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

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Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 84

by Harold Holzer


  62 Diary entry, March 25, 1861, in Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 21.

  63 New York Tribune, May 2, 1861.

  64 William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, orig. pub. 1863, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954), 22–24. For acquaintance with British authors, see Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War,” North American Review 166 (February 1998): 234.

  65 Russell, My Diary North and South, 22–23.

  66 Ibid, 24.

  67 Russell, My Diary North and South, 24; Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War,” 240, 243–44.

  68 Diary entry, November 23, 1861, and letter to Mowbray Morris, March 15, 1862, Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 185, 230.

  69 Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—IV,” 629.

  70 Chapman, Russell of the Times, 122–23.

  71 Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—V,” North American Review 166 (June 1898): 740, 745.

  72 Mowbray Morris to J. C. Bancroft Davis, August 7, 1861, J. C. Bancroft Davis Papers, Library of Congress.

  73 Adam Gurowski, Diary, from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1862), 79; New York Herald, August 27, 1861.

  74 London Times, August 22, 1861.

  75 New York Tribune, July 22, 1861.

  76 New York Tribune, July 23, 1861.

  77 William T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, July 28, 1861, quoted in John F. Marszalek, Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press, orig. pub. 1981 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 65.

  78 Edward Dicey, Six Months in the Federal States, 2 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1863), 1:35.

  79 Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War (July 28, September 3, September 6, 1861), 96, 118, 122; and Russell to John T. Delane, March 26, 1861, 24. See also New York Herald, August 24, 1861.

  80 Ben: Perley Poore criticisms in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 229; William Howard Russell to J. C. Bancroft Davis, June 22, 1861, in Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 74; Harper’s Weekly, July 20, 1861.

  81 Diary entries, July 6, August 26, 1861, and William Howard Russell to John T. Delane, March 26, 1861, in Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, 82, 23–24, 111; New York Tribune, March 20, 1861

  82 Quoted in Chapman, Russell of the Times, 128.

  83 Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War, diary entry, December 4, 1861, 196.

  84 New York Times, July 22, 1861.

  85 New York Times, July 25, 1861.

  86 Harold Holzer and Craig L. Symonds, eds., The New York Times Complete Civil War (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2011), 12–13.

  87 Richard B. Kielbowicz, “The Telegraph, Censorship, and Politics at the Outset of the Civil War,” Civil War History 40 (June 1994): 97–98.

  88 Scott’s notice of July 8, 1861, ordered that “the telegraph will convey no dispatches concerning the operations of the Army not permitted by the Commanding General.” See OR, Series 3, vol. 1: 324.

  89 New York Times, July 24, 1861. A Cincinnati Gazette reporter similarly tried to report that telegraph censors insisted on his communicating the Bull Run outcome as a federal victory. See Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1861–1862, Record Group 233, National Archives.

  90 Testimony of Alfred Talcott, Records of the House Judiciary Committee, 37th Congress, 1862 Record Group 233, National Archives, quoted in Michael Hussey, “The Great Censorship Debate,” in Discovering the Civil War (n.a., Washington, D.C.: Foundation for the National Archives, 2010), 138.

  91 New York Times, July 22, July 26, 1861, quoted in Starr, The Civil War’s Bohemian Brigade, 49–50.

  92 Chapman, Russell of the Times, 128.

  93 The Atlantic 47 (September 1861), 346.

  94 G. F. Williams, “How a Reporter Faced Danger in Disguise,” The Independent 53 (August 8, 1901): 1860–62; New York Times, May 16, 1861.

  95 “The Army Correspondent,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (October 1863): 627–33; Starr, The Civil War’s Bohemian Brigade, 232.

  96 Franc B. Wilkie, Pen and Powder (Boston, Ticknor & Co., 1888). See also Michael E. Banasik, Missouri in 1861: The Civil War Letters of Franc B. Wilkie (Iowa City: Press of the Camp Pope Bookshop, 2001), 107–14, 125.

