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

by Harold Holzer

  Summoned before the House Judiciary Committee on February 10, the “Chevalier” refused to provide satisfactory answers, whereupon its members ordered him thrown into the Old Capitol Prison until he was ready to cooperate. General Daniel Sickles, Wikoff’s friend, attorney, and fellow Bennett intimate, then appeared to offer the committee a preposterous explanation: White House gardener John Watt had glimpsed the president’s manuscript in the mansion’s library (however distant that second-floor chamber stood from Watt’s outdoor post), where he miraculously committed it to memory and later recited it word for word to Wikoff. No one could doubt that Wikoff had been in and around the mansion at the right time; on December 3, he even wrote an unctuous note to the president on White House stationery suggesting that as “a compliment to Mr. Bennett” he should provide the editor with an advance copy of his message. “This compliment was always paid Mr B by the last President,” he advised, “& it can hardly be denied that it is deserved as much & more from Your Excellency.” Yet Senator Orville Browning had no doubt that “the President’s message had been furnished to Wycoff [sic]” by Mary.111

  Lincoln himself may have come to suspect his wife’s complicity. The very day after Wikoff refused to testify to Congress, at least according to veteran journalist Ben Perley Poore, the president rode up to Capitol Hill himself to urge Republicans on the investigating committee “to spare him disgrace” and drop the matter altogether. Since Lincoln’s beloved son Willie was at the time clinging to life at the White House—he would die of typhoid fever just a week and a half later—the congressmen expressed no desire to add to his sorrows. The gardener’s “improbable story was received,” Poore recalled, “and Wikoff was liberated.”112 The president thereupon banned the troublemaker from the White House, by one account physically tossing him out the door. Completing the purge, Lincoln declared that Watt, then on leave from the army to work in the White House gardens, was “not needed,” and ordered him returned to his regiment.113

  Suspected of leaking the president’s 1861 annual message to the Herald: Mary Lincoln (left) and her friend “Chevalier” Henry Wikoff (right).

  But Lincoln surely knew who bore the principal guilt for the scandal. When, late in September, the persistent “Chevalier” brazenly petitioned the president for a pass to accompany a naval vessel down the Potomac “as a reporter for the Herald,” Lincoln refused to accommodate him. Explaining his decision to Bennett, Lincoln was careful to avoid mention of the Annual Message affair; Wikoff’s request, he insisted, had simply arrived too late at night to justify awakening the secretary of the navy. “I write this to assure you,” Lincoln told Bennett, “that the administration will not discriminate against the Herald, especially while it sustains us so generously, and the cause of the country so ably as it has been doing.”114 The ban applied to Wikoff alone—not the newspaper for which he worked—that is, the president implied, as long as the Herald sustained the administration. Lincoln never mentioned Wikoff’s name in writing again.

  Mary Lincoln surely knew how close she came to public exposure. Months before the purloined letter incident, she had reached out to flatter the powerful Bennett, thanking him for “the kind support and consideration, extended towards the Administration, by you, at a time when your powerful influence would be sensibly felt.” In her rambling prose style, clogged as always with an overabundance of commas, she added: “In the hour of peace, the kind words of a friend are always acceptable, how much more so, when a ‘man’s foes, are those of their own household’ . . . rights are invaded and every sacred right, is trampled upon!” Mary’s reference to foes within the “household” may have applied to the fractured Union, or to her own White House coterie, Wikoff and Watt included; she did not specify. She was merely grateful “in my own individual case, when I meet, in the columns of your paper, a kind reply, to some uncalled for attack, upon one so little desirous of newspaper notoriety, as my inoffensive self.”115

  Abraham and Mary Lincoln were not the only observers to notice how thoroughly Bennett’s Herald had altered its once hostile editorial policy since it first tasted the anger of the mob back in April 1861. Visiting English writer Anthony Trollope, whose own novels abounded with brawls of the kind in which Bennett had once specialized, concluded that despite “the largest sale of any daily newspaper,” the Herald’s violence-prone editor was now “absolutely without political power,” having “truckled to the Government more basely than any other paper.” Trollope thought the situation a matter of just deserts for what he regarded as the most offensive of the “tyrannical and overbearing” American newspapers, one for which “vituperation” had long been a “natural political weapon.” But “since the President’s ministers have assumed the power of stopping newspapers which are offensive to them,” Trollope charged, “they have shown that they can descend to a course of eulogy which is even below vituperation.”116 What Trollope failed to understand is that by introducing such innovations as front-page battlefield maps, and by adding extra reporters and bonus pages to cover major events, the Herald was in fact attracting more readers than ever, benefiting from its new understanding with the White House, and prospering accordingly. If he was guilty of “treason,” Bennett chortled, it certainly paid handsomely. James Gordon Bennett never cared about political power for its own sake, but only as a means to economic success. And according to those standards, by 1862 he was more powerful than ever.

