"Public Sentiment Is Everything": The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus...

"Public Sentiment Is Everything": The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the BogusProclamation of 1864Author(s): Menahem BlondheimSource: The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Dec., 2002), pp. 869-899Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3092344 .

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"Public Sentiment Is Everything": The Unions Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864

Menahem Blondheim

The Public Communications Dilemma in the Civil War

War is no less about mobilizing human minds and wills than about recruiting sup- plies, weapons, and manpower and deploying them in combat. Given the scale, scope, and duration of the Civil War and its unprecedented costs in economic and human resources, it was imperative for the Union war administration to reach out and touch the public mind and the collective will. No one understood that better than Abraham Lincoln. "Public sentiment is every thing," he averred. " With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions. He makes possible the inforcement of these, else impossible." Yet the task of molding public sentiment in the wartime Union was a formidable one.1

Mobilizing a politically divided public for heavy sacrifices in a war of aggression would have represented a serious challenge to any national government. In other times and other places, a government could rally the masses to the cause by controlling powerful and centralized media of communication and persuasion. Such control over information and media would enable authorities to address the public at will, set its agenda, and serve as gatekeeper: dissident views would find no expression, and the voice of the opposition could be effectively silenced.2

Menahem Blondheim is senior lecturer in the departments of American studies and communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of the university's Smart Family Communication Institute. He dedicates this article to the memory of Yehoshua Arieli (1916-2002), his inspiring teacher, colleague, and friend, a pro- found scholar and great individual.

Readers may contact Blondheim at <[email protected]>.

1 Abraham Lincoln, notes prepared for speeches after the Dred Scott decision, [Aug. 21, 1858], in The Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953-1955), II, 553.

2 For a comprehensive introduction, see Harold D. Lasswell, David Lerner, and Hans Speier, eds., Propaganda and Communication in World Historfi vol. II: Emergence of Public Opinion in the West (Honolulu, 1980). For a recent application to the Civil War, see Phillip S. Paludan, "'The Better Angels of Our Nature': Lincoln, Propa- ganda, and Public Opinion in the North during the Civil War," in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, ed. Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler (Washington, 1997), 357- 75.

The Journal of American History December 2002 869



870 The Journal of American History December 2002

But in the case of United States wars generally, and of its Civil War in particular, this path could not be taken. The First Amendment barred the administration from tampering with the free expression of ideas and regulating the press. True, it was universally expected that in wartime military necessity might justify curtailing certain freedoms. Freedom of the press and of speech, however, were exceptions. In the unique circumstances of the Civil War, free speech and a free press were practically untouchable, not to be violated with impunity.3

For the issues of freedom of the press, of speech, and of opinion stood at the very center of the sectional storm and therefore of the war itself. As the sectional conflict unfolded, the Northern cause was framed and popularized as an all-out contest between freedom and slavery, and within that context, freedom was to be broadly construed. It emerged as an omnibus concept, a package that included, as the Free- Soilers' battle cry proclaimed, free soil, free labor, free men, and, last but not least, free speech.4 Since free speech was perceived and propagandized as one of the issues over which the war was fought, the war administration could ill afford to undermine its own cause through highhanded interference in the communications environment. As Horatio Seymour, New York's Democratic war governor, would put it: "Our sol- diers in the field will battle in vain for constitutional liberty, if persons, or property, or opinions, are trampled upon at home."5

Here, then, was a dilemma for the Lincoln administration: effective management of the war required stringent control of public communications, which the declared goals of the war forbade. Lincoln and his administration had to face this policy challenge squarely. In its broadest features, the approach they adopted could well be construed as a liberal one, upholding freedom of the press. In the course of the war there were no legislative measures specifically aimed at the press that would radically alter the ante-

I See, for instance, James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (New York, 1926); Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York, 1991); and the more recent and much less rigorous William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (New York, 1998). For a contrast- ing point of view, which contests the assertion in the text, see Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York, 1973), 65-80.

4 On the prominence of freedom of speech issues in the antebellum sectional contest, see William E. Gienapp, "The Crime against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party," Civil War History, 25 (Sept. 1979), 218-45; Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1965); Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing, 1963); Donna Lee Dickerson, The Course of Tolerance: Freedom of the Press in Nineteenth-Century America (West- port, 1990), 81-139; John Nerone, Violence against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History (New York, 1994), 84-110; and Michael Kent Curtis, Free Speech, "the People's Darling Privilege": Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History (Durham, 2000), 117-299.

5This statement was made in the context of the bogus proclamation episode. Horatio Seymour, "The Suspen- sion of Democratic Newspapers in New York," May 23, 1864, in Horatio Seymour, Public Record (New York, 1868), 218-20. The North's victory in a war construed as a contest over civil liberties appears to be the source of the dramatic transformation in the perceived meaning of the First Amendment from a safeguard against prior restraint to a positive right. See Menahem Blondheim, "Regulating Freedom of the Press," paper presented at the Fifth Conference on the Nineteenth-Century Press, the Civil War, and Press Freedom in America, Chattanooga, 1997 (in Menahem Blondheim's possession). That argument is consonant with the one in Leonard W. Levy, Emer- gence of a Free Press (New York, 1985). Levy's approach to constitutional aspects is complemented by the analysis of developments in common law and legal scholarship in Timothy W. Gleason, "Nineteenth-Century Legal Prac- tice and Freedom of the Press: An Introduction to an Unfamiliar Terrain," Journalism History, 14 (Spring 1987), 26-33; and for the latter nineteenth century, in David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge, Eng., 1997). For the opposing view, see Jeffery A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York, 1999).



Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864 871

bellum media environment. The opposition press had free rein during the conflict, and no machinery for prior restraint of publications, such as systematic censorship of newspaper copy before it went to print, was established. Elsewhere and in other times, such censorship was the hallmark of government-press relations in wartime.6

The record does show dozens of wartime incidents that could be considered substantive infringement of press freedom, even by nineteenth-century standards.7 How- ever, when weighing the number of the violations and the limited and temporary nature of most of them against the long duration of the war, the huge number of Northern newspapers, and the enormous volume of public information, not to men- tion the vehemence of opposition speech, the significance of those isolated, unsys- tematic infringements would appear minimal. Moreover, almost all of the sporadic violations of press freedom were instigated and carried out by military commanders in their restricted jurisdictions, not by the civil government.

Since control over public communications was crucial in carrying out a war of such magnitude and cost, the question that forcefully presents itself is how the administration could afford to pursue its moderate attitude toward the press. Con- temporaries, however, were generally silent on the administration's thinking about communication on the home front, and Civil War historiography has tended to over- look communications issues, at least on the policy level. The dearth of explicit explanations of the administration's public communications strategy suggests a need to reconstruct it by observing it at work. This may be achieved by tracing the general procedures and practices the administration instituted within the communications environment. Such a reconstruction may then be confirmed or modified through close analysis of salient cases of conflict and crisis.

The bogus proclamation episode of May 1864 presents itself as a particularly fit- ting prospect for such an analysis. It was the only violation of press freedom initiated at the presidential level and deliberated in the war cabinet. The affair culminated in the closing down, by presidential order, of two of the most prominent opposition newspapers in the nation's largest metropolis and in an order to arrest their proprietors and editors-outspoken critics of the Lincoln administration-at a critical stage in the war and in Lincoln's political career. Moreover, the affair featured extensive administrative intervention in the communications environment of the wartime

6 Strict censorship of telegraphic messages to the press was instituted early in the war, and the censor occasion- ally stopped messages that related to wartime politics and diplomacy, not only to military affairs. See "Allegations of Government Censorship of Telegraphic News Reports during the Civil War," unpublished hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, 37 Cong., [(37) HJ-T.1-12], Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). See also Richard B. Kielbowicz, "The Telegraph, Censorship, and Politics at the Outset of the Civil War," Civil War History, 40 (June 1994), 95-118; and Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 134-37. The Post Office Department, in the early stages of the war, excluded opposition newspapers from the mails. See Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens, Ga., 1977), 42-54. Neither of those restrictions, however, constituted prior restraint in its traditional sense.

7For good summaries of many of the incidents, see J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pitts- burgh, 1955); Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York, 1951); Dickerson, Course of Tolerance; Nerone, Violence against the Press; and Smith, War and Press Freedom. For an unusually broad perspective on these incidents, see David Donald, "Died of Democracy," in Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Donald (Baton Rouge, 1960).




United States, and it produced a barrage of political and popular reactions and even legal action. As possibly the most salient crisis in the freedom of the press during the Civil War, the bogus proclamation case can provide particularly revealing insight into the policies and practices of Lincoln's administration in the communications sector. Conversely, a general perspective on the administration's strategy of public communications may clarify some lingering ambiguities in the unfolding of that lively event and help us interpret its meaning.

A Control Revolution: The Wartime News Axis and Its Management

The Abraham Lincoln portrayed by his biographer David Herbert Donald had two serious shortcomings as a war president and commander in chief. He was the president least prepared for the presidency, having had only meager experience in public office, let alone executive and military experience. He also appeared to be indecisive, making changes in course even while pursuing the most significant goals he had set. Those two shortcomings also proved to be, according to Donald, Lincoln's two greatest assets. He was unencumbered by precedent, convention, and habit of mind in fac- ing the challenge of the war, and he was a learner, growing into greatness through trial and error.8

When it came to public communications, its principles and its practice, Lincoln proved an exceptionally perceptive student. Through his senatorial and presidential campaigns against Stephen A. Douglas, he had mastered the art of spin; and the learning president, together with his administration, completed an education in journalism and mass communication in the course of the war. Lincoln and his administration ultimately mastered the paradox of forcefully controlling information in the North with but minimal tampering with what Americans perceived as their First Amendment rights. The strategy they shaped was based on a keen grasp of, and a cre- ative response to, far-reaching changes that had taken place in the American public communications environment in the prewar decades.

