‘I Didn't Have an Answer'

When we clicked yesterday morning on the Drudge Report's headline "Republican Congressmen Take It To Bush," it took us to a story in the New York Times about how Republican moderates had gone to warn President Bush that their support for the war was faltering. The Times quoted Congressman LaHood of Illinois as saying, "It was a tough meeting in terms of people being as frank as they possibly could about their districts and their feelings about where the American people are on the war."

At that, we reached for Lloyd Wendt's history of the Chicago Tribune, which begins with a chapter about what could have been called the Civil War Surge. It tells of an encounter, in 1865, between the young editor of the Tribune, Joseph Medill, and President Lincoln, the Illinois lawyer the Tribune had, to oversimplify the story a bit, essentially assigned to go down to Washington to run the country. "Some observers went even further," Mr. Wendt writes, "asserting that the Tribune had started the war, a compliment the proprietors were disinclined to accept."

The encounter Mr. Wendt describes between Medill and Lincoln started when a delegation comprising Medill and two other Chicagoans had gone to the war department to try to get Secretary Stanton to back off from drafting more men from Cook County. An angry Stanton rebuffed them, and they'd gone over his head, to the White House, and met with Lincoln in his office. Lincoln wouldn't back off, either; a dozen states were trying to get out of draft calls. But Lincoln agreed to walk back over to Stanton's office and "hear the argument on both sides."

"The War Department's blue-uniformed sentries came rigidly to attention as the president appeared," Mr. Wendt writes. Lincoln, he says, gave them a friendly "at ease" and led his visitors through the "chattering telegraph operations room," where he knew everyone by name, to Stanton's "vast cave of maps and charts," where Stanton glowered beneath dark oil paintings of Generals Knox and Dearborn. Stanton was none too pleased to see the same Chicagoans whom he'd shooed out of his office earlier in the day return with his boss. Medill made a game effort, reading from his own newspaper about how no other congressional district had put so many men into the war.

For months, Mr. Wendt explains, the Tribune had "acknowledged to its readers that after four years of the most brutal fighting known to man, even greater sacrifices would be required. The armies were devouring men on a scale not known before in military history, as new weapons outmarched generals' old tactics." Draft riots ensued, particularly in New York. The Tribune required an entire supplemental page, Mr. Wendt notes, just to list Illinois casualties among the more than 13,000 suffered by the Union at Shiloh.

When Medill finished his plea, Stanton nodded to his provost marshal, General Fry, who "read the sanguinary statistics of four years of fighting in a loud, sonorous voice," while Lincoln listened with his head bowed. Stanton then rejected the plea, saying, as Mr. Wendt paraphrases it, that there could be no city nor section nor state asking for special favor, not even Illinois. Medill left the meeting pledging to remain silent about it until the war ended. It would be 30 years before he could bring himself to write the account that Mr. Wendt quotes at some length.

"I shall never forget," Medill said of Lincoln, "how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face. ‘Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. … Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. … Go home, and raise your 6,000 extra men."

Then, in Medill's own account, Lincoln turned on the great editor. "‘And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any [other] paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.'" Wrote Medill: "I couldn't say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn't have an answer. …"

***

That was how The Great Emancipator turned the tables on the Republicans who had gone weak-kneed in the middle of a war. Chicago did meet its draft call, sending, by Mr. Wendt's count, nearly a fifth of its population into the struggle for the Union. For nearly three decades, we have carried in our wallet a dog-eared passage of Medill's confession to share with aspiring young editors. There are those who will say that the circumstances are different today. But by our lights, it doesn't matter whether the pleaders are newspaper editors or congressmen. It is Bush who is in Lincoln's boots. The rest of the country knows in its heart the honorable course, which history will remember for generations after the encounters now taking place.