Rapidly making a mark as a mesmerizing lecturer and orator, Douglass briefly took the abolitionist gospel to Europe. After returning to America in 1847, he decided to devote himself to “wielding my pen as well as my voice in the great work of renovating the public mind, and building up a public sentiment, which should send slavery to the grave.” In short, he proposed establishing a newspaper of his own, devoted to restoring “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to “the people with whom I have suffered.” Friends warned Douglass that another new antislavery paper “was not needed” and “could not succeed.” Further, they cautioned, the very idea of a “wood-sawyer”—the period term for effervescent public speakers whose gestures resembled sawing wood—“offering himself to the public as an editor” was “absurd.” Undeterred, Douglass relocated to Rochester, New York, and there established the most famous black-owned newspaper of them all: The North Star—later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and ultimately Douglass’ Monthly. “Now,” he proudly recalled, “I had an audience to speak to every week.”63
Douglass went on to do battle not only against slavery, but against the reigning suspicion “that both my editorials and my speeches were written by white persons.” So low was the “estimate of Negro possibilities,” he noticed, that Southerners visiting nearby Niagara Falls frequently detoured to Rochester to see for themselves whether “an uneducated fugitive slave could write the articles attributed to me.”64
Frederick Douglass, editor of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, later Douglass’ Monthly.
Not that the novice editor abandoned the lecture circuit entirely—even if his appearances invariably elicited brutally racist coverage in the conservative dailies. Typically, when Douglass spoke at the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1847, he provoked nothing but condemnation in the New York Sun. In what the orator described as “a weak, puerile, and characteristic attack upon me,” the Sun protested against “the unmitigated abuse heaped upon our country by the colored man Douglass.” Tongue-in-cheek, Douglass considered it something of a victory to be labeled a “colored man” and not “a monkey” in the mainstream press.65
In Washington, similarly, the long-established, party-affiliated Intelligencer and Daily Union of course exerted far more influence than the capital’s new, official paper of that same Anti-Slavery Society, the National Era, which was edited by a courageous New Jersey–born physician named Gamaliel Bailey, Jr. Even though his would later be celebrated as the first paper to serialize Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dr. Bailey endured constant condemnation along with outright threats of violence. During Lincoln’s first months in Congress, Bailey’s office and home both came under direct attack from anti-abolition mobs.66
Although he left no comment about the hotly discussed Bailey incident, the event must have reminded Lincoln painfully of the atrocities committed by the mob that had killed Elijah Lovejoy back in Illinois in 1837. This latest attack, which occurred after seventy-two slaves were caught trying to flee the capital on a ship moored in the Potomac, unnerved all of Capitol Hill. Slave catchers detected and dragged the escapees back to their bondage soon enough, but after trying without success to lynch the ship captain, a mob turned their rage onto the National Era.67 Bailey and his paper barely escaped their fury. When, around the same time, John P. Hale, an antislavery senator from New Hampshire, offered a bill that would impose federal oversight on all private property in the District, newspapers included, an outraged Southern colleague invited him to visit Mississippi and “grace one of the tallest trees in the forest, with a rope around his neck.” It took an increasingly influential, compromise-minded Stephen Douglas to step in and calm the dispute, burnishing his own reputation in the process.68
• • •
The brief and indecisive 1849 congressional debate over slavery in the District of Columbia occurred at the precise time the Tribune’s reform-minded antislavery editor was himself serving in the House. But even Horace Greeley could exert little impact on the chamber in the scant three months he served there. While his staff back home later claimed, “No member was ever more faithful to his duties, and no one ever received smaller reward,”69 Greeley himself conceded that “much” was said but “little was achieved” during “that short session.” He explained: “As those were the last sands of an Administration already superseded, the old heads of either party were indisposed to have much done beside passing the necessary Appropriation bills.”70
In fact, showing little understanding that editorializing was a different art than legislating, the editor-congressman bombarded various House committees with proposals, parliamentary objections, and floor amendments that had almost no chance for serious consideration, much less passage. Greeley’s quirky initiatives included a measure to provide homesteads on public lands (a cause Lincoln would not embrace for another generation), another to cut funding for the recruitment of soldiers (his argument was that merely “planting the flag” would attract volunteers), yet another to deduct the cost of publicly funded book purchases from congressmen’s salaries, and one particularly bizarre proposal to change the name of the United States to “Columbia” in order to dampen states’ rights and promote nationalism. While the editor steadfastly maintained that his windmill-tilting “did some good,” Greeley’s bills, including his slave trade prohibition, routinely went down to defeat.71
These failures did not entirely demoralize Greeley, who at least got the opportunity to rail against what he believed to be Congress’s hidebound indifference to progress—on both the House floor and in his own paper. He particularly relished one dubious highlight of his brief congressional career. It was a fight he picked over a routine proposal that the House as usual “pay from its contingent fund seven dollars and a half per column inch each to The Union and the National Intelligencer respectively for reporting and printing our debates.” This was standard end-of-session fare: a payout to both Democratic and Whig papers for their months of gavel-to-gavel coverage. But ever the zealous reformer, Greeley took issue with the tradition. And he proved stubborn in his opposition.
