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Menahem Blondheim, “Public Sentiment Is Everything”: The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864, Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 869–899, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092344
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Extract
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
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
