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

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Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 13

by Harold Holzer


  On December 6, 1847, the very day Lincoln first squeezed his immense frame into his new desk before a large window in the rear of the House chamber, the anti-Administration Intelligencer denounced President Polk as a “bully” who had “scooped out with thumb a prostrate adversary’s eye.” To Gales and Seaton, the president was “the savage of the court-yard”—a description that insatiable newspaper reader Lincoln almost certainly perused before making his exhilarating debut on the House floor the following month. He likely noted as well that the very next morning, the pro-administration Union responded in kind by declaring the late war “just,” “gloriously” waged, and well worth pursuing “till its great ends of peace and justice are obtained.” Moreover, predicted the paper, American voters would surely “crush and grind to powder” any politician who rebuked the glory wrought by military victory.33 If the warning resonated with Lincoln (as perhaps it should have), he showed no fear at the time.

  Lincoln never publicly subscribed to the conspiracy theory which held that Polk had waged war expressly “for the purpose of extending slave territory,” a charge frequently repeated in the Whig press. He preferred to view the Mexico adventure as a “war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”34 At least, that is how he cast his position when reflecting on it from a distance of twelve years. While serving in Congress, however, he had no compunctions about forging alliances with abolitionist New England Whigs who believed that just such pro-slavery plotting had indeed inflamed Democratic war fever.

  Together, this Whig coalition constituted a formidable bloc, though never powerful enough to derail administration policy. Lincoln would vote aye “at least forty times,” by his own proud, though exaggerated, reckoning, for the Wilmot Proviso—a rider introduced by Whig congressman David Wilmot to bar slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico. The measure regularly failed in the Senate.35 In reality, Lincoln never voted for the original Proviso, which was introduced before he ever entered Congress. But supporters did subsequently resubmit amendments echoing its sentiments, and Lincoln reliably supported them all because, as he put it, they reflected “my opposition to the extension of slavery into territories now free.”36 He may have shied away subsequently from identifying himself with those who viewed the Mexican War as a ploy to expand the institution, but his actions at the time spoke louder than his words would later.

  Eager to “distinguish” himself in the House, Lincoln caused a genuine stir just two weeks into his term by offering resolutions demanding that the president inform the House of the precise “spot” in Texas where Mexican forces had first spilled American blood the previous year—the act that had provoked Polk’s response.37 Hostilities were winding down, but Lincoln and his fellow Whigs intended to harp on the notion that no evidence existed to support the claim that the original confrontation had occurred on indisputably American soil.

  Then, on January 12, Lincoln rose to deliver his first major address: a forty-five-minute-long attack on the Polk administration couched within a spirited defense of those “Spot” resolutions. His only previous “speech-making” from the floor had come on a minor “post-office question of no general interest . . . by way of getting the hang of the House,” as he reported home, adding: “I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court.”38

  “Scared” or not, Lincoln put his mesmerizing talents on full display that afternoon, offering a grandiloquent oration oozing with vitriol, couched as a closely argued and devastating critique of Polk’s recent pro-war message to Congress. “As to the mode of terminating the war, and securing the peace,” he charged, “the President is . . . a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.” His assault growing more impassioned as it progressed, Lincoln climaxed his speech with the kind of hyperbole that would later vanish from his political vocabulary. No doubt hungry for press coverage, he turned to a newspaper for inspiration for its most orotund flourishes. A year earlier, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (in an article faithful reader Lincoln undoubtedly noticed) charged that America had launched a war “in which Heaven must take part against us.” As Greeley saw it, “The laws of Heaven are suspended and those of Hell established in their stead. It means that the Commandments are to be read and obeyed by our people, thus—Thou shalt kill Mexicans; Thou shalt steal from them, hate them, burn their houses, ravage their fields, and fire red-hot cannon balls into towns swarming with wives and children.”39

  Now Lincoln summoned God in unmistakably similar terms to demand answers of his own from the president. There seems little doubt that he had modeled his remarks at least in part on Greeley’s impassioned editorial. Lincoln expressed it this way in his most famous congressional speech:

  As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no envasion—no equivocation. And if, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed—that it was not within an inhabited country, or, if within such, that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of Texas, or of the United States . . . then I am with him for his justification. . . . But if he can not, or will not do this—if on any pretence, or no pretence, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him [emphasis added]; that he ordered General Taylor into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, purposely to bring on a war; that originally having some strong motive—what, I will not stop now to give any opinion concerning—to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy. . . .40

  The one-two punch provided by his lawyerly “Spot” resolutions and his impassioned antiwar floor oration helped establish Lincoln’s Whig bona fides in Washington. His “military glory” oration in particular earned the congressman his first trickle of press attention in regions outside the West. One particular item by an observant Washington correspondent soon found its way into print in small Whig newspapers in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York state’s Hudson Valley. It was far from blanket national coverage. But it was a start:

