For weeks, Lincoln worried anxiously about the tense Ohio situation, especially once sympathy for Vallandigham metastasized beyond the Buckeye State. In one example, outraged Democrats convened a mass meeting in mid-May at Albany, Thurlow Weed’s home base. They issued a series of resolutions denouncing the administration over the Ohio crackdown, particularly its disregard for “the liberty of speech and of the press,” forwarding a copy to Lincoln on the 15th.39 The president pondered his response for nearly a month.
Unfortunately for Lincoln, the fallout from the Vallandigham affair meanwhile triggered the most controversial incident of press suppression to date. It surprised no one that the Chicago Times had lambasted Burnside and Lincoln over Vallandigham. But Burnside shocked nearly everyone when he foolishly escalated the crisis by ordering the paper padlocked and its gun-toting editor arrested. The governors of both Indiana and Illinois had each implored the War Department in Washington to take action against the paper, but few expected the blow to come from the commander of the Department of the Ohio. Yet on June 1, Burnside issued an order not only banning delivery of the New York World from his district and closing down the Jonesboro Gazette, but authorizing the suppression of the Chicago Times “on account of the repeated expression of disloyal and incendiary statements.”40 Two days later, while Lincoln was still weighing his answer to the Albany Democrats, an officer representing Burnside warned Wilbur Storey not to print his next day’s edition. That night, the truculent editor instead locked his doors and set his press to work. At 5 A.M., a detachment from nearby Camp Douglas—named for the late senator, the onetime object of the paper’s affection—stormed the office, ousted its staff, stopped the presses, hauled stacks of freshly printed morning editions into the street, and shredded them. The army declared operations suspended and occupied the building.41
The shutdown of the Chicago Times unleashed a firestorm of protest—more than Burnside (who had acted without the authority of Stanton or Lincoln) expected, and certainly more than the president desired at this sensitive moment. A bipartisan group of municipal leaders quickly urged Lincoln to overturn the order; on June 4, Senator Lyman Trumbull and Chicago congressman Isaac Arnold—both Lincoln allies—worriedly forwarded the petition to the White House. That same day, the Illinois General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the suppression as “destructive of those God-given principles whose existence and recognition for centuries . . . have made them as much a part of our rights as the air we breathe.” Although Chicago’s newly established, pro-Republican Union League defended the shutdown (“prosecute the blatant spouters of Treason,” it demanded),42 and Kansas editor Mark Delahay reacted by telling Lincoln he had been “too Easy and lenient with . . . Traitor News papers,”43 their support was drowned out by dissenting voices. A crowd of some twenty thousand angry citizens rallied in the Windy City to express their anger, spinning rumors that they were planning to get even by sacking the pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune.44 “Why should the Chicago Times be suppressed,” James Gordon Bennett mischievously wondered, “and the New York Tribune, which is a thousand times more dangerously treasonable, be permitted to rave on unrebuked?”45
Squaring off over press freedom in Chicago: General Ambrose E. Burnside (left), who ordered the shutdown of the Chicago Times, and its Copperhead editor, Wilbur Storey (right), who resisted it.
With the crucial Ohio election approaching, and the Albany dissidents still awaiting an answer to their protest, Lincoln wanted nothing less than a distracting side debate over freedom of the press in Chicago. This time he acted decisively—and retreated. On June 4, even as sixteen carloads of Union troops set out by rail from Springfield to Chicago to put down any potential street revolt, Lincoln informed Stanton that “additional dispatches” had convinced him that “we should revoke or suspend the order suspending the Chicago Times.”46 The paper resumed publication; the Burnside occupation had lasted but thirty-seven hours. As Lincoln later told Isaac Arnold, the petitions from angry Chicagoans had “turned the scale in favor of my revoking the order.” Henry Raymond, speaking for the many Republican editors who sincerely believed that this instance of suppression had gone too far, hailed the revocation as “a just and timely act” and strongly cautioned against any repetition.47
Raymond did not, however, join a bipartisan group of fifteen New York editors who convened a special emergency meeting at the Astor House on June 8 to devise a uniform policy on the limits of press dissent (“each individual Editor must exercise his own judgment and act accordingly,” Raymond insisted).48 The diverse group included proprietors of anti-administration journals like the Daily Argus, the Journal of Commerce, and the Caucasian, along with liberal editor Theodore Tilton of the Independent and a group representing the city’s ethnic papers: the Staats Zeitung, the Jewish Messenger, and the Irish American.49 The editors not surprisingly elected the most prominent man among them as chairman: Horace Greeley. Under his stewardship, the editors hammered out a six-point resolution conceding “the rights and duties of the press in a time like this,” acknowledging the illegality of inciting treason or rebellion, but questioning “the right of any military officer to suppress” a journal “printed hundreds of miles from the seat of war.” Newspapermen had no more privilege “to incite, advocate, abet, or uphold or justify treason” than other citizens, the statement declared, but the press still enjoyed the constitutional right “to criticize freely and fearlessly the acts of those charged with the administration of the Government, also those of their civil and military subordinates.”50
New York editors who drafted a press freedom code in the wake of the Chicago shutdown face “The Hand-Writing on the Wall”—the looming shadow of Lincoln pointing their way to imprisonment at Fort Lafayette.
