99 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, and Lincoln to Raymond, Thurlow Weed, and Edwin Morgan, August 31, 1864, in CW, 7:526.
100 Usher and Julian recollections are in Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 60, 87.
101 John G. Nicolay to Horace Greeley, April 25, 1864, in Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, 138; Greeley to Nicolay, April 26, 1864, Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress, Martha Todd White to Lincoln, December 19, 1863, ALPLC. In truth, there was no love lost between the Lincolns and Martha. The president had barred his half-sister-in-law from the White House when she attempted to visit unannounced; Lincoln even threatened to have her arrested as a spy. The Tribune’s first and second articles (the second the “correction”) were published on March 28 and April 27, 1864, respectively.
102 Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 186–90, 193.
103 Clipping from the John Hay scrapbook, October 14, 1861, John Hay Library, Brown University, reprinted in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 108.
104 Dispatches of July 31, 1862, December 25, 1862, New York Express, 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), 90, 128.
105 John Russell Young, “Men Who Reigned: Bennett, Greeley, Raymond, Prentice, Forney,” Lippincott’s Monthly 51 (February 1893): 185–86, 188–90.
106 Noah Brooks dispatch of May 28, 1863, in Staudenraus, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, 188–89.
107 Washington National Intelligencer, June 29, 1842, quoted in Wilhemus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital from Its Foundation Through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 2:282.
108 Ibid.
109 Murat Halstead, “Some Reminiscences of Mr. Villard,” The North American Review of Reviews 23 (January 1901): 62.
110 Henry Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard: Journalist and Financier, 1835–1900, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 1:153–54, 2:267.
111 See H. L. Wayland to Manton Marble, October 13, 1862, and Samuel L. M. Barlow to Marble, June 15, 1868 (Barlow joked that he stepped in to rescue the foundering World because Republicans were unwilling to engage in “hazardous speculation”), both letters in Manton Marble Papers, Library of Congress. See also Mary Cortona Phelan, Manton Marble of the New York World (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1957), 7–8.
112 New York World, September 10, 1862.
113 New York World, September 13, 1862.
114 New York World, September 24, 1862.
115 New York World, May 6, 1863.
116 Samuel Cox to Manton Marble, June 1, 1862, Manton Marble Papers, Library of Congress.
117 New York World, May 18, 1864.
118 New York Tribune, May 19, 1864. The Albany Argus for May 19 assessed the Herald print run at “fifty reams.”
119 Prime, Stone, Hale, and Hallock, letter to the New York Times, published May 19, 1864.
120 Richard Yates to Lincoln, May 18, 1864, ALPLC; Lincoln to Yates, May 18, 1864, CW, 7:351.
121 David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps During the Civil War (New York: The Century Co., 1907), 231–32.
122 Lincoln to Major General John A. Dix, May 18, 1864, CW, 7:347–48. Dix had already launched an investigation of his own.
123 Sydney H. Gay and others to Lincoln, May 19, 1864, ALPLC. John Nicolay wrote a personal note to Horace Greeley to shoot down rumors that Salmon Chase had instigated the crackdown.
124 Boston Commonwealth, June 6, 1864; Bryant’s views reported in the New York Times, May 21, 1864.
125 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:37–38, entry for May 23, 1864.
126 Ibid., 38. For congressional action, see Josiah Grinnell to Lincoln, May 25, 1864 (explaining his watered-down resolution, meant to replace a more condemnatory one introduced by Democratic congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox, ALPLC. See John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 9:47.
127 New York World, May 23, 1864.
128 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 3:451.
129 See Edwards Pierrepoint to Edwin M. Stanton, July 3, 1864, ALPLC. This letter from the War Department attorney acting for Dix’s defense survives in the Lincoln Papers, indicating that Stanton shared information about the case with the president. For reports of the subsequent hearings, see New York Times, July 4, July 10, 1864. For Marble’s open letter, see New York World, May 23, 1863. Horatio Seymour letters to District Attorney A. Oakey Hall were published in the New York Times, May 25, May 29, 1864. Marble kept the issue alive for years. In 1867 he republished the editorial in pamphlet form with an epigraph from Cicero on the title page: “Nulla potential supra leges esse debit” (“There ought to be no power above the laws”). See Manton Marble, Letter to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Privately printed, 1867).
130 Thomas F. Carroll, “Freedom of Speech and of the Press During the Civil War,” Virginia Law Review 9 (May 1923): 527.
131 Henry Ward Beecher to John Defrees, August 2, 1864, ALPLC; Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, August 22, 1864, with endorsements by Stanton and Lincoln, August 23, original in ALPLC (also CW, 7: 512–13). Defrees agreed with Beecher that “The public good does not require the further punishment of Howard.” See Defrees to Lincoln (accompanying Beecher note), September 16, 1864, ALPLC. The three-week delay between Beecher’s plea and Howard’s pardon does not indicate indecision on Lincoln’s part; Defrees was simply away from Washington when the Beecher letter arrived, and did not forward it to the White House until his return.
