Unwilling to confront Bennett directly—probably a wise decision—Lincoln nonetheless viewed the problem seriously enough to forward his concerns to the secretary of the Republican National Committee, Senator George G. Fogg of New Hampshire, who had taken up residence at a New York hotel for the campaign. “I am annoyed some by the printed paragraph . . . taken from the N.Y. Herald,” Lincoln began, pasting in a copy of the offending paragraph in case Fogg had not yet seen it. “This is decidedly wrong. I did not say it. I do not impugn the correspondent. I suppose he misconceived the statement. . . . I have, playfully, (and never otherwise) related this incident several times; and I suppose I did so to the Herald correspondent, though I do not remember it. . . . Now, I dislike, exceedingly, for Kentuckians to understand that I am charging them with a purpose to inveigle me, and do violence to me. Yet I can not go into the newspapers. Would not the editor of the Herald, upon being shown this letter, insert the short correction, which you find upon the inclosed scrap? Please try him unless you perceive some sufficient reason to the contrary.” The so-called “scrap” contained a precisely worded third-person correction that Lincoln improbably hoped would be published verbatim: “We have such assurance as satisfies us that our correspondent writing from Springfield, Ills, under date of Aug. 8—was mistaken in representing Mr. Lincoln as expressing a suspicion of a design to inveigle him into Kentucky for the purpose of doing him violence. Mr. Lincoln neither entertains, nor has intended to express any such suspicion.”50
Fogg obliged by calling at the Herald and, “in the most diplomatic way of which I was master,” making the case for publishing Lincoln’s third-person correction. Bennett “expressed himself very kindly disposed towards yourself personally,” Fogg reported back to Springfield, echoing Medill’s earlier impressions, “and of course very far from wishing to misrepresent you.” He would print “any correction desired”—but only if it appeared over either Lincoln’s signature or Fogg’s. To issue it “editorially or by his correspondent,” Bennett insisted, “would be to acknowledge the Herald or its correspondent in error. . . . That was the best, and all he could do.” Fogg’s advice was that Lincoln let the matter lie; he did not believe “the ‘correction’ he offers, would pay.” Illinois Republican Norman Judd, who was still in New York, concurred, and Lincoln ultimately backed off. “You have done precisely the right thing in the matter with the Herald,” he wrote Fogg a few days later. “Do nothing about it. Although it wrongs me, and annoys me some, I prefer letting it run it’s [sic] course, to getting into the papers over my own name.”51 Once again, a high-level negotiation between a Lincoln representative and James Gordon Bennett had ended in frustration for the candidate.
Lincoln never did get the satisfaction he desired from the Herald. Although Samuel Haycraft replied that he would be “pleased” to “make a statement to the paper,” Lincoln rejected this approach, too. A week later the nominee wrote again to insist rather unconvincingly that his only interest in suggesting a correction had been “to assure you that I had not, as represented by the Herald correspondent, charged you with an attempt to inveigle me into Kentucky to do me violence.”52 Temporarily embedded Herald reporter Simon P. Hanscom—who was either an ardent Lincoln enthusiast or an “unscrupulous” schemer, depending on whose opinion the candidate was willing to accept—went on to produce some friendly articles for the paper in October, maintaining from his Springfield perch that Lincoln was no radical.53 But the Kentucky episode had taught the president-to-be a valuable lesson: fighting newspaper editors for the last word—especially independent newspaper tycoons like James Gordon Bennett, whose principal goals were broad circulation and white supremacy—was a losing proposition.
