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

by Harold Holzer

  75 Quoted in Jay Monaghan, The Man Who Elected Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 169. Medill and Ray were no longer on speaking terms when the former offered this recollection. Others on the scene later recalled that the deal had indeed been struck, but did not mention the Chicago editors as parties to the agreement. Medill in the Ohio delegation quoted in Elmer Gertz, Joe Medill’s War (Chicago: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1945), 6.

  76 Lincoln note in the margins of the Missouri Democrat, [May 17, 1860], CW, 4:50.

  77 William B. Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 142.

  78 Wilson ed., Intimate Memories of Lincoln, 280.

  79 New York Times, May 15, 1860; Hesseltine, Three Against Lincoln, 146–47.

  80 New York Times, May 15, 1860.

  81 New York Tribune, May 18, 1860.

  82 Charles H. Ray to Lincoln, May 14, 1860, ALPLC.

  83 Hesseltine, Three Against Lincoln, 163.

  84 Ibid., 171–72, 177; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 21, 1860.

  85 Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 21, 1860, quoted in Herbert Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him (Chicago: Rinehart, 1956), 175.

  86 For the Journal office version, see Charles S. Zane testimony, ca. 1865, 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), 492; “I felt sure” in Henry B. Rankin, Abraham Lincoln the First American: Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 189. The Journal kept what it called “the chair in which Honest Abe Lincoln was sitting when he heard of his nomination as candidate for the Presidency” until 1886, when the publishers donated it to a Lincoln collection being assembled by S. B. Munson. It was offered for sale on eBay in 2013. See Illinois State Journal, January 21, 1865, and The Lincoln Nomination Chair, catalogue description, February 2013, www.sethkaller.com/item/625-The-Lincoln-Nomination-Chair.

  87 William Schouler to Lincoln, May 21, 1860, ALPLC.

  88 Lincoln to A. K. McClure, August 30, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers Project, Springfield, Illinois.

  89 G. H. Stewart, “Horace Greeley at Lincoln’s First Nomination,” The Century Magzine 41 (November 1890): 157.

  EIGHT: I CAN NOT GO INTO THE NEWSPAPERS

  1 Mark Delahay to Lincoln, June 8, 1860, ALPLC.

  2 New York Herald, May 22, 1860.

  3 Quoted in Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 56.

  4 Ibid., 54.

  5 New York Herald, May 23, May 30, 1860.

  6 Quoted in Thurlow Weed Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 2:271.

  7 Ibid., 274–75; New York Times, June 15, June 16, 1860.

  8 New York Tribune, May 25, 1860. Learning at Auburn that a disappointed Seward was contemplating retirement, Raymond published a sympathetic story in the Times describing Seward’s home as a paradise, and characterizing their cordial meeting as proof of the senator’s manly dignity in defeat. For his part, the New York senator, not quite ready to abandon politics after all, quickly endorsed the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket and scheduled a campaign swing in its behalf.

  9 New York Tribune, June 14, 1860.

  10 Philadelphia journalist John Russell Young kept a scrapbook of undated clippings, from which these comments are extracted. John Russell Young Papers, Library of Congress.

  11 New York Times, June 15, 1860. Not every paper blamed Greeley for Seward’s humiliation. Jane Grey Swisshelm’s St. Cloud (Minnesota) Democrat warned on June 7, 1860, “if this war upon Mr. Greeley, for following his honest convictions, is in any way sanctioned by Mr. Seward, it shows that we were mistaken in the man; and that his nomination was not fit to be made.”

  12 Thomas Hicks, in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 593.

  13 New York Tribune, October 23, 1860; New York Tribune, October 12, 1860.

  14 Douglass’ Monthly, June 1860.

  15 Mary J. Windle, Life in Washington, and Life Here and There (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1859), 66. Windle was an unabashed admirer. “There has been, during the last two years, raised against him a storm of rebuke and misrepresentation,” she added to her rosy prognostication about Douglas’s political future. “ . . . But with the whole storm of unpopularity roaring round him, he sternly pursues his course, breasting the storm, combating the surge.”