132 John Defrees to Lincoln, ibid. See also Congressman Moses Odell to Lincoln, September 8, 1864, ALPLC.
133 Joseph Howard, Jr., to Lincoln, September 19, 1864; Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, September 20, 1864, CW, 8:13.
134 New York World, May 23, 1863.
135 For draft, dated May 17, 1864, see CW, 7:344.
136 James R. Gilmore to Sydney Howard Gay, May 18, 1864, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University.
137 The most authoritative, original, and thoroughly researched article on this subject is Menahem Blondheim, “ ‘Public Sentiment Is Everything’: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,” Journal of American History 89 (December 2002): 889–92. For Independent Telegraph Company shutdowns in other cities, see Donald E. Markle, ed., The Telegraph Goes to War: The Personal Diary of David Homer Bates, Lincoln’s Telegraph Operator (Hamilton, N.Y.: Edmonston, 2003), 93.
138 Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, 242. Henry Villard did not mention the humiliating incident in his memoirs.
139 Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, 235–40.
140 Proclamation Calling for 500,000 Volunteers, July 18, 1864, CW, 7:448–49.
141 Gilmore, Personal Recollections, 146.
142 Charles M. Segal, Conversations with Lincoln (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), 320–21.
143 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1868), 409.
144 New York Tribune, February 23, 1864.
145 Isaac B. Gara to Simon Cameron, February 20, 1864, ALPLC.
146 Horace Greeley to Salmon P. Chase, September 29, 1863; Chase diary entry, October 2, 1863, both in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, 2 vols. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993), 1:459.
147 Quoted in Harlan Hoyt Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), 351.
148 Noah Brooks dispatch of June 8, 1864, in Staudenraus, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, 335.
149 Carpent
er, Six Months at the White House, 168.
FIFTEEN: LONG ABRAHAM A LITTLE LONGER
1 William Cullen Bryant to Lincoln, June 25, 1864, June 30, 1864, ALPLC, and Lincoln to Bryant, June 27, 1864, CW, 7:410.
2 Lincoln to Thurlow Weed, March 25, 1864, CW, 7:268.
3 John G. Nicolay to Lincoln, March 30, 1864, copy in ALPLC.
4 Nicolay met with Weed and other leading Republicans to discuss Customs House patronage on August 30, 1864; see Nicolay to Lincoln of that date, sent by hand via Robert Lincoln, ALPLC. For Raymond endorsement of his candidate for the post, Abram Wakeman, see Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, March 10, 1864, ALPLC. See also Nicolay to Lincoln, August 29, 1864, ALPLC.
5 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, September 11, September 14, 1864, ALPLC.
6 New York World, June 20, 1864.
7 Reprinted in Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847–1865 by Ward Hill Lamon, ed. Dorothy Lamon (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1895), 143.
8 Unsigned letter to Horace Greeley, April 20, 1864, enclosed in Samuel Wilkeson to John G. Nicolay, September 21, 1864, John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress.
9 Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 141.
10 Ibid., 142.
11 “One of Mr. Lincoln’s Jokes,” New York World, September 9, 1864.
12 A. J. Perkins to Ward H. Lamon, September 10, 1864, in CW, 7:550; Lincoln quoted in Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 144.
13 Handwritten memorandum by Lincoln, signed by Ward Hill Lamon, ca. September 12, 1864, CW, 7:549.
14 Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 146, 148, 153. Lamon corrected the record only after Lincoln’s death.
15 For the lithograph by “CAL,” see Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., American Political Prints, 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 536–37.
16 David G. Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: Bromley & Co., 1864), 61, 69. Croly was a former reporter for the New York Herald.
17 [James Van Evrie], Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; or, An Answer to “Miscegenation” (New York: John Bradburn, 1864), 39, 56.
18 New York Daily News, April 4, 1864.
19 New York Freeman’s Journal & Catholic Register, April 30, 1864, quoted in David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 1994), 171.
20 New York World, July 12, 1864, September 18, 1864.
21 New York World, October 17, 1864.
22 George McClellan to Manton Marble, June 25, 1864, Manton Marble Papers, Library of Congress.
23 New York World, October 22, 1864; headlines are from the editions of September 30, October 1, 3, 8, 14, 19, 28, 1864.
24 See for example, the story on Post Office espionage, New York World, October 20, 1864, the untitled editorial of October 22, 1864, and “Justifying Mob Law and Outrage,” November 2, 1864.
25 For an example of the “Miscegenation Ball” stories, see New York World (quoting New York Tribune), September 25, 1864.
26 New York World, October 3, 1864.
27 Joseph Holt quoted in Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak, The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013), 23.
28 New York World, November 7, 1864.
29 William H. Simpson file, Record Group 21, Records of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, August 1864, National Archives, Boston. The author is indebted to Bob Rackmales for uncovering and sharing these documents through Dr. Jonathan White. See also Joseph Williamson, History of the City of Belfast in the State of Maine from Its First Settlement in 1770 to 1875 (Portland, Maine: Loring, Short, & Harmon, 1877), 355.
