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

by Harold Holzer

  When Greeley responded by renewing the charge that the Herald’s advertising columns alone revealed its depravity, Bennett shot back that the Tribune’s own paid notices so often abounded with “quack advertisements . . . about ‘dyspepsia,’ and the ‘piles,’ ‘syrup of Naphtha, the only cure for consumption,’ ‘liverwort and tar,’ ‘compound syrup for nervous debility,’ calomel, and all sorts of medicines and disorders, scattered through its columns,” that “the man who can talk about ours, has a degree of impudence harder than brass, yea, even than steel itself.”54

  Bennett was on to something. Whatever his fondness for arcane philosophies, Greeley never lacked for brass and steel, whatever ridicule he inspired. However spirited his arguments with Bennett, nothing aroused the Tribune editor more passionately than issues involving war and politics. And he never permitted his paper to abandon its incurable hostility to American involvement in Mexico. On the very day after Lincoln’s “Spot” resolution speech on the House floor—which the Tribune failed to cover—the paper’s Washington correspondent, filing a report under his usual pseudonym, “Richelieu,” did note: “This is the anniversary of the day on which James K. Polk unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced the war with Mexico.”55 The Tribune’s opposition to the Mexican adventure remained strong, and Greeley’s image in period cartoons became ubiquitous. He emerged as something more than a celebrity. He was a symbol.

  To his Whig base, Lincoln hardly appeared isolated or extreme on the Mexican War issue. His peace position neither compromised his standing among party and press leaders (if the press recognized it at all), nor imperiled his renomination, however belittling the attacks it increasingly provoked from Illinois’s Democratic newspapers—criticism that in one sense served to elevate, not reduce, Lincoln’s stature.56 Though it flew in the face of the early belief that Congressman Lincoln had been important enough to denounce and defeat, the true explanation for his retirement was far less dramatic: the nomination for the congressional seat was, by previous agreement, irrevocably scheduled to rotate among other ambitious Whigs back home. Lincoln had himself secured the nod in 1846 (similarly succeeding sitting congressman Edward D. Baker) with the understanding that he, too, would serve but a single term and then yield the seat to another. Salving political egos at home clearly remained a higher priority for local Whigs than building influence for the district through congressional seniority.

  Greeley—an immediate mainstay in political caricature—dances to the tune of radical “coons” during the 1846 New York gubernatorial campaign; and as a tightrope walker wavering between Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren and Whig nominee Zachary Taylor during the 1848 presidential race.

  Although Lincoln did confide to friends that he would have liked to scuttle the arrangement and take his record back to the voters, it was remembered that when Baker plotted a similar maneuver to win renomination two years earlier, Lincoln had insisted to a Whig editor: “Turn about is fair play.”57 Baker was a family friend—Abraham and Mary had named their younger son, Eddy, in his honor—but Lincoln had shown no reluctance to pressure him to yield. Now, Lincoln’s “word and honor” forbade an outright fight for his own renomination. “Turn about” was still “fair play.”58

  In a version of the succession saga later drafted by Lincoln himself—eager to quash the idea that he had lost his seat over policy issues that hurt his popularity—he described the prearranged transition as fully “in accordance with an understanding among leading Whigs of the district, and by which Col. John J. Hardin and Col. E. D. Baker had each previously served a single term from the same district.”59 At the time, however, he left the door to renomination ajar, telling Herndon up to the last minute that “if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again.”60 “The people,” however, never demanded his return.

  A fresh look at the succession question suggests that the full story is perhaps more complex than the revisionist scenario has suggested, with Lincoln perhaps deserving more responsibility for the ultimate political result that year in Sangamon County than modern scholars have been willing to assign him. After all, on Election Day, the unbroken string of recent Whig successes in his congressional district did come to an end. A once safe Whig seat turned over to the Democrats; the “enemy” did prevail. And Lincoln’s widely publicized antiwar stance surely played some role, even if his name did not appear on the ballot.