Even when the bill’s sponsor barked at him, “I believe you have been a member of this House some four or five days, and you seem to begin early to decide what measures can and what cannot pass,” Greeley dug in his heels. “No matter,” he defiantly retorted, “you can’t pass that measure here.” Embarrassed, the majority temporarily tabled the motion, which proved a pyrrhic triumph for Greeley. He had made powerful new enemies. “Up to this period,” he admitted, “I had been favorably regarded and kindly treated by Messrs. Gales and Seaton, the excellent but unthrifty editors of The National Intelligencer; but they wasted no more civilities nor smiles on me so long as they lived.” Indeed, from that day forward, Gales and Seaton believed that Greeley had opposed their bonus payment out of either “personal hostility or general malignity.”72 For years to come, the rivals would joust for national attention—and later, for Lincoln’s favor as well. Sometimes the warfare between Whig papers could prove more acrimonious than that between Whig and Democratic ones.
So could conflicts among Whig politicians. Greeley’s most ill-fated, but perhaps best-remembered, legislative initiative came when he sought to expose, and curtail, the padded eight-dollar-per-twenty-mile travel expense allowances routinely claimed by congressmen journeying between Washington and their home districts. Though loosely required to submit reimbursement requests based on standard but outdated “postal routes,” many members unsurprisingly preferred charting meandering itineraries that enabled them to visit appealing tourist attractions, or perhaps deliver political speeches along the way to and from the capital. Greeley firmly believed that while new steamboat routes were indeed “much more swiftly and cheaply traversed,” they were also less direct than the older stagecoach roads, and thus both lengthier and costlier for the government to reimburse.
At first, the actual travel records proved so hard to obtain that Greeley hired “a reporter” just to search throu
gh the appropriate files and transcribe the relevant information.73 As Greeley suspected, the elusive archives proved damning. And the Tribune’s research showed that among the guilty congressional wanderers was none other than Abraham Lincoln. His most recent journey home had detoured significantly to include his Taylor-for-president speaking tour, followed by a westward sojourn along a circuitous route that enabled him, with his wife, to see Niagara Falls. The natural wonder had set an awestruck Lincoln to pondering the days “when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea.”74 But given his zeal for House rules, Greeley probably would have censured Moses himself for wandering too slowly toward the Promised Land. At least Lincoln again got his name prominently mentioned in the New York Tribune, though this time it was for allegedly pumping up his expense account. Shortly before Christmas 1848, the paper published what Greeley called “an elucidated exposé of the iniquities of Congressional mileage,” including a chart that indicated that fellow Whig Lincoln had added more than eight hundred miles to the “actual no. of miles by postal route,” resulting in an excess allowance of a hefty $676.80.75
In January, after the holiday recess, Greeley brought his official complaints about travel abuse to the House floor, attempting to affix a mileage reform amendment to a military appropriations bill. His effort prompted an outcry from colleagues like Thomas J. Turner of Illinois, who accused Greeley of altering the records, misunderstanding travel needs, and displaying an unwillingness to speak “the truth”—prompting Greeley to reply that “gentlemen” did not use “such language . . . in my section of the country.” After one particularly heated exchange on the issue, an equally offended Representative Robert C. Schenck of Ohio demanded of Greeley: “Do I understand the gentleman’s reply to be that he did not intend a sneer upon members of Congress?” To which Greeley replied, to derisive laughter, “No I didn’t say that.”76 On January 25, Greeley hit back at Turner for calling him “a malignant and wanton defamer,” but in the end watched helplessly as his amendment went down to defeat by a voice vote. Angry colleagues would not even permit a roll call. Reporting his defeat with pride in an article grandly headlined, “The Funeral of Mileage Reform,” the “Correspondent of the Tribune”—Greeley himself—lamented: “Thus endeth the last chance to affix a Mileage Reform proviso to any bill which must pass.”77
