Lincoln's Lie by Elizabeth Mitchell

Author:Elizabeth Mitchell [Mitchell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, editor Hallock walked into the Journal of Commerce office accompanied by Captain Barstow. Hallock had heard the premises would be released to the editors that morning.

The rooms where Hallock worked daily producing the breaking news lay as if under a spell, silent, soldiers sprawled about the floor in various positions, sleeping. Barstow barked for them to wake up and ordered for them to leave, so they rose and lumbered out.2

About an hour later, Will Prime burst into Dix’s office on Bleecker Street to claim whatever paperwork was needed to restart his Journal of Commerce.3 Dix was so jovial about the reversal of the suppression, he even gave Prime his arrest order as a souvenir.

Prime, too, felt elated. Upon arriving at his office, he asked the officer who had commanded the occupying force to share a glass of wine with him across the street at Brown’s. The celebratory gesture took all of ten minutes, but such a throng had gathered outside Ninety-One Wall Street in his absence that Prime had to push his way through the crowd to reach the door. This time, the tenor was entirely different from the rage he had witnessed on May 18. Inside, he found his friend McClellan, the former Civil War general and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, writing him a note. They hugged as Prime shouted with joy at the reunion. McClellan stayed two hours, watching the rooms fill to the walls with well-wishers—Democrats and Republicans alike—offering donations and denouncing the evil of Lincoln’s order.

The closure of the newspapers had pushed even political enemies to side with the Democrat newspapers. “Men shouted, ‘I am an abolitionist, but I go The Journal of Commerce hereafter for its bravery and its wrongs.’ Many—very many—said this,” Will Prime reported to Mary. “The outburst through the city was noble—and so all day long it was impossible to do anything.”4

Even Republicans seemed troubled at Lincoln’s actions. Mary wrote to Will on May 22 that The Hartford Times had picked up the hoax, and when it was discovered to be false, the “indignation was great & having no one else to direct it against, the citizens directed it all against the Times— & everyone was shouting for its suppression—but the moment it was announced that you were taken possession of, the clamor ceased, men seemed frightened at what had been done & the injustice & wickedness of it.”5

Prime postponed his own thoughts of protest until later. He had so much work piled up, so many stories to get covered by his staff. It was only in the evening that he could turn his attention to his first editorial. He labored over it for three hours. Once satisfied, he read the completed work repeatedly to Stone and Hallock.

In the first editorial published in his newly freed newspaper, Prime raged at Lincoln over multiple paragraphs, but he ended up on a pitying tone. “It is not we that have been harmed so much as he [the President] who so fiercely struck at us,” Prime wrote.

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