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

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  For Edith

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION A More Efficient Service

  A Note on the Newspapers

  PART ONE DRUMBEAT OF THE NATION

  CHAPTER 1 The Types Are in Our Glory

  CHAPTER 2 Not Like Any Other Thunder

  CHAPTER 3 That Attractive Rainbow

  CHAPTER 4 A Position We Cannot Maintain

  CHAPTER 5 A Mean Between Two Extremes

  CHAPTER 6 The Prairies Are on Fire

  CHAPTER 7 The Perilous Position of the Union

  CHAPTER 8 I Can Not Go into the Newspapers

  CHAPTER 9 Lincoln Will Not Talk with Anyone

  PART TWO UNCIVIL WARS

  CHAPTER 10 Wanted: A Leader

  CHAPTER 11 Freedom of the Press Stricken Down

  CHAPTER 12 Slavery Must Go to the Wall

  CHAPTER 13 Sitting on a Volcano

  CHAPTER 14 No Time to Read Any Papers

  CHAPTER 15 Long Abraham a Little Longer

  EPILOGUE We Shall Not See Again the Like

  Acknowledgments

  About Harold Holzer

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  A More Efficient Service

  “He who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

  —Abraham Lincoln, August 21, 1858

  To many of his thriving neighbors, Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, seemed by the 1850s nothing less than a “paradise in miniature.” Abundant with “stores, taverns, and shops,” and illuminated by modern, gas-fed lights, even the unpaved, mud-mired streets could not inhibit what Lincoln called “a great deal of flourishing about in carriages.”1

  Behind its serenely bustling facade, however, the frontier capital also ranked as one of the most contentiously riven political hotbeds in the country—a seething two-party battleground where election campaigns took on the militant urgency of outright war, and combatants deployed newspapers as their most powerful weapons. Such was never more the case than in 1859—the eve of the most potentially divisive presidential election in American history.

  As a state capital boasting some nine thousand permanent residents—and far greater than that number whenever politicians and lobbyists jammed into town for annual legislative sessions—Springfield served as a year-round stage for partisan speeches, rallies, parades, picnics, barbecues, illuminations, conventions, and outright street brawls over both issues and candidates. Even with its population in perpetual flux owing to the almost daily arrival and departure of new residents, its voting-age men stood equally (some said hopelessly) divided between Democrats and Republicans. Whether the legislature was in or out of session, Springfield’s citizens remained passionate about their politics year-round, ever ready to argue the issues of the day, both in person and in print.2

  Fueling this combustible mix were Springfield’s two major newspapers. Both covered neighborhood news with anodyne charm, but when it came to local, state, and national politics, both stoked the ferment with an overtly partisan style that combined advocacy with almost libelous criticism. One paper was dependably pro-Democratic, the other unfailingly pro-Republican, and each was steadfastly, often maliciously, opposed to the other. Rather than merely reprint what one editor termed the city’s constant “flood of eloquence”3 from politicians on both sides, these irreconcilable journals could be depended on to laud allies and eviscerate opponents. When they were not dishing out equal doses of praise and rage in their regular editions, they engaged their presses to print party pamphlets and political orations. If they were fortunate and well connected, they received rewards for their loyalty in the form of government printing jobs. The mutual interdependence that grew up between the press and politics made for a toxic brew. No politician was above it, no editor beyond it, and no reader immune to it.

  Now, with the next national election only a year away, with the contest already being widely touted as the most crucial of the century, and with the issue of slavery roiling the country, local interest in national issues and personalities approached a fever pitch in Springfield, in part for a reason unique to this otherwise typically divided Western city. For by 1859, its residents could boast that their town had incubated two immensely gifted potential aspirants for the White House: United States senator Stephen A. Douglas, and former congressman Abraham Lincoln.

  Douglas, the “Little Giant,” led the pack among his fellow Democrats. And while “Long Abraham” was perhaps not yet widely known enough nationally to rank as a top-tier contender for the Republicans, he remained an intriguing dark-horse possibility for their ticket—perhaps, as some ardent supporters began whispering, for vice president. No one knows precisely when Lincoln began aiming still higher, but to bring the presidency within his sights he certainly knew where he needed first to burnish his political profile: in the Republican Party press, and not just among the usual loyalists who read the newspapers in his hometown. Lincoln had been assiduously courting editors in nearby villages and cities for years. Describing his ambition as “a little engine that knew no rest,” his law partner and political confidant, William H. Herndon, testified that Lincoln “never overlooked a newspaper man who had it in his power to say a good or bad thing of him.”4 For now, however, Lincoln still lacked both real political power and routine attention in the press beyond Springfield. And he still thirsted for both.