“Members did not relish the exposure of their dishonesty,” Greeley’s junior editors later understated, “but their talking did not in the least disturb Mr. Greeley’s equanimity.”78 The editor may have been a bit more unnerved when James Gordon Bennett summarized his brief congressional career by commenting:
We have not, probably, in the last thirty years, been blessed with such a perfect specimen of a little, mean, pettifogging demagogue in Congress, as Hon. Mr. Greeley has furnished in his own career during the past few months. His extreme affectation of morality, his ultra professions of humanity, the claims he puts forth for political purity, have been amply and fully illustrated in his miserable . . . equivocating, shuffling, sniveling course on the Mileage of Members, and on the Book Expenditures of the House. . . . We are glad that the noise and clap-traps of Master Greeley to catch the little applause of ignorance and envy, have been thrown overboard, as they deserved to be.79
Inevitably, Greeley’s campaign against fellow Whigs also delighted opposition Democrats in the House. One of them—a congressman who had earned the nickname “Sausage” Sawyer for demanding the expulsion of a reporter for eating a bologna sausage sandwich behind the speaker’s chair—admitted that Lincoln’s orations on the floor were often “pretty good.” But unable to resist a comment on his wandering style—and the recent travel dustup—Sawyer wickedly added: “I hope he won’t charge mileage on his travels while delivering it.”80
To no one’s surprise, the House of Representatives never took formal action against Lincoln or his equally peripatetic colleagues on the matter of travel expenses. Instead, they mounted an effort to expel Greeley from Congress—until a Democratic representative from Illinois, “Long” John Wentworth (himself a newspaperman), blurted out to his colleagues: “Why, you blessed fools! Do you want to make him President?” Escaping ouster, the crusading editor remembered appreciatively that since Lincoln did not support “the active cabal against me, though his mileage figured conspicuously in that exposé, I parted with him at the close of the Congress with none but grateful recollections.” Not all of his congressional colleagues were equally forgiving, specially the pro-slavery Democrats on the other side of the aisle. “I am confident,” Greeley admitted after one session marked by particularly violent outbursts, “I could not have passed quietly through that side of the House between ten and two o’clock of that night without being assaulted; and, had I resisted, beaten within an inch of my life, if not killed outright.”81
The Tribune lamented the apparent conclusion of Lincoln’s own national political career by praising him, along with other outgoing Whigs, in a story signed by “X,” but likely composed by the editor himself:
Hon. ABRAHAM LINCOLN of Ill. also goes out, having declined a reelection. He is an universal favorite here—an entirely self-made man, and of singular and striking personal appearance. It is said that his District will send him back here at the next election, nolens volens [willingly or unwillingly].82
Years later, Greeley insisted that while Lincoln was indeed “liked and esteemed” in his congressional days, “ . . . there were men accounted abler on our side of the House.” In Greeley’s estimate, “had each of us been required to name the man among us who would first attain the presidency, I doubt whether five of us would have designated Abraham Lincoln.”83 “Five” may actually have constituted an exaggeration. Lincoln’s brief exposure to Washington officials and journalists alike, ending in early 1849, had made him a wiser, but not yet a more conspicuously promising, politician. As for Greeley, he ended his own brief congressional career “not likely,” he admitted, ever to hold office again. Yet he valued the experience, acknowledging: “I saw things from a novel point of view; and if I came away from the Capitol no wiser than I went thither, the fault was entirely my own.”84
