As it turned out, Lincoln would not use Clephane as his exclusive mouthpiece after all. The new president quickly learned that there was far more advantage in doling out information to the more widely read Washington dailies, one story at a time. For the rest of his presidency, Lincoln used the District’s newspapers selectively and informally—occasionally pitting one against the other in quest of the best coverage—feeding the New York press with stories released first to the Washington editors and all but terminating the “party organ” tradition that had thrived unchanged since the age of Jackson.
Before long, Lincoln began to favor one Washington-based journalist in particular: that wily political chameleon John Wein Forney. The forty-three-year-old publisher of the Philadelphia Press, a former Buchanan and Douglas Democrat, had already spent twenty-five years in the newspaper trade, in the course of which he had exacted political rewards dating back to the Polk administration. In late 1859, Forney had established a second paper, a Washington weekly called the Sunday Morning Chronicle, and began spending most of his time in the national capital. Now he filled his new paper with flattering comments about the Lincoln administration. He made sure to secure his first face-to-face appointment with the new president less than two weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration.38 The reasons for the editor’s political reawakening, not surprisingly, involved political patronage—not only what the editor could secure for others, but what he could earn for himself. Within a year, Forney converted the weekly Chronicle into an equally pro-administration daily.
“Forney had the loftiest ambitions,” conceded his lieutenant John Russell Young. But he “never learned—or at least never applied—the lesson which Bennett seared into the hearts of the generation,—that the world must fear before it followed, that there is a great deal of the dog in what people call public opinion, and that it must be well flogged before you have the comfort of its affection.” Forney “never came [in]to his own,” Young believed, because he tried too hard for “recognition,” rather than influence.39 Unlike Bennett, and even crusaders like Greeley, Forney yearned to be liked.
To his dismay, Forney had recently lost his patronage sinecure as clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. As he remembered with gratitude, Lincoln thereupon “called in person upon a number of Senators and asked them to vote for me for Secretary of that body”—an even better job, paying $3,600 a year. As soon as the Senate returned for its special session, Lincoln made his preference for Forney clear to an old Illinois ally, Orville H. Browning, the man recently appointed to fill out the unexpired senate term of the late Stephen Douglas. Just five days after Browning arrived in Washington to take up his new duties, he received an invitation to visit Lincoln in the White House, where, among other issues, the president “expressed [to] me a wish that Forney should be elected Secretary of the Senate. Said he had rendered very important services to the administration, acting in good faith with it, and doubted whether the support of Pennsylvania could be secured without him.” A few days later, Browning assured the president, “I think we can elect him.” The Republican caucus chose Forney on July 15, with Browning confiding in his diary, “I voting for him on the recommendation of the President & others, knowing nothing about him myself. Never having even seen him to know him.” In return, Forney commenced bombarding Lincoln with praise—along with patronage suggestions of his own. (Such arrangements were hardly unusual. The president’s longtime supporter Horace White of the Chicago Tribune became clerk of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.)40
To further reward Forney, the State Department gave the Chronicle at least $4,776.34 in advertising during a single year of the war.41 For the administration, it proved a sound investment. With Forney, Lincoln secured two advocates for the price of one, for the editor continued to publish his pro-administration paper in Philadelphia. Forney used his widening access in the capital to launch a new Washington gossip column for the Press, entitling it: “Occasional.” Lincoln not only read it; he “occasionally” wrote for it. Although he had sworn off anonymous journalism years earlier, he could not help ghostwriting items for the new feature. Forney sent one of these unsigned tidbits to Secretary of War Simon Cameron on August 16, proudly identifying it as the “President’s article.” Loyal to the end, Forney devoted not a word in his two-volume memoirs to the open secret of Lincoln’s resumed dabbling in journalism.42 The number of items Lincoln contributed during his White House years has never been calculated and likely never will be; they were, after all, anonymous. Though his efforts may have been less promiscuous than some modern historians have suggested, they were almost certainly more commonplace than his collected works suggest.
Forney entertained lavishly and, some said, drank, talked, and fawned too much. A Democratic journal back in Pennsylvania complained that Forney’s newspapers began “gravitating with constant . . . approaches to Black Republicanism” in order to “entitle it to its reward from the Abolitionists.” Journalist George Alfred Townsend labeled Forney “one of the most timid men that ever filled a dictatorial place like editor. It partly arose,” Townsend believed, “from his nursing office-seeking on one knee and a newspaper on the other.” Even Horace Greeley, seldom timid about promoting his political ambitions through the press, complained that Forney did so clumsily, failing to serve as both “an independent journalist and an office-holder,” and adding disparagingly: “Any journalist who holds an office writes in a straight [sic] jacket.”43
The observation may have been apt, but a penchant for fawning did not make Forney less of a force in the federal capital. Rather, it brought him as close to the leading personality of the day as any editor in the country. Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett, who remained in New York through much of the war, enjoyed far less direct access to Lincoln. For his part, Forney left no doubt about his indebtedness to his new presidential patron. As he later wrote of Lincoln: “He was most considerate of the feelings and deservings of others.”44 What Forney believed he deserved were political rewards, and he got them—recommending appointees to serve from Washington to Colorado—in one case blatantly accompanying his most recent request with a clipping of his latest editorial criticizing administration “fault finders.”45 In many ways, Forney became the administration’s “official organ” after all.
