“There are very few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.” With these words, on September 18, 1851, Henry Jarvis Raymond introduced his New-York Daily Times to the world, scarcely a year after he had helped launch Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, thus fixing a journalistic tone and temper that would endure, improbably, from the clatter of horse-drawn omnibuses to the buzzing of the iPhone. “We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good,” announced Raymond, “and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform.” Neither Adolph Ochs nor Ezra Klein could have said it better.

One feature of American life apparently not worth getting angry about—or that, perhaps, anger would not improve—was the institution of human bondage. The first front page of the Times carried news of an affray in Pennsylvania a week earlier. In pursuit of four escaped slaves, a Maryland man named Edward Gorsuch had traveled to Philadelphia and procured the assistance of a deputy U.S. Marshal, as was his legal right under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. At Christiana, in Lancaster County, the posse was confronted by the fugitives themselves, backed by an armed resistance led by other African Americans. In an exchange of gunfire, Gorsuch was killed; his former slaves, assisted by Frederick Douglass and others, made their way to freedom in Canada.

fugitive slave riot in lancaster co., pa. ran the Times headline. On the editorial page, Raymond’s paper took his characteristic middle ground. Dismissing accusations of a wider Northern conspiracy against the Fugitive Slave Act, the Times insisted that the affair was neither “treason” nor “rebellion” but simply “a negro riot.” The good people of Lancaster County were innocent of the charges thrown at them by raving Southerners and scurrilous Democrats. Yet while others in the New York press, including Raymond’s onetime mentor Horace Greeley, justified the fugitives’ resistance at Christiana—“They defended an inalienable right, namely, the right to their own persons”—the Times offered high-minded condemnation: “Resistance to law is always an offence against the peace of society.”

From the beginning, the Times was a moderate paper with a great deal to be moderate about. In issue one, its Solomonic verdict on slave resistance shared space with an earnest critique of proslavery filibustering in Cuba, sober reflections on the lunacy of William Lloyd Garrison and New England abolitionism, and several impish but thoroughly genteel boasts about the superiority of American to English yachtsmanship. In this it only reflected the humor of its progenitor and guiding spirit.

Across an eventful life in journalism—which included the management of Harper’s in its infancy—Raymond managed to occupy the political center with the firmness of magnetized iron. Yet the striking fact about the American Civil War era, and the chief paradox and fascination of Raymond’s own career, is that the political center kept moving. Only a few years after his lofty denunciation of the violence at Christiana, Raymond was organizing a vigorous new antislavery party, and urging these new Republicans to meet “the champions of Slavery . . . upon their own ground and with their own weapons.” Within a decade, he found himself in the very cockpit of Abraham Lincoln’s war of conquest and emancipation. Raymond, said Lincoln, ranked with Ulysses S. Grant as his “lieutenant-general in politics.” During the Civil War, few Union men did more to ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which completed the liberation of four million slaves and thus the liquidation of $3 billion of “property”—perhaps the largest forcible expropriation of wealth in human history to that date. The moderate, curiously enough, had become a revolutionary.

Raymond’s story began early and ended early. As a seventeen-year-old farmer’s son and debt-ridden student at the University of Vermont, he managed to inveigle some of his rough-hewn rhymes (“When my spirit was light as the zephyr’s wing / Wafting in gladness the voice of Spring”) into a New York literary journal run by Greeley. By twenty-one he had become an indispensable assistant editor of the New-York Daily Tribune and already a kind of founding father of the city’s press. At forty-nine Raymond was dead: discovered by his daughter unconscious in his own front doorway. He had been deposited there by two unknown escorts, who had driven him home after what the Times called a “political consultation,” or a tryst with the celebrity actress Rose Eytinge, according to gossip spread by the abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher.

At his funeral, Beecher’s eyes may have glimmered when he eulogized Raymond as “a man who loved and was beloved. . . . The nearer you came to him and the better you knew him, the more you esteemed and loved him.” Raymond neither outlived nor quite outran his youth. Even as the richly mutton-chopped chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was still rendered by cartoonists as a snub-nosed newsboy. The hostile New York Herald claimed that Raymond was the original for Jefferson Brick, the childlike war correspondent drawn by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit:

A small young gentleman of very juvenile appearance, and unwholesomely pale in the face . . . his lank hair—a fragile crop—was not only smoothed and parted back from his brow, that none of the Poetry of his aspect might be lost.

