History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
THE TIMES AND GREELEY'S TRIUMPH
As Bennett and the Herald had inspired Greeley to make in the Tribune, a better paper, so it was Greeley and his Tribune that inspired Raymond to be the sponsor of a paper that would be less radical, less addicted to all the "isms," than the Tribune.
Raymond, as we learn from his correspondence with R. W. Griswold, had gone to Greeley when a youth, brimming over with idealism and literary ambition. "I never found another person, barely of age and just from his studies, who evinced so much and so versatile ability in journalism as he did," Greeley wrote later of Raymond. "Abler and stronger men I may have met; a cleverer, readier, more generally efficient journalist I never saw. He is the only assistant with whom I ever felt required to remonstrate for doing more work than any human brain and frame could be expected to endure. His services were more valuable in proportion to their cost than those of any one who ever worked on the Tribune."[1]
As Raymond came to know the city and the men influential in politics, he saw that there was room for another paper, a journal that would appeal to those who thought Greeley extreme and Bennett impossible. His political associates, Weed and Seward, also saw that a conservative paper, at a popular price, would tend to bring into the Whig party a conservative element that had not hitherto been attracted. Weed, the practical man, saw that there were business men who could be brought into the party, if some of the radicalism could be curbed.
The Times entered the field at a time when the anti-slave forces in the east needed such an organ. The success of Seward was the success of the new party, and Weed and Seward needed just such a paper. The years between 1850 and 1860 were filled with cross currents; the wisest men declared that they were unable to foretell the future, although it was only those who were called "hotheads" who realized the truth that lay in Seward's words,—that a conflict was inevitable. No one could foresee that Greeley, Seward, Weed, and Raymond, the four men who had made the Republican party possible, would quarrel among themselves, over a mere matter of patronage, to the discomfiture of all of them, but to the benefit of the nation.
Nor would the boldest prophet have suggested that the introduction of penny journalism, producing such pro-slavery journals as the New York Sun and the New York Herald, would ever be considered as one of the important steps that led to the spread of journalism among the masses, and eventually made the question of slavery the one that held the North as a political unit. Had the question of secession come before the country disassociated from slavery, it is difficult to conceive that Lincoln would have received the support that he did. Strong abolitionist as he was, Greeley was one of those in favor of allowing the South to take her slaves As we have contended all through this book, the moral issue lay with the people; it was hammered out by agents as blind and as grimy, politically, as the men who work before an actual furnace. The contentions and political maneuverings of these men were but the means to an end.
When Thurlow Weed, in 1848, wished to retire from the Albany Evening Journal, a banker of Albany, George Jones, (who afterwards became Raymond's partner,) offered the Journal to Raymond, but the negotiations fell through. Later Raymond began planning for a newspaper in New York. As interesting as was Bennett's visit to Greeley, to interest him in the Herald, is the fact that Raymond enlisted in his initial negotiations, Charles Anderson Dana, then of the Tribune.
Seward's son, at that time a writer on the Albany Journal, tells of a call made by Dana of the Tribune and Raymond of the Courier and Enquirer on Thurlow Weed, to seek his advice regarding plans for a new morning journal in New York. Ra3anond felt that somewhere between the Herald and the Tribune there was room in the city for a paper that would be conservative in politics, carefully accurate in its news, and without "reforms or sensations." Dana believed that Weed's short, crisp editorial articles, critical and humorous, were the kind that would be most popular.
Raymond spent the two years following Weed's offer in Albany, first as a member of the legislature, and then as Speaker of the Assembly. During those winters he had many conversations with George Jones; what finally led to the decision to undertake the paper was information received by Jones, to the effect that the Tribune had made a profit of $60,000 in one year.
