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

by Harold Holzer

  • • •

  Early in 1855, a somewhat demoralized group of loyal Whigs joined anti-Nebraska Democratic legislators and their increasingly powerful pro-Douglas brethren for a convocation inside Springfield’s capitol, the scene of so much recent ringing oratory. Now their job was to choose a new junior United States senator from Illinois, a task still constitutionally assigned to legislatures, not the direct votes of the people. By anyone’s reckoning, Abraham Lincoln entered the contest the prohibitive favorite. But Douglas, who had been keeping the Register’s Charles Lanphier fully updated on reaction in Washington to the Kansas-Nebraska debate, wanted nothing more than to sabotage any effort to bring Lincoln back to the national capital as his colleague in the U.S. Senate.

  Douglas predicted, as he anxiously told Lanphier, that “the Whigs will stick to Lincoln to the bitter end” even if the legislature was forced to adjourn before selecting a winner—an indecisive outcome the Little Giant thought “better than the election of Lincoln or any other man spoken of.” Writing to both Lanphier and James W. Sheahan, the journalist only recently installed as editor of the Chicago Times, Douglas urged support for Democratic incumbent James Shields, the very politician Lincoln had come close to dueling years earlier. Now, the calculating Douglas provocatively advised the Irish-American Sheahan that if Shields should fall short of a majority, the press should “throw the responsibility on the Whigs of beating him because he was born in Ireland. . . . Let this be made the issue in the Newspapers & the Legislature & everywhere.”97

  In the end, however, it was Bloody Island all over again—much bluster but no fight. There would be no Lincoln-Shields duel for the U.S. Senate after all. Shields fell out of the running quickly. As for his former tormentor, after leading in all the early counts, Lincoln dropped out after nine ballots, fearful that if he remained in contention Douglas forces would rally support for a pro-Nebraska Democrat. This was too dangerous, and Lincoln responded by directing supporters to a compromise candidate. On the tenth ballot the legislature chose anti-Nebraska Democrat Lyman Trumbull as the new junior senator from Illinois.

  “The agony is over at last,” a distraught Lincoln wrote to a friend.98 Eastern press reaction—or, more accurately, the lack of it—indicated that his pain was not shared by the major opinion makers. Failing to acknowledge that Lincoln had even contended for the seat, Greeley’s Tribune celebrated Trumbull’s victory as “a fitting finale to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise by Douglas & Co.”99

  Douglas may have won the battle to keep Lincoln out of Washington, but he still faced a larger and more dangerous political war. The next Senate seat up for a vote was his own—and the post would be contested in just three years. Between now and then, no one in government or the press believed that Lincoln would again retreat from politics or restrain the journalists yearning to advocate in his behalf.

  * * *

  I. “Daily” vanished from its iconic logo in 1857; the hyphen in “New-York” disappeared in 1896.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Prairies Are on Fire

  One autumn afternoon in Chicago—just hours after delivering his latest antislavery stem-winder—the tall, unmistakable figure of Abraham Lincoln could be seen strolling the city’s streets alongside his friends Isaac Arnold and George Schneider. Typical Chicagoans—meaning they hailed from elsewhere—New York–born politician Arnold was a Free Soil ex-Democrat; Schneider, an abolitionist German immigrant editor who had switched from the Democrats to the Republicans earlier that year. It was Schneider who had invited Lincoln to speak in town this day, October 27, 1854.1

  The editor’s latest venture was the German-language antislavery daily, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung. Since purchasing the paper three years earlier, Schneider, as a contemporary noted appreciatively, had been “attacking everywhere it seemed necessary and useful” to the cause of freedom.2

  The three men soon found themselves standing next door to the Staats-Zeitung offices on Lake Street, before a photo gallery run by Schneider’s friend, a Swede of Austrian descent boasting the elaborate name of Johan Carl Fredrik Polycarpus von Schneidau who had learned his trade as an apprentice to Mathew Brady.3 Schneider managed to importune Lincoln upstairs to the studio, and there persuaded him to pose for a daguerreotype, his first in eight years. Examining the primitive but hypnotic result, it is difficult to choose the most striking among its startling details.

