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

by Harold Holzer

  69 Practically speaking, the navy secretary also worried that efficient workers might choose to quit rather than tithe, making it harder for the department to maintain its furious pace of shipbuilding. Welles further feared that corrupt party hacks would in any event skim the collections before they reached the national committee. See Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:108, 122–23.

  70 Ibid., 2:98, 136–37

  71 Ibid., 2:142, 175–76.

  72 New York Tribune, August 5, 1864; New York Times, August 11, 1864.

  73 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, August 10 and August 22, 1864, ALPLC.

  74 Richard M. Corwine to William F. Dole (forwarded “To the President”), August 26, 1864, ALPLC.

  75 Thurlow Weed to William H. Seward, August 22, 1864, ALPLC.

  76 Blind memorandum, August 23, 1864, CW, 7:514; Lincoln to Henry J. Raymond, August 24, 1864, CW, 7:517.

  77 Frederick Douglass to Lincoln, August 29, 1864, ALPLC; Douglass assessment quoted in Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 89; Douglass to Theodore Tilton, October 15, 1864, in Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 572.

  78 Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 9:221.

  79 New York Times, September 5, 1864.

  80 Theodore Tilton to John G. Nicolay, September 6, 1864, John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress. Nicolay had written Tilton two days earlier: “There is no truth whatever in the report that Mr. Lincoln said he was a ‘beaten man.’ ” See Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln at the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 158.

  81 John F. Marszalek, Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press, orig. pub. 1981 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 186–88; Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War with the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 217.

  82 James C. Conkling to Lincoln, September 6, 1864, ALPLC.

  83 James T. Lewis to Horace Greeley, Theodore Tilton, and Parke Godwin, September 7, 1864, unendorsed copy in ALPLC.

  84 Thurlow Weed to William H. Seward, September 10, 1864, ALPLC.

  85 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, September 11, 1864, ALPLC.

  86 See, for example, Horace Greeley to Lincoln, September 16, 1864 (regarding peace) and September 21, 1864 (regarding a trade permit for “Mr. C. Vanderbilt, junior”), both in ALPLC.

  87 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, August 29, 1864, ALPLC. See also Greeley to Lincoln, August 24, 1864.

  88 See Montgomery Blair to John G. Nicolay (about Greeley’s plan for “distributing the papers . . . gratuitously”), September 13[?], 1864; Horace Greeley to John G. Nicolay (regarding prisoner exchanges), September 19, 1864 (“the McClellanites are making capital on this point”), ALPLC; Nicolay to Greeley, September 15, 1864, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, 159–60; Lucius E. Chittenden to Lincoln, October 6, 1864, ALPLC.

  89 New York World, September 21, 1864. The author is grateful to Walter Stahr for bringing this report to his attention.

  90 New York Tribune, September 24, 27, 1864. Greeley launched his sudden barrage of pro-Lincoln editorializing on September 6 by declaring: “Henceforth we must fly the banner of ABRAHAM LINCOLN for the next President,” although he later launched another effort to dump Lincoln from the ticket.

  91 Max Langenschwartz to George B. McClellan, September 26, 1864, George B. McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

  92 Isaac N. Arnold to Lincoln, August 23, 1864, ALPLC.

  93 Lincoln endorsement, June 18, 1864, CW, 7:399.

  94 New York Herald, May 20, 1864.

  95 Welles, Diary, 2:103.

  96 Leonard Swett to William H. Herndon, July 17, 1866, 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), 164. The controversial Todd visitor was Emilie Todd Helm, widow of Confederate general Ben Hardin Helm, who visited the White House in December 1863 after the death of her husband at the Battle of Chickamauga.

  97 Wakeman’s affability (also his unreliability), cited by Welles in Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:222; Lincoln to Abram Wakeman, July 25, 1864, CW, 7:461.

  98 James Harlan quoted in Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House . . . Diary of John Hay, 299; Horace Greeley to William O. Bartlett, August 30, 1864, Horace Greeley Papers, New York Public Library.

  99 Mary Lincoln to Abram Wakeman, September 23 [1864], in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 180–81.

  100 William O. Bartlett to James Gordon Bennett, November 4, 1864, in Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942), 370.

  101 Donald Bruce Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms, 2 vols. (rev. ed.; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:34–35.

  102 For the claim that the president’s campaign to woo Bennett “brought the Herald to Lincoln’s support” see, for example, Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts, Father and Son, Proprietors of the New York Herald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 191. An excellent historiographical assessment can be found in John J. Turner, Jr., and Michael D’Innocenzo, “The President and the Press: Lincoln, James Gordon Bennett and the Election of 1864,” Lincoln Herald 76 (Summer 1974): 66.

  103 New York Herald, September 23, October 6, October 12, 1864; Albert C. Ramsey to George B. McClellan, October 18, 1864, George B. McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

  104 William O. Bartlett to Lincoln, October 20, October 27, 1864, ALPLC.

  105 New York Herald, October 2, October 22, October 25, October 30, November 4, November 7, 1864.

  106 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.

