Bad press for the President

Accused of changing the rationale for 'his' war, and hounded for mismanaging it. Derided as an uninspiring public speaker. Belittled as an idiot. Blamed for dividing the nation. Charged with incompetence in his administration. Accused of trampling on the Constitution. Engaged in censorship and manipulation of the press. Mockingly compared with lower primates. Pressured for a key Cabinet Advisor's resignation. Of course, we're referring to Lincoln.

Censorship.

Lincoln did censor the press during the Civil War. His administration took control of telegraph lines, temporarily shut down disloyal newspapers and denied them access to the mails (the primary means of communication in a world before phones, radio, TV, etc.), and arbitrarily arrested editors.

Most US wars have been waged under censorship restrictions. World War I saw some press controls reminiscent of those enforced during the Civil War. Congress passed the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act, giving the Postmaster General the authority to censor the mails. President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information and the National Censorship Board. His Secretary of War took control of telegraph and phone lines leading out of the US. Some editors were arrested.

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information. The Army and Navy likewise imposed censorship restrictions.

General ridicule.

For reasons too involved to detail here (in sum, their precarious financial footings), newspapers of Lincoln's time were less 'independent' of those it covered than might (or might not, as your P.O.V. demands) be the case today. In a time of war, Northern papers were initially disposed to give 'their side' the benefit of the doubt. However, the generally poor disposition of the war precipitated grumblings in the Northern papers almost from its outset. The North, after all, had vastly superior resources and therefore were expected to win the war with dispatch, if not ease. (The Southern papers were never kindly disposed towards Lincoln, for obvious reasons.) A major Union defeat at the second battle of Bull Run (August 30, 1862) caused many papers to cast off all restraint in criticizing the President.

Bizarre circumstances surrounding his election left Lincoln particularly vulnerable to criticism: The country was so fragmented that Lincoln was elected president with only 40% of the popular vote. Within a year after his inauguration, an unthinkable (but not unforeshadowed) event transpired: The United States split in two. The remainder of the President's two terms in office would be defined by this event, and much of the criticism directed at him would concern his efforts to cope with it.

Lincoln was called just about every name imaginable in the press of his day, including: A 'grotesque baboon', a 'third-rate country lawyer who once split rails and now splits the Union', a 'coarse, vulgar joker', a dictator, an ape, and a buffoon. The Illinois State Register [published in his adopted home state] labeled him “the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an [American political] office."

Of the abuse that U.S. leaders face, Civil War journalist Donn Piatt wrote: "There is no tyranny so despotic as that of public opinion among a free people. The rule of the majority is to the last extent exacting and brutal. When brought to bear upon our eminent men, it is also senseless."

Ridiculing his public speeches.

The Los Angeles Star commented on Lincoln's inaugural speech (March 4, 1861): “We think the inaugural address of Mr. Lincoln a great failure... The declarations it contains are so contradictory, that while some construed them as threatening... others considered them as merely harmless [bravado]...”

William Howard Russell, the London Times correspondent who covered the early Civil War, also commented on this message: "Somehow or other there is not such anxiety and eagerness to hear what Mr. Lincoln has to say as one could expect on such a momentous occasion." Russell noted that the galleries were not more than threefourths filled, and that the senators appeared disinterested in Lincoln's speech, noting their reading of newspapers, letter-writing, and use of spittoons.

In its December 13, 1862 edition, the Star lambasted President Lincoln’s annual message, calling it “the sorriest document which has ever emanated from [the Presidency]. It is without merit of any kind.... Even the friends of Mr. Lincoln’s administration blush for the failure of their chief.”

Poor choice of administrators.

In March 1861 the Star called Lincoln’s cabinet "by far the weakest that has ever been called to administer the Government of the United States."

Republicans created the war.

The Star copied an article from the Philadelphia Constitutional Union entitled “Who Defeated the Crittenden Compromise?” in its November 8, 1862, edition. The Star concluded that the Republicans defeated the compromise and brought on the Civil War, which the compromise would have averted.

Trampling the Constitution.

In October 1862, the New York World said: "President Lincoln and his chosen advisers must be made to... respect the rights of the people, and to treat the people as their masters and not as their servants."

From a January 1863 Star: “There is no act of tyranny more odious than that which strikes at the liberty of the press—the freedom of thought and speech... for all time to come, history will point back to the reign of Abraham Lincoln, as having displayed a timidity most ludicrous, a terror most abject, a despotism most foul and hideous, a tyranny utterly regardless of all moral considerations, trampling under foot all the guarantees of a written Constitution, which he solemnly swore before God and the world, to maintain, revere, and support.”

In “Away With the Constitution!”, the July 18, 1863 Star reprinted comments made in a speech by John B. Harmon, a prominent Republican lawyer, in which he denounced the Constitution: "This is no time to inquire into the constitutionality of any measure proposed by the government for the arrest of the rebellion. What are Constitutions? Documents that may be made and destroyed at will. Away with the Constitution— push on the war." [Great applause.]

