McClellan, an avowed Democrat incurably suspicious of pro-administration journals, meanwhile undertook a secret effort to gain the support of James Gordon Bennett and the copacetic Herald, sending word to New York that he wanted the editor to identify a specific battlefield correspondent to receive his exclusive confidences. “I am anxious to keep Mr. B. well posted,” he wrote, “& wish to do it fully—ask how far I can go in communicating important matters.” McClellan might more profitably have taken a lesson from his future opponent Robert E. Lee, who shared his adversary’s impatience with journalists, but seemed sympathetic to their legitimate needs. “I am sorry . . . that the movements of the armies cannot keep pace with the expectations of the editors of the papers,” Lee remarked to his wife. “I know they can regulate matters satisfactorily to themselves on paper. I wish they could do so in the field.” But then he added this conciliatory object lesson: “No one wishes them more success than I do & would be happy to see them have full swing.” McClellan—indeed most of the Union military command, not to mention the civilian Lincoln Administration—would probably have disagreed.87
• • •
The momentous year of 1861 ended with a crisis of the diplomatic kind—one that excited a press storm in its wake. It began on November 8, when Captain Charles Wilkes, the overzealous commander of a Union blockading ship patrolling the waters north of Cuba, detained a British mail steamer, the Trent. As Wilkes knew, the ship was transporting two newly named Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, who had recently slipped past the Union blockade en route to London and Paris, respectively, to take up overseas posts as advocates for European recognition of the Confederacy.
Wilkes arrested both men and took his prisoners to the mainland for detention, and their capture came close to engulfing the United States in a world war. British politicians and newspapers threatened an armed response unless American authorities released Mason and Slidell, sent them on their way, and issued a formal apology. It was not just that a Union vessel had seized members of the traditionally immune diplomatic corps (though the Lincoln administration did not recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation entitled to name ambassadors). Far more importantly, at least to England, a United States ship had interfered with a British vessel sailing under Her Majesty’s colors. To many in Great Britain, even those who opposed slavery, this violation of international law constituted grounds for military retaliation.88
At first, Northern newspapers, including the New York Times, urged defiance—until Lincoln made it clear, as he is said to have put it, that the Union could only fight “one war at a time.” A previously bellicose Seward came to his senses and began counseling conciliation. His friend Henry Raymond got the message, too. By mid-December, he editorialized that “if, upon mature reflection, the law should be against us, we shall, in a similar spirit, make the proper reparation.”89
Scottish-born James Gordon Bennett, however, showed no desire to pacify the English he so despised. For weeks, he kept his Anglophobic warmongering at a fever pitch. Although Great Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies believed that Washington would eventually release the Confederate diplomats, he admitted that with “the mob and the Press manning the vessel, it is too probable that this atonement may be refused.”90 For good measure, Bennett accused William Howard Russell of engaging in lucrative insider financial speculation during the “Trent Affair,” prompting the harassed correspondent to lament: “If I am ever in another Bull’s Run you may depend on it I never get out of it alive. . . . I’m the only English thing they can vent their anger on, & the [London] Times is regarded as so dead against the North that everyone connected with it in the North is exposed to popular anger.”91
On November 25, noting that Bennett’s diatribes were “being copied far and wide,” Raymond charged that “the New-York Herald is doing infinitely more to advance the rebel cause abroad than all the agents, official and unofficial, who have gone thither upon that service. For the last two months, its columns have teemed with denunciations, threats and insults, to the English Government, which, coupled as they are with an ostentatiously fulsome support of the Administration, are universally regarded there as indicating a settled purpose on the part of the Government to provoke a war with England.” Asked Raymond: “Is it at all surprising that language like this, habitually used, with every conceivable phrase and form of malignant exasperation . . . should arouse a bitter hostility against the cause of the Union among the people of England?”92
The increasingly political Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper also saw rank opportunism behind Bennett’s militancy. “The Herald was, but a short time ago, entirely in the interest of the South,” it pointed out. “ . . . The conversion of the paper was effected with weathercock celerity, and it is now as vituperative in behalf of Mr. Lincoln as it used to be against him; but its dearest sympathies are with the slavery men, and it still keeps up volleys of slang against all who desire the abolition of the slave system.”93 Bennett’s inconsistencies prompted Thurlow Weed to visit the White House, where he warned Lincoln that “the course of the Herald was endangering the government and the Union.” Always looking to his opponents’ better angels, Lincoln told Weed he was sure that “if Mr. Bennett could be brought to see things in that light, he would change his course.” In this regard, Lincoln was too optimistic.94
Relentlessly fanned by Bennett, the crisis festered unresolved until the day after Christmas, when, their backs to the wall, Lincoln and Seward finally agreed to release the envoys, but without specifically admitting to a violation of international law. The British had hoped for a more abject apology, perhaps a financial settlement, but accepted America’s reversal. Mason and Slidell sailed for Europe and Lincoln endured no worse punishment than the embarrassment of backing down from a fight. Throughout 1861, the administration had proven much more successful at fighting journalists than at battling Rebel armies and standing up to hostile foreign governments.
