In the end, press indiscretion was not enough to tilt the Pennsylvania invasion to the Confederates.75 In a matter of days, Meade fended off Lee’s furious assaults at Gettysburg. Later, the victorious general exacted revenge by expelling New York Times correspondent William Swinton, not only because he, too, supposedly revealed troop movements, but also because Swinton criticized Union officers, Meade included.76 Meade’s ire was not based, as some asserted, on his embittered reaction to criticism that he failed to pursue Lee’s retreating army after Gettysburg—although correspondent Whitelaw Reid reported that Lincoln believed “Lee’s escape the greatest blunder of the war.”77 Rather, “Snapping Turtle” Meade’s hostility to the press dated back to Antietam, where he had ridiculed one correspondent for not knowing the difference between a division and a corps, and confided to his wife that he was sure that resentful reporters would deny him “credit for these last battles.”78 Meade subsequently ordered the arrest of William Kent of the New York Tribune for filing stories “full of malicious falsehoods,” and would also have arrested Thomas Cook of the New York Herald for writing that Lincoln planned to relieve Meade, had not Cook left camp for Washington just before the general ordered his provost marshal to seize him.79
Notwithstanding Meade’s aversion to reporters, the Battle of Gettysburg produced a torrent of celebratory press coverage in the North (a “splendid triumph,” declared the New York Times).80 Not all of the accounts from the South proved accurate. “Today Maryland is ours,” the Vicksburg Daily Citizen lied in an article prepared on July 2, “To-morrow Pennsylvania will be.” One Richmond paper reported exuberantly that the Confederate army had routed the Union and taken forty thousand Union prisoners, branding Northern reports of Lee’s retreat “a Yankee lie.”81 In at least one instance, however, the battle inspired pure poetry. The talented Samuel Wilkeson, now working for the New York Times, undertook to cover the battle, knowing that his own son was serving there. Wilkeson arrived at Gettysburg on the steamy evening of July 1, only to learn that his boy had been gravely wounded by an artillery shell, then left behind in a field hospital when Union forces retreated from Barlow’s Knoll. The younger Wilkeson died that night. “Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendentally absorbing interest,” Wilkeson anguished in a brave story published a few days later, “—the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?” In a sublime coda elevating journalism to the realm of scripture, Wilkeson concluded:
My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh [sic] have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternal and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise—with his left he beckons these mutilated, bloody, swollen corpses to ascend.82
Did Abraham Lincoln read these words? No one knows, though the report certainly won enough acclaim to have invited the president’s attention. If he did see Wilkeson’s story, one phrase in particular may have genuinely inspired him. With his own “new birth of freedom” declaration, Lincoln would soon consecrate all the soldier graves at Gettysburg.
As for Meade, apparently he learned little from his early, unpleasant experiences with the press. A year after Gettysburg, he authorized a severe act of disrespect in punishing Philadelphia journalist Edward Cropsey for making supposedly “libelous statements calculated to impair the confidence of the army in their commanding officer.” Before banishing him beyond his lines, Meade forced Cropsey to march through camp carrying a sign reading, “Libeler of the Press,” the kind of humiliation ordinarily reserved only for cowards and traitors. Meade boasted to his wife that the “sentence” was carried out “to the delight of the whole army, for the race of newspaper correspondents is universally despised by the soldiers.”83 Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, though a former newspaper editor himself, witnessed the episode and remembered only that Meade had been “much distressed” by the criticism that provoked it.84
Journalists, however, reacted to the insult by conspiring to ignore Meade in their subsequent dispatches, except to report his failures. Although Meade continued to command the Army of the Potomac, eventually under Grant, journalists began treating him as if he no longer existed. Later, the first generation of wartime memoirs, many compiled by former war correspondents, did likewise. Unlike the equally press-averse William Sherman, who became so successful he could not be ignored, Meade’s hostility to journalists contributed to his future invisibility, good service notwithstanding. After 1863, the reporters who had been his victims virtually wrote him out of the Civil War.
Such a fate did not befall the Union general who harbored the fiercest contempt for the press. As early as April 1862, “Cump” Sherman, as he was known to his family, complained to his brother, Senator John Sherman, that newspapermen who criticized his conduct at the Battle of Shiloh were cowards who fled at the first sign of attack. A few weeks later, the general’s wife advised the senator: “Cump has opened a regular warfare upon the correspondents, whom he detests, so we must henceforth be content to see him vilified by them.”85 In June, General Sherman issued a frank and bitter letter to one of his political accusers: “I am not surprised when anonymous scribblers write and publish falsehoods, or make criticism on matters which they know nothing about or which they are incapable of comprehending. It is their trade. They live by it. Slander gives point and piquancy to a paragraph and the writer being irresponsible or beneath notice, escapes punishment.”86 No general hated the press more passionately than this victim of earlier newspaper slanders about his sanity.
