152 See editions of all three papers for November 20 and 21, 1863. Lincoln paraphrase is from the New York Times, November 21, 1863, incongruously headlined, “The Gettysburg Celebration.”
153 See Ronald Reid, “Newspaper Response to the Gettysburg Addresses,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (February 1967): 50–53.
154 Noah Brooks, “Personal Reminiscences of Lincoln,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (February/March 1878): 678; Edward Everett to Lincoln, November 20, 1863, ALPLC.
155 See Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel.
156 Quoted in Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Completer Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 64–65.
157 John Wein Forney to John G. Nicolay, December 8, 1863, ALPLC.
158 Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1863, CW, 7:36–53.
159 New York Tribune, December 10, 1863.
160 Nicolay quoted in Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, Lincoln on Democracy: His Own Words, with Essays by America’s Foremost Historians (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 309; Richmond Examiner quoted in Mitgang, ed., Lincoln as They Saw Him, 364.
161 CW, 7: 49–50.
162 New York World, December 15, 1864; Chicago Tribune December 14, 1864.
FOURTEEN: NO TIME TO READ ANY PAPERS
1 “The American Newspaper Press—The Southern States,” Leisure Hour 13 (July 30, 1864): 494; Harold Holzer and the New-York Historical Society, The Civil War in 50 Objects (New York: Viking, 2013), 195.
2 For paper shortages, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront, orig. pub. 1952 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 142; “The American Newspaper Press,” 340.
3 Conversely, in 1863, Confederate soldiers at Raleigh sacked the pro-peace North Carolina Standard; in retaliation, a crowd of Unionist civilians attacked the office of the local pro-secession paper, the State Journal. See The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1863 . . . (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1864), 423.
4 New York Times, June 28, 1862. In fact, Kentucky and Missouri boasted pro-Union papers throughout the war.
5 William H. Seward to Lincoln, October 20, 1862, ALPLC. Only a few weeks before, Frank Leslie’s (September 17, 1862) had pointed out the “evils” of straggling after one of its field artists observed “nearly one fourth of a regiment, including officers, dropping off one by one at convenient opportunities.”
6 Lincoln to Joseph Hooker, May 27, 1863, CW, 6:233.
7 See Lincoln to General John A. Dix, June 6, 1863, CW, 6:252.
8 William T. Sherman to William Scott, February 11, 1863, in Presidential and Other American Manuscripts from the Dr. Robert Small Trust, Sotheby’s catalogue, April 3, 2008, 145; Daniel Butterfield telegram to Lincoln, June 4, 1863, and Lincoln to Butterfield, June 4, 1863, CW, 6:247.
9 Herbert Ravenel Sass, Outspoken: 150 Years of the News & Courier (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 31–33.
10 Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Press Association . . . (Atlanta: Franklin Steam, Publishing House, 1864), preface by R. W. Gibbes, M.D., 5.
11 See Mark E. Neely, Jr., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), Chapter 1: “Engravers Wanted.”
12 Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy, 142.
13 Vicksburg Daily Citizen, July 2, 1863, wallpaper edition, Newspaper Section, Serial and Government Publications Division, Library of Congress; copy in the New-York Historical Society. Fake copies of this famous wallpaper edition abound; it is one of the most frequently forged newspapers of the Civil War era. The story bears eerie resemblance to an account recorded by Union soldier Lorenzo Vanderhoef after occupying the town on campaign near New Creek, West Virginia, in 1864. Vanderhoef recalled: “Finding no soldiers, our troops took down and conveyed to a wagon two secesh Printing Presses, a good share of type, blank paper etc. Some of the boys struck off a few newspapers as the type was already set for next day’s issue.” See Kenneth R. Martin and Ralph Linwood Snow, eds., “I Am Now a Soldier!” The Civil War Diaries of Lorenzo Vanderhoef (Bath, Maine: Patten Free Library, 1990), 50.