Meanwhile, the overtly anti-Lincoln press did its own job relentlessly, assailing not only the candidate but his newspaper supporters as well. A Douglas journal in Pennsylvania complained at one point that the Republican dailies overflowed with “columns of childish trash.” According to a like-minded Nebraska paper, big-city Easterners were so used to collecting waste from the “basement stories of outhouses” that they were pursuing their “old habit of pitching night soil” for their morning editions. The Democratic Boston Herald labeled the Republican press “inhuman monsters, practicing all sorts of rascality.”54
For their part, Greeley and Raymond may not have committed the funds or personnel to provide coverage of Lincoln in Springfield, but they did more than provide editorial support at home: both also took to the stump to advocate publicly for the ticket. As ever, Greeley could be competitive even when working in behalf of others. When poet-editor William Cullen Bryant of the Evening Post composed a new Lincoln campaign song, the Tribune editor promptly did likewise, of course with inferior results.55 The peripatetic Greeley’s campaign tours took him into Connecticut and upstate New York, among other places. Wherever he went, he drew large crowds straining to hear his thin voice. In July, as Cincinnati lawyer Richard M. Corwine told Lincoln, Greeley’s appearance “was made the occasion of a very handsome demonstration for our Cause . . . large & spirited.” In October a Wall Street businessman suggested that Lincoln authorize a “public recognition” of Greeley’s service to the campaign. “I know that New York has an immense population, and that no one man alone can shape public opinion in it so as to determine it’s [sic] vote,” wrote Elliott F. Shepard, “but I also know that Horace Greeley, more than any other one man has done and is doing this.”56
Greeley would have agreed. Sounding as exhausted as Lincoln had been during his post–Cooper Union speaking tour five months earlier, Greeley wrote to his friend Bayard Taylor in August: “There is no rest for me till after the Presidential Election. I must write and speak incessantly, tho’ so weary that I can hardly stand.”57 Meanwhile Bennett showcased his supposed political indifference—and arrogance—by hosting a “grand reception” in New York to honor a visiting Japanese delegation, at which his wife conspicuously adorned herself with a reported “$100,000 worth of diamonds and jewelry.”58
Greeley and his fellow Republican editors also “appeared” involuntarily: that is, lampooned in anti-Lincoln campaign cartoons that went on sale in the summer and fall. Though designed to mock Lincoln as a bumpkin, such images primarily attempted to saddle him with the political baggage that came from association with outspoken liberals like Greeley. The preeminent New York printmaking firm of Currier & Ives, practically the Tribune’s next-door neighbor in the area just south of City Hall Park, issued a number of these anti-Lincoln cartoons. And quite a few of them included Greeley as a main character. In one painfully racist example, “The Nigger” in the Woodpile, the figure of Lincoln sits atop a bonfire-shaped log rail “platform,” attempting to conceal a grinning African American trapped within to represent the lurking slavery issue. However clumsily, the print revealed an inescapable truth: Republican editors indeed preferred to steer clear of the volatile slavery issue in 1860, and instead emphasize Lincoln’s inspiring personal story. Thus Greeley, wearing his trademark battered hat, long coat, frayed trousers, and white chin whiskers, can be seen in the cartoon telling a representative of “Young America”: “I assure you my friend, that you can safely vote our ticket, for we have no connection with the Abolition party, but our Platform is composed entirely of rails split by our Candidate.”59 The lithography firm made the same point with Letting the Cat Out of the Bag, which portrayed Greeley, Raymond, and Lincoln all trying to repel a fierce black cat (labeled “Spirit of Discord”) who escapes from the “Republican Bag” with the encouragement of antislavery zealot Charles Sumner. “What are you doing, Sumner!” Greeley cries, “you’ll spoil all! she ain’t to be let out until after Lincoln is elected!” To many Americans of the period, the composition reflected a growing fear that Greeley and his fellow Republican journalists were conspiring to conceal their candidate’s latent radicalism.60
Greeley and Lincoln try to hide the supposedly radical Republican platform beneath a “woodpile” made of Lincolnian log rails. It concea
ls a cruelly caricatured black man representing the combustible slavery issue.