The administration's key to mastering the public communications dilemma was in realizing what had changed in the communications environment and, at least as important, what had not. The one constant was the newspaper. From Benjamin Franklin to Lincoln and from John Peter Zenger to Horace Greeley, the newspaper reigned supreme as the dominant medium through which politically relevant information reached the public. Whatever else had changed, it was still the nation's editors who processed the news that reached their desks as best they saw fit, and it was still the printed copies of their newspapers that brought most of the news to the public. If politics were to continue as usual during the war years, the administration would have to live with criticism, and press opposition would have to be tolerated. An administration that chose to have the Constitution legitimize its power could not afford to abolish an independent press, ban criticism of the government, or require prior approval for publishing public information.

8 David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995).




But communicating public affairs was a multistep operation, and the newspaper was merely the final step. The other stages involved in bringing news to the public had been radically transformed during the antebellum period. There were two dis- tinct phases to the launch of novel communications processes. One transformation took place during the second quarter of the century, the other in the decade immediately preceding the Civil War. A solution to the wartime public communications dilemma required developing an awareness of, and shaping a response to, both the phases of change.

The first transformation was the emergence of the commercial press as a viable alternative to party-dominated and -financed journalism. Prior to the emergence of a popular, commercial press, party-sponsored and, to an extent, party-financed newspapers dominated the circulation of political news. Politicians fed the newspaper flagships of their party and faction with what they thought was the public's due. Obedient local organs in the periphery, which copied and restated the authoritative party sources, then radiated their messages throughout the country. It was thus the political establishment that reported the news from the inside out, its loyal mouth- pieces delivering the messages of the political establishment to the public at large.9

Commercially oriented newspapers independent of party patronage could report politics from the outside in. Such newspapers began receiving public favor in the 1820s, and in the 1830s, led by large-selling penny papers, they came to dominate the urban newspaper scene. To be sure, the independent press remained political, opin- ionated, and even partisan. Yet its independence of party sponsorship and patronage had far-reaching effects on the nature and flow of public information. The independent press used its own means to gather political news, employing innovative journalistic techniques and facilities, such as the stenographic recording of debates in Congress, interviews with politicians, and networks of news and gossip gathering. Fast becoming affluent enterprises, commercial newspapers could afford to make independent and exclusive arrangements for speedy transmission of the news they gathered to their respective editorial sanctums. There, independent editors would frame the news and comment on it according to their own standards and proclivities.10

9 For a summary of the emergence of the commercial and popular press-perhaps the most researched chapter in American journalism history-see William E. Huntziker, The Popular Press, 1833-1865 (Westport, 1999); on the commercial rationale for the new journalism of the period, see Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization ofNews in the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1992). For a historiographical analysis of the penny press, see John C. Ne- rone, "The Mythology of the Penny Press," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 4 (Dec. 1987), 376-404; David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to DefineAmerican Journalism (New York, 1998); and Andy Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and theAx Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, 1994). On the development and operation of the party press, see Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government's Use of Newspapers, 1789-1875 (Athens, Ga., 1977), 219-34; Frederick B. Marbut, "Decline of the Official Press in Washington," Journalism Quarter4l) 33 (Summer 1956), 335-41; Rich- ard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s (New York, 1989); and Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

10 On this process of change, see Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York, 1986), 63-96. For a description of important aspects of it, see Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gal- lery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 7-72. The distinction between party and political press, which is largely overlooked by Mark E. Neely Jr., attenuates his argument that "under conditions of a party press" interparty conflict in the Civil War worked against press freedom. In this context, commer-




Public information was thereby put before the people more fully, more rapidly, and more transparently, while the process of communicating it became more medi- ated and decentralized. Now it was variegated professionals who reported and transmitted, interpreted and analyzed, the day's news, rather than party spokesmen setting the agenda and making news for the large public. The dominance of party flagships and large networks of party newspapers was eclipsed. Dramatic increases in circulation appeared to indicate that the public appreciated the product of independent news gathering and reporting, as performed by the commercial press.

But by midcentury, the trend was reversing itself. For if in the first half of the nineteenth century the public communications pendulum had swung from centralization and political control to a decentralized free-for-all, in the decade preceding the Civil War the pendulum was swinging back to monologism and control. At the heart of the recentralizing of communications stood new technological and organizational infrastructures focused on the telegraph and a national wire service. As the bonds of national unity were dissolving in the late 1840s, a network of sprawling telegraph wires was gradually connecting the regions of the country. As a new cadre of politicians, blundering or otherwise, was trying to salvage the second party system and in the process dismantling it, rival telegraph chieftains were finding ways to harmonize their interests and rationalize the organization and management of their industry. The rise of the Republican party paralleled temporally the success of the news entrepreneur Daniel H. Craig, working for a group of powerful New York editors, in making the New York Associated Press (NYAP)-a news wire service those editors had established in 1 846-into an organization of national scope.11

In the news sector itself, the centralizing implications of this project of technological innovation and system building were dramatic. Actively and systematically, the NYAP gathered news from all over the country to its New York headquarters via the country's consolidating telegraphic network. There the news was sifted, edited, and consolidated into a single report, ready for inclusion in any newspaper. The NYAP dispatch was then "scattered broadcast" via the vast telegraphic circuits of the regional telegraph giants and received simultaneously by every town and hamlet on the telegraph wire web. Once the telegraph operator in each station took down the Associ- ated Press dispatch on manifold paper, one set of "flimsies" (carbon copies) for each of the subscribing local newspapers, the pioneer broadcastlike operation was complete. Only then did the country's editors take over.12

cial rivalry between newspapers seems at least as relevant as party conflict. See Mark E. Neely Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 89-117, esp. 90.

11 The standard account remains Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph in the United States, 1832-1866 (Princeton, 1947). On wire service history, see Victor Rosewater, History of Coopera- tive News-Gathering in the United States (New York, 1930); Richard A. Schwarzlose, The Nation's Newsbrokers, vol. I: The Formative Years: From Pretelegraph to 1865 (Evanston, 1989); and Blondheim, News over the Wires.

12 On the origins and meaning of the broadcast mode of telegraphy, see Menahem Blondheim, "The Click: Telegraphic Technology, Journalism, and the Transformations of the New York Associated Press," American Jour- nalism, 17 (Fall 2000), 27-52; and Menahem Blondheim, "When Bad Things Happen to Good Technologies: Three Phases in the Diffusion and Perception of American Telegraphy," in Technology Pessimism, and Postmodern- ism, ed. Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard Segal (Boston, 1993), 77-92.




Thus, while a variegated press retained its leading role in disseminating public information, there was a single source for the "fast" news that it published. And while America's editorial voice remained polyphonic, its news columns now sounded in a single voice. Through the operations of the telegraph and wire service it became possible to impress "the whole nation . . . with the same idea at the same time," and by the power of shared information, to "bind [it] together with electrical force." An ally of Lincoln's, the New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond, pointed out the implications of this process for the political leader: "The telegraph gives the speaker . . . an audience as wide as the Union. He is talking to all America ... immediately, and lit- erally with the emphasis of lightning."13

In parallel to these far-reaching developments in the nature of news dissemination and at least as important, the reception of newspaper news was also changing. In the antebellum decades readers altered their expectations, consumption patterns, and even the tastes and modes of decoding the newspaper. The public became trapped in the dynamics of a process that the sociologist Helen MacGill Hughes called "the quickening urgency of news." It had developed a taste for ever more and ever faster hard news, at the expense of editorials and correspondence. It was the telegraphic columns that the public craved, bought the newspaper for, and read first, if not exclusively. 14

Lincoln, it appears, had grasped the significance of the two phases of change and responded to both early on. Realizing the decline of a centrally orchestrated system of party papers, he did not trouble to establish a Washington organ upon assuming office; nor did he cultivate a network of loyal newspapers, pampered by subsidies in the form of generous contracts for public printing. The establishment of the Govern- ment Printing Office in 1860 effectively abolished the instruments of newspaper patronage. But further, Lincoln and his administration appear to have fully grasped the new dynamic of recentralization, which had affected America's news communication system as the Civil War neared. They found ways to harness the new tools for central control over news to their advantage.'5

In fact, recentralization provided Lincoln and his administration with their solution to the dilemma of public communications in wartime. The administration could live with a free press so long as it controlled the process of feeding information to that press. By managing the release of wartime news, overseeing telegraphy, and influencing the wire service, the administration could dominate the provision of timely hard news to the public. This would still be done through the nation's newspapers, but over the heads of their editors. The waning of the newspaper's editorial

13 James Gordon Bennett, quoted in A Journalist [Isaac C. Pray], Memoirs ofJames Gordon Bennett and his Times (New York, 1855), 365. And cf. New York Weekly Herald, June 7, 1844. New York Times, Sept. 9, 1859.

14 Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, From 1690 to 1872 (New York, 1873), 548; James D. Reid, "The Western Press and the Telegraph," National Telegraph Review, 1 (Oct. 1853), 231-46; William S. F Shanks, "How We Get Our News," Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 34 (May 1867), 513; Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (Chicago, 1940), 2-19, 58. See also Charles Royster, Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York, 1991), 331-41.

15 Smith, Press, Politics, and Patronage, 219-34; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1973), 65-68.




A field telegraph station at Wilcox Landing, Virginia, during the Wilderness campaign, May-June 1864. The telegraph served the Lincoln administration as an essential tool for managing the war both in the field and on the home front. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B8171-2351.

function had both substantive and technical aspects. It reflected the increase in the importance of hard war news relative to editorial comment, and it was facilitated by the modus operandi of wire news transmission. The telegraphic reports for the morning newspapers were sent late at night, after the managing editors had left their offices, and they were incorporated into the morning edition by the technical crew, usually without any editorial intervention, let alone comment.16

The administration's influence over the news-providing process thus ran along an axis from the battlefield to the printed newspaper, its power diminishing as news pro, gressed along that axis. The administration's power was greatest at the source of the news-the battlefield and its own newsworthy affairs-and weakest at the outlet, the newspaper. Through well-developed and orderly procedures, the Union armies sent timely information up the military hierarchy and over networks of military telegraph lines spatially paralleling this hierarchy to the civil administration.17 The administra-

16 On the significance of the late arrival of wire news to editorial offices, see testimony of Samuel Wilkeson, the New York Tribune's Washington editor, Jan. 24, 1862, "Allegations of Government Censorship."