  107 New York Herald, November 1, 1864.

  108 Bartlett told Bennett that Lincoln had described himself as “shut pan, to everybody.” See Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 370; Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 2:258.

  109 Lincoln to James Gordon Bennett, February 20, 1865, CW, 8:308; Bennett to Lincoln, March 6, 1865, ALPLC.

  110 Mary Lincoln to Abram Wakeman, March 20, 1865, in Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, 205.

  111 New York Tribune, November 9, November 10, 1864.

  112 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, November 8, 1864, ALPLC; Horace Greeley telegram (lost) quoted in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), “How the President Took the News,” dispatch of November 11, 1864, 143–144. See also John Wein Forney, Edward L. Baker, and McKee & Fishback to Lincoln, all November 8, 1864, and Brooks, “Table of Election Returns,” undated, probably November 9, 1864, all in ALPLC; Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years (Hartford, Conn.: A. S. Hale, Co., 1870), 169. On the matter of forcing out the additional Republican congressional candidate (who only won 8 percent of the vote), see Henry Wilson to Lincoln, October 30, 1864, ALPLC.

  113 New York Times, New York Tribune, November 10, 1864; New York Herald, November 9, 1864.

  114 Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1864.

  115 Response to a victory serenade, November 10, 1864, CW, 8: 100–101.

  116 Burlingame and Ettlinger, ed., Inside Lincoln’s White House . . . Diary of John Hay, 243.

  117 Stuart Robinson to Lincoln, December 10, 1865, ALPLC.

  118 Rev. Stuart Robinson to President Lincoln, pamphlet, published in Toronto and dated January 26, 1865. For context, see Preston D. Graham, Jr., A Kingdom Not of This World: Stuart Robinson’s Struggle to Distinguish the Sacred from the Secular During the Civil War (Macon
, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002). Although Graham republishes Robinson’s letter in its entirety, he inexplicably dates it January 26, 1866 (page 258). For the Indiana reaction to Robinson, see Sean Scott, A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 162.

  119 James C. Welling, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” North American Review 130 (1880): 182.

  120 Henry J. Raymond, The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln . . . (New York: Derby & Miller, 1865), 646.

  121 Horace Greeley to Lincoln, November 16, 1864; W. N. Bilbo to Lincoln, November 22, 1864, January 26, 1865, ALPLC. History has yet to pass final judgment on the role Bilbo played, if any, in securing House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment resolution. Though still a mystery, Bilbo emerged firmly from the shadows of history as a character in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie, Lincoln.

  122 Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 2nd Session, January 5, 12. 1865, 125. Greeley apparently used his time on the floor to confer with Republicans about the latest prospects for peace. An annoyed Congressman Cox retaliated by ordering the Tribune’s latest editorial read into the record. The article in part predicted that the country would “regret” any effort to quash armistice talks.

  123 Francis Preston Blair, Sr., to Horace Greeley, January 23, January 27, 1865, Horace Greeley Papers, New York Public Library; the former in William Ernst Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 2:311.

  124 Lincoln to Alexander H. Stephens, John A. Campbell, and Robert M. T. Hunter, January 30, 1865, and Lincoln to Congressman James M. Ashley, January 31, 1865, CW, 8:248.

  125 Edward L. Baker and Ward Hill Lamon to Lincoln, February 1, 1865, ALPLC.

  126 New York Times, February 3, 1865; New York Herald, February 2, February 3, 1865.

  127 Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 202; New York Tribune, February 10, 1865. See Horace Greeley on the “Conn. Delegate” to Elihu Washburne, February 6, 1865, Elihu Washburne Papers, Library of Congress.

  128 Joseph M. Medill to Lincoln, January 15, 1865, ALPLC; James B. Conroy, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons, 2014), 196; New York Times, June 26, 1865.

  129 Burlingame, Lincoln Observed, dispatch for February 12, 1865, 161.

  130 New York Herald, February 5, 1865; New York Times, February 5, February 6, February 11, 1865; New York Tribune, February 6, 1865, New York Daily News quoted in New York Tribune, February 3, 1865; Richmond Sentinel, February 7, 1865, quoted in New York Times, February 10, 1865.

  131 Second inaugural address, March 4, 1865, CW, 8:332–33.

  132 Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, 192.

  133 Thurlow Weed to Lincoln, March 4, 1865, ALPLC; Lincoln to Weed, March 15, 1865, CW, 8:356.

  134 New York Tribune, March 5, 1865; New York Herald, March 5, March 6, 1865.

  135 New York Times, March 6, 1865.

  136 Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, March 8, 1865, ALPLC.

  137 For Locke’s pro-Lincoln editorials during the 1864 campaign, see John M. Harrison, The Man Who Made Nasby, David Ross Locke (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 117–18.

  138 New York Herald, April 4, 1865. For early press reports on Lincoln’s planned trip to Richmond, see Richard Wightman Fox, “ ‘A Death Shock to Chivalry and a Mortal Wound to Caste’: The Story of Tad and Abraham Lincoln in Richmond,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 33 (Summer 2012): 1–19; New York Herald, April 3, April 4, 1865.

