Lincoln, His Life and Time: Being the Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States, Together With His State ... and Closing Scenes Connected With Hi
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Restoration and the Union Party: Speech of Hon. Henry J. Raymond, of New York, on the Conditional Admission of the States Lately in Rebellion to Representation in Congress (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from Restoration and the Union Party: Speech of Hon. Henry J. Raymond, of New York, on the Conditional Admission of the States Lately in Rebellion to Representation in Congress
I think, in the third place, we should provide by law for giving to the freedmen of the South all the rights of citizens in courts of law and elsewhere.
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History of the Administration of President Lincoln: Including His Speeches, Letters, Addresses, Proclamations, and Messages. With a Preliminary Sketch of His Life
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Disunion and Slavery: A Series of Letters to Hon. W. L. Yancey, of Alabama (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from Disunion and Slavery: A Series of Letters to Hon. W. L. Yancey, of Alabama
Does that look like making this a subject of trade merely? Does that look like insisting on a continuance of the Slave-trade for twenty years?
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Henry Jarvis Raymond was an American journalist, politician, and co-founder of The New York Times, which he founded with George Jones.
Background
Henry Jarvis Raymond was born on January 24, 1820 at Lima, New York, the son of Jarvis and Lavinia (Brockway) Raymond. His father, whose ancestors had migrated in the previous century from Connecticut, where the family had long been settled, was a farmer, comfortably off.
Education
He was educated at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary and at the University of Vermont, where he graduated with high honors in 1840. Like most of his honors, they cost more than they were worth; he contracted at college the habit of overwork that contributed to his early death.
Career
He had taught a country school and had some idea of teaching in the South, but his real interest was already journalism.
He went to New York, supported himself by free-lance writing, and presently got a regular job from Horace Greeley, to whose weekly, the New Yorker, he had contributed while still in college. Raymond's first employer was to be his bitterest rival throughout most of his life. The temperamental difference between the two is illustrated by their later judgment of the New Yorker: Greeley despised it as weak and ineffective; Raymond admired its "fair examination of both sides" - an exception in the journalism of the time, which was passionately partisan and was to become more so as the slavery question sharpened animosities.
In the spring of 1841 Greeley founded the New York Tribune and took Raymond with him as his chief assistant. Here Raymond was thoroughly indoctrinated in the new journalism which the elder James Gordon Bennett had invented and Greeley adapted to the taste of the "moral element"; he became brilliantly successful, and a close friendship which he formed with George Jones, 1811-1891, then in Greeley's business office, led the two to project a paper of their own. They had no capital then, however; so Jones moved to Albany and Raymond went over in 1843 to James Watson Webb's Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer.
His reputation grew, not only as a newspaperman but also as an orator and Whig politician; in 1849 he was elected to the state assembly and "leaped into prominence in the week he took his seat". He was reуlected the next year and became speaker in January 1851. His alignment with the Free-soil group in the party led by William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed led to a break with his employer, General Webb, in the spring of that year.
He was already managing editor of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, which had appeared in the previous June, but though he held this position till 1856 he never had much time to give to it. In 1848 he and Jones had almost succeeded in buying the Albany Evening Journal from Weed; now they prepared to establish the New York Daily Times with Raymond as editor and Jones in charge of the business office. The first issue of the Times declared that "we do not mean to write as if we were in a passion, - unless that shall really be the case; and we shall make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as possible. "
This and similar statements were interpreted as a bid for the support of conservative Whigs, alienated from the Tribune by Greeley's political and social radicalism; but they also reflected Raymond's innate moderation of opinion and expression. In a period when the American press was given to intemperate personal controversy and usually to partisan distortion of the news, he longed for the time when men should be governed by cool reason and judgment instead of prejudice and passion.
From this habit of mind sprang what his biographer Maverick calls "his unfortunate tendency to temporize, in all circumstances except those of pressing emergency", which ultimately ruined him as a politician. But the same quality made his paper, as E. L. Godkin wrote in the Nation after his death, "nearer the newspaper of the good time coming than any other in existence" in its impartiality of reporting and temperance of discussion. The Times was immediately successful; it appealed not only to those who disliked violence and personalities, but also to the many who were repelled by the Herald's lack of "principle" and the Tribune's excess of it. Greeley fought the new competitor hard, calling Raymond a "little villain" when he got a state advertising contract that Greeley wanted; but within four years he confessed privately that the Times had more than twice the Tribune's city circulation. Raymond's moderation, however, debarred him from any such influence as Greeley wielded, especially among the farmers, in an age when prejudice and passion were steadily getting the better of cool reason and judgment. At the Whig national convention of 1852 Raymond won renown by a spectacular defiance of the Southern oligarchy, but the party's failure in the campaign of that year disgusted him and he wrote to Seward that he meant "to navigate the Times into a position of independent thought and speech".