17 Awareness of the telegraph as an interface between the strategic and the tactical levels of command in the Civil War is demonstrated in the annual reports of the secretaries of war. See the first of them: "Report of War Department Operations," July 1, 1861, in U.S. Department of War, The War of the Rebellion:A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols., Washington, 1880-1901), ser. 3, vol. I, 307. A charming discussion of structural malfunctions of the Civil War military telegraph system inadvertently highlights the tension between the strategic and the tactical, the military and the civilian, functions of modern communication systems in wartime: Roscoe Pound, "The Military Telegraph in the Civil War," Proceedings of the Massachusetts HistoricalSociety, 66 (1936-1941), 185-203.




tion, in turn, decided which of that news to release to the public, when, and in what form.

True enough, war correspondents were an alternative source of war news and could supplement government reporting. Technically, however, the reporters with the armies were camp followers, subject to military law as exercised by the officers whose activities they were reporting. Moreover, correspondents were usually bound by regulatory agreements with those commanding officers. Should those arrangements fail to yield effective supervision, the military had a further check on the reports of war correspondents through its management of the military telegraph lines leading to Washington. Correspondents who evaded the military's control by avoiding the telegraph and using slower alternative media inevitably relinquished the prospect of breaking the news and doctoring its spin. This was precisely what the war administration intended; it sought to make the first impression on the public mind. As a leading Washington journalist told Congress, the administration "had determined" that its "own version ... should have precedence over everything else." It had decided that "nothing should get ahead of it to the public eye." Thus, the reporting of timely news from the battlefield-the information that captured the attention of an aroused and worried public-was effectively controlled by the administration.18

The next steps along the path from news sources to news outlets were the lines of the commercial telegraph network radiating out of Washington and the news distribution system of the wire service based on that network. The government had complete control over the operations of the nominally civilian telegraph companies. At first that power was exercised by way of informal arrangements, but early in 1862 legislation put all telegraphic lines under military control.'9 The legal nature of the executive branchs control over the message traffic of a nominally civilian system was murky. But however ambiguous its powers over telegraphic information flow in theory, in practice the government exercised full control over telegraphic facilities.

Through its control of the telegraph, the administration could dominate the flow and content of telegraphic press dispatches. By 1861 the telegraph industry was well into what its leading historian has called its "era of consolidation." A near duopoly of the American Telegraph Company (monopolizing eastern seaboard telegraphy) and

18 Quotation is from the reexamination of Wilkeson, Jan. 31, 1862, "Allegations of Government Censorship." That collection is also the best source on the early arrangements between officers and reporters and on the agreement of August 2, 1861, between Gen. George McClellan and representatives of the press, by which the journalists agreed to refrain from publishing secret military information and the army committed to facilitate war reporting. For a summary, see Kielbowicz, "Telegraph, Censorship, and Politics at the Outset of the Civil War." An important early study is James G. Randall, "The Newspaper Problem in Its Bearing upon Military Secrecy during the Civil War," American Historical Review, 23 (Jan. 1918), 303-23. Early in the war McClellan preferred the New York Herald over the New York Associated Press (NYAP); see Daniel H. Craig to Lawrence Gobright, Oct. 29, 1861, William Henry Seward Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

19 Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 31, 1862, pp. 334-52. See report of Senate debate on this issue, New York Times, Jan. 30, 1862; General Orders No. 10, Feb. 4, 1862, in War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, I, 879; War Department order, Feb. 25, 1862, ibid., 899. The stable core of telegraph control was the supervision the American Telegraph Company's president, Edward S. Sanford, exercised over telegraphic message flow in the interest of the government. The 1862 law merely gave Sanford the official title of "military supervisor of telegraphic messages throughout the United States." See, for example, H. Emmons Thayer to Frederick W Seward, Feb. 2, 1862, Seward Papers (Library of Congress); Edward S. Sanford to B. P. Snyder and G. H. Burns, Aug. 9, 1861, in War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, I, 394-95.




Western Union (connecting with American and serving the Midwest) came to dominate the nation's telegraphic network.20 Early in the war the administration connected the wires of American to the War Department, and by the time of the battle of Bull Run in July 1861, it had established stringent control over the content of press dispatches passing over the wires. Censorship affected not only military information but also diplomatic news, reports on the civil operations of the administration, and even political news. Reams of telegrams from newspapers' Washington bureaus were doctored or entirely suppressed by the censor, who by autumn 1861 operated under the authority of Secretary of State William H. Seward. The latter was fully aware of the crucial significance of his control over the flow of telegraphic news in shaping the wartime public information environment and affecting the nation's press. "I will take the telegraph in my own hands," Seward vowed early in the war to a leading Washington correspondent. On the basis of that control, he declared, pounding on the table for emphasis, "I will straighten out you men of the press." Seward's weapons in this project were "scissors of various sizes," the "rack of pens ... lead-pencils of different colors . . . [the] pot of mucilage," and the "other properties" of the censor whom he installed over the press's telegraphic news traffic.21

But perhaps the most significant step the administration took in its quest to control wartime news was recruiting the nation's monopolistic wire service, the NYAP, to serve its cause. Organized in 1846 by six leading New York dailies of varying politics, the association had established itself, by the mid-1850s, as the nation's first private- sector national monopoly, serving practically the entire North American press with its telegraphic news. Few Americans were aware of the association's role, let alone its significance. The NYAP preferred to operate backstage, leaving the limelight to its member newspapers and its clients. Only mavens such as Francis 0. J. Smith-a former congressman from Maine, a telegraph entrepreneur, and a veteran of the Tyler administration's covert propaganda campaigns-recognized the "omnipotence" of the NYAP. The association and its head, argued Smith, "could send or withhold such news as he chose, and thus shape public sentiment at will." He believed that conse- quently the association had "more power to make and unmake presidents than either party. 22

From the earliest days of his administration, the perceptive Lincoln entered into a close alliance with the NYAP, the dominant link between the country's telegraphic infrastructure and the press. In the government's relationship with the Associated Press, its power and influence were based, not on any legal or regulatory foundation, but rather on a strong synergy. Substantial mutual interest sustained a cozy, semi-

20 Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 373-406. See also J. Cutler Andrews, "The Southern Telegraph Company, 1861-1865: A Chapter in the History of Wartime Communication," Journal ofSouthern History; 30 (Aug. 1964), 319-44.

21 William H. Seward's statement is quoted in the reexamination of Wilkeson, Jan. 31, 1862, "Allegations of Government Censorship." L. A. Gobright, Recollection of Men and Things at Washington, during the Third of a Century (Philadelphia, 1869), 320-21.

22 Boston Daily Courier, Feb. 10, 1859. On Francis 0. J. Smith's career, see Blondheim, News over the Wires, chaps. 2-4. On his role in the manipulation of public information in the service of the government, see Frederick Merk with Lois Bannister Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 59- 64.




official liaison, in which the NYAP served as a de facto organ of the administration.23 The government provided the NYAP with exclusive bulletins of war news and other information valued in the news market. To the wire service this was a tremendous bonus: by serving as the exclusive outlet for the most authoritative and comprehensive war information, it could buttress its monopoly in the nation's telegraphic news market.

Through this arrangement the government in turn could access a comprehensive national system of news distribution. The NYAP thus became what its Washington agent Lawrence Gobright described as the "medium [of the government] for general dissemination of information of public importance." Thus, Gobright explained, "expense and repetition are avoided and the convenience of the different departments subserved." Particularly so, the agent acknowledged, since unlike the special correspondents who "write to suit the temper of their own organs," he followed NYAP

instructions that forbade his "making any comment upon the facts which I communi- cate." The reports were "merely dry matters of fact and detail" provided by the government and devoid of journalistic intervention or editorial opinion. Indeed, according to the Tribune's Sam Wilkeson, in the course of the war Gobright had become "almost as much the agent of the government as the agent of the newspapers."24

As part of this symbiotic arrangement between the government and the wire service for news control, the NYAP obtained carte blanche to use both the military and the government-supervised civilian telegraph networks to transmit its news. The administration even waived the required pre-approval of press reports transmitted by telegraph: NYAP reports went uncensored. In fact, they served the telegraph censor as the yardstick for approving "special" telegraphic reports for individual newspapers. Spe- cials that contained substantially the same news that NYAP reports provided were allowed to pass over the wires; reports that diverged from the NYAP standard were stopped. Since the administration itself was the source of the wire service news, the censor considered its reports as official material.

By 1864 the administration no longer hid behind the wire service in issuing military news bulletins to the public. The bulletins became framed as telegrams from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to the commander of the Department of the East, Maj. Gen. John A. Dix, stationed in New York. Yet the bulletins continued to be broadcast to the nation through the machinery of the Associated Press out of New York.25 The government thus had a mechanism for delivering its message to practi-

23 The Washington agent of the New York Associated Press (NYAP), Lawrence Gobright, claimed to have initiated the cooperative arrangement between the NYAP and the administration: Gobright, Recollection of Men and Things, 312-14. But see New York Times, Nov. 21, 1861. A contemporary analysis of the arrangement emerges from the reexamination of Wilkeson, Jan. 24, 1862, "Allegations of Government Censorship." See also Blond- heim, News over the Wires, 132-37.

24 Testimony of Lawrence Gobright, Jan. 5, 1862, "Allegations of Government Censorship"; testimony of Wilkeson, Jan. 24, 1862, ibid.

25 David T. Z. Mindich, "Edwin M. Stanton, the Inverted Pyramid, and Information Control in the Civil War," in The Civil War and the Press, ed. David B. Sachsman et al. (New Brunswick, 2000), 179-208. See also Schwarzlose, Nation's Newsbrokers, I, 244; Sanford to Edwin M. Stanton, May 11, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War, 1861-1882 (microfilm: collection M-473), Records of the Office of the Secre- tary of War, RG 107 (National Archives).




cally the entire press of the country, and through those newspapers it could access and address the American public rapidly and simultaneously.