  Lincoln looks almost sleepy in the portrait—as he well might have felt after delivering such a long oration and then sitting through dinner with his Chicago friends. Adding to his otherworldly appearance, he wears an absurd-looking Prince Albert topcoat adorned with velvet-trimmed lapels, over which tumbles an oversized bow tie that appears so light in hue it may well have been yellow. Most astonishing of all, Lincoln grasps in his hands—its front page held to the camera as if in a gesture of endorsement—what appears in some surviving copies to be an edition of Schneider’s newspaper.

  Other, divergent claims have been made about the photograph since—each of them intriguingly supported by retouched prints based on the long-lost original daguerreotype. The suggestion has been made that Lincoln actually posed that day holding the Chicago Daily Democrat. In one ambrotype copy that probably dates to 1858, Lincoln seems to be clutching the Chicago Press and Tribune (which did not even become a Republican daily until 1855, the year after von Schneidau took the original). A definitive identification of the prop remains elusive. But it is perhaps less important to know precisely which newspaper Lincoln displayed for the camera that day than to acknowledge how credible each explanation seemed, both then and now.4 Before this, as far as we know, Lincoln had sat for only one stiffly posed photograph. Yet now, in an era of so-called occupational portraits that showed fireman gripping hatchets and blacksmiths standing proudly before anvils, here was Lincoln immortalizing himself in the year of his political comeback by posing with the principal tool of his own trade: a newspaper.

  Once the Chicago Press and Tribune emerged as “Lincoln’s paper” in the fastest-growing city in his state, what could be more plausible than for its proprietors to order any trace of Schneider’s more radical journal retouched out of the photograph and replaced with the most important new Republican daily in the West? That it could be done so successfully is as remarkable as the fact that Lincoln’s Chicago supporters concluded it was worth doing.

  The reinvigorated Chicago Tribune was in part the brainchild of Canadian-born Joseph Medill, thirty-two years old when he took over the troubled paper. Trained as an attorney, Medill found himself irresistibly drawn to journalists and journalism. At first content just to sell subscriptions to Greeley’s Weekly Tribune, Medill admitted that “the law lingered a little while to reclaim the recusant, but he had tasted the delights of Franklin’s nectar, and he never returned.”5

  While courting his future wife, whose father owned Ohio’s Tuscarawas Advocate, Medill learned typesetting, printing, and editorial writing, and in 1849 purchased a paper of his own, the neighboring Coshocton (Ohio) Whig. He changed its name to the Republican, and initially it did well enough to encourage him to pursue publishing full time. His path to success, however, was neither straight nor swift. By 1851 Medill wrote to Horace Greeley asking whether the famous editor might help him find a purchaser for his struggling paper. “My office, the ‘Coshocton Republic[an],” he sadly reported, “is for sale cheap.” Medill paid two dollars for a Tribune advertisement offering his entire enterprise for $3,200.6

  But journalism was in his blood. After selling, he moved on to Cleveland, where he founded a new daily, later merging it with a local Free Soil paper to form the formidable Cleveland Morning Leader. Impressed with his editorials, Greeley made Medill his official Cleveland correspondent. Around this time, or so Medill claimed, he first suggested the name “Republican” for the emerging new national antislavery party. He even contended he received a written blessing from Greeley himself—the hard evidence was apparently later destroyed in the Chica
go Fire—who allegedly assured him: “If you can get the name Republican started in the West it will grow in the East. I fully agree to the new name and the new christening.”7 Late in life, Medill jokingly offered to share credit with Democrat Stephen Douglas for “pulling down the bars and letting the South into the free territory. The North,” he explained, “united under the name of the National Republicans to drive them out of it.”8

  In 1854, the same year that Lincoln posed for von Schneidau, the conservative, anti-immigrant co-owner of the struggling Chicago Daily Tribune visited Medill in Ohio and urged him to move to town and become its managing editor. By then happily married and fond of Cleveland, Medill at first resisted. Eventually, though, he heeded Horace Greeley’s advice that he, too, go west (Medill actually insisted the famous instruction was originally directed at him!). Medill decided not to work for the Chicago paper, but to buy it. He forged a partnership with Dr. Charles H. Ray, who had left his medical practice to devote himself to the ardently antislavery Galena, Illinois, Jeffersonian. Medill would own a larger share and manage the reorganized enterprise; Ray would serve as managing editor.