  97 James R. Parton, [“The New York Herald,”] North American Review 102 (April 1866): 401.

  98 Ben: Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1886), 2:126, 127.

  99 Washington Evening Star, October 16, 1896.

  100 James G. Randall, “The Newspaper Problem in Its Bearing Upon Military Secrecy During the Civil War,” The American Historical Review 23 (January 1918): 307.

  101 New York Herald, August 14, 1861; total expenditures reported in Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War, 21. For cost per telegraphic transmissions, see Brayton Harris, Blue and Gray in Black and White: Newspapers in the Civil War (Washington D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), 6.

  102 Brayton Harris, Blue and Gray in Black and White, 182.

  103 New York Herald, April 1, 1863.

  104 New York Times, March 27, 1898.

  105 Horace Greeley to Margaret Allen, June 17, 1861, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress.

  106 Randall, “The Newspaper Problem,” 307.

  107 John Wein Forney to John Russell Young, telegram, September 12, 1861, John Russell Young Papers, Library of Congress.

  108 Quoted in Chapman, Russell of the Times, 115.

  109 George Alfred Townsend, Campaigns of a Non-Combatant . . . (New York: Blelock & Co., 1866), esp. 49–57; William Swinton, the Twelve Decisive Battles of the War (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1867), 5.

  110 Quoted in Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave and John Cullen, Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 160–161, 166, 167.

  111 L. A. Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things at Washington During the Third of a Century (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, & Haffelfinger, 1869), 13. Gobright began his career as a congressional correspondent.

  112 Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War, 751–59; J. Cutler Andrews, The South Reports the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 548–51.

  113 Horace Greeley and others to Lincoln, April 18, 1861, ALPLC; Lincoln memorandum, ca. April 8, 1861, CW, 4:325.

  114 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, July 29, 1861, ALPLC. Greeley also confided his Bull Run–induced insomnia to his friend Beman Brockway; see Greeley to Brockway, August 14, 1861, Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress.

  115 Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who kept a diary during the Civil War, made no mention of the Greeley letter in his accounts of the period. See Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. John T. Morse, Jr. 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). Welles’s 1861 entries (in Vol. 1) were sketchy. Like his fellow cabinet diarist, Salmon Chase, Welles did not commence his journal in earnest until 1862.

  116 John Hay, diary entry, April 30, 1864, in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 193. Greeley’s penmanship described in Albert Gallatin Riddle, Recollections of War Times: Reminiscences of Men and Events in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), 199.

  117 Ruth Painter Randall, Lincoln’s Sons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 121.

  118 For press comments on the contraband issue, see New York Times, May 31, 1861 (a “happy fancy”), New York Herald, May 24, 1861 (acceptable unless “Greeley & Co.” used it to promote “Mexican anarchy and dire confusion”).

  119 Proclamation published in the New York Times, August 31, 1861.

  120 Lincoln to John C. Frémont, September 2, 1861, CW, 4:506; Frémont to Lincoln, September 8, 1861, ALPLC; Li
ncoln to Orville H,. Browning, September 22, 1861, CW, 4:432.

  121 Medill to Salmon P. Chase, September 15, 1861, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 394.

  122 Anglo-African, September 21, 1861, quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon, 1965).

  123 Horace Greeley to Samuel Wilkeson, September 17, 1862, Horace Greeley and the Lincoln Administration: An Archive, Raab Collection catalogue, 2013.

  124 New York Times, September 8, 1861.

  125 Dicey, Six Months in the Federal States, 33.

  126 Ibid., 25, 33.

  ELEVEN: FREEDOM OF THE PRESS STRICKEN DOWN

  1 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 405.

  2 Ibid., 200; L. E. Chittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (New York: Harper & Bros., 1891), 74.

  3 Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860–’65 . . . , 2 vols., 2nd ed., orig. pub. 1864 (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case, 1864), 1:549; see also Greeley, “Greeley’s Estimate of Lincoln,” ed. Joel Benton, The Century 20 (July 1891): 377.

  4 Robert R. Raymond, ed., The Patriotic Speaker: Consisting of Modern Specimens of Modern Eloquence, Together with Poetical Extracts Adapted for Recitation, and Dramatic Pieces for Exhibitions (New York: A. S. Barnes & Burr, 1864), 92–93.