While Greeley made the summit meeting his paper’s lead story the next day, Raymond and Bennett (who also boycotted the conference) ignored it in their own editions. It was too much to hope that the big three could really sit down around one table, much less agree on policy. Worse, the New York Evening Post, whose representative did attend the meeting, dissented from the final declaration, preferring “a more decided recognition of the right which the constitution unquestionably confers upon the government to protect itself and the nation in times of ‘invasion and insurrection,’ even to the disregard of the courts and the infringement of personal liberties.”51 Unbowed, Argus editor Elon Comstock forwarded a copy of the resolutions to Lincoln. Comstock heard nothing in response, and neither did Greeley.52 The inability of the city’s eternally competitive major editors to come together around the crucial issue of press freedom doomed the June 8 summit to the status of historical footnote. Had Greeley been able to woo Bennett and Raymond to attend the Astor House conference and endorse the resolutions hammered out there, press suppression might have been dealt a fatal blow. Instead, the war between the military and the newspapers raged on.
The National Intelligencer refused to let the controversy die, either. More devoted to the Union cause than to antislavery or absolute freedom of the press, the paper condemned the now reopened Chicago Times on June 6 for its long history of retrograde journalism. That very day, Lincoln seized the opportunity to dissent, composing an unsigned letter to the editor that hardly disguised his authorship. “Being an Illinoisian [sic],” it began, “I happen to know that much of the article is incorrect.” Lincoln rosily recalled James Sheahan’s prewar Chicago Times as the “ablest” paper in the Democratic fold, pointing out that “since Senator Douglas’ death, Mr. Sheahan left the Times, and the Times since then, has been identified with the Times before then, in little more than the name.” A clumsily edited version of the letter appeared in the Intelligencer that same day. Mutilated or not, Lincoln had once again gotten his message across. However harsh the slap at political editor James Welling and the Intelligencer, it was clear that the president was making an effort to keep Chicago’s James Sheahan loyal to the Union in a city where administration support seemed to be wavering. Lincoln had a
lso allowed the rogue Chicago Times to reopen, made certain that insiders understood that he regretted its current editorial policies, but stressed the difference between partisan and what he considered unpatriotic journalism. Now he was free to turn his attention to the Albany Democrats.53
As he had done the previous year in response to Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Lincoln crafted his latest statement as a private letter to Democrat Erastus Corning, but made certain it reached the New York Tribune and other Republican papers to ensure the most sympathetic reception. It was the longest and toughest statement Lincoln had yet offered to justify the “war power,” and pulled no punches in defending press suppression. The president still believed that traitors, “in their own unrestricted effort to destroy Union, constitution, and law, all together,” had for too long assumed that “the government would, in great degree, be restrained by the same constitution, and law, from, arresting their progress.”54
Now Lincoln charged that “under cover of ‘Liberty of speech’ ‘Liberty of the press’ and ‘Habeas corpus,’ ” traitors “hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors of their cause in a thousand ways.” To demonstrate that wartime censorship would cause no long-term harm, the president harked back to some “pertinent history” involving his old political enemy Andrew Jackson. Lincoln recalled with the sudden enthusiasm of a convert that after the Battle of New Orleans, the general, too, had imposed martial law and suppressed the press. Noting that “liberty of speech and the press” had suffered no permanent “detriment” at Jackson’s hands, Lincoln made the case for his own far-reaching, but temporary, authority to suppress constitutional rights in order to save the Constitution itself. He was as certain that harsh oversight would cease when the rebellion ended as he was sure that no man “could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during a temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them, through the remainder of his healthful life.”55
