Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (49 page)

The interdependence of state and national administrations, as the historian Eric McKitrick has famously argued, became even more salient after the midterm electoral setbacks of 1862: Democratic gains led state Republican organizations into the energetic defense of national policy—notably in justifying emancipation as essential and consistent with the original purpose of the war—and into lambasting their opponents, now encouraged to make bolder calls for peace, as traitors. In this context, Republicans read their victories in the fall elections of 1863 not simply as local successes but as a triumph for Lincoln’s administration. Candidates for even the lowest offices, in asking people to vote Republican, were urging an endorsement of the war, its purposes, and its leaders. Local fused with national, as ordinary citizens, male and female, gave vent to a patriotism sharpened by the sacrifices and upheavals of war. Nothing better revealed the vibrancy of the Union’s civic culture than the local proliferation of ad hoc partisan clubs and of loyalist organizations, which might disclaim a partisan intent, but in effect represented interests no different from those of the Lincoln administration. Wartime elections provided the arena, and the Republican party the means, for “continual affirmation and reaffirmation of [national] purpose.”
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One of the most powerful ligaments of the party, and its ubiquitous instrument of political persuasion, was its newspaper press. Lincoln’s experience in antebellum Illinois and in the campaign of 1860 had revealed the power of the daily and weekly paper to draw its subscribers into a forceful political community. Equally, the ridicule that a hostile press heaped upon him for arriving for his Washington inaugural secretly, in disguise and by night, was a salutary reminder of its power to shape opinion for the worse as well as the better. Cultivating the press thus became a wartime priority, though Lincoln took considerably more interest in using the press as a broadcasting medium for the administration than in reading it for advice. Systematic news management and the modern press conference were developments for the future, of course, and even a loyal press was not necessarily uncritical or biddable. Lincoln thought the “vilifying and disparaging” of the administration in even the Republican press played a part in its election setback of 1862.
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He grew “mad enough to cry” when his letter to Conkling, despite a publishing embargo, appeared word for word in the trusted
New York Evening Post
two days before it was due to be first read at a Union meeting in Springfield, Illinois. John Hay sought unsuccessfully to get an “outrageously unfair” Republican correspondent removed from his job with the western Associated Press.
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Still, the president and his White House secretaries had at their disposal a variety of means to broadcast the administration’s purposes and to reward loyalty.

Hay, for instance, acted anonymously as a political ventriloquist for the White House. Writing as a “special correspondent” for newspapers in New York, Washington, and St. Louis, he engaged in a sustained propaganda exercise for an administration which sought to bolster support within opposition strongholds, especially in the Midwest. There is no evidence that Lincoln put his young secretary up to this: zealous patriotism, admiring loyalty to his president, and a platform for literary exhibitionism were inducements enough. The journalist’s upbeat reports are in sharp contrast to the more sober musings of his private diary, and collectively provided as patriotic a commentary on events and as positive a gloss on the Union leadership as it was possible to find. Lincoln appears as an energetic, prudent figure, with broad vision and a genius for reading the public mood. He enjoys the support of vigorous, gifted departmental secretaries and a fundamentally united cabinet. Supposed abrasions between George McClellan and his political masters are smoothed over. Though Peace Democrats are natural targets for criticism, grumbling Republican radicals attract the sharpest barbs. Military delay and battlefield setbacks prompt no defeatism or panic. The fight for constitutional liberty in the western world will succeed, since “God and the heaviest artillery, . . . justice and a fat larder” are all on one side.
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Lincoln himself composed a few articles specifically for the newspapers and gave careful thought to where his public letters should first appear before they were copied Union-wide. He controlled the press’s access to his private meetings, allocated lucrative government printing contracts to selected Republican papers, and rewarded loyal editors and correspondents with well-paid jobs at home and abroad. Unsurprisingly, loyal correspondents made up the presidential trainload to Gettysburg in November 1863, their place on the platform assured; hundreds of local papers subsequently printed and celebrated Lincoln’s speech, in repudiation of Democratic ridicule of a “silly, flat and dish-watery utterance.” Probably most important of all, Lincoln, though not dependably accessible to reporters, made sure his door was open when it needed to be. Frequent visitors included the young Noah Brooks, reporter for the
Sacramento Daily Union,
and Simon P. Hanscom, who enjoyed “almost exclusive access” to the president’s office. Hanscom’s paper, the
Washington National Republican,
mistakenly came to be seen as the administration’s “organ”—a perception that Lincoln regretted, since jealousies amongst the Washington newspaper corps were unhelpful. Even so, he remained their master, using them to moderate expectations when he thought the public too sanguine and to rally sentiment in the aftermath of defeat.
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Republican editors nationwide generally continued to trumpet their Unionism in even the darkest times, but their faith in the administration itself was far from constant. Joseph Medill of the
Chicago Tribune
began as an enthusiast, but Lincoln failed the editor’s test of radicalism, and the paper grumbled for much of the war without actually withholding support from the president himself. Conversely, the
New York Times,
under the moderate Henry Raymond, remained a dependable supporter even as the war’s purposes became more radical and its course more bloody: the editor’s increasing regard for Lincoln himself made all the difference. No newspaperman was more loyal than John W. Forney, a Philadelphia ex-Democrat whose admiration for what he termed Lincoln’s “unconscious greatness” was no doubt underscored by the president’s part in getting him elected as secretary of the Senate and in securing commissions for his sons.
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His
Philadelphia Press
gave every appearance of being a White House organ. It staunchly defended the president’s handling of civil liberties and in July 1862 made a remarkable volte-face to support emancipation, a shift which, in hindsight, suggests Lincoln’s blessing.

