Lincoln and the Power of the Press Read online

  Two years later, however, Journal editor Simeon Francis demonstrated that Tyler’s unexpected ascendancy had sapped none of his (or his readers’) enthusiasm for the vehicle of the campaign extra as a means of restoring party supremacy. For a mere off-year congressional election in the spring of 1843, Francis introduced yet another new, four-page Extra Journal, offering subscriptions at thirty-seven and a half cents apiece.31 Along with endless reports of alleged violence directed against Whig papers upstate, its pages featured attacks not only on the Democrats, but on the rival Register, which it accused of “Falsehood and Ignorance,” comparing its editors, William Walters and Charles Lanphier, to “sellers of ‘ready-made clothing.’ ”32 Here was another political press project that Lincoln, by then a regular visitor to the Journal office near Capitol Square, not to mention a frequent, uncredited contributor to its pages, surely knew about and endorsed.

  Lincoln had never quite relinquished his concealed role as a contributor of rancorous editorial copy to the Journal. Of course, many neighbors and political allies knew of his second “career” as an anonymous editorial writer. In William Herndon’s words, “Whatever he wrote, or had written, went into the editorial page without question.”33 In public he could remain the “good” Lincoln—advocating reverence for the laws. In print, without attribution, he could assume the role of “bad” Lincoln, excoriating Democrats in his recognizable sarcastic writing style. In one such instance, Lincoln came perilously close to the kind of violence he had mocked when Stephen Douglas was a protagonist a few years earlier. This time the dangerous episode involved not only Lincoln but his fiancée, Mary Todd, and, inevitably, editor Simeon Francis. Historians long searching for credible explanations of what brought the seemingly mismatched Abraham and Mary together have overlooked one obvious answer: the press. Aside from evident physical attraction, newspapers played a significant role in their love affair: the couple enjoyed not only reading them, but contributing to them as well—almost always anonymously and sometimes recklessly. They both seemed to relish the danger.

  Still, their relationship proved rocky. For reasons still unknown, the lovers broke off their engagement on or just before January 1, 1841, sending each into a prolonged depression. In more ways than one, it was the local Whig paper that ultimately brought them back together. For one thing, editor Francis and his wife facilitated a reconciliation by making their comfortable Springfield home available for courting when the two began seeing each other again the following year. There, Abraham and Mary probably hatched the plan to compose what came to be known as the “Rebecca” letters, a series of heavy-handed satires aimed at Illinois’s Democratic state auditor James W. Shields, and all published, of course, in Francis’s Journal.34 The Irish-born Shields had recently infuriated Whigs with a ruling that devalued state banknotes, even for citizens hoping to use them at face value to pay their taxes. Lincoln’s response came in the form of at least one of the barbed critiques, all crafted as mock letters from an outraged pioneer widow named “Rebecca,” and all mercilessly lambasting Shields not only as a deceiver of the poor but as a malodorous popinjay. “Shields is a fool as well as a liar,” the August 27 “letter” charged. “With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.”35

  The personal attacks infuriated the thin-skinned Shields, and his anger only intensified when this latest “Rebecca” letter was followed into the pages of the Journal by a lacerating, unsigned poem admittedly composed by Mary and one of her lady friends, asserting, with no shortage of anti-Irish contempt, that the fictional old “Rebecca” had fallen for Shields: “Ye jews-harps awake! The A[uditor]’s won— / Rebecca, the widow, has gained Erin’s son. / The pride of the north from the emerald isle / Has been woo’d and won by a woman’s sweet smile”—“very silly lines” she carried off to “the daily paper.”36

  For Shields, this proved the limit. The auditor stormed into the Journal headquarters to demand that Simeon Francis identify the author of all the calumnies he had so recklessly published. After waiting a few days for things to cool down—they did not—the editor summoned Lincoln to his office and asked him how best to respond. As Mary proudly remembered, her future husband “felt, he could do, no less, than be my champion.” Gallantly, Lincoln instructed Francis to give his name away as the sole author. He alone “would be responsible”—for the poem and letters alike.37 On September 17, the aggrieved Shields responded to this revelation by sending Lincoln a letter of his own, entirely lacking in the comic, demanding “a full, positive and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions” inflicted by the victim of what Shields called “your secret hostility.” That same day, Lincoln wrote a maddeningly legalistic reply complaining that “without stopping to enquire whether I really am the author, or to point out what is offensive . . . you demand an unqualified retraction. . . . Now, sir, there is in this so much assumption of facts, and so much of menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer that note any farther than I have.”38