• • •
As it turned out, McClellan’s recent and rather clumsy effort to control the press corps not only collapsed, but stimulated unexpected consequences. One was a centralization of government control over the telegraph. Back on October 22, 1861, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward had prohibited “all telegraphic dispatches from Washington, intended for publication, which relate to the civil or military operations of the government.”95 Now, in early 1862, Lincoln’s newly named secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, went a step further, moving official telegraph operations from McClellan’s headquarters to a library next to his own office in Washington. There, for the next three years, Lincoln would be an almost daily (and nightly) visitor to await official news as it arrived from the front.
The relocation may have been convenient for the president, but it proved inhibiting for the press, just as the secretary of war intended. In February, Stanton named Edward S. Sanford, president of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, as “military supervisor of telegraphic lines and offices in the United States”—in other words, chief censor—and issued General Orders No. 10, codifying administration control over “any or all the telegraph lines in the United States, their appendages and appurtenances.”96 On the flip side, Stanton was not above courting loyal journalists—or hiring them. When Horace Greeley abruptly dismissed his managing editor, Charles Dana—because Greeley “was for peace [and] I was for war,” Dana remarked—Stanton promptly named Dana assistant secretary of war.97
Just a few weeks after his confirmation, Stanton showed that he meant business where censorship was concerned by moving to suppress the openly pro-Confederate Baltimore paper The South. The secretary of war ordered commanding general John Adams Dix to “Seize and take possession of the paper” and then to arrest publisher Samuel Sands Mills and editors Thomas W. Hall and Thomas H. Piggott. Hall, who had the dubious honor of being hauled away by the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, was charged with “openly and zealously advocating the cause of the insurrection and lar
gely contributing to unsettle and excite the public mind.” He spent months in a series of military prisons, permitted to see his wife only “in the presence of an officer.” Then in June, Stanton—purportedly with Lincoln’s blessing—ordered the arrest of Charles C. Fulton of the Baltimore American merely for planning to publish details about a recent presidential meeting. Thrown into Fort McHenry, “the depot for traitors” as he called it, the anguished Fulton appealed to Lincoln “for a hearing and prompt release in behalf of my family.” As he insisted, he had “risked both life and property in defending the Union cause” in a hostile city. Deaf to his protests, Stanton insisted for a time that Fulton be confined “closely . . . communicating with no one.”98
Stanton’s show of uninhibited zealousness, followed by the arrival of a petition from leading citizens of Boston reminding Congress that “the Administration has no right . . . to attempt any limitations whatever of the freedom of the press,” prompted an inevitable, perhaps overdue response: a full-scale congressional investigation that unexpectedly entangled the president and his family.99 In early 1862, the House Judiciary Committee began hearings into the question of whether “telegraphic censorship of the press has been established in this city” in contradiction of the Constitution, and, if so, whether censorship had been used “to restrain wholesome political criticism and discussion.” The committee called a number of witnesses from the government and the military, along with journalists suddenly willing to complain under oath that they indeed feared using “severe language” against Lincoln and had been prevented from wiring the truth about Union battle losses. The testimony eventually ran to more than a thousand handwritten pages.100
Some of the interviews proved chilling. Telegraph superintendent H. Emmons Thayer all but boasted that he had censored reports of cabinet meetings, regarding them as “private business” meant to “embarrass the Government.” Asked point-blank during one session if he had ever had “any dispatches suppressed at the telegraph office,” Simon Hanscom of the New York Herald openly admitted: “I have had a great many . . . a great deal of trouble with the Govt. in regard to the censorship of the press.” Hanscom hastened to point out that he perceived no “malice” in the censorship, suggesting that many of the readers at the telegraph office “didn’t seem to comprehend the business they had in charge.” The correspondent also admitted that he tried repeatedly to get around the indistinct rules. Told he “must not write anything about Cabinet meetings no matter what the subject was,” Hanscom tried to slip one such article through Colonel Sanford anyway, reporting that Lincoln and the War Department differed on the issue of admitting escaped slaves into Union lines. The censor informed the reporter that “he couldn’t send it, and couldn’t give me any reason for not sending it. I got vexed.” Individual dispatches might be banned in their entirety—like Hanscom’s initial report on the resolution of the Trent affair—or “the censor would dash his pen over a paragraph, and frequently such an erasure would destroy the entire sense of an article.” Concluding that, where reporting news was concerned, it was better late than never, the Herald correspondent testified that he ultimately found his way around the rules by sending his dispatches to New York by mail.101
Adams Hill, whose rumored flight from Bull Run had made him a laughingstock among his colleagues, got the committee’s serious attention with a similar story. He had once tried to wire a scoop reporting that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox had journeyed to New York to inspect a newly built mortar fleet poised to steam south. The telegraph censors refused to send it, implying that the report would give away Union technological and deployment secrets. Even David Bartlett, a pro-administration correspondent from the New York Evening Post who had written a laudatory 1860 Lincoln campaign biography, testified that, like Henry Raymond, “I was interfered with . . . the morning after the battle of Bull Run,” but thereafter chose “to be on good terms with the censor” and “had few dispatches stopped.” That is, until he tried to report the news of Simon Cameron’s ouster from the cabinet. Bartlett rushed his scoop to the telegrapher, he reported, “but he refused to send it.”102 Such testimony showed that censors routinely interfered not only with military, but also with government news.
