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

by Harold Holzer

  46 Edwin Emery, Michael Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 9th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 132.

  47 Greeley autobiographical sketch for Moses A. Cortland, April 14, 1845, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress; Thurlow Weed Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 2:283; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), 97.

  48 Harriet A. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 1:466.

  49 Quoted in Hale, Horace Greeley, 45.

  50 Horace Greeley, ms. autobiographical sketch dictated to Moses Cortland, April 14, 1845, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress.

  51 Ibid., 49; Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 1:467.

  52 Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 1:467; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1881), 1:328.

  53 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life . . . (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 135.

  54 Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2:283–84; Hale, Horace Greeley, 61.

  55 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 139.

  56 Ibid., 139–40.

  57 McElrath manuscript, December 24, 1887, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress, and 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), 130.

  58 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 128, 138, 140, 141.

  59 Ibid., 154.

  60 Prospectus published in the Log Cabin, April 10, 1841, reprinted in Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 212–13

  61 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 137.

  62 Gregory A. Borchard, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 17; see also Borchard, “From Pink Lemonade to Salt River: Horace Greeley’s Utopia and the Death of the Whig Party,” Journalism History 32 (Spring 2007): 51–59.

  63 New York Tribune, April 27, 1842; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 524.

  64 New York Herald, October 28, 1844.

  65 New York Herald, November 27, 1844.

  66 Hartford Times, reprinted in New York Herald, November 18, 1844.

  67 New York Herald, February 13, 1845, December 24, 1844.

  68 New York Herald, February 12, 13, 14, 1845; New York Tribune, February 13, 1845.

  69 New York Herald, February 16, 1845.

  70 New York Tribune, May 28, 1844.

  71 New York Herald, December 24, 1844.

  72 New York Herald, November 27, 1844.

  73 New York Herald, November 27, December 1, 1844.

  74 New York Herald, February 20, 1845.

  75 James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 33, 167n51. For attacks by other rivals, see, for example, Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833–1918 (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 159.

  76 The comments, and similar ones, published over a five-month period beginning in April 1841, are quoted in Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 33, 167n51. See also O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 159.

  77 For the most recent account of the movement, and Greeley’s involvement, see Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), esp. 225–26. Greeley sent Fuller to Italy to cover its war for unification, but she died on her voyage home when her ship went down off Fire Island, New York.

  78 Horace Greeley, Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy . . . ,” quoted in Bernard A. Weisberger, “Horace Greeley: Reformer as Republican,” Civil War History 23 (March 1977): 11.

  79 For the smoking story from his childhood, see Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 98–99.

  80 Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2:287; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 523.

  81 See Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Introduced Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001).

  82 Frederick Douglass to Horace Greeley, April 15, 1846, in Philip S. Foner and Yuvall Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 27.

  83 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller, March 1, 1842, in Ralph L. Rusk, ed. Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 3:19–20.

  84 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Hy B. Turner, When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 43.

  85 Horace Greeley to Charles A. Dana, May 13, 1856, Charles A. Dana Papers, Library of Congress.

  86 Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years . . . (Hartford, Conn.: A. S. Hale & Co., 1870), 40.

  87 Greeley to C. Chauncey Brown, May 19, 1848, Chauncey Brown Papers, New-York Historical Society.

  88 Quoted in Charles J. Rosebault, When Dana Was the Sun: A Story of Personal Journalism (New York: R. M. McBride, 1931), 50–51.

  89 New York Tribune, February 6, 1845.

  90 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 142.

  91 Brockway, Fifty Years in Journalism, 99.

  92 Cuyler, “ ‘Uncle Horace.’ ”

  93 Quoted in Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, 56.

  94 New York Courier and Enquirer, January 27, 1844.

  95 Quoted in Rosebault, When Dana Was the Sun, 50–51.

  96 See Race Between Bennett and Greeley for the Post Office Stakes, lithograph, probably by Edward Williams Clay, New York, ca. 1843, 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), 196–97.

  97 Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: A Biography of James Gordon Bennetts, 1795–872, (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 213.

  98 Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 167–68; L. D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune, with Extended Notices of Many of His Contemporary Statesmen and Journalists (Chicago: Union Publishing Co., 1873), 173.

  99 Patton, Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy, 1:48.

  THREE: THAT ATTRACTIVE RAINBOW

  1 Though elected in August 1846, Lincoln did not begin serving his term in Congress until December 1847—in accordance with the slow-moving transition traditions of the day, which remained in effect until ratification of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution in 1933.