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the only Whig Member of Congress from Illinois, being the successor of Col. Hardin, is described as a tall, raw-boned, thin, and dark-complexioned man, six feet four inches high. He made his debut in the House last week, in a speech on the War and the President and displayed the rapidity of utterance, abundance of gesture, and striking figurative language which are common to Western men. Speaking of the President being led away by military glory, he said: “Military glory is a rainbow which rises in the heavens and dazzles with its luster, but it comes forth from the CLOUDS OF DESOLATED CITIES AND SHOWERS OF HUMAN BLOOD.”41

  The report mischaracterized his speaking style, and in the bargain misquoted his address, but at least recognized his unique appearance and identified him as a freshman worthy of future attention. The coverage also earned Lincoln a rather ignominious nickname back home: “Spotty Lincoln.” Springfield’s Democratic State Register labeled him the “Benedict Arnold of our District,” predicting he would thereafter be “known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term.”42 To all Democrats there, and perhaps even a few local Whig hawks ambivalent about slavery, he suddenly seemed a gadfly whose antiwar obsession might betray a lack of patriotism.

  Sensing an opportunity to diminish him, the Register’s Charles Lanphier personally urged a Democratic member of the Illinois House delegation to show Lincoln no mercy. “Our long-legged friend from the 7th dist. has very properly damned himself ‘by resolution,’ ” Lanphier wrote John A. McClernand.I “ . . . He may well exclaim ‘Out damned spot!’ for Cain’s mark is on him. Give him hell.” (Lanphier may have already known that Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare play was Macb
eth, and had surely read his recent remarks in Congress comparing wartime casualties to the “blood of Abel.”)43 Critics, many of whom knew better, whispered that Lincoln was unwilling even to support funding to supply American troops—a misrepresentation he was compelled to deny for years.

  Undaunted, Congressman Lincoln proudly sent off the text of his House speech to Springfield for hometown publication. The Journal duly carried the remarks in full on February 10 and for wider circulation reissued it as a pamphlet that Lincoln could mail free to his constituents using his congressional franking privileges. Editor Simeon Francis sought additional attention for Lincoln—and himself—by daring the opposition Register to print the oration as well, charging that Lanphier’s rival Democratic paper “fear[ed] to have it go to his readers.” Unwilling to succumb to a dare that might result in widening the reach of Lincoln’s words, the Register surprised no one when it refused to carry what it characterized as Lincoln’s “imbecile” remarks.44

  The city’s two opposing party organs were not in business to publicize opposition arguments, but its editors likely sensed that a good political feud might boost the circulation of both. So when, soon thereafter, Douglas took the floor of the Senate to deliver a ringing defense of the war, the Register not only published the entire text, but challenged the Journal to run the senator’s oration, too, belatedly offering to reprint the Lincoln address after all if it did. Neither paper took the bait. As a result, Democratic readers alone learned that Douglas had asked, as if in direct response to Lincoln: “Whose heart did not swell and pulsate with patriotic pride as he heard the shout of the glorious victories achieved by our countrymen . . . striking terror to the hearts of all enemies of republican institutions, and demonstrating that ours is the first military, as well as civil power, upon the globe?”45 Lincoln supporters, however, never read these words because the Journal declined to print them. Whig and Democratic newspaper subscribers enjoyed access only to party doctrine since they read the party newspaper of their choice—and unless they were professional politicians who routinely scoured the opposition journals for mention of their names, only the party newspaper of their choice.

  However routine, the publication of Lincoln’s House oration in the hometown Whig paper nonetheless alarmed some of his closest friends and supporters. Mere rumors of his antiwar stance were enough to inspire his adoring but self-important law partner, William Herndon, to dash off an anxious letter expressing concern that Lincoln’s position would ruin him with local voters, particularly if he indeed opposed funding to feed and clothe the troops, as rumored. Lincoln assured Herndon that while he considered Polk’s war policies “unjust,” he would continue to “vote supplies,” though “perhaps not in the precise form recommended by the President.”

  Then Lincoln urged his partner to read his “pamphlet speech” even if he became “scared anew by it,” confidently adding: “After you get over your scare, read it over again, sentence by sentence, and tell me honestly what you think of it.”46 Before Herndon could reply, Lincoln shot off yet another justification, this time questioning whether Polk or any president could ever make himself “the sole judge” of when and whether to invade another country. Raising doubts about the very powers he would years later seize for himself, Lincoln warned against granting a chief executive the right “to make war at pleasure.”47 One can only imagine Lincoln laboring away at this self-justifying correspondence amid the unceasing din of the House floor, where even whispers famously bounced off the chamber walls and into enemies’ ears; or perhaps composing it at his equally bustling quarters at Sprigg’s boardinghouse—made particularly boisterous by his temperamental wife’s occasional outbursts and his children’s more than occasional misbehavior. Like other congressmen of the day, even senior members, Lincoln had no government-funded office in which to attend to his paperwork, or see visiting constituents. All such labor was conducted in the noisy House chamber.