  Working quickly, the new publishers replaced the paper’s worn-out type with a fresh set boasting durable copper facing. They bought a modern Hoe-brand steam press, capable of churning our nine thousand sheets an hour, to replace the Tribune’s ancient Adams printer, which allegedly obtained its “power” by means of a blind horse walking slowly around a rotating shaft.9 Within months, by increasing efficiency and affiliating strongly with the Republicans, the paper hiked its readership and gained new influence in town. Medill would make the Tribune the cornerstone of a journalistic dynasty, building it on antislavery convictions and a growing support for the increasingly dynamic political force from the state capital: Abraham Lincoln.

  The two first met the following spring. Medill heard heavy footsteps outside his office and turned to find a strange-looking visitor slouching at the door. “He was a very tall, remarkably thin man,” the senior partner recalled. “His legs were absurdly long and slender, and he had enormous hands and feet.”

  “Please tell me whom I have the pleasure of addressing,” Medill inquired.

  “Well, down on the Sangamon River they used to call me Abraham Lincoln,” came the reply. “Now they generally call me Old Abe, though I ain’t so very old, either. . . . I’m in a hurry, but I ran up to subscribe for your paper.” And then, Medill insisted, “he pulled from the cavernous pockets of his jeans a pocketbook, untied the strap and counted out four dollars.”

  “I like your paper,” Lincoln volunteered as he paid for a six-month subscription. “I didn’t before you boys took hold of it; it was too much of a Know-Nothing sheet.”

  Joseph Medill, who devoted the Chicago Tribune to Republican office-seekers in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular.

  Medill’s quaint recollections, published posthumously forty-five years later, lack the ring of authenticity. It defies belief that the already distinguished lawyer and politician would wear denim on a visit to Chicago in 1855, or that he might volunteer a nickname that he despised. But one thing is certain: Lincoln soon made the Tribune office his unofficial Chicago headquarters, and grew intimate enough with Medill and Ray that the senior partner could berate him one day: “Get your damn feet off my desk, Abe.”10 Even if he remained irritatingly informal, Lincoln more than made up for his lax manners in private when speaking publicly for Republican principles. At times, Medill recalled, “Lincoln seemed to reach up into the clouds and take out the thunderbolts.”11 Charles Ray found inspiration through more prosaic rewards. In 1856, in return for editorial support for Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont, Ray earned the influential political post of commissioner of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

  • • •

  In Lincoln’s Springfield, meanwhile, the aging, longtime pro-Whig editor Simeon Francis experienced far more difficulty finding a comfortable new political orientation for his onetime party mouthpiece, the suddenly unaffiliated Sangamo Journal. The Whigs were dead, but Francis was courageously disinclined to ally himself with the antiforeigner Know-Nothings. Yet he maintained incurable antipathy toward abolitionism.

  Unable to gain his bearings as nimbly as ex-Whigs like Greeley, Raymond, and Medill, who were quick to embrace the Republican Party, Francis at age sixty-three was moreover physically exhausted from nearly a quarter century running a financially challenged family-owned newspaper. After learning that another journalist planned to establish a pro-Republican daily in Springfield, he decided to surrender rather than compete. In 1855, the Francis clan sold the Journal. As consolation for surrendering the enterprise, Simeon and his brothers received $8,000, twenty times what they had invested to launch the paper.