  That May, Lincoln made a remarkable move to recalibrate this frustrating political equilibrium. The lifelong and voracious newspaper reader decided to become a newspaper owner as well—by acquiring a weekly journal complete with its own printing press and a politically compatible editor ready to churn out enthusiastic editorials lauding him. It did not seem to matter that he would never be able to read the product himself. For the paper would be printed in German, a language he had only briefly studied but never mastered. Moreover, it would be composed in Gothic-style Fraktur typeface, an elaborate black-letter script no more decipherable to him than Sanskrit.5

  To comprehend what motivated this indelibly American politician to purchase a foreign language newspaper he could never hope to comprehend requires a quantum leap of historical imagination—back to an era when the press and politics were profoundly interconnected, and newspapers themselves became more overtly partisan, more narrowly targeted, yet more deeply influential than at any time before or since.

  Abraham Lincoln’s emergence as a newspaper publisher constituted but one example of the pervasive and sometimes incestuous relationships that grew up between politicians and journalists in the fierce battles for public opinion and government power in the decades leading up to the Civil War—and beyond. That such affiliations, however common at the time, were still considered vaguely unsavory by some, seems evident in how assiduously Lincoln kept his own newspaper investment quiet. Except for his private banker, his law partner, and but one fellow Illinois Republican politician, he seems to have told no one about the purchase at the time, or, indeed, for the rest of his life. For four score years, his involvement remained largely unknown even to biographers.6 Yet the truth is, the arrangement would likely have surprised, much less scandalized, f
ew of his contemporaries.

  Lincoln was neither the first nor the last politician of his era to dabble in the newspaper business—ethnic or otherwise, covertly or not. Countless prominent officials of the mid-nineteenth century did so with confident abandon, making partisan journalism an integral cog in their political machines. This vanished tradition informs the neglected story explored in this book: how in the age of Lincoln the press and politics often functioned in tandem as a single, tightly organized entity in the furious competition to win power and to promote—or, alternatively, resist—political and social change. The financial and popular success that many newspapers enjoyed in pursuit of political goals enabled them to influence both leaders and events, and emboldened them to report on politics with a biased fury unimaginable in previous or subsequent generations. Not until the Civil War would precedent-shattering conflicts arise between government and the press, forcing these traditions into dramatic (and perhaps overdue) change.

  To explore these complex relationships, and calculate their profound impact on history, this book proposes to reexamine Lincoln’s political life through prominent period newspapers and their editors—focusing not just on how newspapers reported on and influenced his ascent, but how his own struggle for power, and that of most of his political contemporaries, unfolded within a concurrent competition for preeminence among newspapermen to influence politics and politicians. Newspapers of the day occasionally manufactured politicians, just as politicians often manufactured newspapers—but in the end they were of, by, and for the same environment. They became mutually dependent and totally inseparable—weapons in the same arsenal. In some cases, they synchronized their efforts so closely that it was impossible to determine where one organization ended its work and the other began it. Lincoln embraced and thrived in this milieu, yet the story has escaped full scrutiny since.

  • • •

  The emergence of a party press had begun in earnest the century before. In the mid-1790s, the explosive growth of political enthusiasm and the slow but sure development of improved printing technologies coincided to make newspapers more widely available as well as more openly partisan, and served to connect politicians to both editors and their subscribers. In time, readers came to align themselves with party newspapers as routinely as they began aligning themselves with political organizations: both loyalties helped define their identities. In this atmosphere, political parties commenced openly funding and promoting sympathetic newspapers, while newspapers began overtly shilling for party organizations. Newspapers not only brought people together, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, but remained “necessary to keep them together”—and, as it often turned out in a vast and increasingly sectionalized nation, to keep them apart.7

  George Washington’s second administration was the first to endure this seismic shift in the relationship between politics and publishing. An increasingly robust anti-Washington press surprised and dismayed the father of his country, who was accustomed to universal approbation, and its growth may have helped dissuade him from seeking a third term. The long, subsequent conflict between John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans further hardened newspaper loyalties, inspiring press attacks on political leaders that occasionally bordered on the scurrilous. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Bache, founded the American Aurora specifically to advance the Jeffersonian worldview and eviscerate Adams’s affection for the British.8 Adams infamously reacted by signing a sedition law that imposed fines and imprisonment on editors who dared to “print, utter or publish . . . scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States.” No less convinced that newspapers presented “only the caricatures of disaffected minds,” Jefferson variously courted and suppressed the press, too. Late in life, he claimed that he read only the Richmond Enquirer, “and in that chiefly the advertisements,” as he caustically remarked, “for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”9

  Yet there was no ignoring the press’s growing ubiquity and influence. New York state alone boasted thirty-one hand-printed newspapers by the beginning of the new century.10 Within ten years, the country at large could count 376 papers selling more than 22 million copies annually—even though fully half the American population was then sixteen years old or younger, a fifth were slaves barred from reading altogether, and most literate subscribers commonly shared their papers with as many as twenty friends and relatives each. As Noah Webster marveled: “In no other country on earth, not even in Great Britain, are Newspapers so generally circulated among the body of the people, as in America.”11

  To speed government news to this scattered population, leading politicians and journalists hatched the transformational idea in around 1800 of designating one particular Washington-based newspaper as an official political “organ.” For generations thereafter, whenever one party or another took over the White House, an anointed journal assumed the privilege of breaking administration news in the capital, and introducing debate points that papers in outlying cities could readily adopt for their own readers.