  To be sure, the Whig nominee to succeed him, saddled with the burden of defending Lincoln’s record in Washington, notably lacked the incumbent’s nimble debating style and extraordinary magnetism on the hustings.61 But most voters also knew that the 1848 candidate, Stephen Trigg Logan, was not only Mary Lincoln’s cousin, but years earlier had shared a law office with none other than her husband. Their once intimate professional and personal association likely did Logan more harm than good. Lincoln may have consoled himself in the belief that Logan lost the state’s only Whig congressional seat only because he was a lackluster campaigner with a prickly personality to boot. But at the time, the Democratic press openly promoted the Democratic nominee, Major Thomas Harris, as a hero of the war that Lincoln had supposedly disgraced by opposing it.

  Candidate Harris pushed hard for the pro-Democratic Register to “light up the district in a blaze” during the campaign, urging the paper to “severely” criticize not only Logan, but also Lincoln and the pro-Whig press, until the resulting “thunder and lightning” made voters “exclaim with Lady Macbeth ‘out damned spot.’ ” Harris was sure the district’s “young men,” specifically those Mexican War veterans arriving home in time to cast their votes, would vote to reclaim the seat for the Democrats. Delighted to oblige, the Register proclaimed that it was now up to each voter to choose between “the side of his country,” or “with Illinois Journals and A. Lincoln.”62

  Voters chose “country”—albeit barely. Logan lost the August election by only 106 votes out of some 14,500, with a third-party “Liberty” candidate siphoning off enough support to defeat him—or, reading the results another way, reflecting additional anti-Whig sentiment. Returning veterans, disenfranchised in 1846 (guaranteed absentee voting for soldiers did not yet exist), probably made an additional difference in Harris’s favor.63 In the end, however, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion but that the 15 percent voter swing back to the Democrats was at least in part a rebuke of the Whig incumbent, even if Lincoln himself was not a candidate.64 He certainly lost renomination through no fault of his own, and hardly committed political suicide by denouncing the war; but had he secured the Whig nod and stood for a second term, what Herndon accurately labeled “defections from the party ranks” might well have doomed his own candidacy, too. In any case, the Democratic newspapers in the district helped ensure Whig defeat by using Lincoln as their punching bag.65

  For a time, Lincoln tried ignoring the result, telling one friend merely “that he would rather not be put upon explaining how Logan was defeated in my district.”66 But he and his supporters surely smarted over the defeat. In Springfield, the Whig loss so unnerved Lincoln’s principal press advocate, Simeon Francis, that the editor published a wild charge alleging that the Democratic victor was no war hero at all, but a coward guilty of “skulking” at the battle of Cerro Gordo. Infuriated, Congressman-elect Harris armed himself with a walking stick and stormed into the Sangamo Journal office to avenge his honor by confronting the huge man he derisively referred to as “Fatty.”

  Finding the editor at his desk in his second-floor office, Harris barked: “Mr. Francis, I wish you to stop the publication of the low personal lies against me, with which your paper is of late filled.” Desist, he warned, “or I shall force you to do so with this big cane.” Francis—as sedentary as Harris was virile—daringly retorted: “Suppose, Major, you try it now.” Harris then turned to leave, but the editor rushed at him and tried to seize him by his coat. The congressman-elect flicked him away with his cane, wh
ereupon Francis grabbed a nearby mallet and lunged back at Harris.

  The ensuing brief scuffle proved more comical than dangerous. Harris departed uninjured, and later joked: “I was more fortunate than even at Cerro Gordo—for there I admit my breeches were torn by the chaparral, while here, neither skin nor knuckles were injured.” Authorities took the dustup more seriously, slapping Francis with a $21 fine.67

  However ludicrous, this latest incident demonstrated how volatile the intersection of press and politics remained, and how close to the surface real violence lurked, especially once incendiary news began reaching readers by telegraph while it was still “hot.” Unfortunately for Lincoln, the press’s growing ability to report news rapidly began to increase just as his ability to generate it began to diminish.

  • • •

  As for the war between Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett—and anyone else who questioned their politics—it continued to rage long after the American army withdrew from Mexico.