  Questioned about the Annual Message scandal during his own interrogation by the committee in late January 1862, the rival Tribune’s Samuel Wilkeson proved as reluctant as Frederick Seward to reveal any knowledge of the affair. He hinted only that he would never “quarrel” or “complain” about losing an exclusive story when the “source of that news was obtained from women.” Pressed to reveal whether he believed that the document in question had been obtained from “Members of the President’s family,” Wilkeson stammered: “Yes, sir. I suppose the Herald had relations with the female members of the Prests. family & gave that paper an advantage over the rest of us.”117 By then Bennett’s “advantage” had grown so strong that, however his information was obtained, one of Greeley’s assistant editors conceded: “The Herald is constantly ahead. We are obliged to copy from it.”118

  • • •

  In the end, not only did the accusations against Mary Lincoln remain unreported, the House committee entirely dropped its distracting side inquiry into the leaking of the Annual Message. It did, however, conclude in its March 20 final report that unobjectionable news reports had indeed been swallowed up in the teeth of widespread telegraphic censorship; that the censors had interfered not only with “military information which might be of advantage to the rebel authorities” but also with “numberless” dispatches “of a political, personal, and general character”; and that what began as an agreement between the press and General McClellan had widened into a much broader system of censorship “controlled by the Secretary of State.”

  Insisting that “Government interference” should be confined to “what may legitimately be connected with the military and naval affairs of the nation,” the committee strongly recommended that in the future the telegraph be “left as free from government interference as may be consistent with the necessities of the government in time of war.” Members urged passage of a specific resolution declaring that “the government should not interfere with the free transmission of intelligence by telegraph” unless the information was objectionable or if the military required priority use of the telegraph for its own “legitimate purposes.”119 The proposal proved ambiguous enough to inhibit the Republican-dominated full House from enacting any legislative remedy. The censors were left in charge without further oversight.120

  In the midst of the hearings, as if to send a message of his own on the subject, Secretary of War Stanton issued a strict new order to Washington’s chief of police: “All newspaper editors and publishers have been forbidden to publish any intelligence received by telegraph or otherwise resp
ecting military operations by the United States forces. . . . If violated by any paper issued to-morrow, seize the whole edition, and give notice to this department that arrest may be ordered.” In another announcement issued that same day, Stanton declared that the president had taken possession of all telegraph lines throughout the United States. Any paper guilty of using the telegraph to publish military news not approved by “the official authority” would be excluded from using the wires or the railroads to transmit future news.121 While Congress and the press were busy hashing out the limits of access to and transmission of the news, the secretary of war had staged a successful interoffice coup and seized control of censorship operations from the secretary of state—and he did so with Lincoln’s acquiescence. When Stanton asked the president for more discretion in controlling the Bureau of Ordnance and “perhaps some others”—possibly meaning the telegraph system—Lincoln replied: “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter.”122 Stanton did precisely that.

  No one seemed immune from the resumption and consolidation of the censorship dragnet, even the administration’s most loyal friends in the press. On March 17, 1862, just three days before the committee was scheduled to issue its formal findings, the War Department punctuated its claim to total oversight by closing down John Wein Forney’s Washington Sunday Chronicle, of all newspapers, for publishing a report on military movements in violation of General Orders No. 67. Only when the editor offered profuse regret and explained that the news had been brought to him very late the previous night, that the edition went to press without his customary editorial supervision, and that he would be certain to “carefully guard against a recurrence,” did the War Department permit the Chronicle to reopen after a day in rare silence.123

  Stanton had served notice that whatever Congress thought about the arbitrary censorship rules previously enforced by Montgomery Blair, Simon Cameron, or George McClellan, or overseen by the father-and-son team of William and Frederick Seward, and investigated by the House Judiciary Committee, he was now in full control and had no reluctance about suppressing even Lincoln-friendly newspapers.

  Toil and trouble: Vanity Fair likens the troublesome New York editors to “The Three Beldams.”

  For his part, Lincoln struggled mightily to remain above the fray. Ben Perley Poore and other leading correspondents turned up in the White House one day to convince him that “the surveillance of the press” had become “as annoying as it was inefficient,” resulting in “innocent sentences which were supposed to have a hidden meaning” being “stricken from paragraphs which were then rendered nonsensical”—all in the name of censoring supposedly classified information that was readily available throughout both Washington and “Dixie.”

  To this complaint Lincoln answered with one of his distracting funny stories. When two of the “angry journalists” persisted in their protests, demanding that the president return to the subject they wanted to discuss, Lincoln “listened in his dreamy way” and then commented: “I don’t know much about this censorship, but come down-stairs and I will show you the origin of one of the pet phrases of you newspaper fellows.”

  Lincoln was referring to the growing vogue for the idiomatic French catchphrase “revenons à nos moutons”—roughly translated as, “let’s get back to the subject at hand,” but literally meaning, “let’s return to our sheep.” Leading his bewildered visitors down several staircases and into the White House cellar, the president “opened the door of a larder, and solemnly pointed to the hanging carcass of a gigantic sheep.”

  “There!” Lincoln exclaimed to the startled reporters with a smile, “now you know what ‘Revenons à nos moutons’ means.” Pointing proudly to the huge slab of meat, he enthused: “It was raised by Deacon Buffun at Manchester, up in New Hampshire. Who can say, after looking at it, that New Hampshire’s only product is granite?”124 What this perplexing demonstration had to do with press censorship none of his visitors could fathom. But his comments successfully terminated the meeting without further argument.

