Lincoln and the Power of the Press
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Lincoln and the Power of the Press

The War for Public Opinion

Harold Holzer

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Lincoln and the Power of the Press

The War for Public Opinion

Harold Holzer

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"Lincoln believed that 'with public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.' Harold Holzer makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Lincoln's leadership by showing us how deftly he managed his relations with the press of his day to move public opinion forward to preserve the Union and abolish slavery." —Doris Kearns Goodwin From his earliest days, Lincoln devoured newspapers. As he started out in politics he wrote editorials and letters to argue his case. He spoke to the public directly through the press. He even bought a German-language newspaper to appeal to that growing electorate in his state. Lincoln alternately pampered, battled, and manipulated the three most powerful publishers of the day: Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and Henry Raymond of the New York Times.When war broke out and the nation was tearing itself apart, Lincoln authorized the most widespread censorship in the nation's history, closing down papers that were "disloyal" and even jailing or exiling editors who opposed enlistment or sympathized with secession. The telegraph, the new invention that made instant reporting possible, was moved to the office of Secretary of War Stanton to deny it to unfriendly newsmen.Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start through to the night of his assassination—when one reporter ran to the box where Lincoln was shot and emerged to write the story covered with blood. In a wholly original way, Holzer shows us politicized newspaper editors battling for power, and a masterly president using the press to speak directly to the people and shape the nation.

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Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9781439192740
Images
Abraham Lincoln holds a newspaper to the camera in an 1854 photograph by Polycarpus von Schneidau taken in Chicago. Although he clutched a different newspaper in the original photo, the Chicago Press and Tribune later added its own masthead.

