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

by Harold Holzer

• • •

  In the aftermath of the presidential election, the New York newspapers began paying attention not only to the prospects of a Lincoln presidency—and cabinet—but also to the unmistakable secession rumblings that began emanating from the South. “The revolution is marching apace,” an alarmed James Gordon Bennett fretted in early November, “and as news of Lincoln’s election spreads through the South, the echo comes back telling of a rising feeling in favor of secession and resistance.”71

  For months, the Charleston Mercury had been defiantly urging secession should the “Abolitionist” Lincoln win the White House. Now it bluntly proclaimed that his victory meant “disunion.” The paper’s firebrand owner, Robert Barnwell Rhett, was the quintessential Dixie-style politician-journalist, a onetime congressman and U.S. senator who emerged during the post-election period as the Deep South’s preeminent agitator for separation. Rhett’s was a formidable voice. Even the pro-Union New York Illustrated News, the youngest of the city’s prospering picture weeklies, conceded of this “journalistic standard bearer of secession” that “his style combines both nerve and sinew.” Now Rhett editorialized that the Southern states faced “the crisis of their fate,” noting that “nothing is needed for our deliverance but that the ball of revolution be set in motion.”72 In this opinion, Rhett was not alone. A Georgia editorial similarly warned: “We have met the enemy, and they have conquered.” And a Richmond paper likened Lincoln’s election to “a declaration of war.”73

  In response, Raymond’s cautious Times declared: “We are not surprised,—nor in the least alarmed,—at the symptoms of resentment and the movements toward secession which greet the news of Lincoln’s victory in the Southern States.” Dixie’s angriest editors, he predicted, would certainly “denounce the Union and proclaim their determination to withdraw from its obligations. . . . But we have entire faith in the final subsidence of these waves of popular frenzy.” Greeley, who republished the Mercury’s threat in his own paper just a few days after the election, similarly questioned the “unmistakable impress of haste—of passion—of distrust of the popular judgment.” But he taunted all too dismissively that “the South could no more unite upon a scheme of secession than a company of lunatics could conspire to break out of bedlam.”74 Better that the Southern states leave the Union anyway, he insisted, than for the government to yield an inch on slavery. It was not the first or last time Greeley and Raymond underestimated popular sentiment. Bennett proved no more prescient, but far cruder, when he complained that “nigger worship has ruined churches, ruined parties and now is ruining the whole country.”75

  In a way, Raymond’s and Greeley’s delusional overconfidence was understandable, because it was based in part on a professional assessment of their Southern counterparts’ supposedly limited influence. The pro-secession press spoke loudly, but after all, the total circulation of all sixty-six daily newspapers in the future Confederate States of America remained comparatively tiny—little more than the combined readership of the New York Herald and New York Tribune—and could hardly wield as much influence, the Northern editors miscalculated, as their own papers. Greeley dismissed them as “silly gasconading journals.”76 Besides, Southern newspapers were far from unified in urging separation from the Union in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s election. Yet in a breathtakingly short time, a matter of weeks, secession fever escalated into an epidemic, fanned by an increasingly radicalized Deep South press. As Greeley later described the situation, clinging to his view that the secession movement did not truly represent Southern sentiment, “a violent, unscrupulous, desperate minority . . . conspired to clutch power and wield it for ends which the overawed, gagged, paralyzed majority at heart condemn.” Even Greeley admitted that “the ‘sprinkle’ swelled into a cascade, the cascade into a river, which inundated and reddened the whole breadth of our country.”77

