In the competition for political reward, Lincoln’s virtues proved insufficient to earn him an advantage. He fared no better in securing the kind of post he expected than had the perennially frustrated aspirant Horace Greeley. Among the similarly disappointed and dispossessed were Gales and Seaton of the Intelligencer, who paid the ultimate price for their earlier criticism of Taylor’s nomination. At the new president’s insistence, the Whig Party stripped them of their longtime role as official administration organ and terminated their contracts for official government printing. The Intelligencer’s days of Whig Party influence were over.91
Lincoln’s new goal was securing a presidential appointment to the post of commissioner of the General Land Office, a major federal agency that oversaw the surveying and selling of publicly owned acreage nationwide. Here was a patronage job in turn rich with considerable patronage power of its own. Back in Springfield, Whig editor Simeon Francis could barely contain his enthusiasm. His appetite for influence over so vast a trough thoroughly aroused, the editor joined a group of Whig leaders urging Lincoln to fight hard for a position they judged “important enough to the interests of Illinois” to require “one of our own” installed in the post. Six days later, a Whig leader from neighboring Jacksonville similarly urged Lincoln into the fray, asking him to forward copies of Francis’s newspaper, no doubt so he could keep abreast of the “official” party-wide campaign for the Land Office.92
But the editorials published in his behalf by Whig papers in Illinois fell on deaf ears in Washington; the ex-congressman ultimately lost out to another patronage aspirant from Illinois. Disappointed as he was, Lincoln still hoped to secure an equally prestigious appointment that might enable him to avoid returning to live and work in rustic Springfield, which he surely felt he had outgrown. Yet, when the Taylor administration instead came through with another viable offer, Lincoln regarded the proposed outpost—the governorship of Oregon Territory—as too far from his hometown. Taking his acceptance for granted, Greeley’s Tribune prematurely announced his appointment on September 22, 1849, belatedly acknowledging that he had been “conspicuous in the last Congress.” Only now, when it was too late, did the paper heap somewhat discounted praise on Lincoln, describing him as “a man of sound judgment, good though not brilliant mind, and capable, mentally and physically, of great endurance,—qualities very essential to the position he is about to assume.”93 Assume the position he did not; Lincoln declined the consolation prize in the Far West.
For a time, however, Lincoln tried to get the administration to consider another local candidate for the office: none other than editor Simeon Francis. In an impassioned letter to the new secretary of state, John M. Clayton, Lincoln acknowledged that by declining it himself, he had forfeited the “right to claim the disposal of the office.” But he hastened to add that “under all the circumstances”—no doubt an allusion to his tireless campaigning and disappointment in losing the more prestigious Land Office—Francis “ought to receive the appointment” in Oregon. As Lincoln calculated his qualifications: “If a long course of uniform and efficient action as a whig editor; if an honesty unimpeached, and qualifications undisputed; if the fact that he has advanced to the meridian of life without ever before asking for an office, be considerations of importance with the Administration, I can not but feel that the appointment, while it will do him justice, will also do honor to the Administration.”94 Once again, however, the White House ignored Lincoln’s appeal. Francis did not get the job—although his longing to migrate to Oregon only intensified. Nor was Lincoln more successful in securing an appointment for one of Simeon’s brothers and co-publishers, Allen Francis, who implored him to “personally present my case to Old Zack,” adding: “Secure it for me and I will be grateful to you forever—and my wife will pray that no cloud may ever darken the sunshine of your prosperity.”95
Encountering the frustrated office seeker and would-be patronage dispenser not long thereafter, a surprised friend greeted Lincoln by exclaiming: “I supposed you were going to Oregon as governor.” Typically this reminded Lincoln of a funny story. “Two men were playing cards, and one said to the other, ‘Go to Hell!’ The one addressed said: ‘I will go to hell when I am obliged to, and not one minute before.’ ”96
Now home, he believed, to stay, the disappointed ex-congressman was forty years old, and denied the political reward and influence he felt was his due. He had good reason to believe that his best days were behind him. Reduced in his first few weeks in Springfield to refereeing local squabbles for other, lesser federal offices, peppering the State and Navy departments, and even the new president, with recommendations for other patronage seekers, he found the state capital as divided as the national capital had been over America’s Mexico experience, and just as unwilling to forget it.97 Nor had the conflict been experienced in Springfield solely through reports of the debates in distant Washington. After all, the two local Whigs who had preceded Lincoln in the House had both served gloriously in the war: John J. Hardin, killed in action at Buena Vista, and Edward Baker, who led a regiment at Cerro Gordo. And Stephen Douglas’s own devoted friend and press ally William Walters was dead as well, even if he had never reached Mexico.