CHAPTER ONE

The Types Are in Our Glory

Images
The two odd-looking young men who ventured off from their respective family homes, half a continent apart, in that same summer of 1831—each determined to find success on his own, and each fated to loom large in the other’s struggles for fame and power—were as yet totally unknown to one another.
Nothing but coincidence dictated that they launch their adult lives at nearly the identical moment in time, with so few prospects, and in such remarkably coincident circumstances. Yet there were astonishing similarities to their journeys. For one thing, when both boys took leave of their parents, they had accumulated so little in the way of possessions that each was able to squeeze his meager belongings into a single kerchief borne over his shoulder on a stick. Both began their long voyages on foot.
On the surface, they looked as different as any two pioneers on the continent. To be sure, both were unconventional in appearance. One, however, was almost absurdly tall, deeply bronzed, lean but well muscled, with a face creased and “gnarled” well beyond his years; the other, slight in stature, was moon-faced, spectrally pallid, and “angelically cherubic,” far more youthful in appearance than in age.1 Intellectually and emotionally they were unalike as well, one laconic and shy, the other ebullient and confident. Both of them gifted and curious, the taller one was blessed with a rare power of concentration, the smaller barely able to focus his attention on one subject before lurching to embrace another. Had any of their later admirers somehow managed to encounter both of these wanderers that year they would surely have predicted that the two opposites could never become friends. And in a sense, such observers would have been correct. Yet eventually, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley came not only to know each other well, but to figure crucially in each other’s future.
More than fifteen years would pass before Lincoln and Greeley finally met in the whirlwind of mid-century politics. Not for a quarter of a century would they come to affect each other’s lives as well as the destiny of their country—with an enormity that neither could have imagined at the time they began their adult journeys in 1831. These two men would never come fully to know or understand the other. Yet one would become the century’s greatest subject, and the other its most influential observer.
In a sense, these two contrasting strangers on the move that summer had much more in common than anyone who met them later might have realized. Even in 1831, when no one but friends and relatives knew that these boys existed, much less mattered, the similarities between them would have been marked as extraordinary. Each had been dwelling with his family in a crowded, primitive log cabin. Each had worked the land, but had stolen precious time whenever possible to feed an insatiable hunger for reading. And each was poor—nearly destitute. As one of their contemporaries observed: “Both sprang from obscurity; both were cradled in poverty; both worked their way up by sheer brain work; both were excessively simple, democratic, and homespun in their manners and dress; both were awkward in gait; both abounded in quaint dry humour.”2
Both Lincoln and Greeley came of age on hardscrabble farms, yearning for education but lacking access to formal schooling. Lincoln long regretted learning only “by littles” from itinerant instructors who knew no more than “ ‘readin, writin, and cipherin’ to the Rule of Three.” Greeley, as a friend recalled, “seldom had a teacher that could teach him anything”—perhaps as much a testament to the future editor’s sometimes galling self-assurance as to the scarcity of competent instructors in the hinterlands.3
Each boy had nearly died as a result of a childhood accident: Lincoln kicked in the head by a horse and “apparantly [sic] killed for a time,” as he quaintly put it; Greeley “half drowned” after bravely plunging into a river in an attempt to rescue his brother from drowning.4 Most distinctly of all, both boys seemed from the outset oddly different from their friends—more serious, more studious, more distracted—and both painfully awkward with the opposite sex. Of young Lincoln, his stepmother frankly admitted: “He was not very fond of girls.” A New Hampshire acquaintance similarly recalled that where young Greeley was concerned, “For girls, as girls, he never manifested any preference.”5 (As it happened, Greeley married Mary Cheney when he was twenty-five; not until he was thirty-three did Lincoln wed his Mary.)
Not that either youth shrank from the grueling physical work farm boys of the day were expected to perform. Both grew accustomed to physical labor, specializing in felling trees and cutting logs, though neither grew to love such work, and only Lincoln emerged from the experience with a physique worthy of his labors. Unknown to each other they may have been, but the two boys shared another attribute destined to define their lives: their unquenchable thirst for the printed word. From an early age, each had turned to reading whenever and wherever afforded the luxuries of leisure and light. And each sought intellectual nourishment in both the permanent and ephemeral publications that so many among even the poorest American families strove to keep in their homes: first and foremost the Bible, of course—but also newspapers.
With his horizons vastly broadened by what he discovered in his omnivorous reading, Lincoln ultimately decided to enter political life. Greeley determined early that his destiny was to report it. Each would come to believe his respective profession offered not only the best means to improve his own condition, but the best way to wield the power to shape national destiny. From the beginning of their slow rise to national fame, they likely understood that the worlds of politicians and journalists were inextricably bound together.
• • •
Lincoln, at twenty-two the older, and certainly the more robust of the two, had for years devoured as much reading material as he could lay his hands on, especially after the teenager’s family migrated from Kentucky to Indiana, where periodicals were readily available. “I think newspapers were had in Indiana as early as 1824,” his stepmother later recalled. “Abe was a constant reader of them—I am sure of this for the years of 1827-28-29-30. The name of the Louisville Journal seems to sound like one.”6 The boy often read them “very late at night” after he completed his chores, testified a cousin, who remembered Abe habitually turning a chair upside down near the hearth, then placing a pillow on the underside of the seat to support his head while he unfolded his newspaper. He would “lie there for hours,” she remembered, “and read” these papers, sometimes out loud.7 Young Lincoln was mad for them. The more political their content the better. As his future law partner once asserted: “Mr. Lincoln’s education was almost entirely a newspaper one.”8 And he pursued it with little encouragement from a stern father who preferred that his son stick exclusively to his responsibilities on the farm.
Inspiration came from both his empathetic stepmother and from appreciative strangers. At one point, the curious teenager began borrowing a pro-temperance paper to which a neighbor named William Wood subscribed. Lincoln, at most nineteen years old, soon composed an essay of his own on the evils of drink, and proudly shared it with Wood, who found to his astonishment that “the piece excelled for sound sense anything that my paper contained.” Impressed, Wood showed the article to a local preacher, who in turn sent it on to a paper in Ohio, which published it. Once it was in print, Wood read the article “with pleasure over and over again.”
When Lincoln followed this small triumph by composing yet another essay, this time on political issues, Wood handed it over to a local attorney, who saw this latest treatise into print as well. In it, the young man argued that education “should be fostered all over the Country” in order to nourish “the best form of Government in the world.” As Wood saw it, Lincoln’s eagerness to see such views broadly cast at such a young age showed unusual maturity. Although still not twenty and virtually untaught, Abe had already published two newspaper articles, exploring themes to which he would return many times in years to come: sobriety, education, and American exceptionalism. But from the start, writing for Lincoln was a means, not an end. He wrote about policy issues not only to influence others, but to gain influence for its own sake—for himself. Even when he saw his first newspaper printing press at Vincennes, Indiana, he left no comment about the mechanics of making news.9
After his solitary 1831 journey from his parents’ cabin, Lincoln moved to a tiny Illinois mill town called New Salem, where his new neighbors noticed at once that his nose was always pointed toward a printed page. “History and poetry & the newspapers constituted the most of his reading,” testified one. A local shoemaker similarly observed that Lincoln read “all kinds of newspapers,” sitting up, lying down, or walking in the streets. Yet a third concurred. “More than he did books,” he said of Lincoln, “he read papers.”10 Always eager to perform, if he found something particularly amusing or instructive on their pages, he would read the item aloud to anyone within earshot. Though the distinctive new arrival “rapidly made acquaintances and friends,” as he proudly put it, he yet considered himself without real direction in life, trying, then abandoning, a succession of jobs: as a blacksmith, surveyor, and storekeeper, in the last of which he ended up owing creditors so much money that he began referring to his crushing obligations as the “national debt.” Although he never considered giving up and returning to his parents’ fold, young Lincoln remained, he lamented, “a piece of floating driftwood.”11
At least, part-time work as the New Salem village postmaster enabled him to read his neighbors’ newspapers as soon as they arrived, before recipients could claim their subscriptions for themselves. His neighbor, Dr. John Allen, joked that he “Never saw a man better pleased” with a job. As postmaster, Lincoln had “access to all the News papers—never yet being able to get the half that he wanted before.”12 Without complaint, perhaps even sensing with pride that their well-liked, yarn-spinning postmaster was destined for greater things, residents of New Salem patiently grew accustomed to receiving their papers late, badly wrinkled, and carelessly refolded.13
• • •
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 t...

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