  The purchasers were two ambitious young progressives from conservative downstate Illinois: William H. Bailhache and Edward L. Baker. The thirty-year-old Bailhache had all but grown up in the newspaper business; his father long edited the pro-Whig Alton Telegraph. Four years Bailhache’s junior, Baker was a recently licensed lawyer who soon married into local royalty by choosing one of Mary Lincoln’s nieces as a bride. The new owners immediately declared their aspiration to widen their paper’s horizons—and readership—by renaming it the Illinois State Journal and vowing in their opening editorial to “do battle fearlessly and independently for the right.”12 For the rest of their tenure, those battles, like those embraced by Medill and Ray in Chicago, would be waged in behalf of Abraham Lincoln.

  Baker and Bailhache quickly established their antislavery credentials, too, enthusiastically promoting the 1856 Decatur convention credited with officially establishing the Republican Party in Illinois. Like every other journalist who attended a subsequent event in Bloomington, however, they became so mesmerized there by what became known as Lincoln’s “Lost Speech” that they put down their pencils in awe and failed to record a word of it. Baker and Bailhache went on to publish texts and flattering commentary on Lincoln’s increasingly frequent political speeches, and encouraged him to submit unsigned editorial copy whenever he chose. In 1856, the paper ardently supported John C. Frémont, the new party’s first presidential candidate.

  Edward L. Baker, who co-published Springfield’s Illinois State Journal and devoted it to Lincoln’s political future.

  The Frémont campaign may have faced long odds, but the New York Times’s Henry Raymond managed to deliver an electrifying speech at a February 1856 Pittsburgh convention, credited with rallying the faithful to organize the national Republican Party. Declaring fealty to both the Constitution and the Union, the editor charged that slavery interests had for too long waged an aggressive campaign to dominate the federal government, vowing “to secure the repeal of all laws which allow the introduction of slavery in to territories once consecrated to freedom.”13

  During the fall campaign, Raymond worked energetically for Frémont, notably engaging in a well-attended, two-part public debate with Tennessee Democrat Lucien Bonaparte Chase. The encounters commenced at a Brooklyn museum and climaxed at the Broadway Tabernacle in Manhattan. In his final oration, Raymond charged that the South was conspiring “to acquire an absolute ascendancy in the Congress of the United States . . . vindicating slavery upon principle . . . demand[ing] its extension into the territories.”14 Lincoln could not have expressed it better himself.

  Greeley’s Tribune advocated for the doomed Frémont campaign that year as well, but as usual no editor came closer to gauging—and perhaps influencing—the shifting public mood than James Gordon Bennett. The New York Herald began the 1856 campaign season by endorsing Frémont. But then Bennett did a complete about-face and became an ardent defender of Democratic candidate James Buchanan. In November Buchanan lost New York but won the presidency.

  In an 1856 Nathaniel Currier cartoon, Republican candidate John C. Frémont finds a tollgate blocking his way to the presidency—on a wagon piloted by (from left) Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett (with James Watson Webb cli
nging to the carriage from behind).

  • • •

  Once again, despite support from his own press allies, Stephen Douglas not only failed that year to mobilize enough delegate strength to win the Democratic nomination for president, but then to his irritation found his new Chicago press organ threatened by significant inner turmoil. As Douglas followed the crisis from Washington, editor James Sheahan engaged in an acrimonious squabble with his partner at the Daily Times, Isaac Cook. Typical of Chicago feuds, the fight involved charges of political corruption. When Douglas failed to step in promptly to reprimand Cook, Sheahan accused his co-publisher of intercepting the senator’s letters. This particular charge seemed credible at least based on the element of opportunity, for like so many newspapermen, Cook served in political office as well: as Chicago’s postmaster.

  It was time for the senator to take personal control of the situation, and he did. Agreeing that Cook was “the most obstinate man I ever saw,” Douglas intervened on the side of Sheahan. “You must retain the Times,” he instructed him, “and if you should be deprived of it by law, you must start another paper and I shall stand by you in so doing.”15 Armed with Douglas’s support, Sheahan prevailed, and political punishment followed. Shortly after Buchanan became president, Douglas wielded his still formidable patronage power to exact his—and his loyal editor’s—revenge on Sheahan’s erstwhile partner: Isaac Cook found he was no longer Chicago city postmaster.