But he could not bring himself to leave the organization; and two years later, when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill upset political alignments, he argued that the Free Soilers should bore from within the Whig machine instead of founding a new party. They did this successfully in New York, where Raymond played a considerable part in the Anti-Nebraska movement that imposed its views on the Whig convention. But the paramount state issue that year was prohibition; Greeley had made it and expected the nomination for governor but Weed, who controlled the convention, passed him over in favor of an up-state nonentity. Greeley then begged for second place on the ticket but Weed, arguing that an up-state dry should be balanced by a city wet, gave Raymond the nomination for lieutenant-governor.
The strategy was sound as far as it went, but Weed elected his state ticket at the price of mortal offense to the most powerful editor of the time. "No other name, " said Greeley, "could have been so bitterly humbling to me"; and the consequence was the break with Seward and Weed which ultimately brought Greeley to the Republican National Convention of 1860 ready to support any presidential candidate who might beat Seward. Raymond's lieutenant-governorship was accordingly an important factor in making Abraham Lincoln president; but in itself it was of small value to him or the paper, and it meant the breaking of a promise which Jones had prudently exacted when the Times was founded, that he would no longer seek office.
He never had Greeley's ludicrous and pathetic lust for any office, however small; but, less fortunate than Greeley, when he tried for office he usually got it, in the end with disastrous consequences. The Whig party was breaking up; in February 1856 Raymond attended the Pittsburgh meeting that founded the national Republican party, and wrote its statement of principles. Thereafter the Times was steadily Republican (though never abolitionist till war had begun) and Raymond's activity in the new party was interrupted only in 1859, when he went to Italy to report the Franco-Austrian War. In 1860 he worked hard for Seward at the Chicago convention but gave energetic support to Lincoln in the campaign.
When the cotton states began to secede he supported the compromise proposals of the winter; at the same time, in a series of open letters to W. L. Yancey of Alabama, he attacked secession and subjected the issues of the time to an analysis that is still cogent. The war once begun, the Times was Lincoln's most steadfast supporter in New York. Raymond could have been a general, but knew he had no military talent; twice drafted, he offered substitutes, but was often at the front as a newspaperman. He was again speaker of the Assembly in 1862 and unsuccessfully tried for the United States senatorship in the following year. The year 1864 saw him one of the Republican leaders in the nation; he wrote most of the platform of the Republican convention at Baltimore and played the chief part in Andrew Johnson's nomination for vice-president, apparently as Lincoln's agent. His skillful management in the convention earned him the chairmanship of the national committee, but the prospect was not bright.
On August 22 he wrote to Lincoln that "the tide is setting strongly against us" on account of military reverses and a conviction that Lincoln would continue the war till slavery was abolished. Never in favor of abolition till July 1861, Raymond had always regarded it as subsidiary to the preservation of the Union; so he now proposed a peace offer "on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution, - all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the states". The purpose, unlike that of Greeley's contemporaneous peace efforts, was purely political; Raymond thought the offer would be rejected and Lincoln's position strengthened accordingly.
But Lincoln saw that it would not do and talked him out of it. The victories of Sherman and Sheridan reelected Lincoln; and Raymond was elected to the House of Representatives. "He entered Congress with a prestige rarely if ever equalled by a new member"; and his career there was the one great failure of his life. He had been close to Lincoln and was closer still to Johnson; when Congress reconvened in December 1865, with its Radical leaders bitterly hostile to Johnson's reconstruction policy, Raymond became the administration leader in the House. But a man who could see both sides and preferred accommodation to violence had no more chance against Thaddeus Stevens than Kerensky against Lenin.
Blaine's comments suggest that Raymond was further handicapped by overconfidence, and by the jealousy of veteran members for so highly advertised a newcomer. At any rate, he completely missed the significance of Stevens' proposal of the joint committee on reconstruction and offered no objection, either in the caucus or in the House; thereby losing "the only real opportunity he ever had of administering a severe blow, if not a defeat, " to Stevens.
Even the exclusion of the Southern members on December 4 failed to rouse him, and the Times of the following day betrayed a complete lack of realization that Stevens was master of the reconstruction committee. Awakening too late, Raymond spoke in the House on December 21, attacking Stevens' secessionist doctrine as ably as he had once attacked Yancey's, and as ineffectually. When the test came on the Voorhees resolution declaring secession an impossibility, only one other Republican (and that a personal friend) stood by Raymond. It may be that the stars in their courses had fought against him, but he had not given them much of a tussle. Thereafter he could not agree even with Johnson; he voted for the Freedman's Bureau Bill and had trouble explaining his support of the President's veto; he opposed the Civil Rights Bill, but voted for its substance in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was this course chiefly that made men call him a "trimmer"; and led Stevens to remark, when Raymond wanted a pair for some division in the House, that he would have no difficulty in pairing with himself. Beaten in Congress, Johnson tried to organize against the Radicals a Union party of Conservative Republicans and War Democrats. Raymond, when he first heard of the projected National Union Convention, was afraid it would fall into the hands of "former Rebels and Copperheads"; but Weed, Seward, and the President talked him into attending it, and supporting it in the Times.
