Lincoln in the Papers

"What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?"

So wrote Virginia's Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President--"The Ape,'' "Simple Susan," "Kentucky Mule," "Illinois Beast," "traitor," "lowborn, despicable tyrant," "cringing, crawling creature."

"Four Score & Ten." The deadly broadside re-echoes in a lively new book. Lincoln As They Saw Him (Rinehart; $6), in which Herbert Mitgang, an editor of the Sunday New York Times, shows in their own words how editorial writers and reporters viewed Lincoln at every stage of his public life. For all it tells of Lincoln with the fresh impact of the morning's paper, Mitgang's fat volume tells as much about the press from the withering perspective of history.

Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his "assumed clownishness," charged that his "buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience." The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that "he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession." One of Lincoln's greatest speeches, the second inaugural ("with malice toward none") was dismissed by the Times as "slipshod" and "puerile."

Lincoln bore not only the papers' contumely but their inaccuracy. From his entry into politics up to his nomination for President in 1860, newspapers in his own Illinois and across the country could -not seem to spell his first name right. They called him "Abram" Lincoln--and, in the very story of his nomination, so did the New York Times. (Soon afterward, papers began running instructions on how to pronounce "Lincoln.") The Chicago Times repeatedly misquoted him in its report of the Gettysburg address ("Four score and ten years ago . . ."). To its credit, the New York Times ran a letter-perfect full text of the address (followed by "continued applause"), though the reader could not discover that Lincoln had even spoken at Gettysburg until he had plowed through hundreds of words about the memorial ceremony.

Judgment Day. But the press also gave Lincoln staunch supporters, e.g., the Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, and some memorable reporting, such as the Commercial's description of the elation in Chicago at Lincoln's first nomination: "The city was wild with delight. The 'Old Abe' men formed processions and bore rails through the streets. Torrents of liquor were poured down the hoarse throats of the multitude. A hundred guns were fired from the top of Tremont House."

Despite all it said about him, Lincoln enjoyed a lifelong kinship with the press.

As a youth in Springfield, he sold subr scriptions for the weekly Sangamo Journal, covered the state legislature for the same paper when he was a state representative. He carried his habit of writing letters-to-the-editor right into the White, House. For about a year before his inauguration he secretly owned a newspaper, the German-language Illinois Staats-Anzeiger at Springfield. The contract Lincoln drew up to buy the paper left it in the hands of Editor Theodore Canisius but entitled Lincoln to take over its type and press any time the paper failed to espouse the Republican line.

The editorial hatchetmen kept swinging to the end--and even afterward. Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: "God almighty ordered this event." Houston's Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: "From now until God's judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln." But the press was not altogether blind to history. In 1864, during Lincoln's campaign for a second term, the Chicago Tribune stumped for him with prophetic words: "Half a century hence, to have lived in this age will be fame. To have served it well will be immortalitv."

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