  Journalists constantly hungry for news, though perpetually wary of government interference, learned as the war progressed that Lincoln’s own chief product often amounted to silence, deflection, and disinformation, and that when he did not want to get back to the point, the adroit president did not “revient à ses moutons.” Rather, he avoided the subject at hand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Slavery Must Go to the Wall

  Just after New Year’s Day 1862, Horace Greeley returned to the national capital—once again not to report news, but to make it—after the Washington Lecture Association invited him to deliver the latest in a series of antislavery talks at the Smithsonian Institution. Part-time Tribune correspondent William Croffut helped stage the events. But first he had to lobby skeptical Smithsonian officials to make its large amphitheater available for the series. Astonishingly, its secretary fretted that his Southern regents, including Jefferson Davis himself, might object. Greeley seized the chance to lecture, “especially,” he joked, “as I have already earned the reputation of being the poorest public speaker in America.”1

  Greeley was particularly eager that Lincoln hear his talk, so Croffut visited the White House to ask whether the president might attend. “Yes, I will,” Lincoln impulsively replied, turning to his assistant secretary to ask: “I can get away, can’t I, Hay? I never heard Greeley, and I want to hear him. In print every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton; I want to see what he has to say about us.”2

  “Horace Greeley . . . has come down here to marshal the hosts of the grumblers,” John Hay soon reported far less enthusiastically in one of his anonymous newspaper columns—adopting the latest nickname for the Tribune editor: the Grumbler. “No man denies his honesty, no man questions his disinterestedness. He is not a candidate for any office within the gift of the people or President. He grumbles because he is an honest old fanatic, and does not agree with the Administration.”3

  Hay may not have known that, Greeley’s “grumbling” notwithstanding, Lincoln was then in the midst of a quiet effort to repair his strained relations with the editor. Although he had never replied to Greeley’s hysterical letter of the previous summer, Lincoln grew confident enough in his restored stability to enter into an informal agreement at the end of 1861 to supply administration-sanctioned news stories to the Tribune through a third party. One of the middlemen was pro-Union Southerner James R. Gilmore, who had just founded a new magazine called the Continental Monthly. Under the nom de plume “Edmund Kirke,” Gilmore had also written a recent antislavery novel that greatly impressed the president, who remarked that the author genuinely “knew the South” and, moreover, thought like a “lawyer or jurist”—high praise from a man who never read fiction, not even Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 (Perhaps Lincoln admired Gilmore’s Among the Pines because it featured the optimistic prediction: “Free the Negroes by an act of emancipation, or confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day.”)5

  When Gilmore journeyed to New York to tell Greeley of his plans for the magazine, the Tribune editor asked him whether he believed he could ever win Lincoln’s confidence. Gilmore was not sure, but had recently enlisted a pledge for help from an administration confidant, former Kansas governor Robert J. Walker, who in the 1850s had attempted to navigate the “Bleeding Kansas” storm with integrity. “Robert J. Walker!” Greeley exclaimed. “Why, he’s the greatest man we’ve had since Ben Franklin.”6 Greeley was eager to know whether Gilmore might be able to direct Walker “from time to time” to elicit Lincoln’s “views on certain lines of policy” for the Tribune. On this score, Gilmore remained skeptical: he believed Lincoln to be a “hear-all-and-say-nothing sort,” but asked Greeley what he might expect as a reward in return for alerts from the White House. Greeley then proposed what he called a “double harness” arrangement “of mutual help to each other.” If Gilmore could provide him with “prompt information . . . when allowable,” then Greeley wou
ld “materially” support the start-up magazine.7

  Under the terms of the deal, Greeley agreed to contribute to, as well as advertise in, Gilmore’s fledgling publication. The administration would pass news to Walker. Then Walker would spirit the information to Gilmore, who in turn would transmit it to the Tribune. The arrangement was bound to fail—it was simply too complicated to sustain, and the administration inevitably proved highly selective about what it shared for Greeley’s benefit—but for a time, the editor noticeably relaxed his criticism of Lincoln and instead focused his chronic impatience for victory (and abolition) on the battle-weary George McClellan, who spent the early weeks of 1862 maddeningly bedridden in Washington with typhoid fever. Greeley accused McClellan of dithering, and came close to charging him with treason.

  Thus, by the day of his January 3 Washington appearance, Greeley had at last become something of an administration insider by proxy. That evening, in the company of three cabinet secretaries—Chase, Welles, and Attorney General Edward Bates (Horace Greeley’s bizarre first choice for president two years earlier)—the president headed to the redbrick Smithsonian “castle” to hear the editor’s oration. Organizers ushered Lincoln to an honored place on the speaker’s platform and seated him right next to Greeley. The two men were back onstage together—just as they had been at Cooper Union in New York—but this time reversing their earlier roles, with Greeley now on the rostrum and Lincoln perched behind him barely an arm’s length away, a silent observer. The large audience, including, some claimed, two-thirds of Congress and a number of Frémont admirers hostile to the president, kept both the speaker and his most famous listener in sight throughout the evening.