Sherman was no doubt delighted when, in August 1862, General Grant ordered him to arrest Warren P. Isham, the Memphis correspondent of the Chicago Times. Although no formal charges were ever filed—Isham’s offense was variously rumored to be revealing that Confederate ironclads had run the blockade, or being caught in a state of undress at a bordello—the real cause was more likely the fact that the reporter was the brother-in-law of the Chicago Times’s Copperhead editor, Wilbur Storey. Believing all “newspaper harpies” were “spies” and “should be punished as such,” Sherman enthusiastically complied with the order. The general subsequently persecuted Samuel Sawyer, publisher of the Copperhead Memphis Daily Appeal, for filing a critical dispatch about a subordinate. In this case, Sherman exposed a genuine traitor. Yet Sawyer’s editors, John R. McClanahan and Benjamin Dill, charged that “Lincoln’s hireling minions would deprive us of the privilege of expressing at all times our earnest God-speed to the progress of Southern independence.” The Appeal suspended publication in its home city and relocated first to Grenada, then Meridian, Mississippi, and finally to Atlanta, one step ahead of Union troops, shifting headquarters so often it became known as the “Moveable Appeal.”87 Ironically, Appeal correspondent John Linebaugh, assigned to cover the Army of Tennessee, later aroused the wrath of Confederate general Braxton Bragg and found himself in prison.88
As for Sherman, he wanted no further press coverage of any kind, if he could prevent it. In December 1862, he issued an order banning any civilians except transport crews from traveling with his army.89 The following month, after suffering embarrassing setbacks near Vicksburg, he interfered with mail service out of his headquarters, delaying one of correspondent Franc Wilkie’s unflattering reports to the New York Times by more than two weeks. Wilkie complained: “Had the commanding General W. T. Sherman and his Staff, spent half the time and enterprise in the legitimate operations of their present undertaking, that they have in bullying correspondents, overhauling mailbags and prying into private correspondence, the country would not now have the shame of knowing that we have lately experienced one of the greatest and most disgraceful defeats of the war.”90
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sp; Lincoln, who was trying not to intervene in such matters, did make a gesture toward overruling one of Sherman’s most sensational 1863 press suppressions: the general’s overwrought effort to expel and, in an unprecedented move, court-martial, a hostile reporter from the New York Herald. Correspondent Thomas W. Knox had recently attached himself to Sherman’s army without authorization, then charged the general with “insanity and inefficiency” at the December Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs.91 As Knox calmly told Sherman: “I had no feelings against you personally, but you are regarded as the enemy of our set, and we must in self-defense write you down.”92 Sherman, who thought Knox no better than a Confederate spy, threatened to resign if the president interfered with the reporter’s prosecution, “not that I want the fellow shot,” he emphasized, “but because I want to establish the principle that such people cannot attend our armies.”93 At the court-martial, Sherman testified against the reporter personally. He reacted with fury when the court cleared Knox of the most serious charges, declaring him guilty only of accompanying the army without permission—an offense that carried no criminal penalty beyond banishment from army lines.
Accuser and accused: General William T. Sherman (left) ordered New York Herald correspondent Thomas Knox (right) court-martialed.
New York Tribune correspondent Albert Deane Richardson believed Sherman hounded Knox out of a “morbid sensitiveness” to criticism. As he insisted to his managing editor, Sydney Gay: “An accredited journalist, in the legitimate exercise of his calling, has just as much right in the army as the commander himself.”94 Richardson did more than just complain to his home office. In another effort to combat censorship, he gathered signatures from fellow journalists in the field and then, accompanied by James M. Winchell of the New York Times, carried their “memorial” all the way to the White House and secured a meeting with the president. Instantly remembering their only previous encounter back in 1859, Lincoln jovially recalled Richardson as a onetime Boston Journal correspondent who was “out on the prairies with me on that winter day when we almost froze to death.” The president ushered his visitors into seats, flung his leg over the arm of his chair, and regaled them with a funny story about an Indian who spoke defective English. The president then punned that if Longfellow had been right that “Lake Minne-haha” translated into “laughing water,” then a creek Lincoln had once encountered called “weeping water” ought to be named “Minne-boohoo.”95
Only after these jolly preliminaries ended did Richardson get down to business and present his petition. The president dutifully examined it, thought it over, and agreed to pardon Knox—but only if Grant approved. When Richardson protested that Grant would never humiliate his friend Sherman, Lincoln exclaimed: “I should be glad to serve you or Mr. Knox, or any other loyal journalist. But, just at present, our generals in the field are more important to the country than any of the rest of us, or all the rest of us. It is my fixed determination to do nothing whatever which can possibly embarrass any one of them. Therefore, I will do cheerfully what I said, but it is all I can do.” Hearing no further objection, the president proceeded to write out the conditional pardon, handing it over to Richardson with “a little sigh.”96
Sherman was livid when he read the text. Lincoln’s order asserted that “Mr. Knox’s offence was technical, rather than willfully wrong.” Worse, the president proposed allowing the reporter to “return to Gen. Grant’s Head-Quarters, if Gen. Grant shall give his express consent.”97 Grant, who suspected that Knox had indeed come to camp determined to “blast” Sherman’s “reputation with the public,” but wished to offend neither his commander-in-chief nor his subordinate, cleverly passed the decision down to Sherman himself; Grant would permit Thomas Knox’s return only if Sherman consented.98