  5 New York Examiner, September 5, 1861, in Michael Burlingame, ed., Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House: The Anonymous Civil War Journalism of Presidential Secretary William O. Stoddard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 23.

  6 New York Times, May 26, 1861.

  7 For an example of the Local News, see the online newspaper collections of the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: http://chrtoniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025008/.

  8 Lincoln’s Message to Congress, July 4, 1861, CW, 4:429

  9 Records in the National Archives, Record Group 59 (General Records of the Department of State), Entry 985, Box 1. See also Jonathan W. White, “Unearthing Maryland’s Civil War History at the National Archives,” Maryland Historical Magazine 106 (Fall 2011): 363–68, and White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Case of John Merryman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 45.

  10 See Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas’s report to Col. Justin Dimick, March 10, 1862, OR, series 2, vol. 2:786.

  11 New York Times, August 24, 1861.

  12 J[ohn]. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 14.

  13 For the Hagerstown Mail case, see OR, series 2, vol. 2: 298.

  14 New York Times, July 29, 1861.

  15 William F. Swindler, “The Southern Press in Missouri, 1861–1864,” Missouri Historical Review 35 (April 1941): 398–99.

  16 New York Times, August 20, 1861.

  17 Ulysses S. Grant to William W. Worthington, August 26, 1861, and to Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, September 3, 1861, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 32 vols. to date, now with John F. Marszalek as editor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–2012), 2:39–140, 177.

  18 American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1861 . . . (New York: D. Appleton, 1868), 328–29. General John C. Frémont declared martial law in St. Louis County on August 14, 1861.

  19 Dennis K. Boman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 48–49.

  20 “T—Blank” to Montgomery Blair (forwarded to Lincoln), September 24, 1861, ALPLC.

  21 New York Tribune, April 12, 1861; Charles Fishback to William H. Seward, September 9, 1861, OR, series 2, vol. 2:806.

  22 Case of Charles Morehead, Reuben T. Durrett, and M. W. Barr, OR, series 2, vol. 2: 805–6.

  23 George D. Prentice to Lincoln, September 24, 1861 (telegram), ALPLC; Prentice to Lincoln, September 24, 1861 (letter), OR, series 2, vol. 2: 807–8; Lincoln endorsement [September 24, 1861], CW, 4:534.

  24 Joseph Holt to Lincoln, September 25, 1861, OR, series 2, vol. 2: 808.

  25 OR, series 2, vol. 2: 808–10.

  26 W. D. Gallagher to Salmon P. Chase, October 10, 1861; George D. Prentice, Henry Pirtle, Hamilton Pope, Bland Ballard, C. B. Muir, W. F. Bullock, Joseph Dolph, J. Levis, and James Guthrie to Lincoln, n.d. but enclosed with Chase letter, ibid., 810–11; George D. Prentice to Lincoln, November 16, 1861, APLC; Lincoln to William H. Seward, October 4, 1861, CW, 4:549.

  27 New York Ledger, July 19, 1861, republished in the Philadelphia Inquirer, July 21, 1861. For an interpretation of the report as the “screaming” of an “administration mouthpiece”—not really true, since Everett had been an early critic of Lincoln—see Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom, Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2005), 132–33.

  28 Boman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights, 149; Manber and Dahlstrom, Lincoln’s Wrath, 329. See also Jonathan W. White, “ ‘Words Become Things’: Free Speech in Civil War Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Legacies 8 (May 2008): 18–23; and Ray H. Abrams, “The Jeffersonian, Copperhead Newspaper,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 57 (July 1933): 270.

  29 Albany Argus, August 24, 1861.

  30 Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 109.

  31 Amasa Converse to Lincoln, August 28, 1861, ALPLC; “The Suppression of the Christian Observer,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 23, 1861; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 22, 1861. The Christian Observer moved again, this time to Louisville, Kentucky, where it is still published.