Greeley maintained in one of his last and longest House addresses on February 26, 1849, that he had come to Congress “to act, not to talk,” proclaiming: “I do not think my constituents want any speechmaking from me.” Indeed, during his brief but eventful three-month term, whenever he did orate he spoke so softly that clerks and colleagues had trouble hearing him. But with only five days left in his term, the editor rose one more time to note that too much energy had recently been expended debating slavery, as a result of which too much business had been “left undone.” Not even Greeley, however, whether as a powerful editor or a powerless temporary congressman, could hope to hold back the national tide on the slavery issue. He was never more wrong than when he told his colleagues that day: “It strikes me that that topic is well nigh exhausted.”85
Greeley remained in Washington until March so he could attend Zachary Taylor’s inauguration, and then returned quietly to New York to resume full-time work on the Tribune. “With no applauding shouts was Horace Greeley welcomed on his return from the Seat of Corruption,” lamented one of the editor’s earliest biographers. “ . . . Do the people, then, generally feel that an Honest Man is out of place in the Congress of the United States?”86 Greeley himself provided what he hoped would serve as an answer on the pages of his newspaper: “Calling me a hypocrite or demagogue cannot make a charge of $1,664 for coming to Congress from Illinois and going back an honest one.”87 It sounded almost as if Greeley was departing Washington with a slap against Illinois’s Abraham Lincoln.
• • •
Lincoln’s own most prominent political target also “came away” from Washington in March 1849, no doubt delighted that he would never again have to endure attacks by Lincoln, Greeley, and their more powerful Whig allies over his record as chief executive. After the inaugural, a relieved James Polk left the capital to make way for his successor
, Zachary Taylor. Just three months into his retirement, however, the exhausted fifty-three-year-old ex-president died at his home in Nashville, inspiring press eulogies that ranged from respectful to worshipful. Democratic journals like the Union extolled the late chief executive as a demigod, while the Whig press—even the long-hostile Intelligencer—paid muted tribute. Not every Whig organ concurred. In New York, William Cullen Bryant’s antislavery Evening Post reminded readers that Polk had demonstrated a “low tone of character” throughout his battles with the Whigs over issues of war and national expansion. Back in Washington an outraged Thomas Ritchie denounced the Post as “unable even under such circumstances, to control its savage temper,” adding: “Surely, the viper should be shaken from the skirts of democracy.”88
In fact, the “viper” of press warfare outlived the Polk and Taylor administrations alike, the Mexican War and its acrid aftermath, and the earliest rumblings of renewed political agitation over slavery. The war of words over sectional issues was just beginning to percolate. At full boil, abetted by further improvements in transportation, as well as new printing and news-gathering technologies that all worked to make newspapers yet more affordable and available to readers more quickly than ever, the press stepped up attacks not only on opposition politicians but, with increasing furor, on each other as well. Once the realm of ink-stained country printers, newspapers had become a major American industry.
For a time, Lincoln postponed his own departure from Washington. Although surely yearning for a reunion with his wife and children, he, too, remained in the crowded and reenergized national capital for Taylor’s inauguration but unlike Greeley lingered a few weeks more to lobby the new administration for a job. Not until March 20 did he retreat toward Springfield, only to return to Washington in June to campaign further in his own behalf—and not without enduring some mocking press coverage for his efforts, with the pro-Douglas hometown Register deriding his quest for patronage as a “steeple chase” in the “federal capital.”89 More portentously, an incident occurred along the way that the superstitious and self-deprecating Lincoln loved to recount ever after. Somewhere between Springfield and Washington, a fellow stagecoach passenger offered the office seeker tobacco, which he politely refused, then liquor, which the abstemious Lincoln rejected as well. This prompted the traveler to observe: “See here, stranger . . . my experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has d—d few virtues.”90
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 17
