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

by Harold Holzer

  Lincoln often let such expressions of disrespect roll off his back—even though White House clerk William Stoddard complained that criticism from “prominent portions of the New-York press” was then “without parallel in the history of American journalism.” As Stoddard viewed matters, “The conservatives, falsely so called, seem to be in an agony of fear lest the President is on the eve of launching the country into a war of rapine, pillage and destruction. The fanatical radicals are in a foaming rage because he makes provision for the carrying out of his proposition to the Border States representatives.”59

  Whipsawed by Border State resistance, conservative mistrust, and Republican impatience, not to mention military inertia, a frustrated Lincoln contemplated his next move. Inevitably, he turned his thoughts to executive action under the war power. Even before reading “Enquirer’s” observations, he had commenced writing the first draft of a presidential decree that would cite military necessity to ban slavery in all the seceded states. Emancipation was now at hand.

  • • •

  Lincoln reverted to a familiar technique to introduce his bombshell plan: the precisely timed newspaper leak. On July 17, the day after Congress passed the bold but largely unenforceable Confiscation Act, intended to free, shelter, and perhaps colonize slaves held by disloyal Southerners, the well-informed New York Times advised its readers: “It seems not improbable that the President considers the time near at hand when slavery must go to the wall.” Raymond was on to something. The president would “not conserve slavery much longer,” John Hay echoed in a confidential July 21 aside to a prominent antislavery activist. “When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound.”60 The very next day, Lincoln prepared to unleash that sound with a force he knew would be heard around the world.

  On July 22, 1862, the president called his cabinet into session and read aloud the brief document he had recently been drafting: an order aimed at destroying slavery in all the Rebel states, whether individual slave owners were actively disloyal or not. Based on the Confiscation Act, which impractically left enforcement to federal courts that no longer sat in the Confederacy, Lincoln proposed giving the liberating power to the armed forces. His text concluded with the momentous vow that, as of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.”61

  Lincoln did not follow custom that day by formally polling his ministers. As he remembered it: “I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.”62 Huddled around their conference table, however, the officials refused to be silenced. Attorney General Bates at once objected to Lincoln’s idea on legal grounds—he doubted the president had the power to confiscate slaves in Confederate territory, even as a war measure. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair warned that the summertime initiative carried enormous political risk for the autumn; the proclamation, he prophesied bluntly, “would cost the Administration the fall elections.”63 Lincoln regarded these objections as unsurprising and unconvincing, for Bates and Blair were the most conservative members of the cabinet, and both hailed from slave states, Missouri and Maryland respectively.

  The president held his ground even after Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, the longtime antislavery advocate from Ohio, shockingly suggested that Lincoln merely give generals in the field the authority they needed “to organize and arm the slaves” themselves.64 Only when Seward came up with an unexpected rationale for delay did Lincoln listen. Such a radical move after so disastrous a military campaign on the Peninsula, argued the secretary of state, would “be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” Here was “an aspect of the case,” Lincoln admitted, that he had “entirely overlooked.” Bowing to Seward’s counsel, as he later told a visiting artist, “I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory.”65

  Francis Carpenter’s painting The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation featured a copy of the Tribune in the foreground (lower left corner). Greeley viewed the painting at the White House in 1864 and suggested improvements.

  • • •

  The wait proved far longer than he had hoped. Lincoln occupied his time expanding and refining his text, working at his summer retreat north of downtown Washington and occasionally jotting down a few words at the War Department telegraph office while awaiting success from the front that might lay the groundwork for its announcement. For a time, emancipation remained Washington’s best-kept secret.

  Meanwhile, the president launched an elaborate campaign—through the press—to prepare white America for the thunderbolt that was burning a hole in his desk drawer. To some observers, especially in retrospect, the statements emanating from the White House that summer constituted a campaign of dissimulation bordering on deceit. As clumsy as some of these messages sounded even at the time, however, they in fact served to prepare the country’s divided, and arguably bigoted, white majority for black freedom, even if at some cost to Lincoln’s subsequent claim to high reputation as a liberator.

  Lincoln had reasons to tread carefully, even surreptitiously. For one thing, he anticipated strong resistance to emancipation from the Border States, even though they would be exempt from the proclamation. He feared further opposition from within the army, particularly from Democratic officers like McClellan who had insisted they would not fight for black freedom. And Lincoln expected a fight from Democrats in conservative Union strongholds like New York, where poor white immigrants feared an influx of free black workers who might compete with them for future jobs. To stress the constitutionality of his order, and also to reassure the more racist elements of his fragile Union coalition, Lincoln determined to couch emancipation in terms of “military necessity” rather than social benevolence.