  Although some Southern unionist publications tried for a time to stem the tide (“Is it wise so long to anticipate evils very likely never to come?” asked one North Carolina paper), the fire-eaters quickly overwhelmed the moderate voices. In the face of a growing public opinion avalanche, editors who preached restraint and patience were “miraculously” converted, or replaced at their posts by journalists committed to a more aggressive agenda, some even forcibly silenced.78 For example, when one Corinth, Mississippi, editor tried cautioning against separation, he was “surrounded by infuriated rebels, his person threatened with violence, he was broken up and ruined forever, all for advocating the Union of our fathers.”79 The editor of the Nashville Democrat, which Greeley called “the best Union paper in Middle Tennessee,” fled the city in terror, his wife forced to follow soon thereafter, “afraid that if she stayed after the election . . . she should not be able to escape at all.”80 Northern correspondents stationed in the South faced rude questioning from self-appointed “Vigilance Committees,” and were routinely accused of fomenting slave insurrections and driven out of town. When one self-described “attaché” from the New York Herald arrived to cover the situation in Columbia, South Carolina, in December 1860, “an excited, vulgar, unruly, ignorant crowd” confronted him, forced him into a local doctor’s office for questioning, tore through his belongings in search of incriminating documents, and peppered him with suspicious queries like: “Ain’t you an abolitionist,” and “Did you vote for Lincoln?”81

  In the case of another menaced Unionist journal, the Richmond Dispatch, its editor tried only briefly to urge readers to “take time to consider” an appropriate response to the admitted “calamity” of Lincoln’s election. Many Virginians, it argued, hoped and anticipated that the newly elected president would issue a statement of conciliation. When such assurances did not come quickly, the paper performed a sudden about-face and commenced urging that Virginians wait no longer for the president-elect to give “a sign,” adding: “The outrage perpetuated is great, and cannot be wiped out by the failure of Lincoln to commit an ‘overt act.’ ”82 The Northern press was not alone in underestimating secession sentiment in the Deep South. Ohio journalist Donn Piatt believed that for far too long Lincoln himself felt the movement merely “a political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North.”83

  • • •

  Defeated but unbowed, Stephen Douglas, heading home after his grueling campaign swing through the South, tried making one last appeal to Southern editors who had yet to succumb to secession fever. Writing from New Orleans, he insisted that “the mere election of any man to the Presidency by the American people, in accordance with the Constitution and the laws, does not itself furnish any just cause or reasonable ground for dissolving the Federal Union.”84 The comments appeared in the Missouri Republican—a Democratic paper—on November 17. They did little to stem disunion momentum in the Deep South.

  On December 20, a convention at Charleston formally voted to take South Carolina out of the Union, the first state to secede. Remembering that the Palmetto State had tried leaving the Union once before, during the Jacksonian era, the Tribune calmly editorialized, “If she chooses to be without the advantages of the Union, which her sister States enjoy and will continue to enjoy, the loss is hers, and the advantages—so far as the saving of some heavy expense is concerned—are ours. . . . Only let the State continue to pay the regular duties on imports, and keep her hands off the [federal] Forts, and she can secede as long as she pleases.” Once again, Greeley miscalculated secession fever, but another view of the crisis was taking shape at his newspaper as well: the editor was now preparing himself, and his readers, for the departure of the entire South, and without regret. “How far can secession go?” the paper asked on December 22, “and, second, if it should happen to be successful, is it not just possible that the North may feel disposed not to go over the ground a second time, even for the sake of bringing the seceders back again?” As Greeley later described his position, “the North could do without the South, and the South could do without the North.”85 Lincoln’s
two private secretaries maintained that Greeley’s “damaging vagaries” encouraged the South “to hope for peaceable disunion.” As a result, argued John Nicolay and John Hay, “the timid grew more despondent, the traitors bolder, and the crisis almost became a panic.”86

  James Gordon Bennett, by contrast, almost immediately understood that the South Carolina action represented “The Great Crisis of the Age,” though he placed much of the blame on Northern antislavery Republicans. The Herald called on Lincoln, “if he understands his duty to his God and his country, and has the courage” to speak, to “declare himself independent of all factions, creeds, or partisan feelings of any sort,” adding: “We want a President for the whole country—not for Vermont.” Bennett could not resist taking a swipe at Republican journals in general, and Greeley in particular, for “grasping at straws” by suggesting that New York and New England could survive unscathed without the South. “The Massachusetts factories,” argued Bennett fantastically, “with the aid of the South, merely give a living to their own population, far inferior to that which South Carolina gives her slaves.”87 At least Bennett grasped the importance of Union—even if only as a means of protecting local access to slave state trade.

