Horace Greeley & the Lincoln Administration: An Unpublished Archive

Excerpts:

Blaming Lincoln: “Mr. Cameron, if this country is destined to fall, history will lay the blame on Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, with the half-hearted commanders of their forces and the scoundrelly contractors who armed and fed those forces” – Letter to Secretary of War Simon Cameron from the archive.  January 1862.

Journalistic Integrity: “The simple and sufficient reason for my refusal to ask places of the heads of departments at Washington, why I wish them not to give places with any reference to my wishes, and why I will thank you not to ask favors of them for my friends or anybody, is that I wish to be at perfect liberty to criticize the acts of the administration and to demand changing the cabinet should it at any time appear that the public interest demands such change.” October 1861.

Predicting Lincoln's 1860 Election Victory:  "We have got to beat Douglas in every Free State – and shall do it. Breck and Bell will serve him just so in every Slave State. He [Douglas] is gone."  June 1860.

Prosecuting Generals: “I am in favor of a court of inquiry upon each and every failure, and a court-martial on every officer who even seems deficient in courage or capacity… I have no faith in any of our generals, and less than none in the bulk of the cabinet.”  October 1861.

Despairing for the cause: “You seem not to have fully realized that we are playing the great game to lose, and are merely certain to do it. For me, 'the bitterness of death is past'. All I ask or expect is to get out of this as speedily as we may with honor. There is no chance of success but in taking the bull by the horns and our matador [Lincoln] trembles at the shaking of his tail.” November 1861.

“If this country is worth saving, it will be saved. If not, let it be damned as it ought. If we are a nation of robbers and thieves, let us accept the fate that we deserve. I am equal to either fortune!” February 1862.

“The country that needs to be saved by a newspaper ought to be damned. We tried to save it in June, but wrecked the paper without doing any essential good.” February 1862.

“O God that such a country should be in the hands of such men!” February 1862.
 

Introduction:

"Horace Greeley was one of the earliest and most fretting of the many thorns in the political pathway of Abraham Lincoln." Journalist and Lincoln confidant Alexander K. McClure.

Horace Greeley, a man with little to no formal education, was the most influential newspaper editor of the most influential newspaper of its day, an era that spanned an entire generation and stretched from the antebellum period through the war and into U.S. Grant's Administration.  After serving out a partial term in Congress, Greeley flirted with politics as a profession but his career never took off.  However, he found another way to make his voice heard on the public stage.  After stints with other publications, he founded the New York Tribune, whose pages echoed with Greeley’s unique voice.  He worked to elect politicians, took strong and principled positions on contemporary issues, and took down the political careers of national aspirants, among them William Seward.  In the process, he made political enemies and entangled himself in more than one lawsuit.  But his consistent anti-slavery message and his desire to see the Union at peace were consistent threads of a seemingly capricious cloth.  Greeley’s paper was his mouthpiece, and, other than Abraham Lincoln, he was perhaps the most influential Republican voice during the early war years.  

Greeley’s character is best on display in his relationship with Lincoln.  Here you vividly see Greeley’s fire, his wit, his meddling, his politicking, and his anger.  Greeley played a unique role in the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.  He took much criticism for urging Republicans to support Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 for the Senate seat from Illinois. In 1860 he traveled to Chicago as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.  Ostensibly he supported Edward Bates for the nomination, but his real purpose was to prevent the odds-on favorite, fellow New Yorker, William Seward, from getting the nod.  Moreover, on the third ballot, Greeley switched all the votes he controlled from Bates to Lincoln, thereby ensuring Lincoln’s nomination.

Greeley was a man with a mission, and politicians would help or hinder that.  So during the campaign, he urged Lincoln’s election. But, as McClure said, "On the very day that Lincoln entered the Presidency…Greeley was hopelessly embittered against him.”

