Lincoln's Journalist: John Hay's Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860-1864 (review)

284CIVIL WAR HISTORY on associations that actively identified with the "nationalist" interpretation of patriotism and minimizes cultural debate outside of them. Despite her concentration on conflict within the groups, including the GAR's and WRCs debates over black membership, she concludes that a unified patriotic culture existed for a limited time by WWI. The lack of dialogue outside of the associations derives from a scarcity of alternative voices, most notably immigrants and the working class. O'Leary presents blacks who spoke against, but could not halt, their exclusion from the new construction of patriotism. The lower class status of the GAR's black members could have been underscored to illustrate the elite hegemony she presents in the final chapters. To Die For's interdisciplinary approach highlights a wide variety of sources, including music, speeches, newspaper articles, and institutional records. This work has many thought-provoking insights, including discussions ofpublic statuary to illustrate changes in the meaning of liberty orAmerica (13, 29, 196). The best chapters in O'Leary's synthetic work are those on the Americanization of children and the detailed description of the GAR and WRC, in which soldiers and the women who nursed, fed, and sewed for them readjusted to the Union. Jennifer R. Green Boston University Lincoln 's Journalist: John Hay 'sAnonymous Writingsfor the Press, 1860-1864. Edited by Michael Burlingame. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Pp. xxviii, 393. $49.95.) Unbeknown to the readers of one of Missouri's leading Democratic newspapers , many of the anonymous dispatches appearing in it during the Civil War were sent by a Republican, John Hay, the personal secretary of PresidentAbraham Lincoln. Beginning in the presidential campaign of 1 860 and continuing through May of 1864, Lincoln's young assistant wrote one hundred and thirty-two anonymous letters and editorials, both for Democratic organs such as the (St. Louis) Missouri Republican and the New York World as well as for Republican papers such as the ProvidenceJournaland Washington Chronicle. Michael Burlingame's compilation of these articles offers scholars easy access to extremely valuable primary materials for the study of Civil War-era political history. The columns that Hay wrote for St. Louis's major Democratic newspaper during the first two years of the war, which constitute the bulk of this volume, illuminate the Lincoln administration's use of the press to secure the loyalty of the border states. Lincoln's success in preserving the fragile allegiance of this populous cluster of states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware— played a key role in the ultimate victory ofthe Union. Typical of Hay'sjournalistic effort to dissuade Missourians from seceding was his December 16, 1861, dispatch to the Missouri Republican, in which he underscored the devastation that secession had brought to Virginia: "once the largest, richest and most popu- BOOK REVIEWS285 lous State in the Union, she sees her whole territory desolated as by fire, . . . and the whole prestige of her former power and glory passed away forever" (171). Seeking to allay the fears of Missouri's pro-slavery citizens, Lincoln's private secretary repeatedly emphasized throughout the first year and a halfofthe war that the president had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states. Highlighting Lincoln's refusal to accede to the abolitionist demands of congressional Republicans and Union generals, Hay focused attention on the president's support for financial assistance of slave states willing to emancipate gradually their slaves. When Lincoln issued his preliminary emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1 862, Hay insisted that the purpose of the decree was to persuade the citizens of the Confederate states to return to the Union by January 1, 1863, in order not to lose their slaves. Hay'sjournalistic writings also illustrate how Lincoln and his supporters utilized the press to build political support for the President in the border states, all ofwhich had voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the national election of 1860. Shortly before the fall elections of 1862, he wrote to the readers ofthe Missouri Republican that the President, who had consistently "stood between slavery and those who would destroy it," deserved "the love and gratitude of the loyal Border Slave States" (310). Hay's aim of attracting Missouri Democrats into...