In yet another print, Currier & Ives’s The Rail Candidate, Greeley was back on view together with a black man carrying a squirming Lincoln astride the slavery plank of the Republican platform—in this case formed out of a single, uncomfortable-looking log rail. And in yet another, the editor appeared as a showman introducing an “illustrious individual”—one of Barnum’s most retrograde sideshow attractions, the cruelly exploited dark-skinned child known as the “What Is It?”—as “our next candidate for the Presidency.”61 In The Republican Party Going to the Right House (rather than the White House), Greeley was again depicted transporting Lincoln aboard a rail, this time toward a lunatic asylum, declaring: “Hold on to me Abe, and we’ll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people.” And in Political Blondins Crossing Salt River, Greeley topples off a rail suspended over a raging stream, assuring fellow Republicans he will survive because “a bag of wind won’t sink.”62
Perhaps no campaign cartoon better illustrated the ramped-up collaboration between editors and politicians that election year than The Great Exhibition of 1860. This particular Currier & Ives print found Greeley as an organ grinder (his music box labeled “New York Tribune”), with Lincoln as his comically oversized pet monkey, dancing obediently to the editor’s tune, his waist tied like a puppet to Greeley’s finger and his lips padlocked shut to keep him from saying anything new or controversial. What set this print apart was the inclusion of both James Watson Webb and Raymond, the former shown as a grizzled old man collecting campaign contributions in a tambourine labeled “Courier and Express”; the latter depicted as a bearded dwarf wearing short pants and a vest marked “New York Times,” and carrying a miniature hatchet as he grasps Webb’s hand and declares: “I’ll stick fast to you General, for the present, because I have my own little axe to grind”—meaning his abiding resentment over Seward’s defeat at the Republican convention.63 Old grudges died hard, in images as well as words, so Currier & Ives made the Republican newspaper wars fodder for humorous commentary, taking Greeley’s allegedly pernicious influence over Lincoln to new comic heights. One can only assume that James Gordon Bennett took his exclusion hard. He had last appeared in a separate-sheet political cartoon back in 1856, when he was shown attempting to bribe newly elected president James Buchanan.64
In an image designed to warn racist white voters that Republicans secretly planned to make blacks the equals of whites, Greeley introduces White House nominee Lincoln to “the next Candidate for the Presidency,” an exploited P. T. Barnum attraction from Africa, advertised as less than human, and known as the “What Is It.”
Greeley is an organ grinder, Lincoln his silenced monkey, in a print charging Republicans with concealing plans for abolition. At right, “Little Villain” Henry Raymond and his former boss, James Watson Webb, raise funds for the campaign.
The editors’ efforts on the stump, and their appearances in the graphic arts, may not have changed many votes. But they likely helped spur a gigantic voter turnout—some 80 percent of eligible white males nationwide—which was deemed crucial to Republican success in swing states like Indiana and Pennsylvania. On Election Day, November 6, excitement gripped New York as the vote count began, especially at the city’s newspaper offices, where district tallies trickled in throughout the long evening. “Such crowds as were gathered around the doors of the Times, Tribune and Herald,” Raymond’s paper reported, “are only to be seen on these quadrennial occasions of the country’s salvation or destruction.” Onlookers “climbed on each other’s shoulders and stood on each other’s heads in a vain attempt to peer into the second story editorial room windows. Curiosity, apprehension, exultation—these and all other emotions, were as plainly stamped on each individual countenance as the Eagle on a quarter.”65
When the final tallies were counted, Abraham Lincoln earned the most lopsidedly sectional victory in American history, carrying every Northern state but New Jersey, but winning not a single electoral vote from the South. From distant Oregon, where Lincoln edged out runner-up Breckinridge by some two hundred out of fourteen thousand total votes cast, the victor’s old friend, former Springfield editor Simeon Francis, wrote the victor to “congratulate you on the results of this election,” and, in a sign of things to come, to take his place at the front of the line of journalists who expected to be rewarded for their loyalty. “My hopes, long entertained, [are] so far un realized,” he announced, reminding Lincoln: “I do believe our success . . . carried the state and California—not, however, without much and hard labor.” (Before long, he was writing again with his first, but not last, specific request: that his brother-in-law be retained at his federal job in New London.)66
• • •
Lincoln’s exclusively Northern plurality emboldened many Southern politicians and journalists to insist they would not be bound by the result. Yet there were no true political alternatives. Stephen Douglas amassed the second-highest total of popular votes, but won only twelve electoral votes to Lincoln’s 180. Breckinridge swept the Deep South, and Bell prevailed in three Border Slave States. Yet in winning, Lincoln accumulated only 40 percent of the total ballots nationwide—the second-smallest popular plurality in American history. As for hotly contested New York state, Lincoln won outright thanks to a huge plurality north of Westchester; but whatever national influence Horace Greeley and Henry Raymond had labored to earn, it could be argued that when it came to the North’s most important city, the irascible James Gordon Bennett still reigned supreme in his influence over Democrats: in voter-rich Manhattan, Lincoln collected barely a third of the popular vote.