From the start, Lincoln’s actions as President were too timid, too conservative for him.  He employed incompetent commanders who moved too slowly on the battlefield, ignored the looming and potentially disastrous intervention of Europe, and was too slow to stamp out slavery.  Greeley wrote Lincoln and his Cabinet members, castigating and prodding.  He was a thorn in the side of the Administration, and he could not be ignored.  His voice resonated with the Republican base, which was loyal to The Tribune.

And Greeley meddled. In the early years of the Civil War, the war did not go well for the Union. In 1861 he insisted on quick victories, which did not come, and he demanded that the President punish those responsible. By 1862, Greeley despaired and nearly lost hope, at one moment yearning for vigorous prosecution of the war, and at another looking for a potential accommodation with the Confederacy. He even conjured up a deal to bring European nations into the conflict before Jefferson Davis could do the same. In 1864, Greeley went so far as to press his party to abandon Abraham Lincoln and nominate someone else, even urging his allies in Congress to postpone the nomination in the hopes that someone else would be in a strong enough position to take Lincoln’s place on the ballot.  In openly (and unsuccessfully) advocating Lincoln’s defeat, Greeley asked: "Has Mr. Lincoln proved so transcendentally an able and admirable a President that all consideration of the merits, abilities or services of others should be postponed or foreborne in favor of his re-election? We answer in the negative." Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg wrote that by 1864, "So sharply and peculiarly hostile was the tone of Greeley's newspaper to Lincoln at this time that Harper's Weekly editorially rebuked Greeley for indulging in petty and needless outbursts."

This, combined with Greeley’s failed attempt at negotiating peace with the Confederates later in 1864, a process that embarrassed him and to a lesser extent Lincoln, hurt Greeley but did not diminish his fire.  But it would be wrong to think that Greeley was simply a gadfly, full of nothing but criticism.

Throughout, his was the voice of principled opposition, opposing slavery and striving for peace. He supported Lincoln at times as well, and the two men were political and intellectual allies. In fact, The President considered Greeley’s ideas so important that he designated a drawer in his desk exclusively for Greeley’s correspondence.

Greeley’s career paralleled that of Lincoln.  They served in Congress at the same time, watched the effects of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, saw Kansas bleed, were mortified at the Dred Scott case, and were affected by John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. Yet once the war began, their relationship was characterized by antagonism: two men who sat atop their spheres of influence, arguing for the future of the Union, an argument that Lincoln would ultimately win.

The recipients

Greeley built his wartime Washington office around Samuel Wilkeson, the wily and bright journalist from Buffalo, whose son would die at Gettysburg. Once his relationship with Greeley soured, Wilkeson went to write for the Greeley’s competitor, the New York Times.  This archive consists of 30 letters of Greeley to Wilkeson, 2 of Greeley to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and 1 from Cameron himself to Wilkeson. Most of Greeley’s letters are written on his “Office of The Tribune” letterhead, with many running a number of pages.

Below is a very partial, thematic exhibition of the material.  The letters are to Wilkeson unless otherwise noted.

 1860.  This year saw the confluence of Greeley’s and Lincoln’s fates.  William Seward and Thurlow Weed, Greeley’s one time New York political allies, had in the 1850s refused to advance Greeley for a political position Greeley desired.  In response to this, Greeley wrote Seward dissolving their political partnership, and then, in 1860, he sought to take Seward down.  Seward was the favorite to receive the Republican nomination for president, but Greeley sabotaged his candidacy, then switched his support to Abraham Lincoln and insured Lincoln’s nomination.  This earned him condemnation within the party in New York and made other enemies. 1860 also saw Greeley’s transformation of The Tribune into an election platform for Lincoln. 