  139 Crook, quoted in Fox, “ ‘A Death Shock to Chivalry,’ ” 12.

  140 Admiral [David D.] Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 297.

  141 There are several versions of this exchange, most of the early ones in “Negro” dialect. For this quotation, I have relied on a historian who distilled all the versions before adapting what is regarded as the new standard quote: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 576.

  142 New York Herald, April 9, 1864; New York Tribune, April 7, 1865.

  143 Reprinted in The Liberator, April 28, 1865; see also Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front, ed. R. J. M. Blackett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 297.

  144 Charles C. Coffin, “Late Scenes in Richmond,” Atlantic Monthly 15 (June 1865): 753–55.

  145 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 3:582.

  146 National Daily Intelligencer, April 11, 1865.

  147 Jonathan Brigham, “Living Lincoln Links” (transcript), in the Brown University Collection, quoted in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, 40.

  148 New York World, April 13, 1865; Noah Brooks, “Personal Reminiscences of Lincoln,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (February/March 1878): 367; P. J. Staudenraus, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Washington: The Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, Civil War Correspondent (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1967), 439.

  149 L. A. Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things at Washington, During the Third of a Century (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1869), 348–50, 354.

  150 Lincoln’s Last Public Address, April 11, 1865, CW, 8:403; For Booth’s reaction, see testimony of Thomas T. Eckert, May 30, 1867, House Judiciary Committee, Impeachment Investigation, 39th Congress, 2d. Session, and 40th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867), 674.

  151 “President Lincoln,” undated clipping from the contents of Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated, Alfred Whital Stern Collection, Library of Congress. Other cuttings included “The Disaffection of the Southern Soldiers,” “Emancipation in Missouri,” “John Bright on the Presidency,” “The Message of the Governor of Missouri,” “Sherman’s Orders for His March,” and “The Two Platforms.”

  152 Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things at Washington, 349–50.

  153 Nina DePass, ed., A View from the Inn: The Journal of Anna Marie Resseguie, 1851–1867 (Ridgefield, Conn.: Keeler Tavern Preservation Society, 1993), 116, 251.

  154 Caroline Cowles Richards, Village Life in America, 1852–1872, Including the Period of the American Civil War as Told in the Diary of a School Girl, orig. pub. 1913 (Gansevoort, N.Y.: Corner House Historical Publications, 1997), 182–83.

  155 Jonathan W. White, ed., A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 251, 253.

  156 New York World, April 15, 1865.

  157 New York Herald, April 16, April 17, 1865; New York Tribune, April 17, 1865; New York Times, April 16, 1865.

  EPILOGUE: WE SHALL NOT SEE AGAIN THE LIKE

  1 Henry J. Raymond, The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States . . . (New York: Derby & Miller, 1865). For publishing figures, see J. C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1865), 357–58; Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, November 15, 1865, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 284.

  2 Harper’s Weekly, July 3, 1869; John Swinton, Tribute to the Memory of Henry J. Raymond, Late Editor of the New York Times, New York Times, June 19, 1869, reprinted as a pamphlet in the George Jones and Henry J. Raymond Papers, New York Public Library; Swinton, “The New York Daily Papers and Their Editors,” The Independent 52 (Part 2, January 25, 1900): 237.

  3 Obituaries quoted in Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts, Father and Son, Proprietors of the New York Herald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 210–11. Oddly, the Herald’s tribute to its founder was delayed for days; his old competitors published obituaries fi
rst—a situation that the senior Bennett would have found intolerable.

  4 For the print by C. L. Ludwig, Richmond, 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), 173–74. More typical cartoons of the period more accurately suggested Northern antipathy by suggesting that Davis was a coward who had evaded capture by Union troops after Appomattox by dressing in women’s clothes, or that he should he hanged, hoopskirts and all, from a “sour apple tree.” For examples of this genre, see ibid., Chapter 8, “The Belle of Richmond.”

  5 Horace Greeley to Rebekah K. Whipple, November 13, 1872, quoted in Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley: Printer, Editor, Crusader (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 320.

  6 Theodore Cuyler, “Uncle Horace,” The Temperance Record, January 25, 1873, 40.

  7 Charles C. Parton, Glory to God and the Sucker Democracy: A Manuscript Collection of the Letters of Charles H. Lanphier, 5 vols. (Privately printed, Frye-Williamson Press), 1:135.

  8 Andy Van Meter, Always My Friend: A History of the State Journal Register and Springfield (Springfield: The Copley Press, 1981), 334.

  9 Presidential authorization for Charles H. Ray, February 15, 1865, CW, 8:299.

  10 Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1870.

  11 Joseph Medill and James W. Sheahan, Chicago (New York: Scribner’s, 1880).

  12 See Harriet A. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884).

  13 New York World, May 22, 1876.

  14 Mary Cortona Phelan, Manton Marble of the New York World (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1917), Chapter 5: “The Editor in Retirement.”

  15 Douglass’ Monthly, August 1863.

  16 Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876, in Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 624. For the phrase from Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, see CW, 5:537.