For the most part the work was drudgery, but everywhere he looked in New York, Raymond could see the promise of future comfort, fame, and influence. Walking down Broadway one day, he found himself striding alongside “a tall, handsome, silently dressed young man” adorned in white kid gloves and diamond studs. The struggling journalist fancied the stranger “one of the nabobs of the town,” and “could not help contrasting my own position with his . . . dazzling splendor.” The next day, Greeley sent Raymond to the Barclay Street offices of Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a popular weekly specializing in horseracing and other sports and leisure news, to pick up the latest copy of the paper. To his astonishment, while waiting at the front desk, in strode “my magnificent friend of the day before, all accoutered as he was. . . . He walked into the back part of the office, took off, folded and put away his white gloves, hung up his hat and coat, put on an ink-stained linen jacket, and set himself to work writing wrappers [news summaries]. I felt decidedly encouraged as to the prospects of New York life!”13
What he still lacked in comparable glamour Raymond supplied in hard labor. When he took ill after one particularly grueling assignment and missed several days of work, Greeley visited Raymond at his room on the top floor of a Church Street boardinghouse. After climbing the steep stairs, the editor sat down solicitously at his deputy’s bedside, but then instead of inquiring about his health, made the mistake of impatiently asking exactly when Henry planned to return to the office. Perhaps emboldened by fever, Raymond retorted: “Never, on the salary you paid me,” pointedly using the past tense. Startled, the editor asked how much the young man required to stay on. Raymond demanded a staggering raise—from eight to twenty dollars a week. Bolting for the door, Greeley vowed he would never pay so high a salary to so inexperienced an employee.14 Eventually he yielded. But even the increased compensation was not enough to sustain the Greeley-Raymond relationship for very long. Politics—the shared belief system that had brought them together in the first place—was now beginning to drive them apart.
Raymond feared Greeley was becoming too radical, and Greeley in turn complained that Raymond was growing too stodgily conservative—“too infernally Tory in your leanings, both in Church and State,” the editor lectured him—and increasingly unsympathetic to “true democracy,” the brand of reform populism the Tribune increasingly espoused.15 Their bond was fraying. The Greeley whom Raymond had first admired in the days of the New-Yorker—the man who offered a “fair examination of both sides of the political topics which divided the country . . . unbiased by party feeling”—had, Raymond believed, abandoned the “calm, dispassionate character” of his early writing. Raymond, too, believed in political journalism, but maintained it required more subtlety and calm than Greeley was willing to inject. In 1843, when crusty newspaper veteran James Watson Webb offered Raymond a better-paid position at his Courier and Enquirer, both Raymond and Greeley were ready for a professional divorce. Greeley refused to match the five-dollar increase that came with Webb’s new job. Raymond departed and, according to his earliest biographer, “turned his back forever upon Mr. Greeley and the Tribune.”16
Raymond’s subsequent attempt to revive the Courier and Enquirer proved challenging. Editor Webb, still handsome at age forty-one, and blessed with a military bearing forged in genuine combat experience, considered himself the “Apollo of the Press,” and was also demanding, ill-tempered (a “burly, honest kind of savage,” in James Gordon Bennett’s estimation), and locked into a fading form of journalism.17 The old broadsheet still retained political influence as well as a faithful if dwindling readership, but in the new era dominated by the racier penny press and the high-minded Tribune, its glory days were behind it. Raymond did introduce a number of reforms that at least brought the paper up to date, reorganizing its news page under more distinct categories, ordering darker ink to make its columns easier to read, and for the first time publishing both humor pieces and transcriptions of political speeches. “That little Raymond” complained the paper’s “phlegmatic” old business manager, Thomas Snowden, “will not rest contented till he has turned The Courier and Enquirer into a two-cent paper.”18
In a far more aggressive move to hike circulation, the combative Webb unleashed a brutal attack on Greeley in early 1844, accusing his rival of “unbearable . . . affectation and impudence” and questioning everything from his weakness for radical causes to his mode of dress and personal hygiene. “The editor of the Tribune is an Abolitionist; we precisely the reverse,” the attack concluded. “He is a philosopher; we are Christian. . . . He seeks for notoriety by pretending to great eccentricity of character and habits, and by the strangeness of his theories and practices; we on the contrary, are content with following in the beaten path, and accomplishing the good we can, in the old-fashioned way.”19
Always primed for a fight if challenged, Greeley wasted no time in responding in the modest third person, but with a venomous swipe of his own on his assailant’s recent pardon from Governor William Seward, who had spared Webb the prison sentence some New Yorkers thought he deserved: “The object of this silly raillery has doubtless worn better clothes than two-thirds of those who . . . assailed him,—better than any of them could honestly wear, if they paid their debts otherwise than by bankruptcy; while if they are indeed more cleanly than he, they must bathe very thoroughly not less than twice each day. . . . That he ever affected eccentricity is most untrue; and certainly no costume he ever appeared in, would create such a sensation in Broadway, as that James Watson Webb would have worn but for the clemency of Gov. Seward.”20
The Tribune had the last word in this particular exchange, but the initial attack permanently soured Greeley on Raymond (he began referring to him as “The Little Villain”—a nickname that stuck).21 No doubt the published assault had originated with Webb, not Raymond, but Greeley believed that his disgruntled onetime employee had at the least told his new editor inside, personal stories, and done too little to prevent Webb from lashing out.