Lincoln’s “Corning letter” quickly earned widespread distribution beyond Albany. The president’s friends at the Chicago Tribune lost “no time in spreading before our readers the President’s admirable reply.” In Washington, Forney wrote effusively: “God be praised the right word has at last been spoken by the right man, at the right time. . . . It will thrill the whole land.” And in New York, Greeley printed the letter “conspicuously,” predicting it “will do much good.”56 Even Bennett called it “most interesting,” though he congratulated “our Democratic fellow-citizens on the manifest good effects of the spirit, vigor and resolution with which they have compelled Mr. Lincoln to come before the aroused and indignant country with a defensive apology.”57 In rebuttal, the New York World bristled: “Was anything so extraordinary ever before uttered by the chief magistrate of a free country? Men are torn from their homes and immured in bastilles for the shocking crime of silence!”58
Attempting a rejoinder in behalf of Albany’s Democrats, Erastus Corning insisted that “the American people will never acquiesce in this doctrine.”59 He was wrong. Corning’s foundry may have provided some of the iron plate for the USS Monitor, but this time Lincoln had pierced his armor. The presidential message, printed in countless newspapers and republished in pamphlet form (including a “War Tract” from the New York Tribune that sold fifty thousand copies) dominated the national conversation, and for a time put the Vallandigham and Chicago Times matters on ice.60 One of its several pamphlet editions—of which as many as half a million may eventually have circulated nationally—bore the quaint title of The Truth from an Honest Man, cannily reviving the president’s “Honest Abe” image to add still more credence to the message.61 The Corning letter, often remembered primarily as a defense of executive power, served many purposes at once. Issued just as rumors began swirling about another Confederate thrust into the North—perhaps this time into Pennsylvania—it also justified using force to suppress antiwar journalists like Philadelphia’s Albert Boileau, not to mention Chicago’s Wilbur Storey.
Actually, Lincoln never fully convinced himself that he acted wisely in revoking the shutdown of the newspaper that had hounded him for so long. A full year later, he was still admitting of the Chicago Times imbroglio: “I can only say I was embarrassed with the question between what was due the Military service on the one hand, and the Liberty of the Press on the other. . . . I am far from certain to-day that the revocation was not right.”62 One thing was certain: Lincoln had meant what he said in his Albany letter: newspapers that overstepped their bounds indeed warranted suppression. What remained unclear were the bounds themselves. At the end of June, General Schenck, perhaps emboldened by the Corning letter, acted without much publicity or objection to prohibit Baltimore’s newspapers from publishing “extracts” from the anti-Lincoln New York World, New York Express, Cincinnati Enquirer, New York Caucasian—and of course the reopened Chicago Times.63 Then in September, Schenck closed the Baltimore Daily Republican for printing a poem called “The Southern Cross,” and banished its three proprietors to the Confederacy.64 For his part, Chicago’s Wilbur Storey stubbornly resumed his campaign against conscription. In July he published a notice provocatively entitled, “How to Resist the Draft,” which recommended that dissenters collect funds to buy substitutes to serve in their place.65
In New York, Henry Raymond’s Times seemed equally reluctant to join the anti-suppression bandwagon, but for a different reason: jealousy over Chicago’s growing rivalry with the nation’s largest city. Raymond continued to flog Storey’s paper and to denounce Chicago itself, which he charged “surpasses Boston in conceit and self-idolatry.” Determined to halt the city’s rising influence, Raymond condemned its Republican and Democratic journals alike: “We can hardly remember a week since the present Administration came into office,” he editorialized, “when the newspaper press of Chicago was not badgering it for want of sense or backbone.” In Raymond’s opinion, it was “time to put down the brakes on this too ambitious town.”66
Bennett, too, attacked the Windy City’s press wholesale, criticizing both the Chicago Times (“a mere party hack, representing a set of politicians the vilest and meanest in the Union”) and the Chicago Tribune, branding both papers as “representatives of a corrupt city, whose social depravity . . . is a byword throughout the land.” Predictably, Bennett could not help but harp, yet again, on the indignities he had personally endured after Sumter, when, he reminded readers, “mobs . . . under the leadership of the attaches of the [New York] Tribune, visited various newspapers with a view to their intimidation.” Perhaps now, he declared, the “people are at last awakened to the necessity of vindicating the bill of rights.”67 Yet no such awakening followed.