This was unfair. Though Raymond never topped five feet six inches, and in society cultivated a certain fashionable aspect, no doubt savoring of the zephyr’s wing, he was neither a child nor a lightweight. Greeley, who came almost to hate the man he styled “the little villain,” still rated Raymond the most versatile and efficient journalist he had ever known. During the Civil War, none of his rivals, from the thundering Tribune to the caustic Herald, proved more adept at winning or wielding real political power.

Raymond’s perpetual odor of youth never held him back. Antebellum America was a young republic that belonged to young men, to an extent that might baffle our age of old fogyism. When Raymond began his career in journalism, he was eighteen and his editor, Greeley, just twenty-seven; his political hero, Governor William Seward, was thirty-seven; and Seward’s party chieftain, Thurlow Weed, already “dictator” of the New York Whigs, was practically ancient at forty-one.

Representing the liberal-minded elite of the Empire State within this political faction, Raymond distinguished himself as the most conservative sort of progressive. Under Greeley’s dynamic but eccentric leadership, the Tribune endorsed almost every sort of romantic reform, from cooperative farming to the vegetable diet developed by Sylvester Graham; it was, said the Herald, the “organ of Fourierites and Squashites.” Raymond had little patience for such enthusiasms. Leaving to join the rival Courier and Enquirer, a commercial paper, he goaded his former boss into a debate on utopian socialism. Here Raymond took up the businessman’s philosophy of antebellum Wall Street, full of stolid maxims on the “essential selfishness of man,” but landed a knockout blow only when he aimed below the belt. The utopian doctrine, he said, would destroy Christian marriage by proclaiming “the passion of love . . . the highest law which man can or should obey.”

A furious Greeley detected “a spice of roguery” underneath Raymond’s prudish posturing. (The young editor himself, indeed, was never exempt from what Charles Fourier termed “the law of passional attraction.”) In truth, Raymond’s real interest lay neither in promoting nor in suppressing social reform. As the first managing editor of Harper’s, Raymond helped create a popular journal that navigated controversial questions—including the heated national debate on slavery—by tastefully avoiding them altogether. In the 1850s, said one contemporary critic, Raymond’s magazine had “no opinions, no politics, no religion, no strong expression. . . . Every month it made its courtly bow; and, with bent head and unimpeachable toilet, whispered smoothly, ‘No offense, I hope.’ ”

The same accommodating spirit infused the newspaper Raymond had founded in 1851. From the start, the Times aimed at that “class of quiet, domestic, fireside, conservative readers” who liked neither the crusading Tribune nor the cynical Herald. And, priced at just one penny per issue, the new paper was marketed to a much larger public than mercantile sheets like the ponderous Courier and Enquirer. When the young Raymond had told Greeley he was considering leaving journalism for the law, the editor replied emphatically: “Curse Blackstone and fortune and office! What are they to 100,000 confiding readers!” Raymond abandoned his old mentor but never despised his advice. Within a year of its founding, the Times had reached as many readers as the Tribune.

In temper and ideology, Raymond was a moderate; in politics, he was a Whig. This was by no means a subordinate form of identity. His editorial acceptance of the Fugitive Slave Act—and disdain for the “negro rioters” at Christiana—did not grow out of any real commitment to that unloved piece of legislation. It stemmed from the partisan imperative of keeping the Whigs competitive in the South and North alike, the great end sought by Raymond’s patrons Seward and Weed.

In 1854, the Times opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, not only because it might spread human bondage into the West, but because an awakened antislavery movement threatened to wreck the Whigs as a national organization. “We believe,” said Weed, “the end of Parties to be—not, like Armies, to aggrandize one ruler and dethrone another, nor, like Churches, to uphold abstract creeds of faith—but to deal directly with the practical issues of their day and generation.”

This was music to moderate ears, and heartily endorsed by the Times. At the Whig state convention in Syracuse that summer, antislavery militants and ideologues were thoroughly hidden from view. All that could be seen, said the Herald, were

the same old whigs, with their sleek, well shaven faces, neat apparel, and grave deportment—the same brisk young whigs, with very high shirt collars, very new hats, very stiff linen, very well dyed whiskers, very large bowed cravats, and very shiny black clothes.

Raymond was their mouthpiece, their manager, and their benchmark. That fall he was elected lieutenant governor of New York on the Whig ticket at the age of thirty-four.