  16 New York Times, August 14, 1860; Charles H. Ray to Lincoln, June 27, 1860, ALPLC.

  17 William Cullen Bryant to Lincoln, June 16, 1860, ALPLC.

  18 The Rail-Splitter, June 23, 1860.

  19 New York Tribune, October 24, 1860. For the Currier & Ives cartoon, “Taking the Stump”: Or Stephen in Search of His Mother, see [George Buss, ed.], Out from the Shadow of Lincoln: Stephen A. Douglas (exhibit catalogue) (Wabash, Ind.: Wabash County Historical Museum, 2010), 15.

  20 Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press (1973), 733.

  21 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, July 5, 1860, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 497.

  22 Quoted in Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 782.

  23 Illinois State Register, September 1, 1860.

  24 For the texts of these bitter complaints, see James W. Sheahan to Charles H. Lanphier, July 28, August 3, 1860, Charles H. Lanphier Papers, ALPLM, reprinted 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: Frye-Williamson Press, 1973), vol. 5.

  25 James W. Sheahan, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 527–28.

  26 Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1860. For Lincoln’s role in deleting the phrase, “They shan’t do it, d—n ’em,” see Herbert Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him (New York: Rinehart, 1956), 178.

  27 For the second and last Lincoln “autobiography,” and notes about its publishing history, see CW, 4:60–67.

  28 For Bartlett’s experience in the campaign biography trade, see Margaret Clapp, Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), 104.

  29 Harper’s Weekly, June 9, 1860. See also Louis A. Warren, “Earliest Published Biography Exclusively Lincoln,” Lincoln Lore, Bulletin of the Lincoln National Life Foundation, No. 668 (January 26, 1942).

  30 The author is grateful to Thomas Horrocks for sharing research he amassed for his own study of Lincoln’s campaign biographies and biographers: Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). For Codding, see Ernest James Wessen, “Campaign Lives of Abraham Lincoln 1860: An Annotated Bibliography of the Biographies of Abraham Lincoln Issued During the Campaign Year,” Papers in Illinois History and Transactions for the Year 1937 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1938): 198.

  31 Lincoln to Samuel Galloway, June 19, 1860, CW, 4:79–80.

  32 W. D. Howells, Years of My Youth (New York: Harper & Bros., 1916), 207.

  33 See D. W. Bartlett, Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln . . . (New York: Derby & Miller, 1860); W. D. Howells, Life of Abraham Lincoln, orig. pub. 1860, centennial edition featuring Lincoln’s handwritten corrections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), comments on Howells’s literary career by editor Clyde C. Walton, vii; The Campaign of 1860 (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1860).

  34 [Horace Greeley]. A Political Text-Book for 1860: Comprising a Brief View of Presidential Nominations and Elections . . . (New York: The Tribune Association, 1860), iii-iv; see also advertisement for the book in the New York Tribune, September 11, 1860; Gregory Alan Borchard, “The Firm of Greeley, Weed, & Seward: New York Partisanship and the Press, 1840–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2003), 198–99.

 
35 J. F. Cleveland, The Tribune Almanac and Political Register for 1860 (New York: H. Greeley & Co., 1860).

  36 John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: The Century Co., 1904), 155. Nicolay reiterated his respect for this material years later when he embarked on his own biography of Lincoln; he acquired the very notes and interviews that law student James Quay Howard had prepared for the disputed William Dean Howells biography in 1860. See James Q. Howard biographical notes in John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress. See also Roy P. Basler, “James Quay Howard’s Notes on Lincoln,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 8 (December 1947): 400.

  37 “The Hour of Sadness,” signed with the pseudonym “Sylva,” and the record of Patent No. 9305, in the John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress; lines from Lincoln’s “My Childhood Home I See Again,” ca. 1846, CW, 1:368.

  38 Fragment of a letter in the John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress.

  39 Helen Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary: A Biography of John G. Nicolay (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949), 30; Louis A. Warren, “John G. Nicolay, 1832–1901,” Lincoln Lore, No. 718 (January 11, 1943).

  40 Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary, 33.