Soon enough Greeley and Raymond came into direct and protracted conflict in a series of printed exchanges on a far more existential topic. This time, the argument ostensibly involved Fourierism, the brand of communal socialism that had all but hypnotized the editor of the Tribune and inspired him to help establish the Sylvania Colony in Pennsylvania (a “stupendous humbug,” declared the Courier and Enquirer). For eight long months beginning in August 1846, Raymond and his former boss conducted an engrossing, if repetitive, debate that eventually embraced such subjects as human character, labor rights, education, and the institution of marriage. As if confronting each other at a series of political rallies, Greeley would issue a statement, Raymond would respond a few days later, and then Greeley would offer a rebuttal, establishing a pattern that persisted for more than half a year.
Deftly, Raymond used the series to stake out major differences with Greeley, not only on the subject of socialism, but also on the very nature—and limits—of progressive reform. Always unable to resist an argument, Greeley’s willingness to participate in these battles with so junior a journalist served not only to expose his pet causes to repeated criticism, and occasional ridicule, but also to elevate Raymond’s reputation in the bargain. Raymond was no longer just Greeley’s onetime protégé; their debate transformed him into Greeley’s peer. In the process, their protracted argument served to catalogue their sincerely different approaches to both journalism and politics.
“Throughout this discussion,” Raymond concluded in his final installment, “the Tribune has charged us with being hostile to all reform, and especially to every attempt to meliorate the hard lot of the degraded poor. The charge is as unfounded as it is ungenerous. We labor willingly and zealously, as our columns will testify, within our sphere, in aid of everything which seems to us TRUE REFORM,—founded upon just principles, seeking worthy ends by worthy means, and promising actual and good results”—an obvious slap at Greeley’s weakness for lost causes. In his own final appeal, Gr
eeley shot back that without an unwavering commitment to the “spiritual, life-giving, heart-redeeming principles” of Christianity, the world would remain “without HOPE.”22
More than mere concluding arguments, here were statements that not only laid bare the dichotomies within American society at large, but revealed these two combatants as they really were: Greeley the self-appointed representative of God and men, and Raymond the pragmatic problem solver. Politically, the exchanges also exposed major fissures between conservative Whig stalwarts like Raymond and Webb, and impatient liberals like Greeley. Raymond, for one, made it clear he opposed making faddish “isms” into statutes. “When as the editor of a popular Whig Journal,” Raymond lashed out, “he [Greeley] ventures to urge his idle theories upon the Corporation of our city for their adoption, it is our duty gravely to rebuke his fanaticism, and to protest against his folly and monomania being made to attach to the Whig party.” Greeley himself admitted that while the “series of controversial letters” made “a few zealous converts” to “new ideas,” they “aroused . . . more vehement adversaries.”23
To be sure, the debates hardly left Greeley a beaten man. They may have helped seal the doom of Fourierism in New York, but they failed to dethrone its champion as the city’s reigning apostle of social justice. That he was anything but embarrassed by the exchanges was evident when Greeley agreed to “co-author” with Raymond a pamphlet version of their debates, which appeared in 1847 and ran to more than eighty pages of text. But Greeley never again regarded Raymond as an ally. Though his occasional letters to his onetime employee over the years invariably began with the salutation “Friend R,” Greeley reached out to him with increasing rarity. Even when compelled to write to him on mutually important banking issues six years later, the Tribune editor was quick to caution: “I see no necessity for any correspondence between us. I answer your letter because it contains a request that I do so. . . . Understand that I ask no favor from you—none whatever.”24 Their professional competition and personal animus would endure for a quarter of a century.
As for Raymond, six years after joining Webb, the increasingly restless journalist decided he needed further outlets for his own ambition and talent. Not even an unforgettable recognition that came one day from Mrs. Daniel Webster—in Raymond’s presence she had told her husband, “You needn’t give yourself any trouble, Daniel, about your speeches, as long as Mr. R. reports them”—the young editor wanted to do more than reprint oratory.25 An effective orator himself—much more so than Greeley—his job at the Courier and Enquirer provided him a print platform to advance Whig doctrine, but offered no real political outlet outside journalism. So, like many other newspapermen of his day, Raymond turned to politics. In 1849, the same year Greeley began his brief congressional service in Washington, Raymond sought elected office for the first time in New York, running for the State Assembly (as the candidate of a Wall Street clique, James Gordon Bennett sniffed, suddenly anxious about the young man’s ascent). Raymond later claimed he decided to be of “service” to the party only when it became clear that Webb would not be sent overseas with a diplomatic appointment he craved.26 Whatever his principal motivation for running, Raymond went on to launch his new career without abandoning his primary job as a newspaper editor.