In the course of the war the administration also perfected arrangements for addressing European public opinion. The State Department, in conjunction with the NYAP, structured a detailed system for timing the release of war news for European consumption according to the schedule of Europe-bound mail-bearing steamers. In certain cases the release of news intended for European consumption involved elabo- rate arrangements featuring the interception of London-bound mail steamers off Cape Race, Newfoundland, by NYAP news yachts. The yachts provided the steamers' pursers with late news transmitted via a combination of telegraph and cable to St. John's, the easternmost reach of the North American telegraph system. By these means the administration's news was the last word received in Europe about the American conflict. The Reuters agency in England, through a series of understand- ings with the NYAP, arranged for the effective dissemination of the State Department's news in England and on the Continent.26

Here, then, was a system of public communications, perhaps improvised and homespun, but nevertheless one that provided the administration with effective control over national and international news flow. The strategy was based on stringent control of the low-profile links in the system of news flow, which allowed for a hands-off policy at the most conspicuous and high-profile element in the news communications circuit-the daily newspaper. The system made it possible for the government to shape America's war news, to access the public at will, to set the agenda and keep the gates, without resort to prior restraint of newspapers and hence without systematic interference with freedom of the press as perceived by contemporaries. The American public was generally unaware of the meaning of the new technologies and systems that made news control by government possible. It continued to regard its First Amendment freedoms as vested in newspapers.

The Bogus Proclamation: Crime and Punishment

The bogus proclamation affair of May 1864 provides a uniquely revealing setting for observing the Union's public communications strategy in a moment of crisis. It featured one of the most salient encounters between the war administration and the public press: as noted, it was the only case in which the president himself ordered the arrest of editors and closure of newspapers, and it came at a crucial moment during the war and in both Democratic and Republican wartime politics. Commensurate with its significance, the story of the bogus proclamation has been retold many times,

26 As early as October 1861, the War Department adjusted the publication of news via the NYAP to the sched- ules of transatlantic steamers so as to impact the shaping of policy in Europe. See, for instance, Thomas A. Scott to Craig, Oct. 31, 1861, in War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, I, 612; and ibid., ser. 2, II, 1093. On the cooperation between the State Department, the NYAP, and Reuters in reporting war news to Europe, see Julius Reuter to Craig, Jan. 24, 1863 (microfilm), William Henry Seward Papers (Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.); and Craig to Gobright, Feb. 16, March 11, 1863, ibid. This arrangement is not disclosed in the standard history of Reuters: Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, 1849-1989 (New York, 1992), 34-38.




yet it remains surprisingly murky and equivocal.27 Both the heated debate over the affair by contemporaries and subsequent scholarly accounts have focused sharply on the high-handed muzzling of newspapers and its First Amendment implications. That focus has diverted attention from other, at least equally important, aspects of the episode. It is precisely the neglected aspects of the story that give it coherence and moreover provide a wide-angle view of the management of all elements of the wartime communications complex. The bogus proclamation affair thus represents an unequaled site for observing the administration's public communications strategy at work.

For the bogus proclamation affair featured dramatic action all along the news communication axis, from news gathering at its source through telegraph transmission and wire service distribution to the press terminus. Only by tracing the story all along the news axis-from news source to news outlet-can a proper understanding of the incident and its meaning be reached. Close scrutiny of that colorful, but in many ways awkward, affair therefore suggests itself as a case study highlighting the nature and evolution of Union strategies for wartime communications on the home front.

At about three thirty in the morning of May 18, 1864, just as a foreman for the New York Journal of Commerce was about to complete typesetting that morning's edition, one of his three assistants rushed into the office. "You'll have to wait; here's a holiday for you!" he exclaimed, handing the foreman several sheets of New York Associated Press flimsies, just received from an "Associated Press boy." The message scribbled on the sheets was a proclamation signed by President Lincoln and countersigned by Sec- retary of State Seward. The foreman's standing orders were that once the edition was closed and the night editor gone, he could make last-minute changes only in the case of "news of a battle or an official order." The late dispatch just received definitely embodied the latter and also implied the former.28

The presidential proclamation called for a day of fasting, humiliation, and solemn prayer and called up 400,000 additional men for active service. The proclamation's contents, as well as its solemn wording, appeared to confirm the worst apprehensions of a public anxiously waiting for news of the fate of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's forces in Virginia, at that time engaging the Confederates at Spotsylvania Court House. The

27 Secondary descriptions of the incident are numerous. See, for instance, Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, 496-99; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1940), 53-56; James G. Ran- dall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York, 1955), 150-56; Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 289-303; Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York, 1954), 315- 20; Mary Cortona Phelan, "Manton Marble of the New York World. Champion of the Constitution" (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1957), 31-38; Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (Westport, 1980), 301-2, 376-78; Schwarzlose, Nation's Newsbrokers, I 251-54; Blondheim, News over the Wires, 132-36; Donald, Lincoln, 501-2; Brooks D. Simpson, "Great Expecta- tions: Ulysses S. Grant, the Northern Press, and the Opening of the Wilderness Campaign," in The Wilderness Campaign, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill, 1997), 28-29; and Neely, Union Divided, 111-17.

28 New YorkJournal of Commerce, March 26, 1870. TheJournal's account is quoted in full in Hudson,Journal- ism in the United States, 374-76.




dramatic proclamation dashed the high hopes in the North that "the days of the Rebellion are surely numbered." It implied the failure of the Union army in the fateful Virginia campaign. The Journal staff dutifully and rapidly inserted the dramatic news in its morning edition.29

The editorial offices of the Journal had expected bad news. "All the news I have," noted William C. Prime, the Journal's editor and part owner, "comes from administration sources," yet even those sources judged the prospects grim. It appeared that "the battle still rages fearfully" and that the "carnage is awful." Prime's close friend George McClellan, in early retirement from the rage of battle and entering a new career in Democratic politics, had helped Prime and their mutual acquaintance Man- ton Marble, editor of the Democratic and viciously antiadministration New York World, interpret the administration's news. This interpretation by the great expert on the Army of the Potomac was "not cheerful" at all. "Depressed and fearful," the Journal's editor had expected the worst. "Heaven help us all," he wrote his wife with foreboding. The proclamation received by Prime's night foreman also invoked help from the "Throne of Grace" and from 400,000 men to overcome the "unparalleled outrage" and monumental suffering brought about "for reasons known to Him alone."30

A few blocks away, Manton Marble's employees on the New York World were inserting the same words in their May 18 edition. They too had received a set of NYAP

flimsies with the president's proclamation. In both establishments the issue that included the dramatic proclamation was shortly printed, folded, and delivered. A third daily, the New York Herald, also incorporated the proclamation into its May 18 issue. But while the momentous document was rapidly rolling off the fast presses, the attention of the Herald's night manager was drawn to early copies of the Times and Tribune that had just reached his office. The two leading proadministration papers did not contain the dramatic news. The men at the Herald office found this perplex- ing in the extreme.

It was routine enough for the press to receive a presidential proclamation or other official release as a NYAP dispatch. As noted, from early in the war it had been the responsibility and privilege of the wire service to give national circulation to official pronouncements of the administration. Such official matter reaching New York by telegraph was taken down at the NYAP headquarters by stylus on a pile of manifold paper, one copy for each of the seven NYAP member newspapers, others for the association's local clients. Messenger boys delivered the copies simultaneously to the newspaper offices. Why then, wondered the men at the Herald office, had not the Times and Tribune published their copies of the presidential proclamation? They immediately stopped the presses.

29 New York World, May 18, 1864; New York Journal of Commerce, May 18, 1864. The full text of the proclamation appeared on either May 19 or May 20 in numerous newspapers I surveyed. On the great expectations in the North from the Wilderness campaign see, for example, New York Tribune, May 10, 1864; and on the atmo- sphere in the course of it, see Simpson, "Great Expectations," 8ff.

30 William C. Prime to Mary Trumbull Prime, May 11, 12, 13, 1864, in Alice Scoville Barry, Why Did Presi- dent Lincoln Suppress the Journal of Commerce? (New York, n.d.), 2-3; New York Journal of Commerce, May 18, 1864.




A short investigation satisfied the Herald men that the proclamation was not genuine NYAP copy. They found that other local newspapers had managed to discover the forgery before going to print. The first to suspect the authenticity of the news was a cautious clerk at the counter of the Copperhead New York Daily News. That newspaper was marking the anniversary of its resuming publication after discontinuing itself due to its exclusion from the mails by order of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Understandably, it was on its guard. The Daily News clerk, when handed his copy of the dispatch early in the morning, asked the messenger why it was not sent in the standard NYAP envelope. The messenger evaded the question and hurried away. Suspicion aroused, the Daily News made a round of inquiries and found that while the Times had received the dispatch, and apparently even typeset it, the Tribune had not. At the headquarters of the NYAP, the night clerk informed the Daily News people that the dispatch was "as false as hell"-the association had not received nor sent out any presidential proclamation. On learning those facts, the Herald immediately recalled some twenty-five thousand copies it had printed featuring the purported presidential proclamation. Few if any copies of that abortive edition found their way to newsboys or subscribers.31

The World and the Journal of Commerce were not as fortunate. It was only after their issues had been distributed that the editors discovered that the proclamation they had published was not authentic. They immediately informed the public by means of their bulletin boards that the news was a false alarm. The World even published an extra edition announcing that the proclamation it had inadvertently published was a hoax and announced a prize for discovering its perpetrators. The World's editor, Manton Marble, sent a telegram giving all the facts of the matter to the NYAP for circulation over its vast news circuits reaching "nearly every daily paper in the North, from Maine to California." Daniel H. Craig, the manager of the NYAP, immediately announced a prize of one thousand dollars for information that would lead to the discovery of the forgers who had taken the name of the NYAP in vain.32

31 See Menahem Blondheim, "Crossing the Lines: Treason, Dissent, and Ben Wood's Copperhead New York Daily News in the Civil War," paper presented at the Ninth Annual Symposium on the Nineteenth-Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression in America, Chattanooga, 2001 (in Blondheim's possession). It may be that the World and Journal of Commerce received their copies in NYAP envelopes. Craig to [?] Bangs, May 18, 1864, Manton Marble Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). The New York Times claimed to have suspected the proclamation due to its awkward wording and took credit for initiating and making the inquiry at the NYAP offices that exposed the hoax. See New York Times, May 19, 1864. This version was elaborated on in the paper's jubilee supplement: ibid, Sept. 18, 1901, pp. 9-10. But the editor of the Journal of Commerce stated that the Times had typeset and stereotyped the proclamation. William C. Prime to Mary Trumbull Prime, May 20, 1864, in Barry, Why Did President Lincoln Suppress the Journal of Commerce?, 22. On the process of verifying the NYAP dispatch, see ibid.; New York Daily News, May 19, 1864; and New York Times, May 19, 1864. The Daily News stated that a Ger- man-language NYAP client also published the proclamation, but no steps are known to have been taken against it. New York Daily News, May 19, 1864.