  2 Robert W. Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 211; George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 34–35.

  3 Caption to a print, Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, Washington City North side of Pennsylvania Avenue . . . , lithograph by Endicott & Co., ca. 1832, original in the Division of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.

  4 The Sprigg establishment occupied the plot where the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress now stands. Lincoln’s Whig predecessors, Hardin and Baker, each lived there during their terms, and Baker conceivably recommended it to his successor. Abolitionist Joshua Giddings lived there during Lincoln’s residency. See Allen C. Clark, Abraham Lincoln in the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts, 1925), 3.

  5 Theodore Dwight Weld to Angelina Grimké Weld, January 2, 1842, Gilbert Hobbes Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, orig. pub. 1934 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 884.

  6 Kenneth J. Winkle, Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 6–7.

  7 Charles Dickens, American Notes: A
Journey, orig. pub. 1842 (New York: Fromm International Publishing, 1985), 116–17, 119–20.

  8 Quoted in Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas, 207.

  9 Diary of John Quincy Adams (original in the Massachusetts Historical Society, 51 vol.), 44:233, February 14, 1844, online at http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/cfm/doc.cfm?id=jqa44_233.

  10 Hair “getting up in the world” quoted in Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose, orig. pub. 1963 (rev. ed, Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Press, 1985), 18; Herbert Mitgang, ed., Edward Dicey’s Spectator of America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 91.

  11 Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, December 8, 1865, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 298; Mary quoted by Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln . . . (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 140.

  12 Lincoln to Horace Greeley, June 27, 1848, CW, 1:494.

  13 Quoted in Andrew C. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass (American Statesman series, No. 24, Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1891), 232.

  14 Baltimore Sun, April 12, 1847.

  15 M. Y. Beach, “A Secret Mission to Mexico,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (May 1879): 136–40.

  16 Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, orig. pub. 1954 (9th ed., Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 115–16.

  17 Both quotes from Megan Jenison Griffin, “Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878,” Legacy 27 (University of Nebraska Press, 2010): 416; New York Sun, April 15, 1847; Tom Reilly, “Jane McManus Storm[s]: Letters from the Mexican War, 1847–1848,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 85 (July 1981): 35. A veteran foreign correspondent for Greeley’s New-Yorker, Storm later contributed reviews to the Tribune and became a friend of Greeley’s wife. At first supportive of Southern expansion, she later opposed secession.

  18 George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), 63–64.

  19 Douglas Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 35.

  20 Emery, Emery, and Roberts, The Press and America, 117.

  21 Ben: Perley Poore, “Abraham Lincoln. Reminiscences of an Old Newspaper Correspondent,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 6, 1885.

  22 See, for example, late sessions of August 9 and August 12, 1848, reported in Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), 1:318.

  23 Sangamo Journal, July 2, 1846; Quincy Whig, January 27, 1847.

  24 “The National Intelligencer and Its Editors,” Atlantic Monthly 6 (October 1860): 476–77, 486.

  25 Mary J. Windle, Life of Washington, and Here and There (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1859), 150–51.

  26 [Josephine Seaton], William Winston Seaton of the “National Intelligencer.” A Biographical Sketch. With Passing Notices of His Associates and Friends (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 319.

  27 Ibid., 271, 273. The English writer recalled “the pleasant hours we spent in your society.”

  28 Ibid., 289, 299.

  29 Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of Newspapers, 1789–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 169.

  30 Quoted in Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Washington: The Capital City and its Part in the History of the Nation, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), 2:41–42.

  31 [Seaton], William Winston Seaton of the “National Intelligencer,” 15.

  32 William E. Ames, A History of the National Intelligencer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 343–44.

  33 Reprinted in the National Union, December 7, 1847, quoted in Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 404.

  34 Quoted in Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 209.

  35 Speech at Peoria, October 16, 1854, CW, 2:252.

  36 Typescript of a previously unknown and lost Lincoln document quoted in Mark E. Neely, “Lincoln’s Theory of Representation: A Significant New Lincoln Document,” Lincoln Lore, No. 1683 (May 1978), 2.

  37 Resolutions in the U.S. House of Representatives, December 22, 1847, CW, 1:420–22.

  38 Lincoln to William H. Herndon, January 8, 1848, CW, 1:430.

  39 New York Tribune, May 12, May 13, 1846.

  40 Speech in the House of Representatives, January 12, 1848, CW, 1:439. The phrase beginning “that he ordered General Taylor” and ending with “to bring on a war,” was inserted by Lincoln after the fact for the printing of the speech in the Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, New Series, No. 10, 154–56.