Yet all Weed’s wizardry and Raymond’s stiff linen could not prevent “the masses at the North,” as Frederick Douglass later called them, from turning against “the slave-holding oligarchy.” First in tiny hamlets like Ripon, Wisconsin, and then in Northern state capitals from Ohio to Maine, aggressive antislavery Republican Parties burst from the chests of old Whiggery. With the two-party system in ruins, Raymond was forced to join the general movement into the new organization. But by 1856, borne along by a swift popular current, he had become not only a nominal Republican but a fierce and energetic party captain.

At the party’s organizing convention in Pittsburgh, Raymond composed the introductory “Address to the People.” For a generation, he declared in capital type, the powers of the federal government had been

systematically wielded for the promotion and extension of the interests of slavery . . . in open contempt of the public sentiment of the American people and of the Christian world.

Abstract creeds of faith were suddenly acceptable in politics, as were militant maneuvers to dethrone the “despotic rule” of slaveholders. When the Republican Charles Sumner was struck down by a Southerner on the Senate floor, Raymond’s paper called for armed resistance by pistol, bludgeon, and bowie knife, if necessary. That spring the Times printed sixty thousand copies of Sumner’s blazing philippic against slavery, a “transcendent wrong” and “reptile monster” that would pollute the free soil of the West.

Raymond himself remained near the gravitational center of Northern politics, resolute rather than frenzied in tone. The Pittsburgh address, as Sumner wrote, was “strong and yet moderate, conservative and yet progressive . . . the arguments seem to move with a firmness of tread, which has the promise of victory.” Yet the Northern political universe itself had been transformed by the arrival of the Republicans, and the country was now barreling toward civil war. In this new struggle, as sharp-eyed militants understood, firmness of tread counted a great deal more than radicalism of demand.

When the South threatened disunion, and then acted on it in the winter of 1860–61, Raymond’s tread only grew firmer. In an exchange of letters with the Alabama secessionist William Lowndes Yancey, he took up the “real heart and marrow” of the “whole controversy between the North and South”—that is, whether the “right of property in slaves” was recognized by the Constitution. “And upon this point I see no possibility of compromise.” Instead of concessions, Raymond offered forewarnings: “Disunion,” he told Yancey, “means War,—war of conquest,—a war of subjugation.” It also meant emancipation. As Raymond had proclaimed in the Pittsburgh address: “Slavery cannot fail, from the necessity of its nature, to . . . awaken storms that will sweep it in carnage from the face of the earth.” In 1856, this was rhetoric rather than prophecy, a dramatic way to frame the dangers of Southern extremism. Only a few years later, with Raymond’s steady backing, it became the policy of the United States government.

It was characteristic of the Civil War era that many of Raymond’s wildest predictions came true, while his safest pledges were broken. “We shall stand,” he promised Yancey, “upon the Constitution which our Fathers made. We shall not make a new one, nor shall we permit any human power to destroy the old one.” But the first Confederate cannon fire at Fort Sumter, four months later, blasted Raymond and the country into a new world.

The crucible of war imposed a chemical change on Northern politics and politicians. Seward, deemed too radical for the Republican nomination, became the leading conservative in Lincoln’s Cabinet. Benjamin Butler, who at the 1860 Democratic National Convention had voted fifty-seven times for Jefferson Davis, was by 1862 the idol of the most ardent abolitionists in Congress. The old Whig virtuoso Thurlow Weed, unable to stand the pace of change, drifted toward reaction and irrelevance, while Edwin Stanton, a careerist Democratic lawyer until 1861, congealed into a militant and relentless secretary of war.

For Raymond, the war was a steadying influence. “There is no room for half-way measures now,” declared the Times on the morning after the attack on Sumter. “There can be no further talk of a pacific policy,—of measures of conciliation. . . . The South has chosen war, and it must have all the war it wants.” This was to remain the editor’s mantra over the next four years. The conflict gave the Times definition and purpose; the “gentlemanly silliness” and want of virility that, according to its critics, had plagued the paper before the war was replaced by vivid, pioneering coverage from the battlefront. It was Raymond’s paper, not Greeley’s, that published the hospital dispatches that became part of Whitman’s Specimen Days. The Times’s chief editorial writer during the war was John Swinton, a bohemian friend of the poet’s and later a left-wing labor activist who mingled with Marx and Debs.

None of this turned Raymond himself into a radical, at least not in any performative or programmatic sense. Still immune to the moral fervor that infused reformers like Greeley and Garrison, the editor also maintained a studious indifference to ideological debates within the party: “The prime concern is not whether your remedy is called conservative or radical, but whether it will be effective.”