  If the freshman’s debut Mexico speech was meant, in part, to impress his older House colleagues, its impact proved tragically short-lived, particularly for the most eminent Whig among them. Just a month later, on February 21, the frail John Quincy Adams suddenly collapsed at his desk in the chamber just after voting “no” on a resolution to decorate the military heroes of the Mexican War, the victim of a stroke. He expired two days later in the speaker’s room adjacent to the House floor. “Old Man Eloquent” was eighty years old. The death of the antislavery icon, as revered a congressman as he had been a reviled president, ironically deflated what was left of Capitol Hill resistance to peace on Polk’s terms. It also relegated Lincoln’s maiden antiwar speech to the status of a footnote (however dutifully it was later recalled in the future president’s canon of early oratory). Lincoln’s only “spot” now was his position on the thirty-member House committee assigned to accompany Adams’s body to its temporary resting place at the Congressional Burial Ground.48

  Whig objections notwithstanding—and despite complaints by expansionist Democrats like Stephen Douglas who thought that America should have demanded even more land from vanquished Mexico—the Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by a wide margin in March 1848. The Mexican Senate followed suit as expected in June. The war was finally, officially over. But so, in a sense, was Lincoln’s career in Congress. Aside from reprints of his occasional speeches, the sole notice he had elicited in the all-important National Intelligencer since his arrival in Washington seven months earlier was the briefest of acknowledgments that he and Mary had joined a crowd attending a January performance of the “Ethiopian Singers” at Carusi’s Saloon. The “saloon” was more than its name implied; the elegant hall had hosted presidential inaugurals for a generation. But not even the sobriquet “Ethiopian” could conceal the fact that the performers that night were blackface minstrels.49 However hostile toward slavery, Lincoln never quite lost his taste for “darky” entertainments.

  • • •

  Not long after the Senate ratified the peace treaty with Mexico, Whigs back in Illinois substituted another candidate to stand for Congress in Lincoln’s district in 1848. Lincoln was but midway through his term in office. Among historians, it has been a matter of dispute over the generations as to whether the party’s decision to retire him resulted from growing hometown anger over his antiwar stance. William Herndon, who later wrote a highly influential Lincoln biography, nourished that interpretation in part because it made his own earlier warnings about Lincoln’s risky position seem more prescient. In Herndon’s blunt assessment, opposition to the Mexican War “sealed Lincoln’s doom as a Congressman;” his friend and senior partner had done nothing less than commit “political suicide” in Washington.50 For a long time Herndon’s self-serving view earned wide acceptance. Only later did historians point out that Lincoln’s short-lived House career terminated for more prosaic reasons, and that early biographers like Herndon invented the myth of his political downfall to make his subsequent phoenix-like rebirth seem all the more extraordinary.51

  In fact, neither the Whig Party as a whole, nor its various newspaper organs, ever truly retreated from their steadfast opposition to the Mexican War. Even after peace was restored, Horace Greeley’s Tribune perpetuated Whig disgust over the adventure. Greeley maintained a vigil over what he continued to call “the great question—which our vast acquisitions from Mexico had suddenly invested with the gravest importance—of excluding Slavery from the yet unattained Federal Territories.”52 By contrast, Bennett’s Herald had not only supported the contest, but broke the news of the peace treaty before the government was ready to release it—inspiring angry senators to summon the paper’s Washington correspondent to Capitol Hill for questioning in an unsuccessful effort to discover his source.

  As if oblivious to the larger controversy still raging in Washington, Greeley—one of whose early biographers reported that he now believed himself nothing less than the new “target-General to the Press, Pulpit, and Stump of the United States”—accepted a challenge f
rom Bennett to compare their newspapers’ respective daily circulation figures, proposing that an independent committee count the numbers. The loser, it was agreed, would give $300 to one of New York’s orphanages. As it turned out, the Herald won the contest, though just barely, 28,946 to 28,195. Greeley made the requisite donation to charity, grumbling that Bennett had achieved the superior number by counting one of his campaign extras (in fact, the daily circulation figures alone did show the Herald with a slight lead).53

  Unwilling to drop the story, Greeley went on to accuse his competitor in print of “bullying” the Tribune into the competition, but more importantly of a “studied pandering to depraved tastes and vicious inclinations,” and a “careful avoidance of giving offence to any popular vice or profitable corruption.” In typically fearless fashion, the Herald republished the Tribune’s unsportsmanlike diatribe, pleased to find an excuse of its own to prolong the circulation debate and claiming the last word by charging: “It is certainly very amusing in the philosophers of the Tribune, to compare their morality, their regard for religion, or any thing touching on public or private virtue, by way of injurious comparisons to the Herald or its conductor. . . . We have never advocated socialism, the next stop to infidelity, folly, demoralization, and licentiousness of the worst kind. We have never advocated anti-rentism, that atrocious system of legalized plunder, depriving a man of his property by popular agitation and popular outbreak.”

 

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