Horace Greeley (1811–72) of the pro-emancipation
New York Tribune.
His unpredictable mood swings and editorial reach gave him, as Thurlow Weed put it, “the power to ruin our Country.”

James Gordon Bennett (1795–72), the canny, independent editor of the nation’s highest-circulation and most profitable newspaper, the
New York Herald.

John Wien Forney (1817–81) of the
Philadelphia Press
and Washington
Daily Morning Chronicle.
An ex-Democrat of German stock, he came to be devoted to Lincoln.

Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820–69) of the pro-administration
New York Times.
As national party chairman, he drafted the Union-Republican platform in 1864.

KEY UNION EDITORS

Alert to the broadcasting power of the press, Lincoln encouraged loyal editors like Forney and Raymond, fenced with Greeley’s radical
Tribune,
and sought to neutralize the powerful voice of Bennett’s pathbreaking and politically independent
Herald.

We can also see Lincoln’s handiwork in Forney’s establishing a new daily paper in Washington toward the end of 1862. With the stance of the influential
New York Tribune
increasingly uncertain, as Horace Greeley oscillated nervously between support for the administration and alarmed defeatism, the president had suggested to Forney that he turn his
Sunday Morning Chronicle
into a daily. Lincoln was especially concerned by the
Tribune
’s potentially demoralizing effect on Union troops at the time when he was about to remove McClellan from command. Supported by government funds (in payment for printing federal notices and advertising) and given easy access to the White House, Forney developed a newspaper which carried a message of uncompromising Unionism daily to as many as thirty thousand troops in the camps and hospitals of the Army of the Potomac. His papers would set the tone for the pro-administration press in 1864 by being the first to endorse Lincoln’s renomination, when many other Republican editors doubted his ability to win. The president’s opponents called Forney “Lincoln’s dog.”
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Cheap newspapers provided Lincoln with one means of propagandizing the Union, a flood of cheap pamphlets another. At first many titles were individually financed and produced, but from the early months of 1863 pamphlet and broadside publishing achieved extraordinary levels of coordination and activity under the direction of several new publication societies. These bodies grew naturally out of existing Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues, those extraparty associations set up to rally Union morale in the bleak winter days of 1862–63. Their models included the most impressive of all prewar publishing and distribution agencies, the American Tract Society. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia distinguished professionals and intellectuals like Francis Lieber joined with representatives of the business classes to raise huge sums for distributing free Union propaganda and channeling editorial matter to small-town newspapers, to combat defeatism and counter the “disloyal” press. The Philadelphia Union League’s Board of Publications, the largest and most efficient of these societies, raised tens of thousands of dollars toward the wartime production of well over a hundred different pamphlets and broadsheets, and distributed over a million items of literature in army camps and on the home front.
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