•    June 1, 1860, just days after the Republican Convention, in which he justifies his depriving Seward of the nomination: “…No one has treated me so badly in all this business as Mr. William Seward. His use of my letter, and his refusal to let me use it, are of the same piece… Sam, Seward is a bad egg. All the rottenness of both Washington and Albany gravitates toward him…. Let me be counted out ever more. Weed says I know how Seward would have carried heavily in Pennsylvania etc. This can only mean that the Catholic Irish would have voted for him. I couldn't believe it if they were all to swear it on a cross as big as meetinghouse the night before an election. Yet this was the prospect on which we were to visit the fortunes of the Republican Party. I couldn't do it”

•    June 30, 1860, in which he predicts a Lincoln victory:  “The Lincoln fight goes along, as I knew it would. We have got to beat Douglas in every Free State – and shall do it. Breck and Bell will serve him just so in every Slave State. He [Douglas] is gone. The Sage of Binghampton [Seward] goes his pile to Breckinridge and will give him 50,000 votes in our state. It is all right. I do not fight with Weed, but with his legislative cattle who disgraced us and ruined Seward last winter will have to go under. I shall keep on their track till November.”

1861.  This year began the process of dissolution between Greeley and Lincoln, with the former criticizing nearly every move the President made, and making it clear where he placed the blame for Union failures.  The generals moved too slowly, the Treasury spent too much, incompetence all around, and Lincoln and his Cabinet were all in the middle of it.  Another Washington-based editor, Fitz Henry Warren, went off to command a cavalry regiment.  In late July, the President signed a bill authorizing Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to raise money via the issuance of $50,000,000 in notes.  This strained the economy greatly and irritated Greeley.  Around this time, Greeley earned the animosity of many who blamed him in part for egging the Administration on to defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.  The headline, “On to Richmond,” published in the Tribune, turned out to have been written by Fitz Warren, who found himself less welcome in the halls of Washington.  The newspaper business, as the economy suffered, suffered along with it.

In July of 1861, Lincoln called Congress into special session to ratify the actions he had taken at the outbreak of the war, such as raising troops to put down the rebellion. It obliged, approving Lincoln’s war powers steps as necessary to save the Union.  Greeley seems content to have let Congress hold off until July, only so that the blame could be placed squarely on Lincoln’s shoulders.

•    May 2, 1861.  “You write that you would have Congress called earlier. I am opposed to it. In the first place, California must have a chance to send members, and she can't if you hasten the meeting. We must have a quorum somehow, and one very likely to have no slave state represented but Delaware. Then we have imbecility, incapacity and probably treachery already at headquarters; and the country knows who to hold responsible for anything that goes awry. Get Congress together, and the blame would be hustled back and forth from Pres. to Congress and nothing would be done and no one responsible. No: we are rushing a defeat, and it is well to know exactly which horse to saddle with it.”

•    June 11, 1861. "I did my best to have Stanton undertake our Washington business, but he could not. Now it's too late. Warren is fired and cannot be repudiated. Whoever takes that position has to stand well with the State Department. He must be able to telegraph the news, and in these times I should instruct you to keep good your personal standing at the department…." 

•    July 14, 1861.  “Do you consider that the debt will be all but illimitable, and that we can't contract it without providing for the interest at least? How do you fancy that interest is to be paid? Don't you see that the only war we have or can get is the war of the thieves on the Treasury? And that this is certain to be all victories?… They won't get their tariff reductions through this Congress, but Jeff, Congress and Beauregard will both be in the next, if our thieves get done stealing in time, and then all will be done that they choose to demand. I would be willing to compromise on Chase's bill as a priority, but they will do nothing of the sort.  The long and short of the matter is, we are S-O-L-O, and Seward and Scott are the auctioneers…”

•    July 6, 1861. “You may be more diplomatic [than Fitz Warren], but you can only maintain your standing with the Secretaries by concealing a good deal of truth that ought to be told. Does thou not remember that old text, 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.'

•    August 12, 1861. “In my view, every newspaper in New York must retrench radically or die. I do not believe all the newspaper property in our city is worth today 1/10th of its market value six months ago.”

