Themes of the American Civil War

placed his public letters to Greeley, Hodges, and others in the most appropriate journals, from where they were later copied by others across the Union.
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 office door was open when the issue demanded it. Editors he trusted, including the young Noah Brooks of the
Sacramento Daily Union and Simon P. Hanscom of the Washington National
Republican, were quite frequent visitors. A number were rewarded with government posts at home and abroad.
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No editor was more loyal to the administration than James 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. The undeviating Unionism of his Philadelphia Press
gave it every appearance of a White House organ. It not only defended the
President against the charge of violating civil liberties, but in July, 1862, made a remarkable volte-face to support emancipation (the same month that
Lincoln first raised a change of policy with his cabinet)—a shift which, in hindsight, suggests Lincoln’s blessing. We can also see Lincoln’s handiwork in Forney’s establishing anew daily paper in Washington towards the end of 1862. With the editorial stance of the influential, mass-circulation 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. 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 thousands of troops in 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 vehicle for propagandizing the Union, cheap pamphlets another. Civil War Americans witnessed an unprecedented torrent of polemical and exhortatory pamphlet literature.
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 setup to rally
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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 the free distribution of
Union propaganda, with the intention of combating defeatism amongst troops and civilians, and countering the disloyal effusions of Democratic presses. The Philadelphia Union League’s Board of Publications, the largest and most efficient of these societies, raised tens of thousands of dollars towards the wartime production of well over 100 different pamphlets and broadsheets, and distributed over a million items of literature in army camps and on the home front.
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Naturally enough, Lincoln’s own words formed part of this loyalist torrent. But he was more directly involved, too. A measure of his attention to the Union’s propaganda machinery lies in how he responded to
Democratic criticisms of the suspension of Habeas Corpus. His public letter of June, 1863, to Erastus Corning in defense of strong measures . . indispensable to the public Safety was not merely reproduced in friendly newspapers. Lincoln had it printed and sent to Republicans across the country on the frank of his private secretary. As Mark Neely has noted,
this kept the chief executive personally immune to charges of squalid electioneering but indicated the importance he attached to the letter’s circulation. The recipients included Francis Lieber, who wrote to assure the
President that the Loyal Publication Society of New York would runoff copies. Around half a million of what another New Yorker described as the best Campaign document we can have in this state were produced for voters and for soldiers in the field.
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The role of the New York, Philadelphia, and other publication societies in the fall elections of 1863 (notably in securing Curtin’s gubernatorial victory in Pennsylvania) leaves no doubt that at bottom they were adjuncts of the Republican Party, and formidable ones at that. But their association with the Union Leagues also reflects Lincoln’s and the Republicans efforts to widen their coalition by incorporating as many Union Democrats as possible. Pertinent here was the anonymous article that Lincoln (“an
Illinoisian’) wrote for the Daily Morning Chronicle during the crisis over
General Ambrose Burnside’s suspension of the Chicago Times in the summer of 1863: the President was at pains to remove the slur that Forney had unfairly cast on the paper’s previous editor, James Sheahan, a loyal Union
Democrat and now editor of the Chicago Post. Lincoln’s intervention revealed both his sure grasp of the newspaper scene and his determination to do nothing to alienate actual and potential supporters on the middle ground of politics. Here was the key to many of the developments of 1864: the renaming of the Republicans as the Union party the publication societies’
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Richard Carwardine

carefully targeted distribution of unprecedented quantities of materials to wavering voters and Lincoln’s overtures to independent Democrat-inclining editors like James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald.
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Lincoln’s reelection triumph in November, 1864, as much as the Union victory sealed at Appomattox itself, was proof positive of how magnificently the Republicans networks of speakers and publicists could mobilize opinion. Of course, there were also contingent elements at work in McClellan’s defeat notably, the Union commanders roster of late summer successes
(Mobile Bay, Atlanta, the Shenandoah) and the Democrats myopia in adopting a peace platform at their Chicago convention. But it was the
Republican Party itself which constituted Lincoln’s most potent weapon.
Controlling its patronage, enjoying the personal support of enough of its key editors, and living by his wits, Lincoln secured his renomination in June.
Thereafter the party, despite political wobbles in July and August, cranked up a formidable campaigning machinery. Lincoln himself, according to
Francis Carpenter, declared, I cannot run the political machine I have enough on my hands without that. It is the people’s business,—the election is in their hands This was technically correct, but the statement is silent over not only the President’s deep desire for reelection (he liaised closely with
Henry J. Raymond, chairman of the national committee) but also the unflagging efforts of party managers to show the people what their business actually was.
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Whatever the frictions between the powerful state committees and the
Union Congressional Committee, between the localities and the center of a mainly decentralized party, the organizers passion for the Union generated literally millions of printed items and ensured an insistent chorus of political speakers—all in addition to the routine appearance of hundreds of daily papers. Lincoln had been by no means the unanimous choice of Republican editors and publicists earlier in the year. But from early September onwards the alternatives for the party’s thousands of activists were clear enough.
Better Lincoln, whatever his failings, than a Democrat whose platform effectively wrote off the sacrifices of war. Thanks to the cumulative efforts of the party’s publicists during the President’s first term, even Lincoln’s
Republican critics knew that the President—whatever they asserted about his errors in judgment, his lack of vigor in executive action, and his enfeebling kindheartedness—was still a tenacious defender of the Union, honest and unbendable in purpose, lacking in airs and graces, and a man of unimpeachable integrity. He was also widely regarded as morally upright and
God-respecting—characteristics which, as we are about to see, had important implications for engaging a second cluster of national networks in the cause of Union.
Lincoln and the Union
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