Lincoln and the Power of the Press Read online

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  Horace Greeley, the other young man who began his initial adult journey in 1831 but at age twenty, a year shy of his legal majority, not only commenced his career at a younger age, but with a keener sense of his destiny.

  What he called his “unromantic life” began in a log home near Amherst, New Hampshire, like Lincoln on a cold February day. He entered the world struggling for breath so laboriously that few in his family expected him to live more than a day.14 The infant surprised his parents by surviving, but grew up so pale of complexion that acquaintances nicknamed the “feeble, sickly child” the “Ghost.” Treated almost like “a guest or a pet” in his own home, the boy nonetheless performed his share of work. From age six to fifteen, he did his best to cut down small trees, drive oxen, and help till the “rocky” New England ground. He was certainly less proficient at such work than Lincoln. But like Lincoln, whenever he could steal time, young Greeley read voraciously—read, some later claimed, even before he could speak. He could “read very thoroughly at 4 years of age,” he boasted, and “quite passably with the book upside down.” Spelling, he remembered, “was my favorite, as is natural for a child of tenacious memory and no judgment.” From the beginning, it was the Holy Book, and eventually “the newspaper he was given to play with”—an Amherst weekly to which his father subscribed. The Bible and newspapers: for both Lincoln and Greeley they represented equally compelling gospel.15

  From an early age, Horace knew what he wanted to do with his life. “Having loved and devoured newspapers—indeed, every form of periodical—from childhood,” he remembered, “I early resolved to be a printer if I could.”16 Responding, appropriately enough, to a newspaper advertisement, Greeley’s father apprenticed the young man in 1826 to the publisher of a modest journal called The Northern Spectator in East Poultney, Vermont, twelve miles from their home. Horace was only fifteen.

  For the next five years he worked industriously at the struggling paper, learning every aspect of the trade, from typesetting to writing. In return, he received six months’ free board and a forty-dollar annual stipend for clothing. Before long, he recalled, “my hands were blistered and my back lamed by working off the very considerable edition of the paper on an old-fashioned two-pull, wooden Ramage press—a task beyond my boyish strength.”17 If it seemed to young Horace like a form of slavery, he never specifically said so. He not only gained no physical strength from his labors; he lost his good eyesight. At a young age, the owlish-looking Greeley already took to wearing wire-rimmed spectacles to correct his vision. Like Lincoln, he remembered making “many valued friends” in his new surroundings. Yet when The Northern Spectator folded in 1830, Greeley made no effort to linger in Vermont. Instead, with nowhere else to go, he retreated to his family at its new homestead in the wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania.18

  He was reduced to “chopping wood” again, and by his own admission neither “efficiently nor satisfactorily.” By spring, Greeley concluded that “the life of a pioneer was one to which I was poorly adapted.” Determining to make “one more effort to resume my chosen calling,” he scoured the region for a newspaper position, finally securing one at the nearby Erie Gazette for the salary of fifteen dollars a month.19

  Young Greeley held this job only until summer, when he turned down an opportunity to put his money where his ambition lay and become a junior partner at the struggling Gazette. It seemed to him the wrong enterprise at the wrong time. To his professed horror, its proprietor, Joseph M. Sterrett, seemed to love politics more than journalism. The publisher actually aspired to a seat in the Pennsylvania State Senate, and Greeley admitted that at the time he heartily disapproved of such inclinations. The young man even seemed shocked that local readers suffered from a similar “intense addiction to partisan strife.” As he remembered of his own naïveté: “I was fairly appalled by the assiduity and vehemence wherewith political controversy was prosecuted by nearly every man and boy I met in Erie.” For now, the kind of political activism in which Greeley would come enthusiastically to specialize seemed repellent, antithetical to journalism itself—though he later admitted that he, too, became “an ardent politician when not yet half old enough to vote.”20 He instead applied for an editor’s job at distant Wilkes-Barre, but lacking sufficient experience was rejected.

