44 New York Times, September 17, 1852.
45 New York Times, October 11, 1851, reprinted in Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 241.
46 New York Tribune, February 7, 1849.
47 Horace Greeley to William H. Seward, February 6, 1853, transcript in Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress. See also Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1936), 19.
48 Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News; James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 237–38.
49 Charles F. Wingate, ed., Views and Interviews in Journalism (New York: F. B. Patterson, 1875), 156.
50 New York Sun, March 13, 1875, reprinted in Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism, 241; Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 621.
51 William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 3 vols. (Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1889), 2:363.
52 Lincoln to “Editors of the Illinois Journal,” June 5, 1850, CW, 2:79.
53 Eulogy to Zachary Taylor, July 25, 1850, CW, 2:83–90; see esp. 87.
54 Lincoln to John Addison, August 9, 1850, CW, 2:91–92.
55 Illinois Journal, February 7, 1850, reprinted in Harold Holzer, Father Abraham: Lincoln and His Sons (Honesdale, Penn.: Calkins Creek, 2011), 45. Mary Lincoln biographers Ruth Painter Randall, Jean H. Baker, and Catherine Clinton all suggested Mary as the author of “Little Eddie.” Not until 2012 did historian Samuel P. Wheeler conclusively identify the real poet; see Wheeler, “Solving a Lincoln Literary Mystery: ‘Little Eddie,’ ” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 33 (Summer 2012): 34–46. Even earlier, historians Wayne C. Temple and Jason Emerson, among others, contended that the Lincolns did not write the verses, basing their argument on the stylistic and rhythmic differences between the “Eddie” poem and Lincoln’s known verses in iambic pentameter; arguing further that his parents spelled their late son’s name “Eddy,” not “Eddie”; and that Mary’s agonized mourning make it unlikely she could have collected herself to compose her thoughts so soon after her son’s death. See Jason Emerson, “The Poetic Lincoln,” Lincoln Herald 101 (Spring 1999): 8–9. The author is grateful to Wayne Temple for sharing his knowledge of the poem and its authorship.
56 CW, 2:121–32; New York Tribune, June 30, 1852.
57 Resolution in behalf of Hungarian Freedom, January 9, 1852, in CW, 2:115–16; Maverick, Henry J. Raymond, 110–19.
58 David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 127; New York Times, December 8, 1851.
59 New York Tribune, October 11, 1850.
60 Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 296–98.
61 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, December 30, 1851, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 235; 241–43.
62 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, August 3, 1860, in ibid., 190.
63 Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 300.
64 Ibid., 448–49. A copy of the Chicago Times announcement broadside was long in possession of the Martin F. Douglas family in Greensboro, North Carolina.
65 Complicating the race was a third-party bid by New Hampshire’s John P. Hale, running under the Free Soil banner.
66 See, for example, Lincoln’s speech at the Scott Club, Springfield, August 14 and 26, 1852, in CW, 2:150.
67 Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax, quoted in Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley: Printer, Editor Crusader (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 149.
68 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, February 28, 1852.
69 Maverick, Henry J. Raymond, 140–41.
70 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, December 2, 1852, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 258; Douglas to Franklin Pierce, March [?] and March 4, 1853, in ibid., 261.
71 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, November 11, 1853, in ibid., 267.
72 Petition as owners of the Steamboat “Newsboy,” by Henry J. Raymond (Courier and Enquirer), J. & E. Brooks (Express), Grant Hallock (Journal of Commerce), Beach Bros. (Sun), and James Gordon Bennett (Herald), April 9, 1849, James Wright Brown Collection, New-York Historical Society.
73 George E. Prescott, History, Theory and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 385–86; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 213.
74 Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 229.
75 See Isaac R. Pray, Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1855), 460–88.
76 “Horace Greeley’s Manuscript a Source of Much Trouble to Printers Fifty Years Ago: Very Few Could Decipher It—Unable Sometimes to Read It Himself” clipping from an unknown newspaper, May 25, 1951, New-York Historical Society.
77 Ibid.
78 S. W. Jackman, ed., Acton in America: The American Journal of Sir John Acton, 1853 (Shepherdstown: Patmos, 1979), vii, 12–13.
79 Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 127–28.
80 New York Times, June 22, 1853.
81 Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 256.
82 New York Tribune, January 5, 1854; Stoddard, Horace Greeley, 162.
83 Charles A. Dana to James S. Pike, in Pike, First Blows of the Civil War: The Ten Years of Preliminary Conflict in the United States from 1850 to 1860 (New York: American News Co., 1879), 260–61.
84 Autobiographical sketches, December 20, 1859, June [?], 1860, in CW, 3:512; 4:67.
85 Illinois State Journal, September 12, 1854, CW, 2:229–30.
86 Illinois State Register, October 6, 1854, in Herbert Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him (New York: Rinehart, 1956), 72–73.
87 Quoted in Lewis Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 2008), 65, 67; see also 101, 45.
88 CW, 2:255. For an exhaustive and illuminating study of the speech, see Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria.