Heading up to Albany as a freshman legislator, he quickly found himself repelled by the city’s pervasive culture of corruption: on his second day in office, following a drawing to select desks, he witnessed several colleagues offering up to twenty dollars (a significant sum at the time) for the choicest seats so they could “readily command the Speaker’s attention & thus secure the floor.” When not shocking, the Albany routine proved boring, although it left him plenty of “leisure” time to fulfill his duties as a journalist. On a typical working day in January, Raymond dutifully studied his copy of the governor’s latest annual message, then wrote an editorial on slavery for the Courier and Enquirer.27 During a recess, an Assembly colleague visited him at his newspaper office, where the two examined applications for a lucrative political plum, the collectorship of New York.28 Somehow, Raymond made his twin careers work. “Mr. Raymond, it is true, occupied, by his own choice, in a certain degree, a sort of dual role before the public,” the New York World conceded in tortured acknowledgment of his success. He never “absolutely abdicated his real and invisible authority as a writer when he assumed the insignia of a more palpable but less genuine influence as a politician.”29
Raymond ultimately found legislative work less fulfilling than he had expected. When he returned to Manhattan after the session ended, he considered abandoning his flirtation with government service and instead taking on a greater role at the Courier and Enquirer. Webb had departed for a long sojourn in Europe, leaving the office under Raymond’s full control, and what was more had sold his young assistant editor a financial stake in the paper. Even so, Raymond proved unable to resist politics. As fellow editor John Russell Young perceptively said of Raymond: “He was a journalist in everything but his ambitions, and these tended to public life.”30 Changing his mind again, Raymond sought and won reelection to the Assembly in 1850, and the following January the Whig majority elevated him to the exalted post of speaker—a huge honor for a thirty-year-old legislative sophomore, and a testament to his growing influence within the party organization.
Henry Jarvis Raymond as he looked when working for James Watson Webb at the Courier and Enquirer in the late 1840s.
Inevitably, Raymond’s dual careers led to occasional, awkward conflict. When the state legislature set about its lawful task of choosing a new United States senator from New York, another journalist on the prowl for political power—none other than his boss, James Watson Webb—made clear that he desired the seat for himself. Like so many party editors who expected tangible rewards for their loyalty, Webb had yearned for office ever since switching his affiliation decades earlier from Andrew Jackson’s Democrats to the new party whose name he was said to have coined himself: the Whigs. That early defection cost Webb a valuable contract to handle State Department printing, and Raymond remembered his editor returning from Washington “terribly enraged and resolved to . . . abandon the Administration.” His junior associate talked him out of taking revenge in print.31 More recently, the Senate had refused to confirm him as minister to Austria. This most recent blow no doubt made Webb crankier than ever, if his growing penchant for street brawls and editorial feuds was any indication.32 Now, with a Senate vacancy in prospect, he concluded that if Raymond could serve in elective office, so should he. The Whig majority in Albany, however, had other ideas—Webb never became a serious contender—and Raymond was compelled to bluntly inform his intemperate employer that he would not advocate in his behalf. The seat went instead to the state’s Whig governor, Hamilton Fish. Now Webb joined Greeley in imagining himself a spurned mentor whom Raymond had wronged.
The remainder of that year’s legislative calendar proved equally frustrating for the young speaker. The session ended after unresolved fights over internal improvements and increasingly fractious squabbles about slavery. (In his first term, Raymond left a strong clue to his future attitude on the volatile issue by “insisting on the propriety of taking ground with caution.”)33 At least Raymond got the chance to showcase his considerable oratorical skills by stepping down from the speaker’s chair from time to time to engage his colleagues in floor debate. But once the Assembly adjourned, an exhausted Raymond decided to vacation in Europe himself. Still seething over his recent political disappointment, Webb, who disapproved of Raymond’s growing antislavery sentiments anyway, told him that his departure would be interpreted as a resignation from the paper. Defiantly, the speaker left for Europe anyway. The break proved final. “You will probably have seen that I am no longer in the Courier and Enquirer,” Raymond casually informed his brother from London in June 1850. “Two gentlemen in Albany propose to start a new paper in New York in September and I shall probably edit it.”34
• • •
Although Raymond never identified the two Albany “gentlemen” who first suggested a new downstate daily, one was probably Seward’s political angel (and supposed Greeley ally), Thurlow Weed, who had come to know Raymond even before the assemblyman began serving in the legislature. Just as he had plucked Greeley from relative obscurity a few years earlier, this shrewd judge of talent recognized Raymond’s potential earlier than most. As early as 1848, the Albany boss reputedly offered to sell Raymond his Albany Evening Journal, perhaps in anticipation of a major political appointment of his own from the incoming Taylor administration—which never came. Raymond might have pursued that flattering opportunity had not one of Weed’s partners balked at relinquishing his own shares in the paper. During the failed negotiations, however, Raymond renewed his friendship with an Albany banker whom Weed had employed to broker the aborted Evening Journal deal: George Jones, onetime business manager of the Tribune, in whose offices the two men had met years earlier. By 1849, they began exploring the alternative notion of establishing a new Whig daily in New York City. For a time, however, their discussions led nowhere.35
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 19