  It was expected that the big-personality editors of the day devote editorial space to their pet causes and peeves, and for all his insistence that he cared only for the poor and voiceless, Greeley rarely ignored an opportunity to focus attention on himself. Thus, although he lost the widely publicized circulation competition to Bennett’s Herald, Greeley seemed to take almost perverse comfort when another bitter enemy, the Courier and Enquirer’s James Watson Webb, was tried and convicted for participating in yet another duel, and sentenced to two years in Sing Sing. (Not surprisingly pardoned by his friend and fellow Whig Governor Seward, Webb never served a day in prison, and in gratitude even named his next son “William Seward Webb,” a consecration of the marriage of politics and the press if ever there was one.) When Webb responded to Greeley’s lack of sympathy by launching one of his periodic and highly personal editorial assaults on the Tribune editor, Greeley replied with a lengthy third-person plea for understanding—and advantage: try as he might to play the misunderstood philosopher, Greeley as usual gave as good as he got.

  It is true that the editor of the Tribune chooses mainly (not entirely) vegetable food; but he never troubles his readers on the subject; it does not worry them; why should it concern the Colonel [Webb]? . . . It is hard for Philosophy that so humble a man shall be made to stand as its exemplar. . . .

  As to our personal appearance, it does seem time that we should say something, to stay the flood of nonsense with which the town just by this time be nauseated. Some donkey a while ago, apparently anxious to assail or annoy the editor of this paper . . . originated the story of his carelessness of personal appearance; and since then every blockhead of the same disposition and distressed by a similar lack of ideas, has repeated and exaggerated the foolery; until from its origin in the Albany Microscope it has sunk down at last to the columns of the Courier and Enquirer, growing more absurd at every landing.68

  War had come and gone without demonstrably propelling Abraham Lincoln’s political ascent, certainly not with any permanence. But war—between nations and between newspapers—had brought Horace Greeley as close as he had ever come to nationwide fame, and as far as he ever stood from bankruptcy. The “philosopher” was very nearly king.

  By 1850, newspapers had emerged as the most important galvanizing force in communities as small as Springfield and as mighty as New York—bringing rapidly reported news, useful commercial advertising, provocative commentary, and reliable party doctrine to tens of thousands of homes, businesses, and street corners.69 It was this new capacity for what passed at mid-century for instant mass communication that gave newspapers their power. The editor of the Home Journal, Nathaniel Parker Willis, grew positively giddy when he contemplated the impact of the typical daily paper, “opened at the same moment, by thousands, and . . . filling them all, on the instant, with the self-same thought.”70 And by now, whatever his foibles, no newspaperman influenced public thought more than Horace Greeley.

  Even a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, the streets of Manhattan abounded with a printed-word assault on the senses: signs on nearly every window, billboards pasted to wooden fences, and huge whitewashed messages competing for attention along building walls. Added to this spectacle of words was the sight and sound of newsboys hawking papers along the busy outdoor thoroughfares and newsstands piled high with daily and weekly journals and crowded with eager customers reaching for their favorite paper, or, intrigued by an unexpected headline, grabbing for a new one. “As the human tide descends,” observed Tribune reporter Junius Henri Browne in his guide, The Great Metropolis, “the heaps of papers rapidly diminish. There is no conversation between buyer and seller. The money is laid down, the journal, taken up, and the change given, without a word.”71 It was as if what needed most to be expressed was to be found only within the pages of the New York papers.

  Such rituals may have lacked for words—for not every newspaper buyer wanted friends, strangers, or tradesmen to know which paper he purchased on the street (a sure indication by then of a purchaser’s political orientation)—but taken together and repeated six days every week, they loudly amplified the collective voice of the city’s principal editors.

  Every time Bennett or Greeley spoke out in print, tens of thousands heard. And many obeyed.

  * * *

  I. As president, needing Democrats to defend the Union cause, Lincoln would one day name McClernand a general in the federal army.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Position We Cannot Maintain

  Abraham Lincoln’s lame-duck congressional career limped along without attracting much national press attention for another inglorious year. Not that it had brought him widespread acclaim before his district chose a Democrat to succeed him.