  41 Ibid., 34.

  42 John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 33–34.

  43 Joseph Medill to Lincoln, June 19, 1860, ALPLC.

  44 Joseph Medill to Lincoln, July 5, 1860, ALPLC.

  45 New York Herald, September 6, September 15, 1860.

  46 New York Herald, November 6, 1860.

  47 Ibid.

  48 New York Herald, October 2, October 20, 1860.

  49 Lincoln to Samuel Haycraft, June 4, 1860, CW, 4:69–70, and August 16, 1860, CW, 4:97; New York Herald clipping pasted into Lincoln’s letter to George G. Fogg, August 16, 1860, CW, 4:96.

  50 Lincoln to Samuel Haycraft, August 16, 1860, and to George G. Fogg, August 16, 1860, CW, 4:96–97. The glued-in clipping is visible in the original, as reprinted in Lincoln and the New York Herald: Unpublished Letters of Abraham Lincoln from the Collection of Judd Stewart (Plainfield, N.J.: Privately printed, 1907), endpapers.

  51 George G. Fogg to Lincoln, August 23, 1860, ALPLC; Lincoln to Fogg, August 29, CW, 4:102.

  52 Samuel Haycraft to Lincoln, n.d., ca. August 23, 1860, ALPLC; Lincoln to Haycraft, [August 23, 1860], CW, 4:99.

  53 Comments by William Kellogg and a correspondent for the New York Tribune, in Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2:668.

  54 Easton [Pennsylvania] Times, October 20, 1860; Daily Omaha Nebraskan, October 20, 1860; Boston Herald, October 31, 1860, all quoted in Melvin Hayes, Mr. Lincoln Runs for President (New York: Citadel, 1960), 180–81, 182, 184.

  55 Hayes, Mr. Lincoln Runs for President, 124.

  56 Richard M. Corwine to Lincoln, July 13, 1860; Elliott F. Shepard to Lincoln, October 15, 1860, ALPLC.

  57 Quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 226.

  58 Belmont (St. Clairsville, Ohio) Chronicle, July 5, 1860.

  59 See Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 37.

  60 Original in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; see also Frank Weitenkampf, Political Caricature in the United States (New York: New York Public Library, 1953), 122.

  61 Ibid., 39–40.

  62 Charles Blondin was a tightrope walker famous at the time for taking a high-wire walk across Niagara Falls, and “Salt River” was an imaginary waterway representing the path to political oblivion.

  63 Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., American Political Prints, 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 441, 443.

  64 Ibid., 413.

  65 New York Times, November 7, 1860.

  66 Simeon Francis to Lincoln, November 23, 1860, April 16, 1861, ALPLC.

  67 New York Tribune, November 8, 1860; Gregory A. Borchard, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 70.

  68 Stephen Fiske, “When Lincoln Was Inaugurated,” Ladies’ Home Journal (March 1897), 8.

  69 John W. Forney to Lincoln, November 12, 1860, ALPLC.

  70 Horace Greeley to Beman Brockway, November 11, November 16, 1860, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress.

  71 New York Herald, November 9, 1860.

  72 Rhett quoted in Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 22; see also New York Illustrated News, February 23, 1861.

  73 Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle & Sentinel, November 8, 1860; Richmond Enquirer, November 19, 1860, reprinted in Ford Risley, ed., The Civil War: Primary Documents on Events from 1860 to 1865 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004), 31–32.

  74 New York Times, November 9, 1860; New York Tribune, November 10, 1860, and Greeley quoted in David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 178.

  75 Quoted in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 2:455.

  76 New York Tribune, November 8, 1860

  77 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 398–99.

  78 Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 4, 146, 154.

  79 M. A. Higginbottom, describing the fate of editor James M. Jones, reprinted in Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer, The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 78.

