Quotes from Harold Holzer

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell. Wilbur Storey

In March 1861 alone—Lincoln's first month in office—the U.S. Senate would receive for its advice and consent some sixty pages of names submitted for civilian and military appointments ranging from secretary of state to surveyor-general of Minnesota.

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, Have you any news?

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

At Mount Holyoke, a band of female Wide-Awakes described as "running hither and thither…laughing and shouting, and drinking lemonade," marched in a celebratory torchlight procession, unfurling a banner that read: "PRESIDENT—ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Behind a homely exterior, we recognize inward beauty.

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but "cordial," congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed—in honor of the Prince of Wales's recent triumphant American tour—the "Prince of Rails.

While attending to the customary tasks of assembling a cabinet, rewarding political loyalists with federal appointments, and drafting an inaugural address alone—he employed no speechwriters—Lincoln was uniquely forced to confront the collapse of the country itself, with no power to prevent its disintegration. Bound to loyalty to the Republican party platform on which he had run and won, he could yield little to the majority that had in fact voted against him.

Still, their affection for each other remained strong: while Baker was serving in Washington, the Lincolns honored him by naming their second-born son for the congressman. (Edward Baker Lincoln died tragically at age three in 1850.) When Baker finished his term, he dutifully handed off his House seat to Lincoln.

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe's hirsute fancy warrant— Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was "the great invention of the world.

Lincoln must have welcomed the chance that evening to escape from such friends, if only to submit to a final fitting for the recently delivered inaugural suit from the Chicago tailors Titsworth & Brother.

When a grizzled yeoman worker appeared one morning to complain that as a state legislator many years earlier, in hard times, young Lincoln had inexcusably voted to raise his government salary from two to all of four dollars a day," Lincoln listened to the reproach calmly. "Now, Abe, I want to know what in the world made you do it?" demanded the old Democrat. With deadpan seriousness, Lincoln explained: "I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.

Not only was he sorrowful at the prospect of leaving home, he was convinced, he whispered, that he would never return alive. Herndon implored him to abandon such thoughts.

The very day after Lincoln's election, an obscure Springfield neighbor named Henry Fawcett dispatched a note begging the president-elect to let him "go with you to the White House as your Body Servant." Fawcett, who listed among his qualifications his experience ringing a local church bell when Lincoln won the nomination, offered "to carry your Messages and so forth…even Shaving you as well.

But no opposition grumbling could spoil the moment for the new president-elect. He donned his overcoat, thanked the telegraph operators for their hard work and hospitality, and stuffed the final dispatch from New York into his pocket as a souvenir. It was about time, he announced to one and all, that he "went home and told the news to a tired woman who was sitting up for him.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln glimpsed another "mysterious" and, he feared, "ominous" vision in his own bedroom mirror. While reclining on a lounge, he glanced up to notice a "double-image of himself in the looking-glass," one clear, the other pallid. For a moment, it was vivid; then it vanished—at first, two Lincolns side by side, then none at all.

Lincoln likely concluded—was, as Jackson had put it, "fallacious" in its justifications and, "in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States, contrary to the laws of their country, subversive of its Constitution, and having for its object the destruction of the Union." As Jackson had bluntly concluded: "Disunion by armed force is treason.

His secretary heard Lincoln authoritatively remind a caller on November 15 that "this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity." Here was Jacksonian firmness to spare. "That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter," Lincoln added grimly. "The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the government by force, as ours ought to be a government of fraternity.

One paper boasted that its subscription and advertising numbers proved that America did not need the social change it rival paper advocated.

And Indiana's John Defrees expressed his belief that the inclusion of Winfield Scott of Virginia, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, and Edward Bates of Missouri "would do much to bring about a re-action among the people of all the Southern States except S. Carolina, which is insane beyond hope of cure."134 (Stephens himself later branded as "totally groundless" the "rumor" that he had ever discussed a cabinet appointment with the president-elect.

Only a writer with Bennett's craft and brass could manage to praise and insult his readers at the same time.

THE APPROACH OF Thanksgiving on November 29 sent Springfield into a panic—not over the nation-imperiling crisis plaguing its leading citizen, but the apparently more dismaying prospect of a local turkey shortage.

Lincoln's "campaign" for president ended how and where it began: in adamant silence, and in the same Illinois city to which he had so tenaciously clung since the national convention. Like the solar eclipse that had obscured the Illinois sun in July, Lincoln remained in Springfield, hidden in full view.

The letter is too belligerent. If I were you, I would state the facts as they were, without the pepper and salt. Abraham Lincoln