22 Greeley autobiographical sketch.
23 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 82–87; Greeley autobiographical sketch.
24 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 88.
25 Greeley autobiographical sketch.
26 Simeon Francis to Allen Francis, ca. 1831, Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
27 Andy Van Meter, Always My Friend: A History of the State Journal-Register and Springfield (Springfield, Ill.: The Copley Press, 1981), 11–13; Josiah Francis to Charles Francis, May 4, 1832, Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
28 Undated records in the Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
29 Van Meter, Always My Friend, 7–9.
30 Sangamo Journal, February 23, 1832; Van Meter, Always My Friend, 13.
31 Van Meter, Always My Friend, 9, 13.
32 John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 1:105.
33 Sangamo Journal, March 15, 1832; CW, 1:5–9.
34 CW, 1:8–9.
35 Speech in Congress, July 27, 1848, CW, 1:510.
36 Sangamo Journal, July 19, 1832. The author is grateful to historian Matthew Pinsker for bringing this story to his attention.
37 No copy of the handbill has ever been located. The story that Lincoln reprinted his Journal letter in this format was introduced by Lincoln’s White House secretaries, later his biographers. See Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 1:105. The authors also contended that he “never took his campaigning seriously,” but this is hardly believable.
38 The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has commissioned a computerized textual analysis of the Journal’s unsigned editorials in an effort to identify which can safely be attributed to Lincoln, but it remains to be seen whether the project can ever produce a unanimous consensus among scholars about their authorship.
39 Matheny quoted in Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 430–31.
40 Quoted in Charles C. Patton, ed., Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy: A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier, 5 vols. (Privately printed, Illinois, 1973), 1:17.
41 The Register, quoted in Van Meter, Always My Friend, 109. The charge may have related to Lincoln’s aborted duel with Democratic politician James Shields a few years later; see Chapter 2.
42 For Lincoln’s pseudonymous work as a newspaper columnist, see Wilson, Honor’s Voice, 175–78; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:159–60; postal rates recalled in Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem, 95; Beardstown Chronicle episode in Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 430.
43 Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 374; A. W. Shipton, Lincoln’s Association with the Journal: An Address Delivered by A. W. Shipton, Publisher of the Illinois State Journal, at a Conference of Newspaper Publishers and Executives, Coronado, California, September 27, 1939, pamphlet, Springfield, Ill: n.d.
44 George Henry Payne, History of Journalism in the United States (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), 256.
45 Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 430–31; see also James L. Crouthamel, “The Newspaper Revolution in New York, 1830–1860,” New York History 45 (1964): 91–113.
46 David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 42–50.
47 Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun. New York, 1833–1918 (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 11. The papers were the Courier and Enquirer and Evening Post.
48 Clarence Day, Jr., son of the Sun founder (also named Clarence, or “Clare”) wrote the 1935 autobiographical book that inspired the hit play Life with Father. Quoted in Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 23.
49 Ibid., 26. The Sun was not exactly the nation’s first penny daily, but it was the first to succeed. Earlier, such papers as The Bostonian and the Philadelphia Cent appeared briefly, but quickly folded.
50 New York Sun, September 5, 1833.
51 O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 38, 40, 50.
52 New York’s Children’s Aid Society was founded in 1854 largely to house and educate homeless newsboys.
53 [Isaac C. Pray], Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times. By a Journalist. (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1855), 181–82. Day boasted of introducing high-powered printing presses in a speech in 1851, reprinted in part in Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 418. See also Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 9th ed., orig. pub. 1954 (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 117.
54 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 183.
55 New York Courier and Enquirer and New England Magazine, quoted in Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), 137.
56 Hale, Horace Greeley, 21.
57 Bayard Tuckerman, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1889), 1:30, quoted in Payne, History of Journalism, 262.
58 Tuckerman, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1:271.
59 Philadelphia Public Ledger, March 25, 1836, quoted in Henkin, City Reading, 110.
60 O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 53–54.
61 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 41. Despite its title, Bennett did not cooperate with this book. In fact, when Pray sent his latest proofs to the Herald, Bennett yelled at the messenger, “I don’t want it! I won’t have it,” and threw the package into the hall (10–11).
62 Ibid., 43.
63 Don. C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son, Proprietors of the New York Herald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 18–19; Douglas Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald: A Study of Editorial Opinion in the Civil War Era, 1854–1867 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 13.
64 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 45.
65 Hone Diary, quoted in Hale, Horace Greeley, 23, 63; Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts, 76.
66 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 45.