John Wein Forney, editor of the Washington Chronicle, Lincoln supporter, patronage recipient, and ultimately semi-official administration “oracle.”
Also expecting significant reward was James Watson Webb, another newspaper editor who had advocated for Lincoln’s election in 1860, although with how much impact was open to question. By the time the new administration came to power, Webb’s glory days were behind him. Still, even aging editors past their prime expected political recognition for loyal service long rendered, and the pugnacious old ex-Whig was no exception. In May, Lincoln obliged by offering the editor he respectfully called “General” the job of U.S. minister to Turkey, but Webb evidently thought the posting beneath him, and declined it. His political debt thus paid, Lincoln might have dropped the matter there, but in June he proposed nominating Webb for a South American post instead (“Brazil will strengthen me,” Webb had pleaded with Lincoln, “ . . . and add to my usefulness”), and this time the crusty old newspaperman accepted. Before departing for Rio, Webb sold his enterprise to the New York World, and after more than thirty years in business the Courier and Enquirer ceased to exist. James Gordon Bennett’s most persistent and vitriolic press enemy earned not only a plum diplomatic post, but the enormous sum of $100,000—a record price for a newspaper. Declaring him “dead and buried,” Bennett smirked of his longtime enemy: “we shall sadly miss his fuss and feathers.”46
• • •
In his mid-April recruitment and blockade proclamations, Lincoln had sought to stave off criticism that he had exceeded his authority by calling Congress back into session to ratify his executive initiatives—but not until July 4, by which time, he believed, his new policies would seem irreversible, particularl
y in the warm glow of Independence Day amor patriae. In the meantime, he labored to build an army and navy along with a loyal Republican government, continuing to give respectful consideration even during the mounting military crisis to job recommendations from leading journalists.47 Then, two days before the House and Senate reconvened, with anti-Union sentiment on the rise in Maryland, Lincoln ordered General Winfield Scott to “suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus” wherever “resistance occurs” along the route carrying federal troops between New York and Washington. It was the latest in a series of suspensions aimed at inhibiting further secession. The outcry from the Democratic papers in Baltimore was predictable, swift, and loud. Forney spoke for most Republicans by expressing “universal confidence in the administration.”48
On July 4, the president sent his eagerly anticipated special session message to Capitol Hill. Even without the opportunity to orate in person (tradition of the day required presidents to submit, but not perform, their congressional communications), Lincoln rose to the occasion with a “speech” filled with sparkling phrases. Written in plain language designed to resonate not only with Congress but especially with the Northern people through the press, it offered legal, moral, and practical arguments for armed resistance to the rebellion. In Lincoln’s view, the revolt constituted a challenge not only to “the fate of these United States,” but “to the whole family of man . . . whether”—and here he deployed a phrase to which he would memorably return two years later—“ . . . a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”49
Offering an impassioned justification for suspending habeas corpus, Lincoln denied violating his oath, asking at one point: “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Emphasizing this critical question, he added: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” He accused the “movers” of secession and rebellion of “insidious debauching of the public mind,” and, once again reiterating this argument, of “drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years.”
Fire-eaters, Lincoln charged at one point, had “sugar-coated” outright treason. The colloquialism had prompted former Indiana journalist John Defrees—recently named U.S. government printer—to march to the White House to complain that such language “lacked the dignity proper to a state paper.” Lincoln calmly responded: “Defrees, that word expresses precisely my ideas, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what sugar-coated means . . . I think I’ll let it go.” Defrees also tried editing the text, deleting what he regarded as surplus commas; Lincoln put them all back.50 Yet another veteran editor had been put in his place by the new president.
On the subject of civil liberties, Lincoln insisted in his message that he had curtailed them only with “the deepest regret.” He “could but perform this duty,” he argued, “or surrender the existence of the government.” A “dangerous emergency,” he maintained, required the imposition of an executive authority to which he assigned a novel new name: the “war power.”51 His own “sugar-coating” came seven paragraphs from his conclusion: “This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”52 Focused on the niceties of composition, Defrees and other journalists failed to perceive in the message the groundwork for imminent challenges to freedom of the press.