  By this time, only the absence of faster printing presses and more reliable transportation systems stood in the way of spreading political information more rapidly throughout the news-hungry young nation. Even editors privy to exclusive stories could not yet rush them to readers dwelling in isolated rural outposts. Communications remained so sluggish that press reports of the European peace treaty ending the War of 1812 failed to reach either General Andrew Jackson or his British foes at New Orleans in time to prevent them from fighting a fierce battle there. Jackson proceeded to lead his troops to a victory that won him glory—and perhaps the presidency—but in retrospect proved unnecessary. As an occupier, he promptly limited freedom of the press in the city, in one case arresting a citizen for publishing a critical letter to the editor (a case Lincoln would later cite in defending his own wartime restrictions on freedom of the press). Jackson firmly held that newspapers often villainously misled the public “through ignorance but more frequently from dishonest design.”12

  “Old Hickory” apparently learned from such experiences. For one thing, he named Amos Kendall, editor of the pro-Democratic Argus of Western America, as postmaster general.13 Expanding on the tradition of rewarding loyal newspapers once he became president, he saw to the creation of an entirely new, official administration organ called the United States Telegraph. Its editor, a Missouri-born former Indian fighter named Duff Green, who remained professionally active into the Civil War era, composed his editorial “batteries” with “such vigor and clamor” that he quickly earned the nickname “Rough Green.”14 Green innovatively used his position as the president’s official journalist to establish a large personal following and a wide network of pro-Jackson publications nationwide—essentially the first newspaper “chain,” one in this case linked by shared political beliefs.

  To broaden circulation of the Telegraph, Green initiated a more dubious tradition by seeing to it that Democratic congressmen assumed the cost of distributing his paper in their home districts, a practice that not surprisingly invited abuse. One representative was soon discovered to be using his free postal privileges to send more than sixteen hundred papers to constituents in Kentucky.15 Unthinkable today, such crossover relationships became commonplace in the early nineteenth century, when newspapers were expected to remain faithful to their political patrons, and vice versa. In this linked political culture, there was no room for dissent. When the hot-tempered Jackson later lost patience with the increasingly independent Duff Green, the president scuttled their relationship and helped establish the Washington Globe as the party’s replacement mouthpiece.16 Jackson’s enemies even whispered that he edited the new paper himself. Although untrue, Old Hickory’s rumored personal involvement seemed fully credible at the time. For his part, Duff Green joined the opposition Whigs.

  It is little wonder that one nineteenth-century author soon came to regard the term “party organ
” as a “misnomer” for the nation’s newspapers, “or rather, only a half name.” As L. D. Ingersoll argued: “They should have been called ‘hand-organs,’ for the palpable reason that hand-organs can only grind out those particular tunes which the machines are manufactured to play.”17 But Jackson was hardly the sole organ grinder. Criticizing the Telegraph as “scurrilous and abusive,” his Whig political enemy John Quincy Adams saw to the establishment of the Washington Daily Intelligencer in time to advance his run for president against Old Hickory in 1824. The Intelligencer soon boasted its own web of well-financed satellite papers across the country, and eventually counted leading politicians like Daniel Webster among its contributors.18

  By the late 1830s, with printing processes now modernizing rapidly, many cities and towns across the country boasted successful newspapers of their own. The growing hunger for information—coupled with a rising literacy rate along with a soaring passion for politics—increasingly spawned not one but two rival publications in even the smallest villages. Soon, if a municipality bred one particular journal targeted to local Democrats, it invariably hosted another dedicated to (or run by) the Whig opposition. These papers alternatively endorsed or assailed the official White House line, and applied rigid partisan judgments to regional, along with national, issues and candidates. Within this increasingly connected partisan world, publishers began entering electoral politics themselves, just as politicians—like Jackson and, later, Lincoln—occasionally backed newspapers to expand their influence and reach.

  By the time both Lincoln and his future rival, Douglas, came of age politically in the American West in the 1840s, newspaper publishers were routinely and overtly participating in grassroots politics and vice versa. Elected officials and aspiring candidates labored in tandem to plan campaign strategy, draft speeches, circulate propaganda, and attend conventions not only as correspondents but as official delegates. Working together, they drafted party resolutions and platforms, printed circulars and special “extra” editions during election campaigns, offered printing services and copyediting for orators, and openly advised candidates and officeholders. American newspapers, as historian Mark E. Neely acutely observed, became a virtual “branch of politics,” and in parallel fashion, politicians became full partners in newspaper publishing.19 In the words of early nineteenth-century New York congressman Jabez Delno Hammond, newspapers became “to political parties in this country what working tools are to the operative mechanic.”20