67 Noah wanted to create a Jewish homeland on an island in the Niagara River in upstate New York.
68 Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 76–77, 79.
69 Beman Brockway, Fifty Years in Journalism Embracing Recollections and Personal Experiences with an Autobiography (Watertown, N.Y.: Daily Times Printing, 1891), 32.
70 Ben: Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis . . . , 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 1:58; Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 134. See also Elwyn Burns Robinson, “The Dynamism of American Journalism from 1787 to 1865,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 61 (October 1937): 434–45.
71 Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 429.
72 Robinson, “The Dynamism of American Journalism from 1787 to 1865,” 436.
73 Ibid.; entry from Bennett’s “Diary of a Journey Through New York . . . July 12–August 18, 1831,” New York Public Library.
74 New York Herald, 1836, quoted in James Melvin Lee, History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 197.
75 Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 432–33.
76 James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 21–22.
77 New York Herald, February 28, 1837, quoted in William Grosvenor Bleyer, The History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 191.
78 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 468; New York Herald, November 26, 1841; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, 33.
79 Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald, 18–19.
80 See The Death of Tammany an
d His Wife Loco Foco, lithograph by H. R. Robinson, New York, 1837. Reprinted in Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., American Political Prints, 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 100–101.
81 New York Herald, May 14, 1840.
82 Quoted in Goodman, The Sun and the Moon, 84.
83 Cornelius Mathews, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (1841), quoted in Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 160–61.
84 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 225; New York Herald, May 11, 1834.
85 E. L. Godkin, writing in the New York Evening Post, December 30, 1899.
86 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 188–89.
87 New York Herald, August 31, 1835.
88 Ibid.
89 See announcement of “The Weekly Herald,” as “printed in French and English” for “sixpence,” New York Herald, February 20, 1850.
90 New York Herald, May 13, 1836.
91 Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 194, 214; Payne, History of Journalism, 262.
92 Hale, Horace Greeley, 64; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, 36; Crouthamel, “The Newspaper Revolution in New York, 1830–1860,” 98.
93 New York Herald, June 1, 1840.
94 Whitman quoted in David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 174; anonymous critic in The North American Review 102 (April 1866): 402; Marryatt quoted in Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 312.
95 The Life and Writings of James Gordon Bennett, Editor of the New-York Herald (New York: Privately and anonymously printed, 1844), 4.
96 A modern analogue may be the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, whose global press empire includes the politically conservative New York Post—ironically the twenty-first-century version of the paper that the liberal William Cullen Bryant once edited.
TWO: NOT LIKE ANY OTHER THUNDER
1 Cincinnati Gazette quoted in Harold L. Nelson, ed., Freedom of the Press from Hamilton to the Warren Court (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 192.
2 Joseph C. Lovejoy and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 (New York: John & Taylor, 1838), 277–80.
3 Ibid., 289–91.
4 The best book on the subject is still Paul Simon, Freedom’s Champion: Elijah Lovejoy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
5 New York Evening Press, November 18, 1837; first New Yorker quote from Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir, 334; second from Russel Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1949), 150.
6 Lincoln to “the Editor of the Journal,” dated June 13, 1836, published June 18, 1836, in CW, 1:48. Lincoln’s support may have helped Whig presidential candidate Hugh L. White win New Salem, and by a nearly two-to-one margin, but White lost Illinois—and every other state save for Tennessee and Georgia—to Martin Van Buren.
7 Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum, Springfield, January 27, 1838, CW, 1:109, 111.
8 Ibid, CW, 1:111, 112, 113.
9 Charles C. Patton, ed., Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy: A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier, 5 vols. (Privately printed, 1973), 1:5.
10 The paper had several names (and a co-publisher) before it adopted the title to which most historians refer to it today: The Illinois Advocate and State Register, The Illinois State Register and People’s Advocate, and ultimately The Illinois State Register.
11 Quoted in Andy Van Meter, Always My Friend: A History of the State Journal-Register and Springfield (Springfield, Ill.: The Copley Press, 1981), 91.
12 Joseph Wallace, Past and Present of the City of Springfield and Sangamon County Illinois (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1904), at http://sangamon.ilgenweb.net/1904/lanphierc.htm.
13 William Lanphier to Charles Henry Lanphier, June 19, 1836, Patton, ed., Glory to God, 1.
14 William Walters to William Lanphier, October 28, 1837, ibid.
15 Douglas to Samuel Wolcott, April 16, 1854, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 324; see also Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 3–19.