  The effort commenced on July 30, when Forney’s Philadelphia Press called outright for presidential action against slavery. It is difficult to imagine that one of Lincoln’s closest press confidants was not in on the secret plan. Crafted as if to urge the president toward a policy that Forney likely knew Lincoln had already decided upon, the editorial amounted to a trial balloon not only for emancipation but for black recruitment as well: “A million able-bodied men await but our word to ally themselves with us bodily, as they are with us in heart,” Forney wrote. “A magnificent black blister as a counter irritant! . . . Will we use it? Or shall we go on for another year paying bitterly in blood for our culpable irresolution? . . . The cause is too great to permit such nambypambyism.” Those who understood the inner workings of the administration no doubt suspected at once that the editorial constituted a leak authorized—perhaps even worded—by Lincoln himself.66

  Then on August 14, the president summoned a delegation of free black men to the White House. This was in one sense a milestone in racial progress; no president had ever before invited a group of African Americans to any official conference at the executive mansion. But the historic cordiality eroded quickly. When Lincoln entered the room, his visitors no doubt noticed that a reporter stood at his side to record his words. The president proceeded to launch into a stinging lecture to the delegation—clearly meant not only for his stunned audience at the White House, but for newspaper readers who would soon have the transcribed words before them in print. Admitting that “your race suffer very greatly . . . many of them by living among us,” Lincoln told his visitors that “ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.”67 His proposed solution was voluntary emigration to Central America or Liberia—an old idea, but undoubtedly a fresh disappointment to guests who had arrived at the White House expecting news on emancipation,
not colonization.

  Lincoln could not have been surprised that his blunt speech did little to convince free African Americans to abandon the United States, although he may have been shocked by the hostility it elicited from the black community beyond Washington. Frederick Douglass, who had been barnstorming the country to advocate immediate abolition, reacted with fury when he read the published version of Lincoln’s remarks in the press. The president was guilty of adopting “the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer,” Douglass editorialized, “showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” As Douglass reminded Lincoln, slavery had caused the war, not slaves. “Mr. President, it is not the innocent horse that makes the horse thief, not the traveler’s purse that makes the highway robber, and it is not the presence of the Negro that causes this foul and unnatural war, but the cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money, and Negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.”68

  Lincoln never responded to the criticism, probably confident that his emancipation order, when it came, would ease Douglass’s hostility. Besides, though addressed to blacks, Lincoln’s White House remarks were above all aimed at whites: designed to convince them that he was no particular friend of African Americans, and leaving the impression that any action he might take against slavery would not, if he could help it, include the amalgamation of millions of slaves. Overall, Lincoln was no doubt pleased by the blanket coverage. Once Republican papers printed and praised the remarks, Lincoln’s conservative ally, Senator Orville Browning, assured the president that the effort had made him so “strong among the people”—meaning, of course, white people—that he could safely “do anything which your full and unbiased judgment shall decree necessary to give success to our arms, and crush the rebellion.” Besides, Browning added, the “only grumblers are a few radicals of the Tribune persuasion, and a few other radicals of the pro slavery school—the latter, dissatisfied because the war is not solely for the protection of slavery, the former because it is not solely for its extermination.”69 Browning was certain that military success would drown out all such carping. Perhaps General Pope, now leading the Union army in Virginia in place of McClellan, could regain the offensive against Lee.

  By mid-August, however, the situation in the field remained stalemated, and Horace Greeley, as unpredictable as ever, and no doubt resentful over the legal troubles that still kept him from Washington, decided to strike his own blow for freedom. In a long, blistering editorial entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”—the most savage assault he had ever launched against the president—Greeley charged that Lincoln had been “strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard” to emancipation, and maddeningly unwilling “to fight Slavery with Liberty.” In the Tribune’s withering estimation, Lincoln remained “unduly influenced” by “fossil politicians” from the Border States. He was woefully insensitive to loyal Southerners “writhing under the bloody heel of treason,” and unconscionably blind to the sufferings of escaped slaves rushing in increasing numbers into the protection of Union lines. Warning that “all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause” were “preposterous and futile,” Greeley demanded that Lincoln cease “fighting wolves with the devices of sheep.” The time had come, the editor proclaimed, to embrace the “emancipating provisions of the Confiscation Act.”70 Emancipation would generate hundreds of thousands of new fighting men. For a brief time, the editorial apparently stunned the president. When his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett appeared at the White House, Lincoln showed him recent Tribune articles that seemed to suggest that “the President and all the men in his Administration were a sett [sic] of ‘wooden heads’ who were doing nothing and letting the country go to the dogs. ‘Now,’ said he, [‘]that represents one class of sentiment.[’]”71

  A pox on all their houses: this cartoon assailing Greeley’s 1862 “Prayer of Twenty Millions” editorial mocks the editor, the president (left), and the supposedly inferior African Americans Greeley proposes to liberate.