•    September 17, 1861. “I urged him [Fitz Warren] at the outset to say to the President and his cabinet, what I hope you will take early opportunity to say to them, that I swore to support the administration by silence whenever I cannot do it by words, because I believe its fall would involve that of the government, yet if anything on Earth could make me an operative, bitter enemy of the administration, it would be a knowledge that it had given anything to anybody in order to conciliate, console, reward or secure The Tribune. If I can stand such letters as Lincoln's to Fremont, they need not fear my breaking with them on any personal ground whatever.”

•    October 4, 1861. “The simple and sufficient reason for my refusal to ask places of the heads of departments at Washington, why I wish them not to give places with any reference to my wishes, and why I will thank you not to ask favors of them for my friends or anybody, is that I wish to be at perfect liberty to criticize the acts of the administration and to demand changing the cabinet should it at any time appear that the public interest demands such change.”

On the 30th of August, Union General Fremont issued a proclamation freeing all slaves in Missouri that belonged to secessionists. In a letter dated September 11, Lincoln ordered Fremont to change his proclamation to conform to the First Confiscation Act which did not emancipate any slaves.   In November of 1861, 2 Confederate diplomats were removed from the ship Trent on their way to negotiate with the English for recognition. The British were furious about this assault on their sovereignty and threatened to recognize the Confederacy. This was Greeley’s worst nightmare.

•    October 7, 1861. “As for Fremont, I did not make him commander of the Western department, and I should not have done it. It was best to make him a Maj. Gen., but Lyon, or Hunter or Sigel should have had charge of the department. But there Fremont is, and he cannot now be rid of without endangering everything. So I propose to stand by him till he makes or breaks on the Missouri. If he loses, he is to be treated as McDowell was (he can't do worse than McD did); if he wins, he will take care of himself. But I am in favor of a court of inquiry upon each and every failure, and a court-martial on every officer who even seems deficient in courage or capacity. But why isn't drunken Miles of Bull Run dealt with… I guess we must have two or three more defeats.  I have no faith in any of our generals, and less than none in the bulk of the cabinet. Old Abe's addressing his letter to Mrs. Gen. Fremont is the only good thing of the last week, and even that isn't equal to a crushing victory…”

•    October 27, 1861. "I commend to your kind regard Mr. H.L. Stuart of the city, who visits Washington on business and desire to make your acquaintance. You will find him intelligent and energetic, but not at all sympathetic with anti-Fremontism.”

In November of 1861, 2 Confederate diplomats were removed from the ship Trent on their way to negotiate with the English for recognition. This was Greeley’s worst nightmare.

•    November 22, 1861.  “You seem not to have fully realized that we are playing the great game to lose, and are merely certain to do it. For me, 'the bitterness of death is past'. All I ask or expect is to get out of this as speedily as we may with honor. There is no chance of success but in taking the bull by the horns and our matador [Lincoln] trembles at the shaking of his tail…”

•    To Simon Cameron, December 3, 1861.  “Mr. William L. Cole, editor of The Irish-American, having been very influential and efficient in raising the Irish Brigade, is strongly commended for the most responsible position of Paymaster thereto…”

•    December 12, 1861.  “Is Cameron squelched? It seems so. Your men over the river are not wide awake. They seem not to get half so much news from the rebels as some others. If you get any papers from Jeffdom, send them along to us; or rather, cut out the best portions and enclose them in letters. Look sharp for inklings from Europe…”

1862.  Greeley’s antagonism sharpens and turns to despair.  Simon Cameron was removed as Secretary of War on January 14, 1861 amidst accusations of corruption, and replaced with Edwin M. Stanton. Yet Cameron was still a target of Greeley’s unease with the Lincoln administration, as is evidenced by the first letter of this year.