The outcome aside, the 1860 campaign enriched all the papers. The Herald ended the year with seventy thousand daily subscribers; Greeley now claimed 75,000 daily and more than 200,000 weekly readers. Whatever his onetime misgivings, Greeley reveled in the Lincoln triumph, not surprisingly interpreting it as a personal vindication. Appearing at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Institute, he declared the Republicans “not a man-worshipping party,” but an organization committed to Union and against slavery. In a way, the editor could now back up such claims with raw numbers: since the Republican ticket had won so few municipal votes on Election Day, Greeley could argue that he was now more popular in New York City than Lincoln was.67 Nonetheless, Lincoln had the last laugh on all the newspapers. When a visiting Herald reporter asked him if he had any message for Bennett, he joked with the confident swagger of a winner: “Yes, you may tell him that Thurlow Weed has found out that Seward was not nominated at Chicago.”68
Perhaps half in jest, half in earnest, Bennett now suggested that Lincoln ought to do the right thing and appoint Greeley to his cabinet (he certainly would have been delighted to see his competitor leave New York). The notion gained more serious traction when Philadelphia newspaperman John Wein Forney wrote Lincoln on November 12 to urge him not to “pass by the eminent deservings of the rare talents, and the high and commanding position, personal and political, of Mr. Greeley.” His “speeches, like his editorials, are read and admired by all men,” Forney attested, and gave him “an influence among the masses which no public position could increase, and which long years of partisan persecution have not lessened.” Added Forney: “I do not know whether he expects to be included in the selection of your immediate counsellors, I do not know what his friends may ask of him—I speak only the sentiments of one who, having for years been opposed to him politically, and still objecting to many of his principles—regards him as the first journalist in America, and as eminently entitled to the thanks of his party for the vigor, the courage, and the integrity of his general course.”69
Greeley, however, insisted he wanted no part of the cabinet—a sentiment that dovetailed neatly with Lincoln’s reluctance to consider him. That did not mean that Greeley’s lust for office had cooled. Indeed, very much thirsting for a political comeback, he set his sights on a different prize: the U.S. Senate seat from New York still
occupied by William Seward, but destined to become vacant if the incumbent decided to join the Lincoln administration. The possibility placed Greeley in an awkward position, for he had no desire to see Seward attain higher office; yet only if Seward took the prime cabinet post as secretary of state would his Senate seat open up. “I would like to go to the Senate,” Greeley confided to his friend, journalist Beman Brockway, “and would not like to go into the Cabinet.” As he explained, “I belong to The Tribune, and as a Senator would continue to work for it, while as a Cabinet man I could not”—a remarkably frank assertion that underscored the fact that politics and journalism remained all but interchangeable. Within the week, an increasingly frustrated Greeley added: “I am sure I can do nothing more to make myself U.S. Senator, and I am not even sure that I would try very hard if sure of success.” Nonetheless, Greeley continued to cast his eye on the prize, and before long made clear that he expected Lincoln to support his latest quest for office.70 The editor of the New York Tribune was destined for political rebuke yet again. In the end Lincoln showed more interest in recruiting and rewarding John Wein Forney than Horace Greeley.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 35