14 Original copy in the New-York Historical Society. See also Holzer and the New-York Historical Society, The Civil War in 50 Objects, 299–306.
15 Robert McCalmont, ed., Extracts from Letters Written by Alfred B. McCalmont, 1862–1865: From the Front During the War of the Rebellion Privately Printed by Robert McCalmont, 1908, 56–57.
16 Helyn W. Tomlinson, ed., “Dear Friends:” The Civil War Letters and Diary of Charles Edwin Cort (n.p., 1962), 30–31.
17 Robert W. Daly, ed., Aboard the U.S.S. Monitor 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1964), 247.
18 Michael B. Chesson, ed., J. Franklin Dyer: The Journal of a Civil War Surgeon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 21, 104.
19 Guy C. Taylor to his wife, August 5, 1864, in Kevin Anderson and Patsy Anderson, eds., Letters from Home to Sarah: The Civil War Letters of Guy C. Taylor, Thirty-seventh Wisconsin Volunteers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 84; Thomas P. Lowry, ed., Swamp Doctor: The Diary of a Union Surgeon in the Virginia and North Carolina Marshes (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 2001), 81.
20 Robert E. Bonner, ed., The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), 19. The letter was written from Petersburg, Virginia.
21 A. Bush to “Mary,” in Richard F. Nation and Stephen E. Towne, Indiana’s War: The Civil War in Documents (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 75.
22 Steven J. Ramold, Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 23–24.
23 Court-Martial Files, 1864, LL-1359; Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), Chapter 2.
24 Jessie Sellers Colton, ed., The Civil War Journal and Correspondence of Matthias Baldwin Colton (Philadelphia: Macrae-Smith Co., 1931), 17–18.
25 J. Gregory Acken, ed., Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 1998), 68.
26 James Parton to Benjamin F. Butler, January 4, 1865; Butler to Parton, January 7, 1865, James W. White to Butler, January 5, 1865, in Jessie Ames Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1917), 5: 467–68, 470. Butler, a careful reader of the press, retained many wartime clippings in his files.
27 Army and Navy Journal, debut issue, August 29, 1863; New York Times, October 16, 1865.
28 John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes, War Letters, 1862–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 343.
29 See, for example, Spirit of the Fair, official newspaper of the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York, original run in the New-York Historical Society, and the Albany Canteen, newspaper of the Albany, New York, Army Relief Association Fair, original run in the New York State Library.
30 McCalmont, Extracts from Letters Written by Alfred B. McCalmont . . . , 98.
31 William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1890), 27. For a brilliant summary of Lincoln’s evolving relations with the wartime press corps, see Richard Carwardine, “Abraham Lincoln and the Fourth Estate: The White House and the Press During the American Civil War,” American Nineteenth Century History 7 (March 2006), esp. 8–9.
32 Quoted in James Edward Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947), v.
33 Quoted in Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866), 281–82.
34 Stoddard, Inside the White House, 27.
35 Ibid., 28.
36 Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 153–54. Carpenter arrived in February 1864.
37 Ibid., 154.
38 Ibid.
39 John G. Nicolay to the editors of the Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1863, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 116.
40 Nicolay to Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1863, in ibid., 115–16.
41 Joseph Medill to Lincoln, May 15, 1863, ALPLC.
42 Ida Tarbell interview with Joseph E. Medill, June 25, 1895, excerpted in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 326. Nearly thirty years after the fact, Medill evidently recalled the meeting as having occurred in 1864, but based on the issue discussed and the date of the angry letter from Medill when confronted with the long line waiting to see Lincoln, it is clear the visit occurred the year before.
43 “I wish Mr. Pickett could have the agency,” Lincoln ordered Secretary of War Simon Cameron on March 21, 1861. See CW, 4:297.