89 Quincy Whig, November 3, 1854, quoted in Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria, 67.
90 Illinois State Journal, October 5, 1854. Quoted and explained in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Lincoln, pub. 1889 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 2006), 227.
91 Original Raymond campaign tickets in the collections of the New York State Museum, Albany. See also New York Times, September 20, September 27, September 30, 1854.
92 Horace Greeley to William H. Seward, November 11, 1854, reprinted in Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 315–20. The letter remained private until Seward’s allies distributed it at the 1860 Republican presidential convention to demonstrate Greeley’s bias against the senator’s candidacy.
93 Charles E. Payne, Josiah Bushnell Grinnell (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1938), 26–27.
94 Brooklyn Eagle, undated clipping from John Russell Young scrapbook, John Rusell Young Papers, Library of Congress; Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (New York: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1887), 151. Piatt, an interim U.S. chargé d’affaires to Paris during the Buchanan administration, became a Lincoln supporter in 1860, and later wrote for the Cincinnati Commercial and other papers.
95 Maverick, Henry J. Raymond, 142–45.
96 Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 82, 85.
97 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, December 18, 1854; Douglas to James Washington Sheahan, February 6, 1855, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 331, 333.
98 Lincoln to Elihu Washburne, February 9, 1855, CW, 2:304.
99 New York Tribune, February 9, 1855.
SIX: THE PRAIRIES ARE ON FIRE
1 Paul Selby, “George Schneider,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1906 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1906), 332–33.
2 Raymond Lohne, “Team of Friends: A New Lincoln Theory and Legacy,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 101 (Fall/Winter 2008): 36. Staats Zeitung is German for State Newspaper.
3 Nils William Olsson, “Abraham Lincoln’s Swedish Photographer,” www.kb.se/document/Aktuellt/…217-222OlssonAbrahamLincoln.pdf.
4 Although most early Lincoln photographic historians long assigned this pose to 1858, more recent scholars convincingly redated it to October 1854, although disagreement remains over which paper Lincoln grasps in the portrait. Stefan Lorant dated the picture to 1858 and claimed it was the Press and Tribune, while others have disagreed. See Stefan Lorant, Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life (rev. ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 72–73. Lloyd Ostendorf, who claimed the photographer was Swedish, reattributed the picture to 1854 based on research by collector Bruce Duncan, see Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose, orig. pub. 1963 (rev. ed., Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1985), 18–19. For corroboration see these recent studies: James Mellon, The Face of Lincoln (New York: Viking, 1979), 21, 191; and Philip B. Kunhardt III Peter Kunhardt, and Peter Kunhardt, Jr., Lincoln, Life-Size (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 4–5. See also Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln and His Photographers, Address at the Annual Meeting of the Lincoln Fellowship of Wisconsin, Historical Bulletin, No. 27 (Madison Lincoln Fellowship, 1972), 3. Other views have been suggested in Matthews Pinsker, “Not Always Such a Whig: Abraham Lincoln’s Partisan Alignment in the 1850s,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 29 (2009): 27–46; and Ezra M. Prince, ed., “Commemorative of the Convention of May 29, 1856,” Transactions of the McLean County Historical Society 3 (1900): 12.
5 Megan McKinney, The Magnificent Medills: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 10; James O’Donnell Bennett, Joseph Medill: A Brief Biography and an Appreciation, orig. pub. 1929 (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1947), 7.
6 Joseph Medill to Horace Greeley, November 4, 1851, typescript copy in the James Wright Brown manuscript collection, Box 1, Folder G, New-York Historical Society.
7 Bennett, Joseph Medill, 9. For evidence supporting the alternative story, see A. N. Cole to “the Editor of the ‘Tribune,’ ” August 1, 1884, in Francis Curtis, The Republican Party: A History of Its Fifty Years’ Existence and a Record of Its Measures and Leaders, 1854–1884 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 210; also Medill obituary, Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1899, in Wyatt Rushton, “Joseph Medill and the Chicago Tribune” (Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1916). Others gave credit to coining the name for the new party to Greeley himself. At the very least, Medill hosted an important, all-night planning meeting for disgruntled Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers in Chicago around the same time the new party was getting organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.
8 John Tebbel, An American Dynasty (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947), 9.
9 The capabilities of Richard Hoe’s new, four-cylinder rotary press were described in “The Newspaper Business in Europe and America,” New York Tribune, October 27, 1849.
10 The recollections of Lincoln’s maiden visit to the Chicago Tribune come from the Saturday Evening Post, August 5, 1899; the remark about Lincoln’s feet from Ralph G. Martin, Cissy: The Extraordinary Life of Eleanor Medill Patterson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 12. Both are reprinted in McKinney, The Magnificent Medills, 20–21.
11 Recollection by Joseph Wilson Fifter, quoted in Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Intimate Memories of Lincoln (Elmira, N.Y.: Primavera, 1945), 154.