30 Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. John T. Morse, Jr., 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 2:109–10. Gilmore’s piece was published in the prestigious Atlantic.
31 James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 1898), 288–89.
32 The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1864 . . . (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1869), 393–94. The accounting lists thirty-six incidents, two for the Columbus Crisis, plus the closings that occurred after the publication of the bogus presidential proclamation.
33 Isaac N. Arnold to Lincoln, July 2, July 18, 1864, ALPLC; Lincoln to John L. Scripps, July 5, July 20, 1864, CW, 7:423–424, 453.
34 See Greeley to W. C. Jewett, January 2, 1863, quoted in James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the “New York Tribune” . . . rev. ed., J. orig. pub. 1872 (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1889), 469.
35 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, ALPLC.
36 Shelby M. Cullom, Fifty Years of Public Service: Personal Recollections (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911), 101.
37 Chauncey M. Depew, My Memories of Eighty Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 62.
38 Recollection by Iowa senator James Harlan, quoted in Ida Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 4 vols., orig. pub. 1900 (New York: Lincoln History Society, 1907), 3:198.
39 James M. Ashley, Address at the Fourth Annual Banquet of the Ohio Republican League, 1891, quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 182.
40 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, July 10, July 13, 1864, ALPLC; Lincoln to Greeley, two letters of July 15, 1864, CW, 7:440–42.
41 Pass for John Hay signed by Lincoln, July 15, 1864, CW, 7, 442; Lincoln to Horace Greeley, July 9, 1864, CW, 7:435; Michael Burlingame and John T. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 224—report ca. July 21, 1864.
42 John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 9:194; New York Daily News, September 22, 1864.
43 Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House . . . Diary of John Hay, 226; Francis N. Zabriskie, Horace Greeley, the Editor (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890), 249–50.
44 Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House . . . Diary of John Hay, 226–27; Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:110–11.
45 Depew, My Memories of Eighty Years, 63.
46 Horace Greeley to John Hay, August 4, 1864, Greeley to Lincoln, August 8, 1864, ALPLC; Lincoln to Greeley, August 6, 1864, CW, 7:482.
47 Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 9, 1864, and to Henry Raymond, August 15, 1864, CW, 7:489, 494. Excerpt is from Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, ALPLC.
48 Both comments from the New York Tribune, July 26, 1864, in Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1936), 166.
49 Joseph Medill to John Hay, August 10, 1864, in John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 89. The Clay letter is in OR, series 4, vol. 3, 586.
50 Noah Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery, orig. pub. 1888 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 402.
51 William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 211.
52 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:112.
53 Chauncey Depew recollection quoted in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 436.
54 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:272.
55 Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866), 152. Greeley’s new book was the first volume of a comprehensive history of the slavery crisis and the war: see Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America . . . (Hartford, Conn.: O. D.
Case, 1864).
56 Douglass chapter in Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 189; Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 153.
57 Charles D. Robinson to Lincoln, August 16, 1864, ALPLC.
58 Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864 (draft), CW, 7:500–501.
59 John Wein Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1881), 2:180–81.
60 Lincoln to Isaac Schermerhorn, who had invited the president “to attend a Union Mass Meeting at Buffalo,” September 12, 1864, CW, 8:2; speech to the 148th Ohio Regiment, August 31, 1864, CW, 7:528; New York Tribune, September 2, 1864.
61 Thomas A. Horrocks, Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 83; Joseph R. Nightingale, “Joseph H. Barrett and John Locke Scripps, Shapers of Lincoln’s Religious Image,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 92 (Autumn 1999): 262.
62 J. C. Derby to John G. Nicolay, February 24, 1864, John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress.
63 J. C. Derby to John H. Nicolay, March 22, 1864, Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, April 4, 1864, ALPLC. For Lincoln’s message to the workingmen, March 21, 1864, see CW, 7:259–60. In an era in which civilians were constantly referred to as “Major” or “Colonel” in recognition of even the most cursory military service, some of Raymond’s admirers called him “Governor”—in recognition of his brief service as New York’s lieutenant governor.
64 J. C. Derby to John G. Nicolay, April 11, April 19, May 16, 1864. For Lincoln’s address at Baltimore, April 18, 1864, see CW, 7:301–3.
65 Henry J. Raymond, History of the Administration of President Lincoln . . . (New York: Derby & Miller, 1864), 484; “Now Ready . . . Mr. Raymond’s History of President Lincoln’s Administration,” advertising circular in George Jones and Henry J. Raymond Papers, New York Public Library. See also, Louis A. Warren, “Raymond’s Lincoln Books,” Lincoln Lore, No. 848 (July 9, 1945).
66 New York World, May 18, 1864.
67 J. C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1884), 357.
68 See, for example, The Issues of the Campaign. Speeches of Henry J. Raymond and Gen. J. H. Martindale, Delivered at the Union Meeting in Tweddle Hall, Albany, on the Evening of Wednesday, October 11, 1865, pamphlet in the George Jones–Henry Raymond Papers, New York Public Library.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 89
