MUST RAISE A FUND AND FORWARD US FOR EXTRA COPIES—every county ought to send FIFTY OR ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS,—and the copies will be forwarded to you for distribution among our POLITICAL OPPONENTS.” Unmasked earlier than they hoped, the Whigs went forward with their effort anyway and launched the paper on February 1, at least getting a two-week jump on the opposition Old Hickory. Now the real press war began. By March 1, a delighted Lincoln could report: “Subscriptions to the ‘Old Soldier’ pour in without abatement. This morning I took from the post-office a letter from [state representative Jesse K.] Dubois inclosing the names of sixty subscribers; and carrying it to Francis, I found he had received one hundred and forty more from other quarters by the same day’s mail. This is but an average specimen of every day’s receipts.”21
Openly identifying himself as one of the editors of the Old Soldier (he oddly likened his role to that of a “superintendent”), Lincoln provided a direct appeal on its pages, exhorting prospective readers “to aid us in filling its columns with such ‘burning truths’ and ‘confounding arguments’ as may sear the eye-balls, and stun the ears of the Old hero’s thousand-tongued calumniators.” This may have seemed tough language from the man who only a few years earlier had preached civility at the Young Men’s Lyceum. In virtually the same breath, the paper vowed to publish no “vile falsehood” in the Old Soldier. Nothing would “appear in its columns, as facts, which we do not, on the fullest investigation in our power to make, believe to be true.”22 Its assaults against Van Buren (and Douglas) proliferated anyway. Lincoln later alluded to “the infernal Extra Register” to indicate that the opposition campaign sheet did no less in return.23 In the era long before political action committees could buy time to air negative advertisements, these campaign extras served the very same purpose: providing a forum for merciless and often irresponsible attacks on the opposition.
The inevitable reprisals were not always limited to the printed page. They sometimes turned physical. The corpulent but feisty Simeon Francis was certainly no stranger to outright violence. A few years earlier the rotund editor had been “rudely assaulted in the street” by one Jacob M. Early, a hot-tempered local doctor-turned-preacher known in the community as the “fighting parson” because of his penchant for brawling, often in defense of the Democratic Party.24 On the last day of February 1840, Douglas himself grew so agitated over Francis’s recent articles—one of which likened the politician to a horse thief—that he launched a physical attack of his own against the much larger Whig editor on a busy Springfield street. The contest ended quickly and inconclusively, with little permanent damage to either combatant and much amusement for eyewitnesses. Lincoln found the episode droll enough to report to a friend the following morning: “Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted by something in the ‘Journal,’ undertook to cane Francis in the street. Francis caught him, by the hair and jammed him back against a market-cart, where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him. The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else (Douglas excepted) have been laughing about it ever since.”
Douglas supporters resumed their own laughter soon enough. Declaring the overweight six-footer Francis as a “compound of goose fat and sheep’s wool,” the Old Hickory boasted that Douglas could never be “injured by the croaking of all the Old Grannies about the Journal office.” Francis promptly retorted that he had actually escaped harm because the Little Giant’s “stick was too heavy for him to wield, our head too high for him to hit, or . . . he adopted a retreat too soon for his success.” According to the Journal, Douglas “came, he saw, he got mad . . . he got a stick bigger than himself . . . his mighty hand raised the stick, and we received the blow upon an unoffending apple.”25 Their physical confrontation may have been over, but both men gleefully returned to exchanging vitriol on the pages of their party extras.
Stephen A. Douglas—darling of Walters and the Register—his earliest known portrait, a painting by Charles Loring Elliott, ca. 1840.
Although historian Mark Neely aptly labeled such campaign specials “the quintessence of early American journalistic art,” the role they really played had little to do with the original art of journalism.26 They were designed specifically to energize faithful voters to the polls, organize geographically scattered supporters around unifying themes, and raise funds to do more of both. They contained no advertising, only editorials and items related to the campaign. Not even the party-affiliated town papers could so brazenly devote all their space to politics. The campaign extras did so freely. But the parent papers still maintained involvement of their own. Just as the Old Hickory enjoyed promotion from the Register, the Old Soldier remained connected to the Sangamo Journal: the Whig extra was in fact printed on the very presses Simeon Francis owned and operated to print his Springfield weekly, and more than likely the Old Hickory shared printing facilities with the Register.
The additional business put much needed cash in the publisher’s pocket at a time when the economy was so bad it was said that the Journal stayed above water only because of the income it collected by printing bankruptcy notices. As Simeon Francis confided to one of his brothers that September, he felt compelled to “toil at my profession until money is more plenty.” Aside from Whig patronage, Springfield seemed to him “dull,” with “nothing doing in the way of business.”27 Fighting the “cursed” Van Buren administration by assigning his presses to pro-Whig campaign extras generated money and not a little excitement. It suited Simeon’s politics, too. Still filled with “enthusiasm” for the Whigs, Fra
ncis yearned for the day “Martin leaves the cage at Washington, which he has so long besmirched and dishonored. It will take some time for old Tip to rig and fix the ropes of the ship of state as they were before Jackson and Van took the helm—but I can see in the distance a brighter day for our country.”28
For Francis, brighter days for the nation arrived sooner than he expected, although his impact on the race proved indecisive. Always dependent on busy election campaigns to get him past the lean years, by the end of 1840 his Old Soldier was reaching more Illinois readers than the Journal itself: eight thousand statewide.29 “We have the numbers,” Lincoln boasted, “and if properly organized and exerted, with the gallant HARRISON at our head, we shall meet our foes, and conquer them in all parts of the Union.”30
In this prediction Lincoln proved incorrect. The war of words among the rival campaign extras, not to mention the openly partisan Springfield dailies, ended triumphantly for the Democrats, not the Whigs—at least statewide. A narrow 51–49 percent majority gave Van Buren Illinois’s five electoral votes. But Harrison prevailed nationally, and headed to Washington to assume the presidency the following March. Barely a month after his inauguration, however, he disproved the famous adage that old soldiers never die. After braving the March wind to deliver his record-long inaugural address without benefit of a topcoat or hat, William Henry Harrison succumbed to bilious pleurisy, the first president to perish while in office, on April 4, 1841. Harrison’s successor, Vice President John Tyler, was a former states’ rights Democrat with weak ties to the Whig organization. If Tyler was a man without a party, the official Whig newspapers now regarded themselves as a party without a man.