32 The World stopped over-the-counter sales of the edition at 8:00 A.M. The employees of both newspapers were dispatched to retrieve copies of the morning edition. Morgan Dix, Memoirs ofJohn Adams Dix (2 vols., New York, 1883), II, 98-99. Gen. John A. Dix's headquarters, however, received information that the World "sent copies of their edition of the 18th inst. To the Str Scotia as late as 1 oclock P.M." Wilson Bantom [?] to Manton Mar- ble, May 19, 1864, Marble Papers. On the rewards for the discovery of the perpetrator, see Marble to Craig, May 18, 1864, ibid; Craig to Marble, [May 18, 1864], ibid.; and Craig to the proprietors of the New York Journal of Commerce, Sun, Herald, Express, Tribune, Workl and Times, May 18, 1864, ibid.




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While the New York newspapers victimized by the forgery were busy assuaging the damage, Washington was alerted to its publication. The New York manager of the government-controlled American Telegraph Company sent the text of the proclamation, as printed in the World, to his superior, Maj. Thomas T. Eckert, superintendent of the military telegraph. Maj. Gen. John A. Dix, commander of the Department of the East, informed Secretary Seward of the publication of the proclamation, "believed to be spurious," and requested immediate official clarification.33

The haste was due to the scheduled departure of the steamer Scotia for England that same day. As noted, the State Department had an arrangement with the NYAP and Reuters ensuring that late news from America, as released by the administration, would be promptly circulated in England and on the Continent. Should the Scotia leave New York with information of the purported presidential proclamation on board, Europeans were certain to believe that the Union war effort was in dire straits. The British and French governments, if convinced that momentum was with the Confederacy, were likely to make policy decisions that could significantly affect the course and perhaps even the outcome of the war. Samuel Cunard, the Canadian owner of the Scotia, was apparently notified of the emergency and agreed to delay the departure of the steamer until the confusion was cleared and the affair sorted out.34

It shortly was, through a brief but emphatic telegram from Secretary Seward to the NYAP, intended for, and addressed to, the American public. The proclamation, announced the Secretary of State, was "an absolute forgery." "No proclamation of that kind or any other," he assured the public, "has been made or proposed to be made by the President, or issued or proposed to be issued by the State Department or any Department of the Government." The denial was to be conveyed to Europe by the Scotia and telegraphed to ambassadors Charles Francis Adams in London and William L. Dayton in Paris by the ship's purser immediately upon landing.35

Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in a telegram to General Dix, tersely confirmed the denial. The proclamation, stated the secretary, was no less than a "treason- able forgery." Stanton's wording underscored the severity with which the incident was regarded in Washington. The general immediately launched an investigation and early in the afternoon met with the World's editor, Manton Marble, and the journal's, William C. Prime. Dix received a full account of the circumstances sur- rounding the publication of the forged NYAP dispatch from the editors. The editors' explanations squared well with Dix's own findings, and he prepared a telegram for Stanton with a summary of his investigation. Dix was relieved to report that the bogus proclamation, albeit trifling "with the authority of the Government and the

33The entire correspondence is available in Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. Much of it is reproduced in War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, IV, 386-95.

34 The delay was brief At 2:30 P.M. the NYAP notified Washington that the Scotia had sailed with the official contradiction of the bogus proclamation aboard. Philadelphia Associated Press to William H. Seward and Stan- ton, May 18, 1864, Seward Papers (Library of Congress). For the suggestion that Samuel Cunard was personally involved in the episode, see Dix, Memoirs ofJohn Adams Dix, II, 99.

35 The denial and orders for forwarding it to Charles Francis Adams and William L. Dayton were sent from Washington at 12:00 noon. The Journal of Commerce editors informed Seward that they authorized a denial to be delivered by the steamer: William C. Prime, David M. Stone, David Hale, and Gerard Hallock to William H. Seward, May 18, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War.




feelings of the community at this important juncture in our public affairs," was no more than a "gross fraud."36

Dix understood the forgery as a simple case of wartime financial speculation. Together with all astute Americans, the general knew full well that news of a military debacle was sure to produce a sharp increase in the price of gold. Insecurity and uncertainty would drive many to buy the ever-trusty specie, and greenbacks issued by the faltering government would decline. By anticipating news of a disaster, let alone manufacturing it, one could make a fortune in a series of brisk speculative transac- tions on the exchange. The perpetrators of the forgery could therefore most likely be detected by tracking those who had bought large amounts of gold on the exchange in previous days. Dix was confident that before long he would have the guilty party under lock and key, and he conveyed that assurance to Stanton.37

Before Dix's telegram went out, however, he received a dispatch from Washington, signed by the president himself, which put the affair in an entirely different light. Rather than an "infamous trifling," President Lincoln considered the publication of the spurious proclamation no less than a meditated act of treason. Indeed, for Lin- coln the meaning of the publication went far beyond mischief to the authority of the government and the feelings of the community; it was the giving of "aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and to the rebels now at war against the Govern- ment, and their aiders and abettors." Accordingly, the president instructed Dix to arrest and imprison the editors, proprietors, and publishers of the two offending newspapers and to take possession, by military force, of their printing establishments. The same rationale clearly underlay his instructions, in his presidential order, to arrest any other newspaperman who republished the bogus proclamation "with intent" to give "aid and comfort to the enemy."38

Dix must have been thoroughly perplexed by the president's strongly worded order and the stern measures it called for. The bogus proclamation appeared to him a clear- cut but crude attempt at rigging the local financial markets, and only a moderate success at that. The editors had published the document inadvertently and were victims rather than perpetrators of the local forgery, and, besides, no real damage had been done. The Scotia steamed out of the harbor with an official denial of the hoax, and although signs of antidraft stirrings were evident, the home front was under control. Throughout the country and even in testy New York City, the denials had generally reached the public ahead of the forgery.39 Dix was therefore confident that after offi-

36 Stanton to John A. Dix, May 18, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War; Dix to Stanton, May 18, 1864 (received 4:35 P.M.), ibid.; William C. Prime to Mary Trumbull Prime, May 18, 1864, in Barry, Why Did President Lincoln Suppress the Journal of Commerce?, 7.

37 By then Dix had apparently been advised by a New York broker of inquiries a journalist had made about the potential market effect of the publication of a proclamation calling up 300,000 additional troops. See note 43.

38 Abraham Lincoln to Dix, May 18, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. 39 Gold rose by only 5% on the morning of the publication of the bogus proclamation. New York Times, May

17, 18, 19, 1864. Maj. Charles G. Halpine reported "great agitation" in New York and advised that a "cheerful dispatch from Secretary [Stanton] to [Mah. Gen. John A.] Dix [intended for publication by the press] would do good." Charles G. Halpine to George W Cullum, May 18, 1864 (received 4:40 P.M.), Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. The Evening Post reported that "the working population" of the city "began to assemble in groups at the corners of the streets. .. if the proclamation had been genuine there might have been serious disturbances in the city before night." New York Evening Post, May 18, 1864.




cial Washington received his report and realized that the whole affair was a tempest in a teapot, his unprecedented orders to shut down newspapers and arrest their editors would be revoked.

They were not. In a short and emphatic telegram, Stanton reminded Dix that the president's telegram "was an order to you." "It was your duty to execute [it] immediately upon its receipt." Dix, understandably, procrastinated in carrying out the reaf- firmed, if strange, orders. Expecting that before long someone in Washington was bound to realize that the affair was a small-time local swindle, he conditioned his promise to seize the newspapers and their editors by force: He would do so "unless I hear from you before the guards are ready." And of course Dix knew that his guards were no minutemen.40

Dix's maneuvers to allow Washington time to reconsider the momentous and unprecedented order were hardly appreciated. In an angry telegram Stanton com- manded Dix to carry out his orders forthwith and gave his longtime friend a summary lecture on the duties of a loyal officer: "how you can excuse or justify delay in executing the President's order," snarled Stanton in conclusion, "is not for me to determine." By the time Dix's guards managed to round up the editors and just before they undertook to deposit them on a police steamer-the Berdan-its engines already roaring, ready to take them to Fort Lafayette, the military prison in the offing of New York harbor, Washington finally retreated. Possibly influenced by a plea from the member newspapers of the NYAP, who represented both the nation's leading newspapers and its dominant wire service, and another plea by Thurlow Weed-a leading Republican political operator and a reputed expert on New York press affairs-his superiors allowed Dix to suspend action against the editors. The newspapers, however, were to remain closed, although Weed received assurances from Seward that the presses would be released "in an hour."'4'

It was a long hour before the presses were restored: the newspapers reappeared only on Monday May 22. On Friday-two days after the publication of the bogus proclamation-Dix managed to seize the perpetrator of the hoax. The culprit was Joseph Howard Jr. of Brooklyn, a prominent journalist and staunch Republican temporarily short of funds. Former president of the Young Men's Republican Club in Brooklyn and Henry Ward Beecher's secretary, Howard was one of the most supportive of the Lincoln administration among the prominent journalists of the day. He had worked on the pro-Republican Times and Tribune before joining the Copperhead Brooklyn Eagle. Howard made a full confession. His motivation was indeed financial gain, and he was apparently unaware of the potential damage to the Union that his daring spec-

40 Stanton to Dix, May 18, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War; Dix to Stanton, May 18, 1864 (received 5:40 P.M.), ibid.

41 Stanton to Dix, 8:30 P.M., 10:40 P.M., May 18, 1864, ibid.; NYAP editors to Lincoln, May 19, 1864, Abra- ham Lincoln Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). The appeal to the president was the initiative of the Herald's Frederic Hudson: Craig to Marble, May 19, 1864, Marble Papers. Thurlow Weed to Stanton, May 18, 1864 (received 5:00 P.M.), Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. On Weed's assurances, see William C. Prime to Mary Trumbull Prime, May 19, 1864 (two letters), in Barry, Why Did President Lincoln Suppress theJournal of Commerce?, 11,15; and Weed to Stanton, May 19, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War.