  Rhett’s Charleston Mercury did not even wait until the morning after South Carolina secession to announce the momentous news of secession to its readers. On the very afternoon the convention reached its historic decision—within a breathtaking fifteen minutes, according to some accounts—the paper rushed out a single-sheet broadside extra proclaiming in supersized bold type: “THE UNION IS DISSOLVED.” Only two hundred copies came off the press in its initial run, followed by another two hundred the following day—hardly enough to meet frenzied local demand for the souvenirs.88 Yet rare as the broadside was even then—it instantly became a valuable collector’s item—a local group calling itself the “Palmetto Boys of the Palmetto State” proved willing to part with one, dispatching a precious copy to President-elect Lincoln at Springfield, more as a defiant threat than a memento. In an attempt to “give the deed of a most malignant enemy the guise of a friendly act,” one of his visitors observed, Lincoln tried assuring his worried eldest son that “it must have been intended for a Christmas gift.”89 It would not be the only anonymous warning to reach Lincoln during the dangerous interregnum between his November election and March inauguration.

  In this post-election caricature from Vanity Fair, Greeley (right) greets Lincoln’s election by “fiddling over the ruins of our beloved country,” while Bennett (left), envisioning that New York would now become a wasteland, boards up the Herald.

  Christmas found the defeated Stephen Douglas back in Washington, worrying no less than his successful presidential opponent that the Union they both loved might be on the brink of destruction. Total dissolution seemed more likely than ever once Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana joined South Carolina by seceding in January and February—all expressing in their justifications an unwavering commitment to preserving and protecting the institution of slavery, which Lincoln’s election, they insisted, threatened to destroy. As he had done so often during his long but, in the end, frustratingly disappointing political career, Lincoln’s lifelong rival chose to express his concerns publicly through the press. In a long letter to his closest friend in journalism, Springfield editor Charles Lanphier, obviously meant for publication, Douglas poured out his fading hopes for compromise and peace. “We can never acknowledge the right of a State to secede and cut us off from the Ocean and the world, without our consent,” he began. Then, typically, he assumed his customary partisan tone to warn: “The fact can no longer be disguised that many of the Republican Leaders desire war & Disunion under pretext of saving the Union.”

  Like an old bantam rooster not quite ready to give up dominance over his flock, Douglas concluded: “I am for the Union, and hence am ready to make any reasonable sacrifice to save it.”90 By then, however, President-elect Lincoln had firmly decided that he would offer no gestures to mollify secessionists if they required compromise that would extend slavery westward. In the end, Douglas’s warnings proved too little, too late. His plea appeared in print, but went unheeded. Few readers would have guessed that his desperate message to Charles Lanphier would also prove to be one of the last letters the exhausted Little Giant would ever write, to a journalist or to anyone else.91

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lincoln Will Not Talk with Anyone

  Ignoring the growing clamor for reassurances that he posed no threat to slavery where it existed, Lincoln rigorously maintained his policy of “masterly inactivity” during the long wait between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration four months later in March 1861. This was the tense period known to history by Henry Adams’s enduring descriptive phrase, the “Great Secession Winter,” and it indeed grew into a season of frustrating discontent for journalists increasingly desperate for news from the president-elect.

