"Public Sentiment Is Everything":
The Union's 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 supplies, 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	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	2
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	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 soldiers in the field will battle in vain for constitutional liberty, if persons, or property, or opinions, are trampled upon at home."5	4
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 antebellum 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	. . .