16 Douglas to Julius N. Granger, December 15, 1833, Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 2–3. Following custom, Granger replied by sending Douglas a copy of a newspaper containing one of Granger’s political speeches back home (8). For Lincoln’s affinity for Major Jack Downing, see Robert B. Rutledge’s recollection in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 427.
17 See Richard J. Jensen, Illinois: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), esp. 41–46.
18 J. S. Buckingham, America, Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), 1: 123–25. To be fair, Buckingham acknowledged that the American papers had learned such tricks from the English press.
19 Receipts for notices, September 30, 1842, February 1, 1843, February 15, 1844, originals in the Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
20 Douglas and others to William Walters, ca. February 18, 1840, Johanssen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 74–80; Illinois State Register, February 21, 1840.
21 Campaign circular, January 31, 1840, CW, 1:202–3; Lincoln to John T. Stuart, March 1, 1840, CW, 1:206.
22 Letter “To the Readers of the Old Soldier,” like the January 31 circular, signed by Lincoln, Anson G. Henry, Dr. Richard F. Barrett, Edward D. Baker, and Joshua F. Speed, February 28, 1840, CW, 1:204–5.
23 “Rebecca Letter,” August 27, 1842, CW, 1:292.
24 James Gourley, quoted in Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 451. Not long thereafter, Early brandished a chair at an armed neighbor with whom he was also feuding; the cowering victim shot Early to death and Lincoln joined the legal team that successfully defended him from a murder charge. Douglas in turn counseled the prosecution; in Springfield, even murder cases could be political.
25 Lincoln to John T. Stuart, March 1, 1840, CW, 1:206; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 80; Van Meter, Always My Friend, 82–83.
26 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Extra Journal: Rallying the Whigs of Illinois (Fort Wayne, Ind.: Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, 1982), 3.
27 Simeon Francis to Charles Francis, September 6, 1840, Francis to his son and daughter, September 17, 1840, Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
28 Simeon Francis to his son and daughter, September 17, 1860, and to Charles Francis, April 4, 1840, Francis Family Papers, ALPLM.
29 Roy P. Basler quoted Judge Thomas C. Browne’s testimony regarding circulation achievements, February 25, 1840, in CW, 1:203n5.
30 CW, 1:203.
31 Springfield Extra Journal, April 20, 1843. Curator and Lincoln expert James T. Hickey unearthed the only known surviving set of the papers during the 1980s. See Neely, The Extra Journal, 3.
32 Springfield Extra Journal, May 15, May 30, 1843. The report of an “Outrage on the Press” in “Juliet” [sic] appeared on July 15, 1843, the last known issue of the Extra Journal. According to the report, Democrats, led by politician John Wentworth, had dismantled the printing press of the Whig Signal and “secreted” some of its parts in order to stop “publication of the paper until after the election.”
33 Paul Angle, ed., Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, orig. pub. 1930 (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1949), 183.
34 Historian Douglas L. Wilson insists the courtship did not resume before this episode occurred, but while the date of the reconciliation remains open to question,
Mary later embraced the idea that she and her future husband had conspired in the attacks. See Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 265–76.
35 “Letter from the Lost Townships,” Sangamo Journal, dated August 27, 1842, in CW, 1:291–97.
36 Sangamo Journal, September 16, 1842, quoted in Richard Lawrence Miller, Lincoln and His World: Prairie Politician, 1834–1842 (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 2008), 519; Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, December 8, 1865, and to Mary Jane Welles, December 6, 1865, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 299, 295.
37 Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, December 8, 1865, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 298–99.
38 Shields to Lincoln, and Lincoln to Shields, both September 17, 1842, CW, 1:299–300. The entire Lincoln-Shields correspondence ultimately appeared in the Sangamo Journal.
39 William Herndon to Jesse Weik, December 24, 1887, quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 248–49.
40 Mary Lincoln to Mary Jane Welles, December 6, 1865, and to Josiah G. Holland, December 4, 1865, in Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, 292–93, 296. Holland had revived the long-suppressed story, much to Mary’s chagrin, in his recently published biography of the late president.
41 Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, December 8, 1865, in ibid., 299; Milton Hay to Thomas Vennum, January 26, 1892, in Louis A. Warren, “Herndon as a Contemporary Townsman Knew Him,” Lincoln Lore, No. 653 (October 13, 1941).
42 The periodical has no relationship to the modern magazine of the same name.
43 Introductory prospectus quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950), 27, 29.
44 J. C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1884), 127. Derby became a noted publisher of books and popular prints.
45 Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 87–88.
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