Walters’s young successor at the helm of the paper, his onetime apprentice and brother-in-law Charles Lanphier, brought scant managerial experience to his new post, but much knowledge from his years under Walters, along with unbounded enthusiasm for Democratic politics. As early as 1839, he had served as a Democratic Party poll watcher.98 Six years later, in 1845, Stephen Douglas reached out to Lanphier to flatter him into his political orbit, writing: “I believe you . . . possess talents that would be very serviceable to the Democratic cause.”99 Requiring no further encouragement, Lanphier enlisted fully in the cause. The same state legislature that chose Douglas for the Senate back in December 1846 rewarded the editor with the post of Public Printer—still a coveted prize for local publishers.100 Buoyed by his new official role, and benefiting from further support from a new investor in the perennially struggling paper—attorney George Walker—Lanphier, like his late brother-in-law before him, became one of Douglas’s most reliable, ardent, and effective supporters, and one of Lincoln’s most unrelenting enemies, in the press.
Meanwhile, although disappointed by his failure to secure a federal post from the Taylor administration, Simeon Francis sought to take his Whig paper to a new level, too. In 1847 the weekly Sangamo Journal became the Illinois Daily State Journal, better to reflect not only its increased publishing frequency but also its widening influence, or at least to imagine and boast about it.
The Mexican War had spiked reader interest in both of the town’s rival newspapers, the Register and the Journal alike, each of which had provided accounts and analyses of the fighting. Occasionally both had offered welcome, if outdated, news from the home front for the consumption of local troops stationed far away, but fortunate enough to receive cuttings from their loved ones by mail. One thing was certain: more people were now reading the two papers than ever. Perhaps thousands saw the Register’s story marking Abraham Lincoln’s homecoming by labeling the returning ex-congressman a “moral traitor.”101 It proved but the opening salvo in a new war of words.
As for Douglas, even with the Whigs now in power in Washington, he continued steadfastly maintaining that the conflict with Mexico had been “a war of self-defence, forced upon us by our enemy, and prosecuted on our part in vindication of our honor, and the integrity of our territory.” The senator’s argument certainly resonated with widely read big-city papers like James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, and by the time Lincoln resumed his residence in Springfield, it was clear that a majority of voters at home endorsed this position, too. For as long as Douglas could score political points by regurgitating Lincoln’s antiwar record in Washington, he never let his once and future rival forget his opposition to the Mexican-American conflict.
Most significant of all, it was Douglas alone who took a seat in Wa
shington for the next session of Congress, enlarging his career in the Senate and further expanding his stature and influence. Lincoln, denied the federal appointment he coveted, resumed his professional life as a private citizen in Springfield. He was again a lawyer, not a lawmaker. Once more he was a reader, not a maker, of news.