  With only ten dollars in his pocket, few realistic prospects in his adopted state, and, as he took note, with a surfeit of equally ambitious printers beginning to head west in search of opportunity, Greeley made a bold, if unexpected choice. In an ironic reversal on the advice for which he would later become famous, the young man decided to go east. Unlike Lincoln, who elected to begin his career in a tiny village, Greeley headed to the fastest-growing city in the nation.

  Horace Greeley reached New York City on August 17, 1831, still not quite twenty-one years old, dressed in “scanty and seedy clothes,” and with but “ten dollars in my pocket and not an acquaintance within two hundred miles”—another piece of “floating driftwood,” but at least in a bigger pond, and more certain than ever about his professional goals.

  Here, Greeley would have encountered a breathtaking skyline crowned by church steeples almost as far as the human eye could see, all surrounded by a harbor choked with ships, large and small, lurching upriver and down, and from shore to shore, in all directions at once. Here were horse-drawn carriages and overstuffed sidewalk bins vying with pedestrians for precious space along newly paved streets and sidewalks; and brick and wooden structures sitting cheek to cheek along streets that faded at their eastern and western extremes toward the mysterious uncertainties of the docks. Greeley arrived in town in the middle of the hottest month of the summer, a time when, as another visitor of the day complained, even when dressed “in the thinnest clothing, the perspiration streams from every pore, trickles from every hair of the head, and falls in a shower to the floor.” Residents had no choice but to drink profusions of the “fresh” water that, according to warning signs adorning every public pump, might well cause death from cholera. To Greeley, it was a paradise.21

  By his own description “slender, pale, and plain,” he remained so rustic-looking he feared no one would take him seriously. In fact, the editor of the prestigious New York Journal of Commerce refused him a place, telling him that he resembled “a runaway apprentice from some country office.” Only later would Greeley learn proudly to emphasize his singular appearance—until his country hats, long coats, and, later, chin whiskers, became not impediments but instantly recognizable trademarks.22

  The very morning after his arrival, August 18, the aspiring journalist landed his first New York job at a Chatham Street printing establishment run by one John T. West. The youngster’s unenviable assignment—which he quickly concluded he had secured because no one else in town would take it—had little to do with newspaper work. It required him painstakingly to set a tiny Bible in such minuscule type he could barely see it. Worse, when Greeley finished the arduous project, he found himself unemployed again: West had no further work for him. Horace moved on to a monthly publication, which reneged on his meager salary, and then slunk back to West’s to typeset a new edition of the Book of Genesis. The only mark of upward mobility he could afford was a “second-hand suit of clothes” purchased from a “Hebrew” who “shaved me villainously for them.”23

  Greeley was beginning to feel as if he might spend the rest of his life bent over type racks fourteen hours a day. He considered looking for work in Washington, but “could not pay my way” to the capital. On New Year’s Day 1832, Greeley at last secured a promising new post as a compositor at the Spirit of the Times, a thrice-weekly sporting journal that two of the young printers from West’s had recently launched on nearby Wall Street. Initially “their paper did not pay,” Greeley lamented, adding: “I know that it was difficult to make it pay me.”24 But Greeley might have been willing to pay his new employers for the priceless experience he began acquiring. Eventually the salary came trickling in. And exactly a ye
ar later, on January 1, 1833, Greeley felt he had enough experience and, more miraculously, enough funds, to launch a newspaper of his own. Readers evidently disagreed. Greeley’s new Morning Post survived a total of twenty-one days. Its editor, Greeley admitted of himself, “had neither money nor brains.”25

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  In New Salem, which boasted no papers of its own, Abraham Lincoln meanwhile openly embraced the interlocking worlds of partisan politics and journalism that Greeley still eschewed. Out-of-town newspapers provided for him both a source of political news from afar and a means of expanding the reach of his political voice at home. In the same year Greeley went to work at the Spirit of the Times, 1832, Lincoln not only began reading law, but though not yet an attorney, parlayed his growing neighborhood popularity into his first run for public office. He launched his bid for a seat in the State Assembly by doing precisely what his experience as a teenage freelancer in Indiana had taught him: publishing his views in the nearest paper. In this case, it was the newly established Sangamo Journal. He would remain its close and loyal friend, and sometimes more, for the better part of the next three decades.