  Understandably dissatisfied, Shields responded with typical frontier bravado and challenged Lincoln to a duel. Days later, the two men actually headed off to “Bloody Island,” a strip of land in the Mississippi River, technically part of the state of Missouri where dueling was legal. There they came shockingly close to facing off in deadly combat—and all over newspaper articles. Lincoln saved the day—and, perhaps, his life as well—by exercising a challenged party’s right to choose weapons and proposing outsized broadswords that would have put the much shorter Shields at a disadvantage. Their seconds then arranged a truce and the duel never occurred, but the episode may at last have dissuaded Lincoln from further forays into published satire. It also bound the two lovers together, perhaps closer than ever. Just a few weeks after the incident, Abraham and Mary Lincoln were wed—a marriage in a real sense forged in partisan journalism.

  By one account, wedlock and the passage of time soon emboldened Lincoln to believe he might have won the fight with Shields after all. “I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone,” the bridegroom allegedly boasted to his law partner about the aborted duel.39 In a somewhat less nostalgic frame of mind, Mary recalled years later that her husband “thought, he had some right, to assume to be my champion, even on frivolous occasions.” She added that she and her husband were “always so ashamed” of the “foolish and uncalled for rencontre” that “Mr L & myself mutually agreed, never to refer to it & except in an occasional light manner, between us, it was never mentioned” again.40

  During the Civil War, a Union general appeared one day at a White House reception and, in Mary’s words, “said, playfully, to my husband ‘Mr. President, is it true, as I have heard that you, once went out, to fight a duel & all for the sake, of the lady by your side.’ Mr. Lincoln, with a flushed face, replied, ‘I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.’ ” When, on another occasion, one of the actual “participants of the affair” turned up in Washington and similarly attempted to get Lincoln to “rehearse the particulars” of the episode, a “sore” president again demurred, complaining: “That man is trying to revive his memory of a matter that I am trying to forget.” As Mary put it: “This affair, always annoyed my husband’s peaceful nerves.”41

  At the time it happened, the “matter,” or “affair,” certainly demonstrated to the future bridegroom that there were better, and safer, ways for a busy politician to use newspapers to his advantage. Not that Lincoln or the Whig press ever lost their zeal for energetically attacking Democrats in print—and vice versa.

  • • •

  Horace Greeley had meanwhile been busy in the newspaper world as well—but not yet profitably. He had tried establishing a printing business in New York in partnership with one Francis V. Story, press foreman at the successful sport and entertainment weekly Spirit of the Times. But their joint enterprise died not
long after Story drowned in the East River. Still the ambitious Greeley would not give up. In 1834, after failing with his quickly aborted Morning Post, the thrifty, abstemious twenty-three-year-old dreamer, still as cherubic-looking as the day he left his father’s farm, but now thinner than at any time in his life, somehow cobbled together $1,500, found a new partner in Jonas Winchester, and launched an ambitious sixteen-page weekly of his own. He called it the New-Yorker.42

  Headquartered on bustling Nassau Street in the heart of Manhattan’s publishing center, the paper proposed to offer “general literature” without the “humbug.”43 This promise the New-Yorker kept—publishing fiction by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe as well as essays on science, government, and other “questions of absorbing national interest.” Auburn-based bookseller James Cephas (J.C.) Derby, who became its upstate distribution agent, noted appreciatively that the New-Yorker “seemed to fill a void for . . . readers who were inclined to well-written, original articles.”44 In one year its circulation rose from fifty to 4,500. Greeley hardly became rich, but felt himself successful enough, at least, to resist an 1835 invitation from James Gordon Bennett that they join in partnership to found a new penny daily. Bennett, after all, was not only irascible; he had spent just enough time covering news in South Carolina, Greeley sensed, to regard slavery with the smug satisfaction of a plantation master.45