Such pragmatism brought him close to Lincoln, who shared Raymond’s coolness of temper and concern for political unity. In the course of a long and taxing war, simple steadfastness was not to be underrated. While the mercurial Greeley and other radicals veered between strident demands for abolition, protests of the crackdown on civil liberties, and panicked calls for peace talks, Raymond stayed the course (or, at least, kept his wobbles private). “The Times,” wrote Lincoln, “is always true to the Union.” In July 1863, when draft rioters menaced both the Tribune and the Times offices on Newspaper Row, Greeley first called for nonresistance—“I don’t want to kill anybody”—then escaped out a side door as the furious mob battled police officers outside. Raymond, a hard warman to the end, kept the Times building safe by mounting two Gatling guns in a second-floor window.

On the question of emancipation, Raymond and Lincoln traveled together. “The President considers the time near at hand when Slavery must go to the wall,” announced the Times in July 1862, just as Lincoln began to work up his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. When the final decree was signed on New Year’s Day 1863, Raymond did not cavil at its bureaucratic language or military framing, but succinctly noted what Lincoln had wrought: “Hitherto Slavery has been under the protection of the Government; henceforth it is under its ban. . . . This change of attitude is itself a revolution.”

Raymond’s own revolution climaxed in the following year. At the Baltimore convention that renominated Lincoln, Raymond wrote the resolutions that put emancipation at the center of the 1864 campaign:

As slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this Rebellion . . . justice and the National safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.

Raymond’s platform called for a constitutional amendment to terminate the “gigantic evil” of bondage, while praising black soldiers and demanding their equal protection under the laws of war, “without regard to the distinction of color.”

In Baltimore, the platform was greeted with thunderous applause. Raymond made no pretense of leading the people, but neither did he fear following where they led: “The very radicalism of these resolutions,” noted the Times, “which two years ago would have been a fatal reproach against them, is now their most potent recommendation.” Old William Lloyd Garrison himself, whose “craziness” the Times had mocked in its very first issue, attended the convention and celebrated its platform as “a full endorsement of all the abolition ‘fanaticism’ and ‘incendiarism’ with which I had stood branded for so many years.” “We question whether at any Convention ever held by the American Anti-Slavery Society,” wrote another activist, “abolition sentiments of a more radical nature have been uttered.”

A Republican triumph that fall ensured both the defeat of the Confederacy and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The well-timed capture of Atlanta, along with overwhelming support from Union Army soldiers, is usually cited as the key ingredient to Lincoln’s victory. But not much farther down the list were the tireless labors of Henry Jarvis Raymond. In addition to the party platform, he co-wrote Lincoln’s official campaign biography, beat the drum in the daily Times, and as chair of the RNC, wielded patronage to make sure every federal employee in the North, from those in customhouses to those in navy yards, would support Lincoln. Hardly any other single figure in the Union, with the possible exception of William T. Sherman, did more to win the election that destroyed slavery in the United States.

Raymond’s Civil War revolution was neither personal nor ideological. Even as he did his full part to steamroller the ancien régime of antebellum America, the editor remained allergic to the idea of radical reform; to the end, his politics had more than a whiff of schoolboyish conservatism. And as soon as the war ended, he began to climb down from the vanguard of history.

Taking a seat in the House in 1865, Raymond backed Andrew Johnson’s plan to restore the Union as quickly as possible, leaving freed slaves at the mercy of the oppressive black codes installed by the ex-Confederate planter class. Though he came to support the civil-rights guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment, Raymond balked at both the means and the ends of Reconstruction. “We had no sympathy,” his paper insisted, “with the fanaticism which enacted universal negro suffrage.” By the time of his death in 1869, Raymond had been cast out of Congress and was again what he had been before 1854: the stiff-necked moderate at the helm of a complacent and genteel New York Times.

Somehow, this respectable foe of radicalism had organized the political realignment that broke up the Union, sustained the war that overthrew the South’s ruling class, and managed the struggle that emancipated its proletariat. Along the way, he and his party produced a sweeping and unprecedented revision of the Constitution.

“I claim not to have controlled events,” wrote Lincoln in 1864, at the flood tide of this second American revolution, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Raymond’s part in this transformation, too, owed less to inner conviction than to worldly circumstance. Yet, for all that, it shook the world no less violently. Every successful revolution, perhaps, requires its moderates.