  80 New York Tribune, June 12, 1861.

  81 New York Herald, December 30, 1860.

  82 Reprinted in the Memphis Daily Appeal, November 9, 1860.

  83 Donn Piatt in Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 480–81.

  84 Douglas to the citizens of New Orleans, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 499–501.

  85 New York Tribune, December 21, December 22, 1860; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 396.

  86 John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1890), 3:253–54, 255, 258.

  87 New York Herald, December 20, 1860.

  88 I am grateful to Daniel Weinberg of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago for inviting me to examine a surviving copy of the broadside, and for explaining the tiny difference that marks the first and second editions: a comma. For the speed with which the Charleston Mercury broadside reached the public, see Richard Barksdale Harwell, Cornerstones of Confederate Collecting (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1953) 6, and Swann Auction Galleries Catalogue of Printed and Manuscript Americana, Public Auction Sale 2324, October 10, 2013, No. 112.

  89 Joseph H. Gillespie in Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Intimate Memories of Lincoln (Elmira, N.Y.: Primavera, 1945), 334.

  90 Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, December 25, 1860, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 504.

  91 His final letter to Lanphier was written from Ohio on April 22, 1861: “Mrs Douglas & myself leave here for Springfield tonight,” in ibid., 510.

  NINE: LINCOLN WILL NOT TALK WITH ANYONE

  1 Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, December 10, 1860, CW, 4:150.

  2 Gibson Peacock (Philadelphia) to Lincoln, January 28, 1861; J. K. Moore, George Gray, William H. Wood, and Jane Grey Swisshelm (Minnesota) to Lincoln, January 1, 22, 23, February 22. 1861; William H. Romeyn (Kingston) to Lincoln, February 27, 1861; Austin Coltin (Rockford) to Lincoln, March 2, 1861; and C. Waggoner (Toledo) to Lincoln, February 13, 1861; David Atwood (Wisconsin) to Lincoln, February 16, 1861 (John Defrees wrote as early as December 15 to endorse Dole), all
ALPLM. The author is indebted to Marilyn Mueller for transcribing these newly discovered incoming letters.

  3 Henry D. Cooke (Ohio) to Lincoln, February 22, 1861; S. A. Parks (Alton) to Lincoln, February 26, 1861, ALPLC.

  4 Theodore Canisius to Lincoln, February 1 [?], 1861, ALPLC.

  5 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, February 6, 1861, Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, February 11, March 1, 1861, ALPLC.

  6 Lincoln to Henry J. Raymond, November 30, 1860, CW, 4:146.

  7 John D. Defrees to Lincoln, December 15, 1860, ALPLC; Lincoln to Defrees, December 18, 1860, CW, 4:155.

  8 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, December 22, 1860, ALPLC. (Lincoln had apparently written to Greeley the day before, although a copy of his communication has never been located.) Four days later, Greeley wrote to William Herndon, whom the editor had met in New York in 1858 to discuss Lincoln’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate, to explain: “I would have liked very much to talk peace and fraternity—begging the Secessionists to look toward a peaceable separation; but our friends will not listen to any thing but fight, so I shall have to let them have their own way. If Mr. L. were [at] once in possession of the White House, this would all do; as it is, I think we mistake in not talking smoothly at least until we are in position to use daggers as well as speak them.” See Greeley to William H. Herndon, December 26, 1860, ALPLC.

  9 George Peckham to Mary Campbell, February 28, 1861, collection of Jonathan W. White. The author is indebted to Professor White for this and the other pieces he shared from both his personal collection and his own prodigious research.

  10 Lincoln to Thurlow Weed, December 17, 1860, CW, 4:154, and to James Watson Webb, December 29, 1860, ibid., 164; William Cullen Bryant to Lincoln, December 25, 1860, ALPLC, and Lincoln to Bryant, December 29, 1860, CW, 4:163–164.

  11 Lincoln to Nathaniel J. Paschall, November 16, 1860, CW, 4:139–40.

  12 William C. Smedes to Henry J. Raymond, December 8, 1860; Raymond to Lincoln, December 14, 1860, ALPLC.

  13 Lincoln to Henry J. Raymond, December 18, 1960, CW, 4:156; Smedes to Lincoln, February 4, 1861, ALPLC.

  14 New York Herald, December 6, 1860; Leonard Swett to Thurlow Weed, December 10, 1860, in Thurlow Weed Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 2:301.