  At first striving to be nonpartisan, the New-Yorker editor could not resist politics for long. Greeley found himself increasingly attracted to Whig philosophy, especially once financial reverses threatened the survival of his unaffiliated paper. To Greeley, Whig economics promised the best path toward not only national—but personal—recovery. And Whig fealty offered access to political inner circles where Greeley felt ever more comfortable. Fortuitously, one of the party’s most prominent leaders had caught wind of Greeley’s growing Whig leanings: the shrewd political wire-puller Thurlow Weed, who ran the influential Albany Evening Journal while managing upstate New York’s Whig Party machine.46 Although a onetime publisher’s apprentice himself who insisted he was but a “poor printer . . . on the same footing with Mr. Greeley,” Weed was by then successful and powerful. A former New York state assemblyman, the party boss had already helped engineer the election of a handpicked state senator—his protégé William H. Seward—and now planned to promote Seward for governor of New York by establishing a temporary State Committee campaign newspaper. To run it, he wanted someone with both “principles” and “talents”—the very words he used to describe Horace Greeley, whom he had yet to meet. And Greeley, who admitted he had “struggled on in the face of imminent bankruptcy” for years, desperately needed a well-financed patron to rescue his own paper from ruin.47

  One November day in 1837, Weed strode unannounced into the New-Yorker’s attic office in search of the idealist he sensed might now make an ideal party editor. There at the type racks, setting up the next issue for printing, one letter at a time, he encountered for the first time a “young man with light hair and blond complexion, with coat off and sleeves rolled up,” as Weed described him. “This youth was Horace Greeley.”48 Weed fervently made his pitch. It succeeded. In part to save his own struggling publication, Greeley accepted the part-time Albany job Weed offered that day, which came with a much needed annual stipend of $1,000. “Weed took in Greeley when the rascal had not two pair of breeches to his legs,” rival James Gordon Bennett scoffed, “and gave him a clean shirt, a good dinner, and a new pair of boots.”49 The New-Yorker proprietor may indeed have accepted Weed’s “clean shirt” out of desperation to save his own enterprise, but the move marked a turning point in Greeley’s career for another reason: the formerly independent journalist became, in a sense, owned and operated by the Whig Party, devoted now to shaping and supporting the organization’s future. On that day, Greeley embraced the inevitable alliance between politics and the press—and their dependence on each other for survival and influence.

  Editing two newspapers, in two different cities, one of them a party-run operation, may not have afflicted Greeley’s conscience, but it severely tested his stamina. Every Saturday, he steamed up the Hudson aboard a riverboat, labored in Albany to put the Weed paper to bed by Tuesday night, then took a night boat back to Manhattan and went immediately to work to get the New-Yorker out by Friday. As soon as he prepared copy for his latest edition, Greeley packed his “valise for Albany again.”50 Yet in the rigorous grind of putting out a party newspaper, Greeley became a better journalist.

  Though the new campaign paper, the Jeffersonian, soon achieved a circulation of some fifteen thousand readers, Greeley came to believe that his ponderous early articles wearied or offended most of them. “There is nothing that bores people like instruction,” he confided to a friend. “It implies that they do not know everything already, which is very humiliating.” Perhaps with an eye on Jamie Bennett’s successful self-promotion, he admitted: “I have not done enough for effect.” But Weed heartily approved of his new editor: “He was unselfish, conscientious, public spirited, and patriotic. He had no habits or tastes but for work, steady, indomitable work.”51 When the Jeffersonian folded as scheduled in early 1839, with Seward now governor, Greeley returned to the New-Yorker full-time. Widened visibility and capital infusion notwithstanding, however, profits still eluded him.