In “Republican Mismanagement”, the same issue reprinted an item from the New York World that questioned the constitutionality of some of Lincoln’s acts, which "outraged and insulted every man in this community.”

This (foreign) people, and this cause, are not worth risking lives for.

The same issue of the Star cited above also quoted from a speech given by former Democratic governor John B. Weller, who commented on the government’s policy of arbitrary arrests: "Fellow citizens, for the expression of these sentiments I may be seized by a military guard, as others have been, dragged away from my wife and children, and incarcerated in prison. Well, if indeed I have outlived the liberties of the people, it is a matter of very little importance where an old National Democrat spends his few remaining years. And if, in the Providence of God, it should be my destiny to terminate my days in a dungeon, I ask kind friends (for I trust I will leave some behind) to raise a simple slab to my memory, and inscribe these words upon it: 'Here lies the body of an American who forfeited his Liberty, and Died in Prison, for refusing to aid in Slaughtering Nine Million Men, Women and Children of his own blood, in order to give Freedom to four million of the African race.'"

A poor military strategist.

Russell of the London Times ridiculed Lincoln’s military acumen: "This poor President! He is to be pitied ... trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movements of troops, military maps, reconnaissances, occupations, interior and exterior lines, and all the technical details of the art of slaying.”

From the New York World: “No General has gone into the field over whom did not impend ... the awful incubus of Washington, with its intrigues, its vanity, its imbecility, its political plots...”

A liar, and a tyrant.

The October 25, 1862 Star commented on the approaching congressional elections, condemning the Republican Party, which “recognizes no loyalty but party loyalty, no constitution but a party platform, no laws but party dogmas.”

On November 7, 1863, under the heading of “Honest Abe”, the Star took to task those who believed that “Old Abe is honest, if nothing else.” Said the Star: “No greater fallacy than this ever found lodgment in the brains of sensible men.” The paper declared that every act since the day he left Springfield was filled with deception, and it confessed ignorance of “a single honest action” since he became president. Even though “Lincoln had a reputation for honesty before he became intoxicated with the maddening cup of power... since his advent to high position, the tyrant has developed itself in his nature to an alarming extent.”

Mocking the justification given for the war.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The Star quoted a “very able article” from the Louisville Journal, which “show[ed] the utter folly and wickedness of this abolition proclamation.”

The November 28, 1863 Star reprinted comments on slavery in America from England's Church and State Review, suggesting that slavery in America wasn’t so bad. The truth, it said, was that the slave “is not a struggling and down-trodden serf writhing under the lash of a cruel task-master, stretching chained hands to heaven in agonized prayers for deliverance. Rather is he a simple-hearted, docile, affectionate child; impatient of work; needing guidance, and even correction, and conscious of his need; capable, no doubt of being trained to a higher and nobler life, but, for the present at least, best and happiest, and, in truth, most contented, as he is... it is in very sadness that we are compelled to point the moral of Southern gallantry and chivalrous devotion by contrast with the sordid meanness, the uncivilized barbarity, [and] the bitter, bloodthirsty unchristianity of the abolition party at the North.”

Questioning the right to interfere in the sovereign affairs of others. Slaveholders portrayed as benign, northern factory owners as despotic.

The December 5, 1863 Star ran a piece on the cause of the war. The article compared the North’s interference with the South’s 'peculiar institution' against the South’s noninterference with the North’s own 'peculiar institution' of 'slavery' in its factories. “The slaveholders of the Southern States,” the article said, “were quietly pursuing the even tenor of their way, cultivating their lands by dependant labor, without intermeddling with the peculiar institutions of their Northern compatriots.” The Star claimed that many of the slaveholders were concerned about workers in Northern factories, who were portrayed as “mere serfs, deprived of all independence in the expression of opinion, either religious or political, working on starvation wages, and embargoed to purchase by tickets from stores, kept by the owners of the factories.” In contrast, the slaveholders “looked complacently on their own slaves, lightly worked and kindly treated, well fed, cared for in sickness.” The Southerners, however, resisted any desire to interfere with the misguided North. They held that “these institutions were peculiar to the State in that section ... and were to be governed by the respective laws of those States.” The article said that “the northern politicians were no more justifiable in their interferences with the institutions of the South than Virginia would have been in intermeddling with those of Massachusetts.”

{Most references were excerpted from this heavily documented eBook: Abraham Lincoln: Press Freedom and War Restraints (from the documents of that time period) by Thomas C. Hanson. We recommend it for further reading.}

This piece appears, with permission, at The One Republic.

{UPDATE: References to Lincoln or the Civil War, usually in the context of present-day events, kept recurring around the 'net for quite some time in 2005. In December, Instapundit linked Kenneth Anderson's comments on Robert Kuttner's slanted and inaccurate piece on these subjects in The Boston Globe. This inspired a fact-laden column from Callimachus, who also comments below, as well as commentary by John Rosenberg. We had noted some of the previous Civil War references here, as had Instapundit.}

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