44 Thomas J. Pickett to John G. Nicolay, March 20, 1863, ALPLC.
45 Thomas J. Pickett to John G. Nicolay, March 30, 1863; Pickett to Lincoln, April 3, 1863; Moline citizens to Edwin M. Stanton, April 8, 1863. Pickett also protested his innocence to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, April 18, 1863, all in ALPLC; Lincoln to Calvin Truesdale, April 20, 1863, CW, 6:182.
46 See, for example, William Yates to Lincoln, May 22, 1863, Jesse K. DuBois to Lincoln, May 23, 1863, Jacob Bunn, Shelby Cullom, and Ozias Hatch to Lincoln, May 25, 1863, ALPLC; Lincoln to Dubois and others, May 29, 1863, CW, 6:237–38; Edward L. Baker to Lincoln, August 24, 1863, enclosing Bailhache’s letter to Baker, August 14, 1863, ALPLC. (Bailhache properly thought it “would be irregular” for him to write Lincoln directly.)
47 Lincoln to Edward L. Baker, June 15, 1863, CW, 6:275. The Edwards case is discussed in Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer, The Lincoln Family Album (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 7–8.
48 Edward L. Baker to Lincoln, September 30, 1863; Ada Bailhache to Lincoln, October 8, 1863, ALPLC.
49 Edward Baker to Orville H. Browning, January 27, 1864, ALPLC.
50 Quoted in Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 2:144.
51 Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865 ed. Dorothy Lamon (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1895), 141; Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 156.
52 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), 104 (entry for October 30, 1863). See also Theodore Tilton to Lincoln, October 28, 1863, ALPLC. Tilton took issue with Lincoln’s response to a Missouri delegation that asked the president to support immediate, rather than gradual, emancipation in that Border State. The New York Tribune (October 1, 1863) reported that Lincoln told his visitors that “their ‘set’ was a little too fast for his policy.” For Lincoln’s official reply, see his letter to Charles D. Drake and others, October 5, 1863, CW, 6:499–504.
53 Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 230–31.
54 Albert D. Richardson, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1865), 326.
55 Stoddard, Inside the White House, 134–35.
56 Richardson, The Secret Service, 339.
57 Ibid., 323.
58 Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 27, 1863, CW, 6:414.
59 L. A. Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things at Washington During the Third of a Century (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, & Haffelfinger, 1869), 337–38; Noah Brooks dispatch of October 29, 1863, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 45.
60 “I am glad for you to have the relaxation,” Lincoln wrote to his faithful if loose-lipped supporter, “though I regret the necessity which compels it.” But the president declined to provide Forney with a letter that might show “foreigners that you . . . appreciate me.” Replied Lincoln: “I have no European personal acquaintances, or I would gladly give you letters.” See John Wein Forney to Lincoln, July 25, 1864; Lincoln to Forney, July 28, 1864, CW, 7:468.
61 Lincoln to James C. Conkling, September 3, 1863, CW, 6:430; John Wein Forney to Lincoln, September 3, 1863, and Conkling to Lincoln, September 4, 1863, ALPLC.
62 Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things . . . , 334, 337–39.
63 Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, CW, 6:410. Addressed as a “letter,” the manuscript was more accurately a formal speech crafted to be read aloud in Springfield by a surrogate. For a brilliant interpretation of the speech, see Allen C. Guelzo, “Defending Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling Letter, 1863,” Civil War History 48 (December 2002): 313–37.
64 New York Times, August 27, 1863, New York Tribune, September 3, 1863.
65 [George] Forrester Williams, “General Sheridan’s Bad Temper,” The Independent 53 (October 10, 1901): 2400.
66 Henry E. Wing, When Lincoln Kissed Me: A Story of the Wilderness Campaign (New York and Cincinnati: Abingdon Press, 1913), 38.
67 Lincoln to the Cincinnati Gazette, August 5, 1863, CW, 6:366; Richard Smith telegraph to Thomas Eckert, August 5, 1863, ALPLC.
68 Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things, 328–29.
69 Ibid., 336–37.
70 Theodore Calvin Pease, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1: 665, diary entry for April 3 describing the meeting of March 26.