A few weeks after the Chicago and Albany brouhahas, the president dutifully remembered that he must not only justify press crackdowns, but reward press supporters. The promise of such rewards remained as vital as the threat of suppression to fulfilling the goal of retaining influence and power. As a reminder of the fragile state of the entire industry, financially stressed by the costs of war coverage, the National Intelligencer nearly went out of business for want of “official advertising.”68 Although the other, smaller Washington paper that Lincoln had earlier designated as his official organ had recently received nearly $600 in advertising orders from the War Department alone, delayed payments threatened its survival, too. “I wish you would allow the Republican (my paper as you jokingly call it) to be paid for advertising,” the president chided Secretary of War Stanton. “The non-payment is made a source of trouble to me.”69 Stanton may have considered Lincoln’s loyalty to “his” National Republican a joke, but to the country’s humorist-in-chief it was no laughing matter. Nor was the crucial Ohio gubernatorial campaign. The Republican won its request for payment, but on October 13, Vallandigham lost his comeback race in a rout. A gratified Lincoln had every reason to feel that his insistence on drawing the line between freedom of expression and treason had been vindicated.
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The Chicago Times incident proved an exception. Lincoln seldom interfered directly when military commanders like Burnside or Sherman took out their aggressions on hostile reporters. That he admired combative generals—on both sides of the war—became more apparent than ever after Forney’s pro-administration Washington Chronicle marked the death of Confederate foe “Stonewall” Jackson in May with an editorial hailing “his heroism, his bravery, his sublime devotion, his purity of character,” adding: “He is not the first instance of a good man devoting himself to a bad cause.” After reading the glowing article, Lincoln unexpectedly wrote Forney: “I wish to lose no time in thanking you for the excellent and manly article in the Chronicle on ‘Stonewall Jackson.’ ” Never before or after did Lincoln praise an enemy combatant so extravagantly—especially in the press. Coincidentally, the very next day, the president rejected as “embarrassing” William Cullen Bryant’s plea to reinstate the German-American general Franz Sigel.70 Unlike Jackson, Sigel did not win battles. For a time, Lincoln did defend Ambrose Burnside’s feisty successor, Joseph Hooker, even after the press accused the new Union commander of harboring dictatorial ambitions. At a White House reception, Henry Raymond recalled, “the President put his hand on my shoulders and said in my ear, ‘Hooker does talk badly, but the trouble is, he is stronger with the country today than any other man.’ ”71
Hooker did not remain in favor for long. In May 1863, “Fighting Joe” mismanaged his army into another catastrophic Union defeat, at the Battle of Chancellorsville, and Lincoln lost confidence in his flamboyant general (even after fatal, accidental fire by his own sentries deprived the Confederacy of their formidable “Stonewall”). Hooker, eager to retain his command, fretted that the president was receiving negative reports about him from hostile journalists, particularly after rumors swirled that he had slipped into Washington without leave after Chancellorsville. “You need not believe any more than you choose of what is published in the Associated press dispatches concerning this Army tomorrow,” a nervous Hooker wired Lincoln on June 26. Lincoln replied the next day to assure him: “It did not come from the newspapers, nor did I believe it.”72 But the president no longer believed in Hooker, especially after Robert E. Lee followed up his Chancellorsville victory by launching an invasion into Pennsylvania—his course charted, some hinted, by reading the daily reports about Union positions published in the Philadelphia papers. In response, on June 26, federal grand jurors in Washington brought charges of treason against William W. Harding, the second-generation publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, for printing “information concerning the army movements to the aid and comfort of those engaged in the rebellion against the United States.”73 But news continued to leak. Lee learned that General J. E. B. Stuart had failed to obey orders to join his invasion force only by reading detailed reports about Stuart’s ride around the federal army in the Baltimore and New York papers, when it was too late to do anything about it.74 It was also too late for Hooker. At the end of June, with his confidence in the commander gone and Lee marching north, Lincoln relieved Fighting Joe and replaced him with Pennsylvania’s own George Gordon Meade.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 57