During his turn in the witness chair, Samuel Wilkeson, Washington editor of the New York Tribune, broadened this complaint by testifying: “I am not allowed to send anything over the wires which, in the estimation of the censor, the Secretary of State, or the Assistant Secretary of State, shall be damaging to the character of the administration, or any individual member of the Cabinet,” or injurious to “the reputation of the officers charged with the prosecution of the war.” It had become clear not only that the State Department was actively involved in domestic censorship, but that the naive telegraph operators themselves were empowered to rely on their own limited judgment without supervision. To Wilkeson, the rules constituted a net cast too widely. “I was not allowed to mention by telegraph the simple fact that Mason and Slidell were surrendered,” he testified. But like Simon Hanscom, he had sent his suppressed reports by post, adding triumphantly, “unless they go to the mails & search out my letters they cannot prevent the publication of what they suppress by telegraph.”103
Not all the witnesses cooperated. After refusing to appear voluntarily, William McKellar, former managing editor of the now shuttered New York Daily News, was dragged from his Harlem bed one morning by two detectives who served him with a subpoena, searched him, and forcibly escorted him to Washington to testify. There, although he had only recently published a signed farewell editorial, he perjured himself to the committee, insisting he had never read, much less written, for his paper. McKellar claimed he had served only as the head of the News’s business department, retained none of the records that might have shed light on the paper’s alleged disloyalty, and had nothing to do with its editor, Congressman Benjamin Wood.104
On the other hand, Lawrence Gobright of the Associated Press had “no comment to make of the censor,” recalling not a single instance in which his straightforward dispatches had ever been suppressed. As he proudly told the committee, taking a swipe at the newspaper reporters with whom he often competed, our “business is merely to communicate facts . . . not to make any comments.” The pro-Lincoln Gobright volunteered: “I would not throw a straw in the way of the successful prosecution of this war. I have not done so, and I would not.”105
Summoned to defend the oversight policies from a government perspective was Frederick Seward, son of the secretary of state, and the official identified by many resentful witnesses as the power behind telegraphic censorship—until supplanted by Stanton. Yet Fred, to whom uncertain telegraph censors occasionally did bring controversial dispatches for further inspection, flatly denied that he played such a role. All he would confirm was that restraints had been put in place not only on reports of troop movements, but “in regard to any action of the Govt, and giving intimation of it where it might reach the enemy prior to the time the Govt intended to have it published.”106
This particular revelation was perhaps less incriminating than it sounded, for the younger Seward was delicately alluding to an episode of “intimation” that had embarrassed the administration just a few months earlier: a news leak of what was considered epic proportions. “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.” So Lincoln had majestically concluded his first Annual Message to Congress on December 3.107 The only problem was that, in an unprecedented breach of protocol, the inspiring words had appeared in the New York Herald that very morning—hours before they were scheduled to be read aloud in House and Senate. The incident set Washington tongues wagging, with many insiders suspecting that someone in the White House must have provided the Herald with an advance text.
Managers of Union telegraph censorship in Washington: Undersecretary of State Frederick Seward (left); and later, Edwin M. Stanton (right), newly appointed secretary of war.
Precisely how Jam
es Gordon Bennett obtained the president’s message remains a mystery. But at the time, eyes focused on the so-called “Chevalier” Henry Wikoff, a sometime diplomat who functioned as a secret source and occasional, uncredited, Herald contributor. Born in Pennsylvania, Wikoff had spent so much time abroad that he seemed vaguely foreign—attractively so, to men and women alike. Even John Wein Forney gushed about the “shrewd” Wikoff’s ability to “talk of love, literature, and war” with equal ease, and Forney was not the only credulous Washington insider to succumb to the “cosmopolite’s” charm.108 While that shrewd judge of character Lincoln disliked him (Bennett once felt compelled to apologize to the president if “Mr Wikoff gave you any trouble” about some “small matter”),109 the “Chevalier’s” circle of admirers soon came to include Henry Villard—nobody’s fool—and, ultimately, the president’s wife, Mary. William Howard Russell smirked that by November 1861, “that disgusting Wikoff” had become “master of ye situation at ye White House.” Although Russell believed Mary Lincoln to be as “loyal as steel to . . . Lincoln the First,” he judged her “accessible to the influence of flattery,” and, he implied, to the promise of money to fund her extravagant spending.110 By December, some in Washington whispered that Wikoff had charmed the Annual Message out of the first lady, perhaps in return for an actual bribe.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 49