  Just the previous November, a husky, determined, Connecticut-born, thirty-five-year-old publisher named Simeon Francis had established the Journal with his brother Josiah in the nearby town of Springfield. Situated about twenty-two miles southeast of New Salem, Springfield was still a backwater—except perhaps in comparison to the primitive outpost Lincoln still called home. Not yet the capital of Illinois, it boasted a few multistory wooden buildings and a good deal of boglike mud occupied principally by roaming pigs. As for Francis, he had an unpromising track record in the journalism business: he had already launched and lost two previous papers, one in New London, the other in Buffalo, the latter put out of business when sacked by an anti-Masonic mob—a violent fate to which “radical” presses of the day were occasionally subjected. Turning dejectedly for a time to farming, Francis yearned to resume his press career. After a brief stint in St. Louis, where the palpable existence of slavery made him uneasy, Francis decided to gamble on establishing his new paper in Illinois.

  No one is quite certain why. With no more than eight hundred inhabitants, most of them recent arrivals who yet lacked a sense of community and had little cash money to spare for subscriptions, Springfield seemed an inhospitable place for the news business. The town had already seen three earlier papers come to life—and promptly die for lack of readers. Nor would its many conservative, Southern-born residents look kindly on the newly arrived Yankee publisher or his politics, which emphasized free labor and government-funded improvements to roads and canals. But Springfield was also a town increasingly populated by equally ambitious newcomers similarly attracted to its possibilities, and determined to grow along with it. Illinois, Simeon Francis earnestly believed, was “the country for poor men—rich in soil, healthy, and pleasant.”26

  Urged on enthusiastically by Josiah, who rosily insisted that the town was the perfect spot for their new enterprise, the Francis brothers launched their weekly paper with just fifteen subscribers in hand at an advance price of $2.50 a year. By 1832, Josiah would boast, “we are now publishing upwards of 600.”27 But the economics of the business remained a challenge. Advertising was scarce. That first year, the weekly took in just $4.50 for six insertions of a paid notice seeking the return of “a prisoner who broke jail.” Four weeks’ worth of legal notices for a writ of attachment brought in only $3.75. Seven repetitions of an advertisement for a local school yielded but $2.75.28

  Nor was editorial copy easy to come by. For its earliest editions, with scant local news to report, the Francis brothers filled their four-page sheet with reprints from established journals like the Albany Argus and the Liverpool Mercury. This was standard procedure at the time for isolated rural papers. Because copyright laws of the day were either lax or unenforceable, small, remote journals were emboldened to purloin articles from the big-city papers that arrived by mail. The earliest editions of the Journal featured maudlin fictional stories lifted from out-of-town literary journals, standard how-to pieces (like a primer on breastfeeding captured from Washington’s National Intelligencer), and polemics that included an article on women’s domestic obligations (emphasizing obedience to their breadwinning husbands) “contributed” by (more likely stolen without permission from) no less than Catherine Beecher. Most of the Journal’s advertisements came from out-of-town papers, too, and were likely unpaid. Its earliest local news items more often than not carried no addresses, for the simple reason that few of Springfield’s streets had yet been given names.29

  Initially the paper made a show of appearing multi-partisan, vowing to print any article that was “decorously written.” To refuse to carry contrary viewpoints, it trumpeted in February 1832, would abridge “the freedom of the press—‘the palladium of our liberties.’ ”30 Even in these formative days, however, readers would have little doubt about the Journal’s philosophy—and as the custom of the day already dictated, newspapers were usually founded around specific political principles and party organizations, and with few exceptions remained loyal to both. The earliest issues of the Journal championed improvements to roads and canals, endorsed high protective tariffs for foreign imports, and assailed President Andrew Jackson as a tyrant—standard doctrine for any anti-Democratic publication worth its subscription price.