The time selected for the introduction of a new paper was, as Raymond's associate and biographer has set forth, exceedingly propitious. The Journal of Commerce was dull; the Express, a morning paper, "behind the times"; the Sun, too much patronized by "domestics in quest of employment and by cartmen dozing at street corners waiting for a job." The Evening Post, which published one edition at half-past two in the afternoon, was noted chiefly for "its vigorous espousal of the doctrines of free trade." The Commercial Advertiser was merely a rival of the Post. The Herald contained much "printed filth"; the Tribune "had got into bad ways"—mainly through its editor's enthusiastic advocacy of the theories of Charles Fourier.[2]
After many difficulties the first number of the Times was brought out on September 18, 1851. Raymond's salutation was as cautious as could be,—there was not even a declaration of principles. He had declared in a preliminary statement that the Times would not "countenance any improper interference on the part of the people of one locality with the institutions, or even the prejudices, of any other." His opening editorial showed the same cautious regard for the sensitive Southerner, in the statement, "there are few things in -the world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve."[3]
What all three—Raymond, Weed and Seward—failed to realize was the fact that all the temperate discussion in the world was not going to bridge the chasm between the slave-holding South and those men and women of the North who believed that slavery was a crime. As politicians, they hoped that, by a careful policy of drift, immediate difficulties might be avoided and, now and then, a political victory achieved. The political situation might have continued unchanged for several years had not Stephen A. Douglas introduced in December, 1853, i" the Senate, the famous " Nebraska Bill," which affirmed that the Clay compromise of 1850 had repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Almost immediately the country .was in a ferment, and the anti-slavery Whigs found themselves able to enroll under the same banner with the Free Soil Democrats. The parties in the country now came to be distinguished as "Nebraska" or "anti-Nebraska." In Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854, the Republican party was born, the result of this last move of the slave power.
Here Seward distinguished himself. In the struggle for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he made a greater fight in 1854 than Rufus King had made in 1820 over the original enactment. It was Seward who answered arguments and marshaled the opposition; whose final great appeal concluded in words that few people at that time realized as fundamental truth: "The slavery agitation you deprecate so much is an eternal struggle between conservatism and progress; between truth and error, between right and wrong. . . . You may legislate arid abrogate and abnegate as you will, but there is a superior power that overrules all; that overrules not only all your actions and all your refusals to act, but all human events, to the distant, but inevitable result of the equal and universal liberty of all men."[4]
An anti-Nebraska State convention was held at Saratoga on August 16, 1854; Horace Greeley offered the resolutions and Raymond was a conspicuous figure. It was here that Greeley was doing his greatest work, in urging the formation of a new party made up of Whigs, Free Soilers and the anti-Nebraska Democrats; it was here that Seward, Raymond and Weed, showed their lack of vision. The New York Senator—whose position in view of his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill, was a commanding one—felt that the Whigs were still numerically strong enough to be the leaders in the movement and that a new party was not needed. "Seward hangs fire," wrote Dr. Bailey; "he agrees with Thurlow Weed."[5]
Strong in debate, Seward was weak in council, due to his great susceptibility to Weed and to Weed's advice. That Weed, in this crisis, was actuated by any other than the highest motives, is incredible, to any one who reads and studies his life; what is evident is that Weed, like any man whose bent has been thoroughly political, was naturally opposed to anything so revolutionary as the formation of a new party, and was most unsympathetic, as are all practical politicians, toward the initiator or the moral enthusiast. Raymond, in the Times, naturally reflected the views of Seward and Weed, but furnished a plausible defense for their position. The result was that at the Saratoga convention in August, nothing was done except to agree to re-assemble in September. When the regular Whig convention met in September, the differences among the Democrats made it appear that the Whig candidate for governor would be elected. This prospect, as much as anything else, was what had held Weed back from a sympathetic reception of the idea of a new party.
Greeley, who had vision, yearned for leadership. The issues that had gone to make the Whig party strong were issues that he had made. Whatever feeling he may have had about Raymond personally, there is no question but that he resented the growing importance of his former associate, and the fact that it was toward him (Raymond) that Weed and Seward were more and more inclined to lean. He harbored the idea that this was the time for him to present himself as a candidate for governor.
In addition to the Nebraska question, the one absorbing topic before the people of the State of New York at that time was prohibition. An anti-liquor wave had swept over the country and the Prohibitionists were popular. Greeley had been ardent in the cause and had, to a large extent, fought its battles; this was to him an additional reason for believing that the time had come for him to run for office. To Weed, therefore, as the acknowledged boss of the Whig party in New York State, went Greeley, and there is very little doubt that there was also in his mind a determination to find out exactly what his own position was in the "firm," that had been known as the Weed-Seward-Greeley partnership.