  Again Weed came to the rescue, this time inviting Greeley to take charge of a newer, bigger version of the Jeffersonian: the Log Cabin, a Harrison-for-president campaign extra to be published by the Whig State Committee for the 1840 presidential race and distributed throughout the Northeast. Again Greeley accepted, and went back to work as a party editor—the equivalent of today’s campaign strategists and spokesmen. Having learned much from his previous experience with the Jeffersonian, Greeley made sure the new venture emphasized the rousing hullabaloo spirit of the Harrison effort. Readers—who eventually numbered an unprecedented eighty thousand—were treated to song lyrics and stories about parades, rallies, and the ceremonial construction of log cabins. Greeley illustrated the paper with woodcuts depicting Harrison’s battle triumphs, and filled it to overflowing with exuberant if dubious reports of steady Whig gains in keenly contested states. It was even rumored that Greeley invented the unforgettable motto, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” Passing harsh judgment on the endeavor, Philadelphia journalist John Wein Forney thought the paper something of an embarrassment to its editor. Forney called the Log Cabin “a model and guide to those who desire to make merry at the Philosopher’s expense,” employing the competition’s latest nickname for the intellectual Greeley. But Weed lauded the product as both “zealous” and “spirited.” It certainly helped Harrison carry New York against Van Buren, the state’s onetime governor.52

  It also emboldened Greeley to aspire for the first time to political reward outside journalism. Earlier in his career, he had criticized editors who expected patronage jobs in exchange for party fealty. But when opportunity presented itself in the afterglow of the Harrison victory, Greeley emphatically expressed his belief that “not many had done more effective work on the canvass than I had.”53 At least briefly he considered making a formal request for an appointment. In an absurd burst of overconfidence, he aimed as high as the president’s cabinet. “Two or three papers have named me for Postmaster General,” he crowed to one intimate, though in the same breath he insisted he wanted “none of their dirty spoils.” To Governor Seward, however, he bitterly complained when he was not immediately “counted in,” and soon enough he was blaming Thurlow Weed for ignoring him, too. Weed, who claimed he initially believed Greeley “indifferent to the temptations of money and office,” later scoffed that “had Governor Seward known . . . that Mr. Greeley coveted an inspectorship, he certainly would have received it.” Though Greeley would remain politically aligned with Seward and Weed for years to come, the editor’s revenge, as had been the case with the spurned Bennett before him, came now through the creation of a bigger, better, and more independent Whig newspaper th
at would eventually surpass Weed’s own.54 In short, Greeley determined to become a political power himself. He decided to found yet another newspaper.

  “I had been incited to this enterprise by several Whig friends,” Greeley wrote of the new venture, “who deemed a cheap daily, addressed more especially to the laboring class, eminently needed in our city, where the only two cheap journals then . . . existing—the Sun and the Herald—were in decided though unavowed, and therefore more effective sympathy and affiliation with the Democratic Party.”55 In April 1841, boasting only five hundred advance subscribers (mostly “warm personal and political friends,” he admitted), a staff of ten whose salaries he could not afford, a rented printing press, and a modest new office on Ann Street—and burdened with staggering new debts from the loan he procured to pay for it all—Horace Greeley published the first issue of the New York Tribune. His “folding and mailing,” he later joked, “must have staggered me but for the circumstance that I had few papers to mail, and not many to fold.” At age thirty, its editor was “in full health and vigor” and by his own unselfconscious description already “favorably known to many thousands.”56

  What Greeley lacked most—cash—he quickly attracted to the enterprise. Within months, he took on a new partner, a successful book distributor and party loyalist named Thomas McElrath, to handle the business side. He openly called the move essential to “strengthen the Tribune in the confidence and affections of the Whigs of New York.” For his part, Greeley’s savvy new partner saw a commercial opportunity. Convinced that the Sun and Herald, while popular among “business men and clerks,” had not “very often penetrated into the parlors or sitting rooms of the uptown residents.” Acknowledging the importance of “the patronage of a political party,” McElrath also believed that “a circulation in the cultivated and influential families of the city was quite as important”—and here the investor saw a niche for the new Tribune.57 McElrath’s crucial $2,000 financial infusion freed Greeley from pecuniary worries, except, he admitted, when he imprudently lent money to bounders.58 Under McElrath’s management, the publication offered neither subscriptions nor advertisements on credit, requiring every reader “to pay for whatever he chose to order.” The Tribune, Greeley proudly recalled, required no further investment, “except through the liberality of its patrons.”59