Abraham Lincoln, shown here drafting the Emancipation Proclamation at the War Department telegraph office, penned a proclamation on the night of May 17, 1864, calling up fresh troops for service in the Wilderness campaign. So did Joseph Howard Jr., a well-connected New York journalist (pictured opposite). Howard's forgery, known as the bogus proclamation, was the key element of a daring financial sting. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC- USZ62-86709.

ulative sting could cause. Col. Edward S. Sanford, military supervisor of the civilian telegraph, described him shortly after his arrest as "crack brained at best," believing

t are 11~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~14

that he "probably had not wit enough to realize the enormity of his offence."4 General Dix had all along been confident that he would find the forger by snoop-

ing in the financial sector. Indeed, his lead appears to have been a New York broker, a Mr. Kent of the firm Kent and Clapp, to whom Howard had confided his scheme. Interestingly, Howard had assured the broker that a genuine proclamation calling up fresh troops was in preparation in Washington and was to be issued before long. Other well-connected New Yorkers, such as the steel merchant Charles Augustus Davis, appear to -have possessed the same information.43

42 Sanford to Stanton, May 21, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. The suggestion that Dix arrested Joseph Howard Jr. on May 18 conflicts with most of the primary source evidence. For the suggestion, see Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 293.

43 New York Daily News, May 22, 1864; New York Times, May 22, 1864; Brooklyn Eagle, May 22, 1864; Wash- ington Star, May 24, 1864. Joseph Howard Jr. had consulted Kent as to the effect of a proclamation calling up 300,000 men-the number in Lincoln's draft proclamation discussed below. Howard claimed to know of the draft "through secret channels of intelligence at Washington." See Washington Star, May 21, 1864. Two New York papers reported on May 18 that "it has been determined" to call up 300,000 more troops, citing confidential assertions by "leading Congressional friends of the administration." New York Evening Post, May 18, 1864; "The Forged Proclamation," ibid.; New York CommercialAdvertiser, May 18, 1864. Charles Augustus Davis to William H. Seward, May 19, 1864, Seward Papers (University of Rochester).




'IX

J0,SEPHI HOWARD, JUN., THE FORGER.

Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The administration's move, meanwhile, was raising a storm of protest. The closure of opposition newspapers for no apparent fault of their editors, who had acted with no criminal intent, had stunned Republicans and aroused Democrats just as the 1864 presidential campaign was being launched. It was universally expected that both the intraparty canvasses and the national election campaign would focus on the somewhat contradictory issues of the war administration's incompetence and of its "executive tyranny," that is, questions about the administration's civil liberties record. The government's ill-considered and harsh response to the publication of the bogus proclamation appeared to supply fodder to the opposition on both accounts.44

Parallel Plots and Reverberations

In the days following the publication of the bogus proclamation, the closing of the Journal of Commerce and the World and the issue of press freedom occupied center stage. Newspapers were the conspicuous link in the chain of wartime communications, and clashes between the administration's interests and newspapers' constitutional privileges attracted the limelight. But the bogus proclamation affair played out on other stages too, and with considerable gusto. The casts of these parallel plots were the less conspicuous players in the chain of wartime news. Like contemporary

44 For the implications for the Democratic opposition, see the New York World and the New York Daily News in the aftermath of the event. See also Neely, Union Divided, 112-17.




commentators, subsequent scholars of the affair were lured by the drama of the violation of First Amendment rights. They paid passing attention at best to the side plots.45 The latter, however, appear to present the key to the affair. Neglect of them has left the episode enigmatic.

In addition to the president's order to shut down the New York dailies and to arrest their editors, Dix received, on the afternoon of May 18, a series of orders for further, and no less bellicose, intervention in the nation's communications sector. Stanton instructed him by telegram to take military possession of the offices of the Independent Telegraph Company in New York City. "Independent" was the company's formal style and also an apt description of this new telegraph network established in the course of the war to compete with the veteran American Telegraph Company. Early in the war the administration took control of the operations of the American Telegraph Company from Washington outward and then extended its control to the company's entire network. Message traffic traveling over the American's system was controlled by the military and subject to stringent censorship, yet the War Department paid the company generously for the massive use of its wires. The superintendent of military telegraphs did not control, supervise, nor use and pay for, the facilities of the new network-it was indeed fully independent.46

Beginning on May 18, 1864, that was no longer the case. Dix was instructed to close down the four offices of the Independent in New York City, to confiscate their equipment and the records of all messages passing through the offices, and to arrest the New York personnel of the company. Dix was called on to delegate his best officers to attack the telegraph company, to give it his personal care, and to exercise it with "strict diligence, attention, and confidence." There was, however, no clue in the instructions as to what could have possibly prompted them. Although Dix could not have made any sense of this set of orders, he apparently had no qualms in carrying them out. In contrast to his equivocations and scruples in the arrest of newspaper editors-a patent violation of the First Amendment-he willingly complied with the administration's attack on the Independent telegraph. He occupied its offices, searched their files, and arrested the company's entire personnel. Shortly afterward, the Independent's managers, operators, and clerks replaced the newspaper editors and proprietors on board the Berdan. The police steamer hurried with its unexpected passengers to the city's notorious bastille, Fort Lafayette.47

45 The one secondary account that provides detail-although not a satisfactory interpretation-of the telegraph and wire service aspects of the affair is Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 289-303. The neglect of the nonnews- paper aspects is evident in contemporary sources, beginning in 1872 with the first comprehensive history of American journalism; see Hudson, journalism in the United States, 73-76, 670-74. Most contemporary secondary accounts followed suit.

46 On the early stages of this arrangement, see "Allegations of Government Censorship." For summaries, see Blondheim, News over the Wires; and Kielbowicz, "Telegraph, Censorship, and Politics at the Outset of the Civil War," 95-118.

47 [Robert Morton], "A Reminiscence of the Arrest and Incarceration of Five New York Telegraphers, Charged with Conspiracy against the Government in 1864," Telegraph Age (Feb. 1905), 56-57. One prisoner was the brother of the prominent New York businessman Edwin B. Morgan. Morgan appealed to Seward upon the trans- fer of the Independent's New York staff to Washington. Edwin B. Morgan to William H. Seward, May 19, 1864, Seward Papers (University of Rochester).




Indeed, the entire work force of the young telegraph company spent the weekend in military prison. For, in addition to prodding and scolding Dix, Stanton kept himself busy on May 18 with the affairs of the Independent and of an affiliated concern, the Inland Telegraph Company, which operated mainly in Pennsylvania. He was masterminding and executing a coordinated attack on the alternative telegraph systems. First, in the morning of May 18, Washington's provost marshal and his men occupied the headquarters and offices of the Independent in the capital. Its operators were interrogated, then sent to the Old Capitol Prison. The company's offices and files were thoroughly searched and put under guard. Then, in concert with Dix's raid on the Independent's New York offices, the commanding officers in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore were instructed to arrest the local managers and operators and to send them under guard to Washington, together with all the records, documents, and instruments in their offices.48

The hyperactivity in Washington did not subside with the launching of its telegraph campaign. Washington's provost marshal soon received orders for an attack related to the next link in the public communications axis. The target, this time, was a start-up news wire and feature service then expanding its operations out of Wash- ington in competition with the government's semiofficial organ, the NYAP. The start- up, established early in 1864, was the initiative of three successful war correspondents, Henry Villard, Horace White, and Adam S. Hill. Villard, the leading spirit, had formerly reported for the NYAP. In the course of the war, however, Villard and his colleagues, together with the country's press, came to realize that the NYAP's coverage left much to be desired. Its nightly dispatch to the country's press comprised mainly the official reports and bulletins issued by the War and Navy departments, the White House, and assorted units of government. When it came to eyewitness news and the coverage of dramatic and fateful events in the field, the NYAP's facilities were extremely limited and its performance poor.49

While NYAP members and other large newspapers thrived on the competition in comprehensive, daring, and imaginative war coverage, smaller and less affluent papers could not arrange for, nor afford, such extensive coverage. It was to this market niche that Villard and his partners directed their operations. They received information from stringers with the armies and from sources they had cultivated in the capital in their reportorial careers with some of the country's leading newspapers. Their reports were supplied, over the wires of the Independent, to the country's less affluent newspapers, primarily in the Midwest and in New England. On May 19 Vil- lard's association issued no report. Villard himself was incarcerated, Hill was "under

48 Order to Superintendent of the Old Capitol Prison for Receiving and Confinement of J. N. Worl, J. M. Lock, and others, May 18, 1864, Union Provost Marshals' File of Papers Relating to Two or More Civilians, RG 109 (microfilm: collection M416) (National Archives); Thomas T. Eckert to Stanton, May 18, 1864 (received 2:15 P.M.), Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War; Stanton to George Cadwallader, May 18, 1864, ibid; Stanton to J. Heron Foster, May 18, 1864, ibid.; Stanton to J. V. Bomford, May 18, 1864, ibid.; Stanton to Lewis Wallace, May 18, 19, 1864, ibid; "Reminiscences of the Forged Proclamation Incident during the Civil War," Telegraph Age (March 1905), 117-20. This latter source disproves Louis M. Starr's contention that the Inde- pendent's staff was jailed due to their refusal to surrender the records of their office. Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 318.

49 Blondheim, News over the Wires, 129-33.




observation," and Horace White was accumulating quality time with his old acquaintance Stanton in intensive interrogation sessions.50

The course taken by the administration in the wake of the bogus proclamation appears practically inexplicable. Its strangest aspect was doubtless the attack on the telegraph companies and Villard's news and feature service. As Washington learned shortly after the fact, the bogus proclamation was a local imposition on the New York press. Neither the independent telegraph companies connecting New York and other cities with Washington nor Villard's agency, operating out of the capital, could possibly have had anything to do with a hoax planned and executed within New York City. The New York newspapers published the forgery inadvertently, and their editors were the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of a crime.