  Successfully resisting calls to conciliate the growing number of seceding states and their pro-slavery advocates in the press, Lincoln attempted to remain as invisible as he had made himself during the presidential campaign. But he also exercised strong behind-the-scenes leadership on two major priorities: enticing representatives of his diverse political coalition (and perhaps a few Southern Unionists) into his cabinet, and preventing unacceptable compromise by lame ducks and old fossils in Washington. When veteran leaders from North and South called for a Peace Convention devoted to finding compromise terms to end the crisis before the inauguration, Lincoln secretly but firmly instructed his closest allies in the capital to discourage any concessions on slavery extension. As he wrote Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, “the tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.”1 Meanwhile Lincoln publicly occupied himself by welcoming to Springfield cabinet aspirants like Edward Bates and Salmon Chase.

  For a man pledged to say nothing new and controversial, especially to newspapermen, Lincoln nevertheless managed to maintain a lively and skillful correspondence with influential editors during the Secession Winter. Not all of them earned the courtesy of a reply—at least as far as we know, for only a handful of responses have survived—but that did not inhibit dozens from sharing their unsolicited views with him, particularly when it came to recommending candidates for patronage spoils.

  The editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, for example, wrote to endorse Pennsylvania’s controversial Simon Cameron for a cabinet post. The proprietors of several Minnesota papers wrote in behalf of Stephen Miller as the state’s “unanimous choice” for surgeon general, a recommendation endorsed a month later by the pioneering woman editor Jane Grey Swisshelm of the St. Cloud Journal. The proprietors of the Kingston (New York) Journal, the Rockford (Illinois) Forum, and the Toledo Blade all proposed judicial candidates, while the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal urged Lincoln to name William P. Dole as commissioner of Indian Affairs (he did).2

  Other editors were less specific in their expectations. One Ohio journalist asked only that a friend get “a position in one of the Departments at Washington, or elsewhere.” A newspaperman from downstate Illinois wanted “any favor you may do” for a “fellow citizen.”3 Lincoln’s German newspaper partner Theodore Canisius asked that an old Alton friend be named consul to Liverpool, based only on his “energetic” labors in behalf “of the republican party and especially of Mr. Lincoln.”4 Similar pleas arrived from newspapermen from San Jose, California, to Oneida, New York—and inevitably from both Greeley and Raymond, who wrote in February and March to urge appointing, respectively, favored candidates for surveyor of the Port of New York and American consul in Le Havre. Prematurely, but flatteringly, Raymond addressed each of his letters to “The President.”5

  Where policy matters were concerned, Lincoln continued to resist committing his views to writing lest they be published and misconstrued. And soon enough such concerns were validated when various newspapers either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted his positi
on on slavery. From his cramped temporary office at the Illinois State Capitol, Lincoln did begin crafting the occasional confidential letter to keep important but anxious editors informed and in line. On one such occasion, late in November, he wrote Raymond to complain when a conciliatory post-election speech by Senator Lyman Trumbull failed to garner positive coverage in Republican newspapers, and worse, had been misunderstood in the opposition’s. “Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech [on readers] with a purpose to quiet public anxiety?” asked a frustrated Lincoln. “Not one, so far as I know. On the contrary the Boston Courier and its’ [sic] class, hold me responsible for the speech”—true enough, for he had drafted part of Trumbull’s statement—“and endeavor to inflame the North with the belief that it foreshadows an abandonment of Republican ground by the incoming administration; while the Washington Constitution, and its’ [sic] class hold the same speech up to the South as an open declaration of war against them.”6

  Northern editors were not shy about sharing advice. John D. Defrees of the Indianapolis Atlas—who served also as the powerful chairman of the Indiana State Republican Committee—warned Lincoln in December that “secession feeling (tho’ not so extensive as the newspaper accounts make it) exists to a much greater extent than the people of the West are willing to believe possible.” But when Defrees suggested that Republicans respond by endorsing what he called “genuine popular sovereignty to the people of our Territories—not the Douglas sham,” Lincoln shot down the objectionable idea. “I am sorry any republican inclines to dally with Pop. Sov. of any sort,” he lectured Defrees. “It acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for.”7 Defrees’s wavering did not prevent Lincoln from considering the influential editor for the position of U.S. Government Printer.