  Early biographers tended to exaggerate Lincoln’s centrality in the Washington debate over Mexico as surely as they overemphasized the premature reports of his political suicide in Illinois.1 This was the inevitable result of viewing these events through the prism of the proto-Lincoln’s extraordinary future development. Such Lincoln-centric scrutiny fails to acknowledge the preeminence in the House of Representatives, and certainly in the press, of more senior opinion leaders whose words carried far more weight in the late 1840s. Lincoln may deservedly be the leading character in his own posthumous biographies, but he was hardly a major figure on Capitol Hill while he served there, certainly not as reported by the major newspapers in the commercial and political capitals of the country: New York and Washington. Such attention remained fixed on his elders. And it also shone brightly on the remarkable young Senate freshman Stephen Douglas, whose own ascent, by comparison to Lincoln’s, seemed meteoric.

  With breathtaking speed, Douglas secured the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Committee on Territories, in whose hands rested responsibility for the future of slavery in the Mexican cession and other Western lands. The assignment ensured that Douglas was destined to play a major role in deciding whether America’s most controversial institution, slavery, would expand beyond the states where it had long existed—and into territory where it had long been banned under terms of the Missouri Compromise. As his political influence expanded, Douglas’s views increasingly earned broader press coverage. His speeches began to draw large and admiring crowds to the Senate galleries. A pro-Democratic editor doubling as a campaign biographer did not exaggerate when he observed that Douglas was no longer “compelled to address empty benches or an inattentive audience.” The senator was enjoying “an increased popularity . . . adding greatly to his rising fame as an orator and debater.”2

  Further evidence of the Illinois rivals’ divergent trajectories could be inferred from their contrasting relationships with the most famous Capitol Hill veteran of all. Lincoln was flattered merely to be invited to the occasional Saturday breakfast with Whig Senate lion Daniel Webster (whom he had first met when the orator visited Springfield back in 1840). At these meals, Lincoln at least shone by telling amusing stories that gave “great delight to ‘the solid men of Boston�
�� assembled around the festive board,” as one journalist allowed at the table recalled.3 Douglas, on the other hand, was unafraid to confront Webster directly on the Senate floor—as a peer. “In a constitutional argument,” marveled James Gordon Bennett’s increasingly pro-Democratic New York Herald, Douglas “has completely worsted some of those—among them Webster . . . who have heretofore been considered as preeminent authorities.”4

  By contrast, politically speaking, Lincoln became something of a dead man walking, and with fully half his term still before him. (According to the rules of the day, his successor would not take his seat until December 1849.) But this particular lame duck had no intention of serving out the session in obscurity if he could help it. Instead, he summoned the enthusiasm to entertain the House with yet another stinging attack on Democratic policies, this time of the domestic variety. In a June 20, 1848 speech, Lincoln railed against both James K. Polk, who had decided not to seek a second term, and Lewis Cass, the 1848 Democratic choice to succeed the president. Returning to a longtime passion, Lincoln denounced Democratic opposition to internal improvements. Polk had long insisted that government support for public works was unconstitutional. From a practical perspective, added the president, such investments invariably favored one state over another, and if applied equally would bankrupt the Treasury.

  The Democrats’ recently adopted national platform reiterated this position, defending Polk’s veto of an earlier internal improvements bill, an action Gales and Seaton’s pro-Whig Intelligencer had labeled “proof” that the Democratic administration was “fast degenerating into a mere quadrennial elective despotism” (Whigs also believed presidents should not casually exert their veto power).5 In his latest speech, Lincoln ignored the veto issue altogether to offer standard, pro-improvements Whig doctrine, but in a syllogistic style more recognizable today as Lincolnian: “The just conclusion from all of this is, that if the nation refuse to make improvements, of the more general kind, because their benefits may be somewhat local, a state may, for the same reason, refuse to make an improvement of a local kind, because it’s [sic] benefits may be somewhat general.”