Lincoln Wrote Fake Letters to Newspapers : The Sleazy World of Abraham Lincoln

There's little doubt that Abe Lincoln didn't like blacks. Now there's evidence that his racism didn't apply just to blacks. It appears Lincoln didn't like Irish people. The New York Review of Books has a review of an important new book about Abe Lincoln and his manipulation of the press. Establishment historian Gary Wills reports:

Lincoln early followed the axiom, If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. As a beginner with no party standing, he lacked the common coin of exchange in the political and journalistic worlds, patronage. A member of the Whig Party, he got into the game the one way he could—by writing anonymous articles for Whig papers to promote him or his friends and to denigrate rivals. This could be dangerous in that era when caning or horsewhipping editors or reporters was common. Horace Greeley, the famous abolitionist editor of the New York Tribune, was pummeled by a congressman on a street outside the Capitol in Washington. The editor of Lincoln’s local paper, the Sangamo Journal, was beaten up several times—once by a furious preacher and once by no less a figure than Stephen Douglas. They got off lightly by comparison with a Massachusetts editor (of the Essex County Democrat), who was drawn around town tarred and feathered for what he published. Lincoln had to know that his own rancorous articles (and those of his ally and law partner William Herndon) could be dangerous for them, as well as embarrassing, if they were found to be the writers.

On one occasion, in 1841, that happened—and it involved not only Lincoln but his fiancée Mary Todd. The two had collaborated on a series of scurrilous letters from a fictitious “Rebecca” that vilified James Shields, a rising candidate in the Democratic Party (he would later be elected a senator three times from three different states). The fake Rebecca, who claimed Shields was a former beau, mocked his Irish origin and declared him “a fool as well as a liar…. With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.”

Shields stormed into the office of the Sangamo Journal, demanding that the editor, Simeon Francis, tell him who was behind the Rebecca letters. When Francis asked Lincoln what he should do, Lincoln, in order to shield his Mary, took sole responsibility (without admitting he wrote anything). Shields challenged him to a duel, and they actually met on the dueling ground—but Lincoln, as the one receiving the challenge, had the right to choice of weapons. When he called for broadswords, this gave him, with his long and strong right arm, a ludicrous advantage, and the fight was called off. Though Mary liked to recollect how her own beau had stood up for her, Lincoln cut off any later attempts to remember this episode—perhaps (though Holzer does not mention this) because Shields, vilified by “Rebecca,” became a Union officer when Lincoln was president, and was wounded at the Battle of Kernstown. There was a real duel after all.

Though Lincoln became more circumspect about his own anonymous writings, he continued to have his secretary John Hay write secretly for the cause when he was president, and Mary leaked her own items to the press from the White House—once almost disastrously when her favorite reporter released to a New York paper Lincoln’s annual address before it was delivered. Lincoln himself, even as president, continued to ghostwrite items for the Philadelphia Press, a paper he liked.

You'll want to read the entire article and buy the book.