12 Andy Van Meter, Always My Friend: A History of the State Journal Register and Springfield (Springfield, Ill.: Copley Press, 1981), 155–56. Even crackpots played the opposing Springfield papers against each other. When the inventor of the quickly forgotten “new art of Tintography” appealed to Bailhache for an endorsement on the pages of the Journal, the politically astute request was accompanied by the warning that such praise had already been procured in the opposition Democratic Press. See J. B. Blair to William Bailhache, May 11, 1854, Bailhache Family Papers, ALPLM.
13 Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years . . . (Hartford, Conn.: A. S. Hale & Co., 1870), 383.
14 Quoted in ibid., 150–51.
15 Douglas to James W. Sheahan, April 9, 1856 in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 353.
16 Douglas to James W. Sheahan, February 23, 1857, in ibid., 374.
17 New York Tribune, April 11, 1856.
18 New York Tribune, January 26, 1856.
19 Chicago Tribune, January 31, 1856.
20 New York Times, May 24, 1856.
21 Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1857.
22 New York Tribune, March 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 1857. These excerpts were collected by historian Don E. Fehrenbacher for the chapter “The Judges Are Judged” in his definitive study of the case. See Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 417.
23 New York Times, March 9, 1857.
24 New York Herald, March 8, 1857; Richmond Enquirer, March 10, 1857, quoted in David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 140.
25 Address at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857, CW, 2:404, 407; Tribune commentary in Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, eds., Lincoln on Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 88.
26 Lincoln to Joseph Harding, May 25, 1855, CW 2:312; document signed by Lincoln, Ozias Hatch, Jesse Dubois, Lyman Trumbull and others and forwarded to John G. Nicolay, July 3, 1857, CW 2:410.
27 Stephen A. Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier and George Walker, December 6, 1857, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 405.
28 New York Tribune, May 8, 1858.
29 Medill and Douglas quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 49–50.
30 Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, December 28, 1857, CW, 2:430.
31 Attacks on Greeley in the New York Herald, February 3, February 10, March 28, 1858.
32 Ozias M. Hatch and Jesse K. Dubois to Lincoln and Republican State Chairman Norman Judd, March 22, 1858, and Lincoln to Hatch, March 24, 1858, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: Supplement, 1832–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), 29–30.
33 William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, orig. pub. 1889, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 240–42.
34 Ibid., 239.
35 Lincoln to Charles L. Wilson, June 1, 1858, CW, 2:456–57.
36 Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 68.
37 Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Lincoln, 244–45.
38 Historian Don E. Fehrenbacher was the first scholar to unscramble and explain the printed version of the incomprehensible early paragraphs of the “House Divided” address. See Fehrenbacher, ed., Lincoln: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1989), 1:870–71. For the Journal version, see CW, 2:461–69.
39 Lincoln to “Editors Tribune,” June 8, 1858, in Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: Supplement, 31–32; Chicago Press and Tribune, June 11, 1858; David W. Davis to Lincoln (identifying his “Dear Friend” as the author), June 14, 1858, ALPLC; Lincoln to John L. Scripps, June 23, 1858, CW, 2:471. For more on the Davis-Lovejoy dispute, see Willard L. King, Lincoln’s Manager: David Davis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 117–21.
40 Lincoln to John L. Scripps, June 23, 1858, CW, 2:471; Horac
e Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 358; Greeley to Joseph Medill (copy in Lincoln’s handwriting), July 24, 1858, ALPLC.
41 Lincoln to Joseph Medill, June 25, 1858, CW, 2:473–74; David Davis to Lincoln, June 14, 1858, ALPLC; Lincoln to Charles H. Ray, June 27, 1858, ALPLM.
42 David Davis to Lincoln, June 14, 1858, ALPLC.
43 Quoted in Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 3.
44 Ibid., 4.
45 New York Evening Post, August 23, September 21, 1858, quoted in Edwin Erle Sparks, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library 3; Lincoln Series, Vol. 1 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1908), 129–30, 319.
46 New York Tribune, August 18, 1858.
47 CW, 3:146, 16.
48 The story is recounted in Paul M. Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield., 1832–1865, orig. pub. 1935 (Chicago and New Salem: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1971), 232.
49 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, [August 15, 1858], Lanphier to Douglas, August 26, 1858, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 426–27.
50 Joseph Medill to Lincoln, June 23, 1858; Ray, Medill & Co. to Lincoln, June 29, 1858, ALPLC.
51 Charles H. Ray to Lincoln, July [?], 1858, ALPLC.
52 Charles H. Ray to Elihu Washburne, undated [ca. August 1858], Elihu Washburne Papers, Library of Congress.
53 Charles H. Ray to Lincoln, August 27, 1858, ALPLC. Ray proposed that Lincoln avow he would support D.C. emancipation only when a “Majority of the people of that District are in favor of ridding themselves of the institution.” This, Ray said, would establish his “sincerity of belief in Real Popular Sovereignty.” Lincoln was already on record in this regard.
54 New York Tribune, August 26, 1858.
55 Ibid.
56 Lincoln’s opening speech at Ottawa, August 21, 1858, CW, 3:14.
57 An examination of the “opposition texts”—that is, the Republican versions of Douglas’s speeches and the Democratic record of Lincoln’s—suggests that loyal editors indeed worked to polish the raw material from each.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 80