Oblivious to the politics—for Lincoln needed to keep Knox’s boss, James Gordon Bennett, happy—Sherman dug in, sending the reporter the following message: “Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with us our fate in sunshine and storm . . . and I will welcome you . . . but come . . . as the representative of the press, which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between truth and falsehood, and my answer is, Never.”99 The ban remained in force. Knox never forgave Sherman, but later came to regard their “little quarrel” as a “ ‘blessing in disguise,’ in saving me from . . . twenty months in Rebel Prisons.”100 That was because by the time Knox wrote those forgiving words, his colleague and advocate, Albert Deane Richardson, along with twenty-one-year-old fellow Tribune correspondent Junius Henri Browne, had fallen into Confederate hands after jumping into the Mississippi River to escape a burning tugboat near Vicksburg. Captured by Confederates on shore, the two ended up confined inside a series of Southern prisons for months until managing a daring escape.101
Under ordinary circumstances, Confederate authorities might have paroled the reporters—after all, they were not enemy combatants—but Richardson and Browne were something worse to Southerners: Horace Greeley employees, and that alone seemed to justify harsh treatment at the hands of their captors, many of whom blamed the antislavery editor for the war. As the Atlanta newspaper The Confederate put it, such reporters were “our vilest and most unprincipled enemies—far more deeply steeped in guilt, and far more richly deserving death, than the vilest vandal that ever invaded the sanctity of our soil and outraged our homes and our peace. . . . We would greatly prefer to assist in hanging these enemies to humanity, than to show them any civilities or courtesies.” By comparison, a New York World reporter seized in the same incident earned a quick parole after his editor sent a pro forma request for his release. The plea from anti-Lincoln editor Manton Marble, according to Richardson, proved as effective “as if it had been an order from Jefferson Davis.”102 On the other hand, Lincoln’s efforts to liberate Richardson and Browne (“get them off, if you can,” he instructed), urged on by Sydney Gay, were ignored.103
The disproportionate Confederate hostility to the Tribune mirrored the irrational anger of William Sherman toward nearly every journalist he encountered. Sherman never lost his often self-destructive hatred of “men who will not take a musket and fight, but follow an army to pick up news for sale.”104 Although he convinced himself that he was “no enemy of . . . freedom of the ‘press’ and ‘speech,’ ” Sherman insisted on his right to regulate journalists covering his military campaigns. As he maintained with almost flagrant disrespect: “Mr. Lincoln and the press may, in the exercise of their glorious prerogative, tear our country and armies to tatters; but they shall not insult me with impunity in my own camp.” Sherman believed in a free press, he said, but insisted journalists “be limited, else in bad hands they generate discord, confusion and war, resulting in military rule, despotism, and no freedom at all.” Whether the ends justified Sherman’s means has been debated ever since.105 As his fame expanded, however, the administration’s inclination to rein him in shrank. Not a soul in Washington reprimanded Sherman when he told another Memphis editor in October 1863: “Freedom of speech and freedom of the Press, precious relics of former history, must not be construed too large. You must print nothing that prejudices government or excites envy, hatred, and malice in a community . . . my first duty is to maintain ‘order and harmony.’ ”106 Few doubted that Sherman’s notion of “order” precluded frank observations by a free and unfettered press. But he was too valuable to the Union war effort to earn any rebuke more substantial than the president’s reminder that he had gone a bit too far with the Thomas Knox case.
While Lincoln maintained his laissez-faire attitude toward Sherman’s press crackdowns, he proved far more intolerant when less successful generals went too far in constraining newspapermen, especially demonstrably loyal ones. William McKee, for example, editor of the long-sympathetic St. Louis Missouri Democrat, fared far better than Thomas Knox when he, too, challenged the assumption that press freedom reigned in the Western Theater. McKee did nothing worse than obtain and publish the president’s May 27, 1863, letter appointing Genera
l John M. Schofield commander of the Department of the Missouri and urging him to negotiate the “pestilent quarrel” among pro-Union men in that state.107
Instead Schofield mounted a new quarrel with the press. Overreacting to the leak, Schofield demanded that McKee identify his source. When the editor refused even to respond, Schofield ordered him arrested. Protests poured into the White House, one of which blasted Schofield’s action as “an insult to the supporters of the Union and the government.”108 Lincoln gently reproached his general on July 13, advising him that while he had not technically violated press freedoms by detaining McKee, his severity was likely to irritate local citizens. “I fear this loses you the middle position I desired you to occupy” in Missouri, the president wrote. “I care very little for the publication of any letters I have written”—this from a man who made so certain his major letters were published and praised in sympathetic newspapers!—“Please spare me the trouble this is likely to bring.” When Schofield resisted, Lincoln tried conceding that there had indeed been “an apparent impropriety,” while insisting, “it is still a case where no evil could result, and which I am entirely willing to overlook.”109 McKee went free, his source protected. As Lincoln cautioned Schofield—in a manner meant to clarify his policy on martial law in all the volatile Border States—“Let your military measures be strong enough to repel the invader and keep the peace, and not so strong as to unnecessarily harass and persecute the people.”110 Never did Lincoln offer a clearer summary of his overarching attitude on freedom of the press in wartime.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 58