The harsh measures taken against the New York newspapers, however misguided or curious, did have a nominal justification. As Lincoln himself explained in his order to Dix, newspaper editors and proprietors were legally responsible for everything appearing in their publications, even if they published it unintentionally or unknowingly. The bogus proclamation-a potentially dangerous text-did appear in the World and the Journal of Commerce, even if criminal intent was not involved. But there was no apparent way the suppression of the telegraph companies and Villard's agency could be explained, let alone justified.

The one transgression that could plausibly be attached to the telegraph companies was their transmission of the proclamation, after the official repudiation of it, to the Midwest press in violation of the president's order. Ironically, however, it was the New York Associated Press-the party that had been the first to brand the proclamation distributed on its stationery as a forgery-that sent it west. Besides, transmitting a NYAP report could not possibly be construed as a transgression, since NYAP dispatches had full clearance to pass over all telegraph lines. Craig did try to pin the responsibility for reporting the New York proclamation to the western press on Vil- lard's agency. Western newspapers, however, easily exposed Craig's clumsy attempt to blame Villard for his own grotesque blunder, labeling it the second "bogus proclamation" of the day. Thus, there appears to be no ready explanation for the closure of the telegraph companies and Villard's agency. Nor did the administration or its later apologists propose a reasonable explanation for it.51

Washington's response to the New York forgery was hardly the cavalier reaction of a hotheaded official unmindful of the sensitivity of the situation; it cannot be attrib-

50 Henry Villard's preliminary rationale for the service emerges from a copy of a confidential letter: Henry Vil- lard to New York Tribune, May 15, 1863, Sydney Howard Gay Papers (Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.). On the beginnings of the service, see Villard to Frnk [?], April 5, 1864, ibid. For descriptions of Vil- lard's agency, see Indianapolis Daily Journal, May 20, 1864; Henry Villard, Memoirs of Henry Millard, Journalist and Financier, 1835-1900, vol. I: 1835-1862 (Boston, 1904), 153-54; Andrews, North Reports the Civil War, 31- 32; and Joseph Logsdon, Horace White, Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Westport, 1971), 96-98. Horace White had apparently previously used inside information gathered in Washington for speculation. See Ritchie, Press Gallery, 70-71. On the investigation of Villard's agency, see David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollec- tions of the United States Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War (New York, 1907), 242.

51 Richard Yates to Lincoln, May 18, 1864, Lincoln Papers (Library of Congress); "The Bogus Proclamation, and Another from Mr. D. H. Craig," Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1864; Cincinnati Commercial, May 21, 1864; Cleveland Leader, May 23, June 4, 1864.




uted to a breakdown in the decision-making process or to disruption in the chain of command. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln's secretaries and later his biogra- phers, placed the responsibility for the imbroglio on Stanton's frail shoulders. Other accounts, most notably that by the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, had Seward sharing the blame with Stanton. Lincoln, however, more than a month after the event, assumed full responsibility for the order to suppress the newspapers. And this was not a pose-a ceremonial assumption of responsibility out of loyalty to his blundering subordinates-Lincoln did it in a closed cabinet meeting, in the presence of both Stanton and Seward.52

The decision to close the newspapers was thus made by the president himself, and it descended in an orderly fashion to the secretaries of state and war, and down the chain of command to their investigative branches. The administration's further orders then radiated through to the periphery by appropriate channels, according to a well-laid plan of action. Yet, however authoritative and orderly, the administration's action appeared to make little sense. Lincoln the president was one of those rare statesmen who second-guess themselves; unlike most of his predecessors or succes- sors, he was in the habit of admitting errors and could even acknowledge his failings with humor. He did none of the above in the case of the bogus proclamation. Lin- coln would not acknowledge his error or repent his flagrant violation of sacred constitutional rights.

The Bogus Prodamation and the Real One

There does, however, appear to be a surprisingly simple logic to the entire vexatious affair of the bogus proclamation. It explains the gamut of otherwise inexplicable moves by the administration. This rationale emerges from a single document in Lin- coln's hand. The document, or rather a draft of one, is dated May 17, and we know it was penned on the night of the seventeenth, only hours before the bogus proclamation was distributed in New York. This nocturnal composition was a proclamation calling up 300,000 men for active duty in the fateful Virginia campaign. Lincoln did not officially issue the proclamation, possibly due to constraints of timing. One concern could have been the departure of the Scotia the next day and the potential nega- tive impact of the proclamation on the stand of the European powers in the conflict. Alternatively, the memory of the previous summer's draft riots in New York may have prompted Lincoln first to coordinate the move with New York's Democratic gover- nor, Horatio Seymour. Seymour was indeed invited to Washington to confer with the heads of the administration before a bona fide proclamation calling up 500,000 men for active duty was issued in July.53

52 John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vols., New York, 1914), IX, 47-50; Gideon Welles Diary, May 23, July 5, 1864, Gideon Welles Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress).

53 Abraham Lincoln, draft order, May 17, 1864, Lincoln Papers (Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Ind.); also in Basler, ed., Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln, VII, 344; Lincoln to Salmon P. Chase, May 18, 1864, ibid, 347; Weed to Stanton, May 10, 1864, Lincoln Papers (Library of Congress); Stanton to Horatio Seymour, May 22, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War.




Af A

A174A-6 fr~Z 1d 1

~~ ;~~4Avo 0 CY' ?, ~ -

The draft proclamation penned by Abraham Lincoln on the night of May 17, 1864. The apparent confusion between Lincoln's draft which was never released to the public and the bogus proclamation published in New York the next morning may explain the Lincoln administration's vig- orous moves in response to that publication. Courtesy The Lincoln Museum} Fort Wayne, Indiana, #4570.




One can well imagine Lincoln's astonishment when he discovered that a variation on the proclamation he had written during the night was published the very next morning in New York. When news of the publication first hit Washington, it was most probably and most naturally assumed that its source was Lincoln's own draft, which had somehow found its way to the opposition press, in other words, that the bogus proclamation was not bogus but genuine.54

Should that indeed have been Washington's theory, its response to the publication would appear perfectly reasonable and, moreover, legally sound. Here was a sensitive state secret, a classified document not intended for immediate publication, leaked out of the White House, transmitted rapidly to New York, and made public there. It must have been transmitted by telegraph-in no other way could it have been published the very next morning in the New York press. Villard's agency, with its excel- lent connections in government circles, was the suspect most likely to have gotten its hands on sensitive contraband information in the immediate environment of the president and his cabinet.55 The Independent, its message traffic neither regulated nor censored, was the most likely suspect for transmitting the sensitive secret to New York, evading the required censorship of telegraphic messages that included war information intended for the press. Finally, given its source and its nature, theJournal and World were necessarily responsible for knowingly making public a sensitive state secret in a city that was a barrel of gunpowder, in a timing that would allow it to reach a watchful Europe just as its major powers were deliberating whether to project themselves into the conflict, with potentially disastrous consequences to the Union.

Much evidence supports this scenario. The administration's first action after it received news of the publication in New York was to investigate whether the text of the published proclamation had passed over the wires of the War Department-controlled American Telegraph Company from Washington to New York. Stanton himself telegraphed Dix that contrary to Dix's opinion, "the officer in charge of the investigations . . . reports that he is led to believe [that the proclamation] originated in this city," namely, in Washington. One of the Washington military telegraphers wrote in his diary that the notion that the proclamation originated in Washington persisted throughout the early stages of the investigation. Accordingly, the Washing- ton office of the Independent was the first to be seized, its files searched and its operators questioned.56 Nor was the leakage of the draft proclamation such a remote

5 On May 20, after the arrest of Howard, Rep. Samuel Sullivan Cox, a peace Democrat, informed Marble from Washington that "the forged proclamation is based on afact... a proclamation was written and similar in impact to the base and damnable forgery for which you are under ban." Cox declined to disclose his source but stated parenthetically that "it may come from Mrs. Mary Lincoln or some one." Mary Lincoln had leaked information out of the White House, and Howard was known as one of her confidants. Samuel Sullivan Cox to Mar- ble, May 20, 1864, Marble Papers; Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 82. On May 18, Lincoln told the Tribune's James Gilmore that he had signed a proclamation calling up 300,000 men the night before but did not intend to publish it until July. James Gilmore to Sydney Howard Gay, May 18, 1864, Gay Papers.

55 Stanton had previously investigated the uncovering and sensational publication of a sensitive secret by Vil- lard-Ambrose E. Burnside's resignation. Villard to Gay, Sept. 18, 1863, Henry Villard Papers (Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.).

56 Welles referred to the bogus proclamation as calling up 300,000 men; that was the number specified in Lin- coln's draft, whereas the published bogus proclamation called for 400,000. Welles Diary, May 18, 1864. See also B. P Snyder to Sanford, May 18, 1864, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the Secretary of War. B. P. Snyder,




possibility, for as noted, members of the cabinet were aware that word of the intended draft had reached New York.

But as the investigation of the affair progressed, it became clear that such a theory as to the source of the bogus proclamation could be neither confirmed nor sustained. No copy or trace of Lincoln's authentic proclamation was found in Washington, whether in the offices of the government-controlled American, the Independent, or Villard's agency. The questioning of telegraphers and newsmen similarly drew a blank. At the same time, positive proof that the bogus proclamation was a local-one might say innocent-New York forgery was mounting. With the collapse of the administration's presumed conjecture under the pressure of a critical mass of evidence, Dix's alternative hypothesis as to the source of the proclamation began to be seriously considered. And, as noted above, Dix shortly provided the clincher: he had the confessed author of the published proclamation behind bars-and he was Joseph Howard, not Abraham Lincoln.

Washington's response to the publication of the bogus proclamation would thus appear to have little if any significance on the communications policy level. Rather than a dramatic change in its attitude toward the press, telegraph, and wire service, the administration's harsh response to the publication would merely represent an understandable reaction or overreaction to the supposed leaking of a sensitive state secret, to its purposeful transmission to New York, and to its meditated publication there by leading opposition newspapers. Once this scenario was disproved, the administration could have been expected to drop the case.