71 Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, CW, 7:281–82.
72 Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 22, 1864, CW, 7:308.
73 New York Tribune, New York Times, New York Herald, April 29, 1864. For Lincoln’s endorsed copy of the Tribune article, see ALPLC.
74 New York Times, April 29, 1864.
75 Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House 188 (entry for April 24, 1864).
76 Ibid.
77 Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 155.
78 Stoddard, Inside the White House, 135.
79 Carpenter, Six Months at the White House 167.
80 Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 226.
81 Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things, 334–35.
82 Noah Brooks, The Character and Religion of President Lincoln: A Letter of Noah Brooks (Champlain, N.Y.: Moorsfield Press, 1919), 9. For a comprehensive analysis of Brooks’s career and relationship to Lincoln, see Wayne C. Temple and Justin G. Turner, “Lincoln’s ‘Castine’: Noah Brooks,” Lincoln Herald 72, 73, 74 (1970).
83 Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: The Century Co., 1895), 2.
84 Noah Brooks dispatches in P. J. Staudenraus, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Washington: Selections from the Writings of Noah Brooks, Civil War Correspondent (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1967), 148–52, 234, 250. It may be instructive that in his dispatches from the front Brooks mistakenly referred to ten-year-old Thomas “Tad” Lincoln as “Tommy,” a nickname his parents never used for their son—perhaps a sign that Brooks did not know the family quite as well as he claimed.
85 Noah Brooks, dispatch of May 2, 1863, ibid., 178.
86 Noah Brooks, “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31 (July 1865): 226; Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time, 200.
87 CW, 8:154–55; Noah Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery, orig. pub. 1888 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 411–12. Regarding one aspect of his quirky spelling habits, Lincoln told Brooks that when he was a young man, someone had “persuaded” him that not capitalizing the days of the week was “the proper
thing to do,” and in later years, “he unconsciously slid into the old trick without noticing it.” See Brooks, “Lincoln Reminiscences,” The Magazine of History 9 (February 1909): 107.
88 John W. Forney to C. S. Pascal, February 4, 1865, John Wein Forney Papers, Library of Congress; Washington Daily Chronicle, December 7, 1864. For Lincoln’s rejoinder at Alton, October 14, 1858, see CW, 3:315.
89 Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time, 300.
90 Quoted in J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 55.
91 Ibid.
92 New York Herald, September 29, October 8, 1863; Isachar Zacharie to Lincoln, October 22, 1863, ALPLC.
93 See Lincoln to James Hackett, August 17, November 2, 1863, CW, 6:392, 559; Hackett to Lincoln, October 22, 1863 and July 1, 1864 (“I have been personally acquainted with Mr. Henry J. Raymond for more than thirty years”), ALPLC; New York Herald, September 17, 1863.
94 A. K. McClure, Lincoln and Men of War-Times: Some Personal Recollections of War and Politics During the Lincoln Administration (Philadelphia: The Times Publishing Co., 1892), 80–81.
95 See, for example, recommendations for: Charles G. Halpine as a brigadier general (June 1, 1863); former newspaperman Col. T. B. Thorpe for “some position which shall be of value to himself, and where he can be useful to the cause,” June 16, 1863; and Abram Wakeman for the collectorship of the Port of New York, March 10, 1864, copies of all in the George Jones–Henry J. Raymond Papers, New York Public Library.
96 William H. Seward to Lincoln, December 15, 1863, ALPLC.
97 Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, May 24, 1864, CW, 7:360.
98 Edwin M. Stanton to Lincoln, May 24, 1864, ibid. See also E. A. Paul to Lincoln, May 23, May 25, 1864, and Henry J. Raymond to John G. Nicolay, May 30, 1864, ALPLC. Paul’s reports on the Battle of Cedar Creek, as it happened, caused an uproar; critics charged he gave far too much credit to General George Custer, who, according to a Times reader, was not even present. See Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War, 608–9.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 88
