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  • Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion by Harold Holzer
  • Jack Furniss
Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. Harold Holzer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4391-9271-9, 832 pp., cloth, $35.00.

Nineteenth-century America had an insatiable appetite for news. When it came to the necessities of life, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared, “Only bread and the newspaper we must have” (324). For aspiring politicians, this held huge significance. In 1856, Abraham Lincoln stated a general fact that later guided his personal ambition: “Our government rests in public opinion, whoever can change public opinion can change the government” (184). The most powerful arbiters and shapers of public opinion were the editors of the nation’s four thousand newspapers and journals. As Harold Holzer explains in his latest work, to reach the people, Lincoln would have to go through the press.

Lincoln and the Power of the Press adds to the work of scholars like David Donald and Doris Kearns Goodwin in stressing the president’s numerous political gifts and his capacity for growth. Holzer couples this with Lincoln’s uncanny knack of sensing and shaping public opinion, a talent central to Richard J. Carwardine’s biography, and to the author’s own 2004 work, Lincoln at Cooper Union. Holzer bucks scholarship trends focusing on the “inner Lincoln” by instead examining the public man. We learn anew about the sixteenth president by better grasping the world in which he thrived and the great political and press figures with whom he competed.

Holzer’s deeply researched and vivid narrative charts Lincoln’s career from the 1830s to his assassination. It unfolds not as pure biography but as a tale of two rivalries that profoundly shaped the nation, one between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and the other among New York’s three journalist titans: Horace Greeley, Henry Raymond, and James Gordon Bennett. Placing these fierce contests in parallel makes clear that the political and press realms were “mutually dependent and totally inseparable” (xvi). Henry Raymond best encapsulated this overlap, serving simultaneously in 1864 as editor of the New York Times, congressional candidate, and chairman of the National Union Party Executive Committee. Holzer maintains that only by understanding how politicians and journalists collaborated and competed together, “operating in tandem as a single, tightly organized entity,” can we grasp how the momentous events of the Civil War era took shape (xvi).

The early chapters follow Lincoln and Douglas as they courted the press to help them ascend their party ranks. Long hours were spent charming and corralling editors, and when persuasion did not suffice, both men crossed the porous line between journalism and politics. In 1852, Douglas ensured the backing of a “true and reliable Democratic Paper” by recruiting and funding Washington journalist James Sheahan to relocate and start the Chicago Daily Times (143). In the run-up to the 1860 election, [End Page 447] Lincoln followed suit, rescuing the bankrupt German-language newspaper Freie Presse. The editor, Theodore Canisius, would be given back all the equipment and funds as long as he signed a contract “not to depart from the Philadelphia and Illinois Republican platforms” (190). Lincoln kept the deal secret, but Holzer is undoubtedly correct that the arrangement would have shocked few in an age when “the blatant exchange of editorial support for political reward was routine” (193).

Ascending to the presidency provided Lincoln new tools with which to manage the press and reach the people. The most effective mechanism that greased the wheels of power was patronage. Holzer revels in disclosing the astonishingly unabashed ways that journalists demanded lucrative offices and the willingness with which politicians bestowed them. While patronage enhanced the president’s leverage, his extraordinary facility with words made the greatest contribution to his legacy. Through the medium of the published private letter Lincoln “revolutionized the art of presidential communications” (448). His meticulously composed documents—most famously to Horace Greeley, Erastus Corning, and James Conkling—permitted an unfiltered presidential voice to emerge that both reflected and gently molded public sentiment. His response to Greeley’s “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”—stating...

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