  Two days later, Lincoln responded with a widely reprinted letter coolly setting out his priorities in a style notably devoid of Greeley’s histrionics. Few of Lincoln’s appeals to the people through the press ever earned such widespread circulation, commentary, or lasting fame. Yet why and how he came to write it have been thoroughly misunderstood almost from the day it first appeared in print. On its most basic level, the reply proved a master stroke if only because it confided a policy he had yet been unable or unwilling to announce publicly. As Lincoln now explained to Greeley—and the nation:

  I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union until they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I will try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.72

  Although he added an ameliorating coda—“I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free”—Lincoln’s declaration was otherwise consistent with his recent remarks to the Washington freedmen. But he had subtly expanded them by introducing the idea of freeing “some” slaves if such an act could win the war and save the Union—the very plan Lincoln had already determined to pursue.

  Lincoln’s genius for synchronized press manipulation was never more apparent—nor was his capacity to exact a little publicly inflicted vengeance. Though addressed to Greeley and couched as a private reply, the president twisted the knife by feeding the text first to the Washington National Intelligencer, where the letter appeared on Saturday, August 23, as the paper’s lead item. (Obviously delighted, Lincoln clipped the story and retained it for his files.) The paper’s editor, James Welling, had been recruited to join the venerable paper by co-publisher Joseph Gales, back in 1851, and had emerged during the war, following Gales’s 1860 death, as its principal editorial force, especially once owner William Seaton entered his seventies.73 Although Seaton praised him as a professional of “high moral and conscientious character,” Welling, like the paper’s original owners, had no compunctions about working for the government and the press simultaneously. He quickly became assistant clerk of the Court of Claims, and the paper, long sympathetic to slave owners and hostile to Lincoln, grew more friendly toward the administration.74 Still, the choice of the Intelligencer to break such an important story must rank as one of Lincoln’s odder public relations decisions. Perhaps he wanted his restrained words to be announced first by a paper not known for its antislavery zeal. Or possibly, Lincoln selected a conservative paper merely to taunt the progressive Greeley. But one cannot help thinking that after spending so much time, so futilely, during his Congressional days, trying to break into the pages of this powerful Washington newspaper, Lincoln took special pleasure in making the Intelligencer dance to his tune at last. Welling himself claimed no special relationship with the president, insisting benignly years later: “The letter came into my hands from the fact
that I was one of the editors of the Intelligencer, to which Mr. Lincoln sent it for publication.”75

  As usual, Lincoln’s timing proved exquisite. The following morning, Sunday, his letter reappeared in newspapers throughout the country, but not in Greeley’s, for the Tribune still did not publish on the Sabbath. Greeley would have his reply, but not directly, not quickly, and certainly not exclusively. And as Welling noted, the rollout of the “pithy and syllogistic” message helped Lincoln “to take the whole country into his confidence.”76 Acknowledging the sheer brilliance of the strategy, Welling noted: “The anti-slavery passions of the North, which had hitherto been kicking in the traces,” he noted, “were now efficiently yoked to the war chariot of the President.”77

  Even overtly anti-emancipation journals reacted well to the Union-first tone of Lincoln’s response, with the customarily hostile New York Journal of Commerce predicting that it would “touch a response in every American heart.” Albany editor Thurlow Weed, who still hoped Lincoln would not “divide and destroy the North” by striking against slavery too hastily, conceded that the president’s letter to Greeley (whom Weed still actively loathed) “warmed the hearts, inspired the hopes, and touched the patriotism of the people,” adding his crucial blessing for emancipation in the future: “Let whatever strengthens our cause, or weakens the Enemy, be done.”78 Greeley himself acknowledged that the “manifesto was exultingly hailed by the less radical portion of his supporters,” though he sulked, “I never could imagine why.”79 He tried securing the last word with a rejoinder, assuring Lincoln “that nothing was farther from my thought than to impeach in any manner the sincerity or the integrity of your devotion to the Union.” But he maintained that the president could not “safely approach the great and good end you so intently mediate by shutting your eyes” to slavery. “The Rebellion is strengthened, the national cause is imperilled, by every hour’s delay to strike Treason this staggering blow.”80