•    January 17, 1862.  “You will allow me to simply indicate my positions. 1. I do not believe that this war can or ought to be prosecuted through the present year. If the rebellion is not substantially crushed within a year from the opening of fire on Fort Sumter, I hold that the European powers will and ought to recognize the Confederacy and interpose to stop the useless and murderous effusion of blood. 2. I hold that the rebellion might have been crushed last June, and might again have been crushed in December. And I think that you should either have seen this done or hung the men through whose fault it remains undone. 3. I think you should have court-martialed and hung or shot Gen. Patterson and Col. Miles directly after Bull Run. If Gen. Patterson was not under express orders to keep Johnston's forces away from Bull Run, then Gen. Scott should have been put on trial without a moment's delay. I know that this rebellion might have been crushed ere this, and that it was your duty to see it done or to shoot those who prevented its being done. 4. The great peril of the contest is here upon us – that of national bankruptcy, brought on by monstrous extravagance and imprudence in outlay, and fraud in the management of the expenditures….  You know how terribly the government has been robbed, had you shot without judge or jury, the first swarm of robbers, there could have been no second. 5. I protest against contracting for arms or anything else on the assumption that this is to be a long war, or at exorbitant prices…. Mr. Cameron, if this country is destined to fall, history will lay the blame on Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, with the half-hearted commanders of their forces and the scoundrelly contractors who armed and fed those forces…. To allow such affairs as Great Bethel, Bull Run and Balls Bluff to pass without even a court of inquiry is, to my view, little less than treason. It was a general permit to traitorous officers to sacrifice their armies and ruin their country. If I am wrong at all this, I hope to be set right; but I, as one of the most cruelly and unjustly assailed for the weakness and worthlessness of this wretched administration, have suffered in silence too long. Your annual report states what seems to you, doubtless, the tenth with recall to the 'Forward to Richmond' impulse; my article on your retirement from the cabinet has the same justification.”

In January 1862, Simon Cameron was removed from his post as War Secretary and, amidst accusations of corruption, Wilkeson was his supporter. Wilkeson had been a strong Cameron advocate, yet even after Cameron’s removal, Wilkeson was favored with early reports from the War Department in return for favorable coverage.


•    February 2, 1862.  Cameron to Wilkeson. "Forney has not told you all I said. Before you read the article to me, I said what he has repeated. After a word, I said to him I had been mistaken, and that I was much pleased with it, as I am… When you read it, I was all attention & was reflecting instead of praising. It impressed me deeply, as it does yet, as excellent in the conception and execution…  You will oblige me by making the corrections agreed on between us, & sending it to me at once, for I fear it will be too late for the publisher."

•    February 3, 1862.  “If this country is worth saving, it will be saved. If not, let it be damned as it ought. If we are a nation of robbers and thieves, let us accept the fate that we deserve. I am equal to either fortune!… The country that needs to be saved by a newspaper ought to be damned. We tried to save it in June, but wrecked the paper without doing any essential good. Henceforth, let it 'give its own quits.' I'm done. If we don't thoroughly thrash the rebels before May, I am for making peace with them.”

•    February 4, 1862. “I wish you would go up to the Houses every day and pick up what is going to be said or proposed. Never mind such saying a propositions being good or bad, but let us have the facts. And when any measure is up, any light you can shed on it by stating its drift and purport is very acceptable.”

In March 1862, President Lincoln removed General George McClellan for inaction.  His action risked a backlash from supporters of the popular McClellan, a reality Greeley seems to have realized.

•    February 25, 1862.  “I guess we lose fully 1000 subscribers by our criticizing of McClellan. No matter; if we thrash out the rebellion and destroy its causes, I am content to die execrated or live a pauper. But we must not wait till May before taking New Orleans, Charleston and Mobile…. And to think that the Treasury is empty and the soldiers unpaid at such a time is enough to drive me crazy. Assume the failing spirits of the ways and means of my intense detestation of all their works and ways, and idlings and courses. O God that such a country should be in the hands of such men!”

•    April 3, 1862.  “I rejoice to hear that Washington is bare of troops. But the rascals won't take it. They can do her. They would have taken it last May had they not feared they could not afford it. I don't doubt that we should have seen the end of them before this had they crossed the Potomac in force….”