Nowhere in the history of American politics is there a more lamentable exhibition of the weakness of the system that had grown up, the system of which Weed was the chief exponent, than the following account of the interview, taken from Weed's reminiscences:
"Mr. Greeley called upon me at the Astor House and asked if I did not think that the time and circumstances were favorable to his nomination for Governor. I replied that I did think the time and circumstances favorable to his election, if nominated, but that my friends had lost control of the state convention. This answer perplexed him, but a few words of explanation made it clear. Admitting that he had brought the people up to the point of accepting a temperance candidate for Governor, I remarked that another aspirant had ' stolen his thunder.In other words, while he had shaken the temperance bush, Myron H. Clark would catch the bird. ... I informed Mr. Greeley that Know-Nothing or 'Choctaw' lodges had been secretly organized throughout the state, by means of which many delegates for Mr. Clark had been secured. Mr. Greeley saw that the 'slate' had been broken, and cheerfully relinquished the idea of being nominated. But a few days afterward Mr. Greeley came to Albany, and said in an abrupt, but not unfriendly way, 'Is there any objection to my running for Lieutenant-Governor? . . . After a little more conversation, Mr. Greeley became entirely satisfied that a nomination for LieutenantGovernor was not desirable and left me in good spirits."[6]
Weed was either very stupid or very canny when he assumed that Greeley left him in good spirits; he had insulted the man as far as was possible,—short of actually throwing him out of the room,—for he had practically informed him that there was no place for him anywhere on the state ticket as long as Weed controlled the machine. In addition to this, his excuses were of the most superficial and insulting kind.
Myron H. Clark, the man selected in place of Greeley, was a fanatic of very slender attainments, originally a cabinet-maker. He had introduced an anti-liquor bill, passed it through the legislature, and was made a state hero by Governor Horatio Seymour's veto. While he was well liked, his popularity was not so great that Weed could not have beaten him had he so wished. To make matters worse, the convention nominated Raymond for lieutenant-governor,—" No other name could have been put on the ticket so bitterly humbling to me," Greeley admitted afterward in a letter to Seward. It was an unnecessary humiliation, although Weed insisted that the convention had acted on its own responsibility and that he had never thought of Raymond until his name had been suggested by others. It was also a fatal error, for then began Greeley's quarrel with the other members of the triumvirate and, in a letter to Seward, he withdrew from the partnership. It was this quarrel that culminated in the defeat of Seward in the Chicago Republican Convention in 1860.
Greeley's letter to Seward, which did not come to light until years later, shows a rather pathetic willingness to have taken a minor place in the triumvirate. It reveals that his more practical and hard-headed associates had grown very tired of this crank reformer, with his fanatical ideas. It is pathetic in the fact that it shows how Greeley,—the man who was then probably the greatest journalist in the country,—was destined to break himself on the rock of political ambition.
This letter was written immediately after the election, in which he loyally supported the unimportant Clark, who was successful. Greeley recited with great pains how he had assisted both Seward and Weed; how they had both advanced politically and how, when he had suggested that he be nominated for lieutenant-governor (he denied that he had asked for the governorship), he had been humiliated by Weed's refusal.[7]
The nomination of Raymond, he frankly said, was more than he could bear, and he thus concluded this remarkable letter:
"Governor Seward, I know that some of your most cherished friends think me a great obstacle to your advancement—that John Schoolcraft, for one, insists that you and Weed shall not be identified with me. I trust, after a time, you will not be. I trust I shall never be found in opposition to you; I have no further wish but to glide out of the newspaper world as quietly and as speedily as possible, join my family in Europe, and, if possible, stay there quite a time,—long enough to cool my fevered brain and renovate my overtasked energies. All I ask is that we shall be counted even on the morning after the first Tuesday in February, as aforesaid, and that I may thereafter take such course as seems best without reference to the past."[8]
Seward's inability to see the political mistake that had been made is shown by the off-hand manner with which, in a note to Weed, he refers to this extraordinary letter, suggests that something be done for poor Greeley and asks if there is a place on the Board of Regents that could be made for him, as if history could be patched up with a place on the Board of Regents!
In the new Republican party that was formed Greeley had, over Seward and Weed, the advantage that he had been an ardent believer in the movement, and had been in frequent consultation with, and had greatly encouraged those who were for the new party, and was said to have been the one who suggested the name, "Republican."[9] On the other hand, Seward and Weed had never given the Republican movement, in the West and in New England, a word of encouragement in 1854,—a mistake that cost them dearly before many years had passed.
When Seward made his great speech favoring the immediate admission of Kansas, and defending the settlers in maintaining their struggle for admission as a free state, Greeley enthusiastically endorsed it as "unsurpassed in its political philosophy." The day that it was printed in the weekly Tribune, the circulation rose to 162,000 copies.