It did not. At what should have been the close of the bogus proclamation affair, there commenced perhaps the oddest turn in its generally outlandish course. Rather than immediately roll back its quixotic attack on telegraphs, wire services, and journalistic word mills once it realized its apparent error in identifying the source of the bogus proclamation, the administration doggedly pushed on, pursuing its original course. It did not immediately restore the Journal of Commerce and World to their proprietors nor release Villard and the personnel of the Independent nor permit the immediate resumption of their operations. While part of the delay in restoring the presses was due to negligence by Dix's staff, the officers and offices of the Indepen- dent were not released until Monday, and Villard too remained in custody for three full days after Howard was put behind bars. The slow processing of the affairs of the Independent and of Villard's agency appeared both deliberate and inexplicable.57

Lincoln, a temperate individual, had responded to the publication of the bogus proclamation with wrath. The affair "angered Lincoln more than almost any other

after confirming that he found no such message, also informed Sanford that he understood that the "Independent line sent dispatch stating 400,000 men were called for and president had asked for day of fasting and prayer." David Homer Bates Diary, May 20, 1864, Bates Collection (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). On the ultimate government arrangements with the Independent, see [Morton], "Reminiscence of the Arrest and Incar- ceration of Five New York Telegraphers"; and "Reminiscences of the Forged Proclamation Incident." Earlier in the war, the Independent had transmitted a bogus telegraphic report of Union victories in the interest of gold specula- tors. The dispatch was blocked by censorship from passing over the lines of the American. See Andrews, North Reports the Civil War, 371. This precedent may have helped condition the administration's response.

57 On the delay in restoring the newspapers, see William C. Prime to Mary Trumbull Prime, May 22, 1864, in Barry, Why Did President Lincoln Suppress the Journal of Commerce?, 27.




occurrence of the war period," stated an eyewitness.58 Lincoln's wrath, the hyperactivity in Washington following the publication, and its persistence after the source of the proclamation was ascertained indicated that the incident was perceived by the administration to have considerable consequence. It represented much more than a bizarre coincidence and a gross misunderstanding of it.

Revamping Strategy, Reestablishing Control

To the administration, the meaning behind the publication could well have been ominous. It could imply the collapse of the public communications strategy it had crafted and nurtured during three years of war. Discovering that this collapse was only imagined would not have relieved Lincoln's consternation. What was thought to have occurred could well have occurred and could occur in the future. The imagined collapse happened at perhaps the most critical period in the war and in Lincoln's political career. Both were hanging in the balance in mid-May 1864. The Union was waging its decisive battle of the war in Virginia, and the presidential nominations and elections were nearing. In such times, public sentiment was indeed everything. It was the worst possible moment for a public communications strategy to self-destruct.

The bogus proclamation affair demonstrated how the entire wartime system of public communications could be undermined. New, independent, and uncontrolled telegraph networks-the Independent, the Inland, the United States Telegraph Com- pany-had entered the field of real-time transmission. A competing wire service, not bound to the administration, had established itself as an alternative system for news gathering and diffusion, and besides Villard's agency, another wire service was orga- nizing itself and preparing to enter the field.59 The opposition press could easily recruit the multiplying telegraphic and news-gathering infrastructures to promote the antiwar and antiadministration cause. It would then have access to what really mat- tered: the traffic of independent "fast news," the commodity an anxious American public sought. And that was precisely what the administration apparently believed had happened in the case of the bogus proclamation. The fact that it had not was immaterial: what could go wrong ultimately would go wrong. The specter of a decentralized, pluralistic, news environment-one the administration did not control- presented itself in all its danger, in a critical moment that would decide if victory on the field was possible and whether Lincoln would have a mandate to pursue it.

According to this line of thought, a crackdown was inevitable. It would have to be done with authority, and it would have to extend over the entire axis of news reporting: from news sources and news gatherers through the news transmission and distribution infrastructures all the way to the opposition press-the First Amendment notwithstanding. Indeed, in the course of sorting out the affair, the administration also arrested Samuel Medary, editor of the seditious Crisis in Columbus, Ohio, and

58 E A. Flower to C. E Gunther, Feb. 14, 1904, quoted in Shelby Foote, The Civil War:A Narrative, vol. III: Red River toAppomattox (New York, 1974), 376. See a slight variation in Randall and Current, Lincoln the President, 156.

59 Francis 0. J. Smith to Executive Committee, United States Telegraph Company, Aug. 16, 1864, Francis 0. J. Smith Papers (Maine Historical Society, Portland).




closed down the Transcript in Baltimore and the Picayune and Courier in New Orleans. It also "semiofficially" warned the Washington press corps "not to criticize the recent newspaper seizure in New York." "In these broiling days," observed the Washington correspondent of the proadministration New York Commercial Adver- tiser, "Mum's the word." In the heat of this apparent revision of his communications policy, Lincoln would reconsider "what was due to the Military service on the one hand, and the Liberty of the Press on the other." In both theory and practice and from end to end, the process of wartime news communication appeared to require a quick reevaluation and thorough revision.60

The administration's actions in the aftermath of the bogus proclamation affair may thus be construed as a significant revamping of its wartime arrangements for control over public communications-an emergency attempt at fixing a collapsing strategy. And indeed, the way the affair was ultimately settled indicated precisely such a pur- pose. Stanton's papers reveal that the Independent and Inland were both fully restored only after a series of meetings he held with their respective presidents, John J. Speed and Theadore Adams. Together they reached an agreement that the lines of the Independent would thereafter connect directly with the War Department and become subject to government supervision and censorship. By coming under government control, the Independent and its affiliates were assured of receiving their fair share of government business. Stanton is reported to have commented with satisfac- tion that he had once again "got the telegraph under his control."61

While the terms for Villard's release were never formally disclosed, the well- informed David Homer Bates, one of Lincoln's telegraphers, confided to his diary that thereafter the administration began supplying Villard's agency with news, even some choice bits exclusively. Here too the effect was to incorporate independent players in the news arena into the administration's centralized system of news management. Howard himself was released several months after the affair, at the behest of his former employer and friend of the family, Henry Ward Beecher. Neither Howard nor his forgery nor even wartime speculation was the real issue.62 It was, rather,.the reestablishing of exclusive control over the entire length of the news axis, from end to

60 "Freedom of the Press," American Annual Cyclopedia and Register (New York, 1965), 394; Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 298; Reed W Smith, "The Paradox of Samuel Medary, Copperhead Newspaper Publisher," in Civil War and the Press, ed. Sachsman et al., 302-3. For the statement in the New York Commercial Advertiser, see Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 298. For Lincoln's reconsideration of the limits of press freedom, see Lincoln to Isaac N. Arnold (draft), May 25, 1864, in Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln, ed. Basler, VII, 361. See also Lincoln to Arnold, May 27, 1864, ibid., 363-64. Some historians suggest that in the aftermath of the bogus proclamation affair, Lincoln regretted having rescinded Gen. Burnside's order to suppress the Chicago Daily Times the previous year. See Craig D. Tenney, "To Suppress or Not to Suppress: Abraham Lincoln and the Chicago Times," Civil War History, 27 (Sept. 1981), 259; and Dickerson, Course of Tolerance, 174. Dickerson's opinion appears to be based on a misquotation of Lincoln's letter to Arnold.

61 Edwin M. Stanton, order, May 23, 1864, Edwin M. Stanton Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Con- gress); John J. Speed and Theadore Adams, statement, May 23, 1864, ibid. According to James N. Worl, the act- ing manager of the Independent's Washington office, Lincoln decided upon this arrangement in response to his appeal. The Independent was provided an office in the Post Office Department building; Worl was appointed government censor for the Independent line. "Reminiscences of the Forged Proclamation Incident." For Stanton's statement and its lineage, see Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 301.

62 Bates Diary, May 21, 1864; see also Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, 243. The severity of Lincoln's response to the publication of the bogus proclamation has been linked to his aversion to fraud. See Neely, Fate of Liberty, 104-5.




end. Since Lincoln held that "public sentiment is every thing," he and his administration made sure that in the decisive phase the war had entered and on the eve of the fateful presidential elections, they were the only players that, as Henry J. Raymond had put it, did the "talking to all America."

In conclusion, the publication of the bogus proclamation appeared to imply that the dynamic of centralization, which had transformed the communications environment just prior to the war, was reversing itself. Centralization had given the administration its power over the wartime flow of public information, and movement toward decentralization was therefore perilous. In response to such a trend, a revision of the government's wartime communications strategy was imperative. For in a field of multiple communications infrastructures and content systems, the opposition press would inevitably develop an independent supply of timely news that, circumventing the official news channels, would allure a news-thirsty public and help promote its cause. The opposition would thus escape the administration's stranglehold over the war news market, and it would constitute a clear and present danger. There would no longer be a solution to the tension between press freedom and military necessity. The administration would be deprived of the luxury of both having a free press and controlling information flow, of both fighting a "hard" war and adhering to the First Amendment.

As we know with the benefit of hindsight, such fears were groundless. The perceived fragmentation of the communications environment was deceptive. In fact, the fracturing of the telegraph and wire service systems in 1864 was merely a symptom of a process that would ultimately lead to an even more centralized communications environment. The temporary splintering in fact underscored a transition from oli- gopoly to monopoly in telegraphy and in wire news.63 Since that was the trend, a free press could safely be put up with, all the way to Appomatox. In other words, no change in strategy was necessary, only its adjustment to shifting circumstances.

In fact, it took more than a century for the pendulum to swing back toward decentralization of the communications environment. Only with the advent of the third millennium did governments have to contend with the effects of multichan- nels, competing infrastructures, and a plethora of outlets for the dissemination of public information. One hopes that there will be no opportunity to test the dynamic that emerges from the foregoing analysis of the Union's Civil War public communications strategy, namely, that a great war in a decentralized communications environment would inevitably bring about the demise of press freedom. One could, of course, posit this proposed dynamic more optimistically, to wit: As news sources, communications infrastructures, and media outlets multiply promiscuously and centralized control over them becomes impossible, major total wars can no longer be waged.

63 Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 405-15; Andrews, "Southern Telegraph Company"; Blondheim, News over the Wires, 145-5 1.



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"Public Sentiment Is Everything": The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus...

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