With a touch of self-pity, Lincoln summarized his diminished status by lamenting his exit from—but not his incurable love of—politics. “I will go home and resume my practice, at which I can make a living,” he wistfully told an acquaintance, “—and perhaps some day the people may have use for me.”102
* * *
I. Years later, Lincoln would repay Hurlbut’s loyalty not only by commissioning him a major general, but by sidetracking investigations into persistent charges of corruption.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Mean Between Two Extremes
Abler and stronger men I may have met,” Horace Greeley conceded after his professional association with the younger journalist Henry J. Raymond ended acrimoniously in the 1840s, but “a cleverer, readier, more generally efficient journalist I never saw.” Finally admitting that he had unwisely paid his protégé a smaller salary than he was worth, the veteran editor acknowledged that Raymond’s “services were more valuable in proportion to their cost than those of any one else who ever aided me on the Tribune.” Almost wistfully, Greeley concluded: “I never found another person, barely of age and just from his studies, who evinced so signal and such versatile ability in journalism as he did.”1
Greeley may have come close to choking on these generous words. For he used them to describe one of the few journalists in his orbit who refused to remain permanently under his yoke. Henry Raymond not only quit the Tribune to work for a rival Whig daily, he went on to establish a newspaper of his own that grew into the only major competition the Tribune ever faced for readership and influence in Whig and, later, Republican and antislavery circles: the New York Times.
The only perceived sins Greeley held against the talented, tireless Henry Raymond were his departure—and his success. Raymond, however, went from admiration to outright contempt for Greeley’s frequent departures from party ideology and discipline. “The Whig party is one of order and stability eschewing radicalism in every form,” Raymond once lectured him in print, “and the better way for ‘The Tribune’ would be to admit that it is Whig only on the subject of the tariff and then devote itself to the advocacy of anti-rent, Fourierist, vote-yourself-a-farm doctrine”—enumerating some of Greeley’s more far-flung passions and “isms.”2 Although he came of age professionally under Greeley’s tutelage, Raymond’s career—and the distinct brand of journalism he introduced—would follow a different course from his mentor’s scattershot idealism. For Raymond, as progressive as he remained at his core, reason, order, and caution trumped zealotry every time. He was a genuine moderate. In this way, he was far more like Abraham Lincoln than Greeley ever was.
• • •
Henry Jarvis Raymond was born on a farm in the rural village of Lima, in western New York state, on January 24, 1820 (a “poor boy from the country,” one of his obituaries would emphasize).3 Contemporary admirers claimed that he could read fluently by the age of three, and speak in public at five. His parents sent their prodigy to study classics at the newly established Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, and after graduation, the boy clerked in a country store for $1.50 a week, then turned briefly to teaching school before demonstrating literary flair by composing a patriotic ode for Lima’s 1836 Fourth of July festivities. Later that year, Raymond set off for the University of Vermont in Burlington—the first of the “big three” editors to matriculate at college—where a schoolmate remembered him as “a young, delicate, intellectual-looking student.”
The experience opened new doors. When Henry Clay came to Burlington in the summer of 1839 to attend the college’s annual Junior Exhibition, Raymond dazzled the audience with a startlingly mature student oration. “That young man,” the Great Compromiser was heard to comment, “will make his mark. Depend upon it, you will hear from him hereafter.”4 Instead, it was tiny Lima that heard from Raymond again, and within the year. With no clear career path before him, Raymond returned home in the fall of 1840 after graduating with honors. For a time, he occupied himself by delivering rousing “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” campaign speeches in neighboring communities, even though he was himself still too young to cast a vote of his own.
Raymond had been devouring Horace Greeley’s work ever since strolling into the Lima post office at age fifteen and asking, “what was the best newspaper to subscribe for?” As the young man remembered of the moment that changed his destiny: “The postmaster threw me half a dozen which had been sent to him by the publishers as specimen numbers; and after due deliberation I selected the New-Yorker as the one which promised to be the most interesting and instructive. I sent my three dollars’ subscription,” and became a faithful reader.5 While still a teenager, he journeyed to Albany to meet Greeley in person, and corresponded with him throughout his college years. The older and younger man shared a passion for Whig politics. At age twenty, Raymond summoned the presumption to propose migrating to the big city to start at the top: by taking over Greeley’s newspaper.