It was this friendliness on Greeley's part when he and they were at one on a matter of principle, that led Seward and Weed to underestimate the extent of the hurt they had done Greeley. They might have realized that the expartner was not inactive in the convention of 1856, which nominated Fremont and—although he was most anxious to be nominated, even against the advice of his friend Weed—passed Seward completely over. Weed believed that it was impossible to elect the Republican candidate in 1856, and for that reason did not support Seward, wishing to save him for 1860; by that time, he believed, the Republican party would be strong enough to elect its candidate. Greeley "sided "with Weed in this sage view of the situation. It was Borgian unanimity.
Two years later the debates in Illinois between Stephen A. Douglas,—whose theory of popular sovereignty had appealed not only to northern Democrats but to many northern Republicans,—and Abraham Lincoln, an unknown Republican "politician," brought to the front the man who was to solve the questions of this grave period. It was during these debates that Lincoln had declared that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Several months later Seward, in his Rochester speech, summed up the impending clash as "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free labor nation." Both of these statements arrived at the same point at practically the same time and Seward, with his greater reputation, was given the credit of having antedated Lincoln.
Bennett, who had remained Democratic and around whom an agitation had developed without any apparent disturbance of his own self-satisfaction, denounced Sewward as a more dangerous person than Beecher or Garrison, declaring that no conflict existed, except the one Seward was fermenting. Even Samuel Bowles, in the Springfield Republican, thought that Seward had made a mistake, but Greeley saw and declared that the position was "calm, sagacious, profound and impregnable, showing a masterly comprehension of the present aspect and future prospects of the great question which now engrosses our politics."[10] Seward's speech was a bid for the Presidency. James Watson Webb, in the Courier and Enquirer, declared that it settled the question of Seward's nomination.
Lincoln, however, was moving up on him. He came to New York in 1860, and was introduced to his audience at a meeting over which William Cullen Bryant presided. Although Bryant and Weed had both met Lincoln years before, neither of them could recall him. Greeley's enthusiasm for Lincoln's address in Cooper Union was unbounded. "He is one of nature's orators," the Tribune declared.[11] To add to the increasingly favorable impression that Lincoln was making, Seward, in a speech before the Senate, showed a weakening in his position, leading Wendell Phillips to declare, in the Liberator, that he was phrasing his speech to suit Wall Street.
When the Republican Convention met in Chicago in 1860, Seward was the leading candidate and the Eastern politicians assumed that he would be nominated. Surrounded by the strongest men of New York, Weed attended, confident and arrogant, to direct the victory. He had not included Greeley in his list of delegates, but Greeley,—holding a proxy from far-off Oregon,—was just as busy, if not so confident or so arrogant, as Weed.
What was more important, the West knew him, knew him favorably and believed that his analysis of Seward's character revealed the true weakness of Weed's candidate. In this way he did more to defeat Seward's candidacy than did any other man in the country.
Both Seward and Weed insisted that Greeley had given them to understand that he was supporting the former. The failure of both men to appreciate Greeley's position, however, is as evident as their failure to appreciate the fact that the Western Republicans, admire Seward though they did, were unable to countenance his political methods and his close association with Thurlow Weed. William Cullen Bryant declared that what injured Seward as much as anything else was the "project of Thurlow Weed to give charters for a set of city railways, for which those who received them are to furnish a fund of from four to six hundred thousand dollars to be expended for the Republican cause in the next presidential election."[12]
Another witness tells us that Weed took an Indiana politician aside, and "pleaded with him to turn the Indiana delegation over to Seward, saying that they would send enough money from New York to insure his election for Governor, and carry the state later for the New York candidate."[13]
It was a moneyed convention, if we are to believe Greeley's statements, and there is every indication that they are true; but the West was firm and, when it was over, Lincoln had been nominated. A Western politician was able to write, "Greeley slaughtered Seward, and saved the party. He deserves the praises of all men and gets them now. Wherever he goes he is greeted with cheers."[14]
- ↑ Alexander, ii, 160.
- ↑ Maverick, Henry J. Raymond, 52.
- ↑ New York Times, September 18, 1851.
- ↑ F. W. Seward, Life of W. H. Seward, ii, 221.
- ↑ First Blows of the Civil War, 237
- ↑ Life of Thurlow Weed, ii, 225.
- ↑ See Appendix, Note D.
- ↑ Busy Life, 320.
- ↑ Alexander, ii, 216.
- ↑ New York Tribune, October 27, 1858.
- ↑ Ibid, March 1, 1860.
- ↑ Godwin, Life of Bryant, ii, 127.
- ↑ A. K. McClure, Lincoln and Men of War Times, 25.
- ↑ Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax, 148.