As in 1854, he opposed the formation of a new party and called for support of all congressional candidates committed to the immediate admission of loyal Southerners. Unfortunately, most of the Republican nominations had already been captured by the Radicals, and many of the Democratic nominations by Copperheads.
At the Philadelphia convention (August 1866), which he reluctantly attended, the chairman of the Republican National Committee could not help being the most prominent figure; especially as he wrote the declaration of principles which the convention set before the country.
It was a sound piece of constitutional reasoning, but prejudice and passion had got the upper hand. Raymond's program was too much for some, too little for others; it needed all his skill to keep harmony in the convention. "Let us set aside feeling and go to business, " he begged a wrangling committee; but the country chose to set aside business and go to feeling. After Johnson's disastrous "swing around the circle" the Radical reaction set in, and Raymond was the first victim.
He was expelled from the national committee; and two weeks later, declining renomination for Congress, admitted his "evident and signal failure" in rallying the Unionists. The gleeful Greeley called him a Judas and a Copperhead, and profited by his unpopularity. Raymond had never used the Times as an organ of personal advancement, an abnegation almost unparalleled in his day; but it suffered with him, losing (though only temporarily) thousands of readers to the Tribune.
He and Weed still hoped to form a Union bloc in the state; but at the Albany convention of Conservatives and Democrats in September the Tammany delegation outgeneraled them, nominating John T. Hoffman for governor. The Conservatives were left out on a limb; Weed clung to it, supporting Hoffman, but Raymond soon dropped off. The first intimation that he would bolt the Albany ticket provoked the Democratic press to violent attacks, which Greeley reprinted under the heading, "Shocking Cruelty to a Fugitive Slave".
He bolted it none the less, and presently was complaining that the "President's party" had generally fallen into the hands of Copperheads. The country shared his view, and the fall election put an end to Raymond's dream of a moderate and Unionist Congress. A Times editorial from another hand, about that time, observed that, "Great changes in the fate of nations are never achieved by men of the juste milieu order". The reference was to the rise of Bismarck, but the man who wrote it must have had his mind on the fall of Raymond. Raymond recognized a fait accompli and did little more kicking against the pricks. The Times finally broke with Johnson on financial issues and the campaign of 1868 saw the paper back in the party, but with an independence of spirit that commended it to such young men of the new generation as Henry Adams and John Hay.
Raymond began to devote himself to less partisan issues; he commenced the attacks on the "Tweed ring" which his partner Jones later finished so brilliantly, and by his advocacy of tariff reduction, sound money, and civil-service reform set his paper in courses which it followed long after his death. Still young, and cured of his political ambitions, he seemed only on the threshold of greater achievement. But he had weakened himself by habitual overwork, and an emotional crisis brought on the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him.
(Excerpt from Restoration and the Union Party: Speech of H...)
Personality
He once said that when he wrote a sentence he could not help seeing before he got to the end how only partially true it was. This trait, and lack of a realistic appraisal of public opinion, were his fatal weaknesses as a politician. His misfortune was not only that he was a temperamental non-partisan in an age of bitter partisanship, but that he was a temperamental non-partisan incurably addicted to party politics.
The charm of his urbane, accomplished, and affable personality was felt by every one - except Gideon Welles, who calls Raymond a "whiffler" and "unscrupulous soldier of fortune, " and the Times a "profligate and stipendiary sheet". This abuse, echoed by no other memoirs of the period, may be a reflection of Raymond's demand in 1861 for Welles's removal on the ground of "indolence, indifference, and inadequacy. " The obituaries in the New York papers reflect a deep feeling of personal loss among the men who had worked with him and against him. This is noteworthy in Greeley's editorial. For all their political and professional rivalry, Greeley seems to have felt a real affection for Raymond; and no doubt this, as well as a natural impulse to speak well of the dead, informed his comment. But it is a singularly just and accurate appraisal of Raymond's character and political position, and a flat contradiction of almost everything Greeley had written about him for twenty-five years past.
Connections
In 1869 he was reunited with his wife, Juliette Weaver of Winooski, Vermont, whom he had married on October 24, 1843, and who had been living in Europe for some years. Of his seven children, two sons and two daughters survived him.