In many circles, Lincoln’s eloquence fell on deaf ears. Perhaps still pining for a Seward coup, the New York Times proclaimed the message such a “painful jumble” it concluded that it must have been faultily transmitted over the telegraph. In Confederate and Border Slave States, Lincoln’s message aroused outright denunciation. The Baltimore newspaper The South spoke for many pro-secession editors when it branded its author “the equal, in despotic wickedness, of Nero or any of the other tyrants who have polluted this earth.”53 From the opposite perspective, Frederick Douglass despaired that the message made “no mention” of slavery, anguishing: “Any one reading the document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that a slaveholding war [is] waged upon the Government, determined to overthrow it.” Almost alone among these observers, onetime Seward supporter George William Curtis of Harper’s Magazine perceived the extraordinary talent behind the message, hailing it as “wonderfully acute, simple, sagacious, and of antique honesty!” Soon to take up an important new post as editor of Harper’s Weekly, Curtis added this of the president: “Some of us who doubted were wrong.”54
• • •
Less than three weeks after the president’s muscular declaration of power, the raw recruits of the Union army marched confidently toward Manassas, Virginia, some thirty miles southwest of Washington, to meet the untested Confederate army in battle. “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!” blared the New York Tribune under the banner headline: “The Nation’s War-Cry.” In the paper’s bold, capitalized words—which Greeley had not authored himself (he was recovering from a knee injury at his Chappaqua farm when they were first published)—“The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July! BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!” Greeley may not have originated the challenge, but he did keep it on page one, unchanged, for eight consecutive weeks. During that time he vowed it would be “the Tribune’s sole vocation to rouse and animate the American people for the terrible ordeal which has befallen them.” As Thurlow Weed sneered: “Mr. Greeley assumed command of our armies, reiterating his orders day after day in italics and capitals.”55
The “orders” were easier issued than accomplished. At age seventy-five, commanding general Winfield Scott was too old and infirm to lead troops; he assigned the task to the West Point–trained Ohioan Irvin McDowell. The Confederate military leadership boasted only slightly more experience: P. G. T. Beauregard, who had overseen the April attack on Fort Sumter, led the principal Confederate army at Manassas, and West Point–educated Mexican War veteran Joseph E. Johnston led a powerful reenforcement from the Shenandoah Valley. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a West Pointer with Mexico experience of his own, felt anxious enough about the situation to rush to the front, too, prepared to take overall field command himself if necessary—though he arrived on the scene too late to do so.
To many residents of nearby Washington, the approaching encounter proved equally irresistible. On Sunday, July 21, hundreds of excursionists packed picnic baskets and headed to the front to enjoy the widely expected Union triumph. Encamping themselves on hillsides where they could view what they assumed would be a quick rout, they toasted early reports of federal gains. Late that afternoon, however, Rebel forces counterattacked, and Union lines broke. The retreat turned into a rout when roads became so clogged that troops trampled over both picnickers and their overturned food hampers. Panic-struck civilians fled for their lives. Edward House of the New York Tribune described the scene as a “perfect frenzy.”56
“Dictator” Greeley attempts to run the war—by ousting Lincoln’s cabinet—in an August 1861 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly.
As House’s presence attests, Washington’s overconfident spectators were not the only civilian witnesses to the Union debacle. For the first time since the Mexican War, a cadre of journalists assembled en masse to cover battle action for the newspapers. This “great swarm of correspondents” had descended on Washington earlier that month, where the initially collegial atmosphere quickly grew competitive in anticipation of imminent military action. In the words of one of the first to arrive: “Any officer who will descant
on the war is certain to have a circle of listeners, notebook in hand, and when the fountain has run out or shuts up, off they rush to the telegraph office or the writing-rooms, which are filled with chroniclers of the gossip of the hour.” John Wein Forney dubbed the newly arrived gaggle “the gentlemen of the ravenous pen.”57
The talented reporters who crossed the Potomac bridges in mid-July and headed to the battlefront on horseback or in wagons included House and Warren of the Tribune, the debonair Edmund Stedman of the World, Henry Villard and William B. Shaw for the Herald, Richard C. McCormick of the Evening Post, and representing the Times, no fewer than four correspondents, including Joseph Howard (author of the Scotch cap calumny), former Confederate prisoner George Salter (“Jasper”), and leading the contingent, editor Henry Raymond himself. And these were just the New York correspondents. On the scene as well were Lincoln’s friends Charles Ray and Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, plus John Russell Young of Forney’s Philadelphia Press, and Charles (“Carleton”) Coffin of the Boston Journal, not to mention a reporter and a messenger for the AP, and illustrator Alfred A. Waud, on assignment for the New York Illustrated News (artist-correspondents like Waud would eventually produce enough drawings to inspire some seven thousand wartime woodcuts in the weekly press).58 Of all these “war correspondents,” only McCormick and Raymond—the latter while visiting Europe during the Austro-Sardinian War in 1859—were known to have ever seen, much less reported on, a military battle. General McDowell, for his part, was delighted that his expected triumph would be recorded by such a huge press corps, for victory would surely make him immortal. “I have made arrangements for the correspondents to take the field,” he informed the reporters, remarking that they should “wear a white uniform, to indicate the purity of their character.”59
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 42