  41 Alexandria (Virginia) Gazette, February 8, 1848; Trenton (New Jersey) Star Gazette, February 14, 1848; Hudson River Chronicle, February 15, 1848.

  42 Illinois State Register, January 14, 1848. The paper attacked Lincoln on January 21, 27, and 28.

  43 Charles Lanphier to John A. McClernand, January 16, [1848], McClernand Family Papers, ALPLM, Box 1 (1848).

  44 Illinois State Register, February 18, March 2, 1848; Illinois State Journal, February 10, 1848.

  45 Quoted in Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 215.

  46 Lincoln to William H. Herndon, February 1, 1848, CW, 1:447–48.

  47 Lincoln to William H. Herndon, February 15, 1848, CW, 1:451.

  48 Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day, 1:304.

  49 National Intelligencer, January 6, 1848.

  50 William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, orig. pub. 1889 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 175, 179.

  51 See, for example, Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln: 1809–1858, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 1:409, 422. The historiography is examined exhaustively in G. S. Boritt, “A Question of Political Suicide: Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (February 1974): 81n5, 83–85.

  52 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford, 1868), 211.

  53 James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), 247.

  54 Debate and commentary published in the New York Herald, January 25, 1848.

  55 New York Tribune, January 15, 1848; “Richelieu” described in Harlan Hoyt Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), 43.

  56 For a compelling look at the politics among Illinois Whigs, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Lincoln and the Mexican War: An Argument by Analogy,” Civil War History 24 (March 1978): 5–24.

  57 Lincoln to Benjamin H. James, December 6, 1845, CW, 1:352.

  58 As he wistfully put it, “I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends, and to keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself.” See Lincoln to William H. Herndon, January 8, 1848, CW, 1:431.

  59 Autobiographical sketch prepared for John L. Scripps, ca. June 1860, CW, 66–67; the text used here was printed in John Locke Scripps, Life of Abraham Lincoln, orig. pub. 1860 (Bloomington: Indiana Universality Press, 1961), 104.

  60 Lincoln to William H. Herndon, January 8, 1848, CW, 1:431.

  61 See Boritt, “A Question of Political Suicide: Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War,” 79–100.

  62 Thomas L. Harris to Charles Lanphier, April 5, 1848, in Charles C. Patton, Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy: A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier, 5 vols. (Privately printed, 1973), 1:57, and full text in Vol. 2 (not paginated); Illinois State Register, May 19, 1848.

  63 For early experiments in absentee voting for soldiers, see John C. Fortier and Norman J. Ornstein, “Election Reform: The Absentee Ballot and the Secret Ballot—Challenges for Ele
ction Reform,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 36 (Spring 2003): 8. The state of Pennsylvania extended voting opportunities to soldiers as early as the War of 1812, but remained an exception to tradition. The author is grateful to historian Jonathan White for pointing out these early experiments in widening the franchise to men in uniform.

  64 The final vote was 7,201 for Harris, 7,095 for Logan.

  65 Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Lincoln, 179.

  66 Lincoln to William Schouler, August 28, 1848, CW, 1:518.

  67 Harris’s version appears in Richard Lawrence Miller, Lincoln and His World, 3 vols. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 3:204; Francis’s version appeared in the Illinois State Journal, October 3, 1848.

  68 Parton, Life of Horace Greeley, 241–42.

  69 For thoughtful commentary on what he calls the “ceremony” of newspaper reading, “repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 35.

  70 Quoted in David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Speeches in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 122.

  71 Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis; A Mirror of New York (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1869), 93–94.

  FOUR: A POSITION WE CANNOT MAINTAIN

  1 See, for example, Noah Brooks, Abraham Lincoln: The Nation’s Leader in the Great Struggle Through Which Was Maintained the Existence of the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888), 105. Conceding that an “illustrious company of legislators” attended the 30th Congress, Brooks, who later knew Lincoln, argued that he was immediately “recognized as a man of great ability.” If so, he was not so acknowledged in period newspapers.

  2 James W. Sheahan, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Harper & Bros., 1860), 74.

  3 Ben: Perley Poore, “Reminiscences of an Old Newspaper Correspondent,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 6, 1885.

  4 New York Herald, March 15, 1849.

  5 Intelligencer editorial reprinted in Washington Daily Union, August 3, 1846, quoted (along with the president’s veto message) in Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 283.