“I have never had any experience . . . in the business of publishing or printing,” he gamely wrote Greeley in June 1840. “If I could obtain a place in the New Yorker under the shadow of your wing, I should be exceedingly well suited.”6 Gently, Greeley replied: “You are a good writer on your own ground; and I think would make an interesting paper.” But “time, talents, and unwearied industry are necessary.” Without a financial investment to buy his way into the business, the New-Yorker had no room for a novice. Greeley ended his rejection letter with a remarkable assessment: “A newspaper ought to have some hobby, and some clique influence, some esprit de corps enlisted in its support,” he wrote. “I believe I have erred in making my tastes too catholic.” Sounding regretful that his paper had been so moderate, Greeley admitted that the “affectation of impartiality and independence” was not enough to guarantee success in journalism. “If I had embraced and zealously advanced Millerism, Mormonism or Survival Magnetism years ago, I should have been independent in the better sense now. Remember this; and if you ever become an Editor, attach yourself to some distinct interest, not noisily, but in such a manner as to secure its support.”7 Raymond would never embrace this advice, though Greeley would make it his future business model.
Undeterred, Raymond began submitting freelance contributions to Greeley’s weekly, and then in December 1840 headed downstate and waltzed into the New-Yorker office, where despite the previous lack of encouragement he again requested a paying job. Small of stature, dark-complexioned, square-jawed, and intense, with piercing eyes, short black pomaded hair, broad shoulders, and a slight paunch, Raymond made for a striking contrast to the ghostly-pale, underfed Greeley. The youngster again impressed the Tribune proprietor with his energy and gravitas, but Greeley had just hired another young editorial associate. He could offer Raymond nothing more than an open invitation to visit his establishment whenever he chose, and to pitch in and help the staff as he saw fit—but strictly on a voluntary basis, without compensation.
Even after turning to law studies, Raymond could not get the newsroom out of his blood. He spent his off-hours at the cramped New-Yorker headquarters happily absorbing the rituals and rigors of the business. “I added up election returns,” he remembered, “read the exchanges for news, and discovered a good deal which others had overlooked; made brief notices of new books, read proof, and made myself generally useful.” Once Raymond even composed a “fancy advertisement” for vegetable pills.8 Weeks later, however, strapped for cash, young Henry received a more permanent offer he felt he must accept. In response to a paid notice he had placed in the National Intelligencer, a community in North Carolina had offered him a classroom job at its local school. Hearing this, Greeley invited Raymond to stroll with him to the post office, a
nd along the way asked how much the new job would pay. Replied Raymond, “four hundred dollars a year.”
“Oh,” Greeley shot back with typical impulsiveness, “stay here—I’ll give you that.”
“And this,” Raymond recalled, “was my first engagement on the Press, and decided the whole course of my life.”9
Not that this paltry salary alone could support him in New York. For a time, Raymond augmented his small income by contributing freelance articles to out-of-town newspapers like the Cincinnati Chronicle, the Buffalo Advertiser, and the Bangor Whig, noting proudly that “none of these journals paid me less than five dollars a week, and one or two of them gave me six.”10 Facing constant deadlines while pursuing his studies of Latin and the law kept his “leisure reasonably well employed.” But when, a year later, Greeley opened the New York Tribune, Raymond abandoned all his outside activities and devoted his full energies to the new venture as deputy editor and correspondent.
“He remained with me eight years,” Greeley recollected, “ . . . and is the only assistant with whom I ever felt required to remonstrate for doing more work than any human brain and frame could be expected long to endure.” In truth, young Raymond served Greeley for only half that time, but perhaps performed so much labor that it seemed like double to his appreciative employer.11 “I was with him less than four years, instead of eight,” Raymond corrected Greeley’s version of the story, “and, though I did work, I believe, quite as hard during that time upon the Tribune as he now gives me credit for having done, I think I have worked still harder for a good many years since.” The fact was, Raymond coolly admitted, “I did it from no special sense of duty,—still less with any special aim or ambitious purpose. I liked it; I knew no greater pleasure.”12 In appreciation, Greeley expanded Raymond’s beat to include political meetings, crime, courtroom trials, book reviews, and financial news.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 18