Ward Hill Lamon was a close friend of Lincoln and the President appointed him Marshal of the District of Columbia. Newspaper accounts uncomplimentary to Lamon appeared in the Tribune, and on April 4, 1862, the Grand Jury of the District of Columbia found a bill of indictment against Horace Greeley for ‘malicious libel of public officers,’ in particular, Ward H. Lamon, United States Marshal for the District.  Greeley had objected to his treatment in imprisoning slaves.

•    April 8, 1862. “I stay away from Washington because I'm afraid to go thither. If there was the least chance of a fair trial I of course would not mind going, but there isn't. Lincoln has disgraced himself  so much by appointing by vagabond Marshal that I presume there is no chance that he will ever remove him. But I would like to collect facts showing how Lamon has behaved himself.”

•    December 26, 1862, in the wake of the disaster at Fredericksburg, the low water mark of the Union cause. "Please understand that I recommend nothing, endorse nothing, with regard to terms of accommodation with the Rebels. You asked me a question and I showed you why it did not admit of a definite answer at present. I do not pretend to pierce the thick…just before us. Whenever the President should see fit to listen to propositions for peace, I stand pledged to sustain and approve whatever he may judge best, so that it include no new prostrations before the slave power. But in all that relates to peacemaking, I wish to follow not lead….”

1863.

•    January 11, 1863. “Chase is a great man, but not a great financier. I wish he had the gut to put a loan of two hundred millions on the market for whatever it would fetch. I would borrow all he now owes, or convert his debt into 7.30s at three years or six percent at par and relieve the money market instead of embarrassing it. But he doubts and is damned….”

•    January 23, 1863.  “I enclose you a letter just received. I shall break out open you and all other professors of red-dog finance one of these days, and then you will hear thunder….”

•    May 27, 1863.  “I am authorized by a Republican to spend $500 of his money in increasing the circulation of the Tribune in the Army of the Potomac. I want you to make arrangements to that effect directly. You, SW, ought to go down at once to the Rappahannock, see Gen. Hooker and others influential there, show them the treasonable articles from day to day appearing in The Herald and World (especially the latter), and suggest that the circulation of journals which try to disorganize and disaffect the Army ought to be stopped peremptorily, and that of loyal journals promoted instead…. Destroy this letter”

1864.  This year saw the final and official rift, with Greeley supporting Lincoln’s ouster as nominee in the Presidential election. He urged his allies in Congress to support a measure to make maneuvers to stall the selection of a nominee until one could be found that would successfully challenge Lincoln within the Republican Party.  

In this first letter, Greeley anxiously awaits the result of his Congressional maneuvering, which he hoped would mean the end of Lincoln’s political career.

•    April 19, 1864.  "Hear me for my cause. You promised me when here that I should receive your dispatches (in fact, at least earlier). It is now 10 minutes past 11, and I have not a line. Of the Associated Press report of Congress, we have a good part; but it tells me what was said for which I care little, and withholds what was done, for which I care a great deal….”

•    April 24, 1864. “Not hearing from you since I last wrote seven days since, I am obliged to make other arrangements with regard to my Tribune stock…”

Postwar.

By 1865, Greeley’s relationship with Wilkeson had soured.  The latter now worked for the New York Times.  But after Lincoln’s assassination, Greeley led an effort to secure for Mary Todd Lincoln a financial grant or pension, and he wrote Wilkeson arguing his case.

•    May 14, 1865, with his views on Reconstruction in its earliest days.  "I know all you can say about the Lincolns, but they have a claim to his salary, and I don't want this to burden on the Treasury. The precedent would be bad. So let us raise the money, and say no more about it. So I know all about the malignity of the South, or rather at the South, and I am trying to disarm and dissipate it while the partisans and the demagogues are feeding it enduring vitality. If they win, we shall have a Corsican vendetta for a generation…”

The final four letters range from 1867-9 and relate to miscellaneous matters, including publication of his "The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States."  There is one additional letter from May but undated otherwise.