  The Journal’s undisguised antagonism toward a powerful president whom many foes regarded as a despot was reflected in its gasconading motto: “Not the glory of Caesar but the Welfare of Rome!” The Journal’s founding prospectus reiterated this crusading inclination in more plainspoken language: “In a word, whatever will tend to advance the prosperity of this highly favored state, develop its resources and exhibit its advantages to the immigrating inhabitants of all other States, will receive deserved attention.”31 Developing “resources” was a code phrase for “internal improvements,” crucial to Henry Clay’s proposed “American System,” which emphasized community building projects. The Sangamo Journal would quickly evolve into a party organ, and as such a natural home for Abraham Lincoln’s political views and potential voters. By the time Lincoln contributed his campaign appeal to the paper a few weeks later, the Journal had established a toehold among the community’s anti-Jacksonians. As a whole, Illinois remained largely Democratic, and the opposition still fragmented, but like the Sangamo Journal, Lincoln “sided with [Daniel] Webster against [John C.] Calhoun, and with [Henry] Clay against anybody.”32 In the Journal, Lincoln found not only sympathetic editorial coverage, but a lifetime ally.

  In his open letter to “the People of Sangamo County,” published March 15, 1832, the young candidate not surprisingly echoed the paper’s founding principles, coming out strongly for “the opening of good roads . . . the clearing of navigable streams,” and “the construction of a rail road.” The proposals were specific, the style compact and unornamented, if stiff and rather formal, and the tone modest. Lincoln pledged that while “it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.”33

  Sangamo Journal, March 1832: Lincoln’s first signed newspaper article, proposing himself for the Illinois state legislature.

  The letter is famous now only because it was a future president’s maiden political message, but here in print was nothing less than the birth of an original political voice. “I am young and unknown to many of you,” Lincoln concluded his editorial with self-effacing charm. “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.” He had no ambition “so great as being truly esteemed of my fellow men.” If victorious, he promised to be “unremitting in my labors. . . . But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background,” he concluded fatalistically, “I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.”34 Chagrined Lincoln may well have been when Francis buried his manifesto on page two of the Sangamo Jou
rnal—along with other routine local news. The editor’s quest for readership and revenue trumped even party fealty. Advertising, not news, appeared on the cover.

  Then Lincoln, too, found a higher calling than his campaign for the legislature. On April 21, just a few weeks after publishing his message, he temporarily abandoned his political battles to enlist in an altogether different kind of war. An Indian chief named Black Hawk had violated a recent treaty and reentered the state with a small army of warriors. Along with many of his New Salem friends, Lincoln joined up for military service after the governor called for volunteers to repel the invasion. Never in real danger, Lincoln thoroughly enjoyed his military experience, relished his election as company captain, and happily reenlisted twice, remaining on duty, and off the political hustings, for nearly two months.

  Unable to work the district for votes while he remained in the service, Lincoln’s unremarkable military record—characterized at its most hazardous, he later admitted, by his “struggles with the musquetoes [sic]”—proved far too lackluster to impress his constituents at home.35 Worse, when the Journal printed the names of the local men who had served in the recent war, Francis inadvertently left Lincoln off the list. Lincoln protested and a correction appeared, but the damage had been done.36 Shortly after his demobilization, and with but a few days left to make up for lost time, Lincoln made a last-minute quest for support. It proved too little, too late. He lost the August 6 election for the State Assembly. Though New Salem residents, who knew him best, gave him a heartening 277 of their three hundred votes, he ran badly in the district-wide race, finishing eighth in a field of thirteen. He had reprinted his Sangamo Journal letter as a handbill, but it did scant good.37 Lincoln was still learning how newspapers and politicians might best collaborate to achieve common goals.