  32 New York Herald, July 23, 1861.

  33 New York Herald, July 13, 1861.

  34 New York grand jury presentment, American Annual Cyclopaedia . . . 1861, 329.

  35 The Confederate States Almanac, and Repository of Useful Knowledge, 1862 [1861] (Vicksburg, Miss.: H. C. Clarke, 1862), n.p.; presentment listed with events, August 1861.

  36 Little is known about Gould except that he listed himself in the 1861–1862 New York street directories as a “broker,” lived on East Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, served with pro-administration men like Francis Lieber on the camp hospital and ambulance corps committee, and chaired several other committees handling arrangements for pro-Union rallies in the summer of 1862. See H. Wilson, Trow’s New York City Directory for the Year Ending May 1, 1862 (New York: John F. Trow, 1862), 152 (he is the only “Charles Gould” in a book that contained 6,995 names under the letter “G” alone—see pp. 3, 5). See also Reports of the National War Committee of the Citizens of New-York. Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine a Plan to Provide for Greater Efficiency in Ambulance and Camp-Hospital Corps (n.p., n.d., ca. 1862), pamphlet collection, New-York Historical Society; unsigned printed invitation from the secretary of the committee on arrangements (Gould) to a “War Meeting” on August 27, 1862, in New-York Historical Society broadside collection; Meeting of Loyal Citizens, August 11, 1862 (form letter signed by Gould); and Report of the Proceedings of the National War Committee of the Citizens of New York, No. 3 (August 1862), broadside collection, New-York Historical Society. Mention of “attacks” by the press in the last-named pamphlet appears on p. 7.

  37 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 3:175.

  38 New York Daily News, April 15, July 22, 1861, reprinted in New York Tribune, July 23, July 25, 1861; Brooklyn Eagle, August 3, 1861; J[ohn]. H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro “Slavery:” The first, an inferior race—the latter, it’s [sic] normal condition (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1854?). Van Evrie republished the screed under his own imprint in 1861; see also reports in the New York Eveni
ng Day-Book, April 6, April 18, 1861, reprinted in Herbert Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him (New York: Rinehart, 1956), 255, 261; New-York Evening Day-Book, April 15, 1861, in Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 121; New York Times, August 16, 1861.

  39 “Presentment of Secession Journals by the Grand Jury,” New York Times, August 17, 1861.

  40 See Presidential Proclamation of August 16, 1861, CW, 4:487–88.

  41 Order of the postmaster general, conveyed by Chief Clerk T. P. Trott, and quoted in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Great Rebellion . . . (Washington, D.C.: Philip & Solomons, 1864), 188.

  42 George A. Coffey to Lincoln, August 22, 1861, ALPLC. Coffey was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. See also New York Daily News, August 27, 1861; New York Times, August 24, August 25, August 29, 1861; Albany Evening Journal (reporting the hoard as six packages of the News), August 27, 1861.

  43 New York Daily News, August 20, August 23, August 26, 1861.

  44 Annual Cyclopaedia . . . 1861, 330; New York Times, August 27, 1861.

  45 New York Herald, August 29, 1861.

  46 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, April 29, August 20, August 21, August 23, August 24, 1861.

  47 Richmond Daily Dispatch, September 7, 1861.

  48 New York Times, Tribune, August 4, November 25, 1861.

  49 New York Herald, August 26, 1861.

  50 Benjamin Wood, Fort Lafayette; or, Love and Secession. A Novel (New York: Carleton & Co., 1862). The story focused more on brave soldiers and swooning women than on the Brooklyn prison. The New York Daily News returned during the Civil War as an evening paper, but under new ownership.

  51 “The Case of William H. Winder,” Boston Courier, October 30, 1862.

  52 William Winder, Secrets of the American Bastille (Philadelphia, John Campbell, 1863), 17. Winder’s brother, John Henry Winder, was provost marshal of Richmond; their father had been a well-known if controversial American general during the War of 1812.

  53 New York Times, September 13, September 14, 1861.

  54 Durrett to Seward, December 2, 1861, OR, series 2, vol. 2: 820.

 

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