The Wilmington Morning Star

Somber Abraham Lincoln stood on the station platform at Springfield, Illinois, and looked down on the faces of the thousand friends and neighbors gathered to bid him goodbye as he left for Washington on Feb. 11, 1861. Removing his hat, the President-elect asked for silence and began his historic farewell address.

A young Associated Press correspondent, Henry Villard, was traveling with Lincoln and as soon as the train had started told Lincoln that he had made an extraordinarily moving address that should be preserved for posterity. He asked that Lincoln write it out, whereupon the President-elect took the correspondent's paper and pencil and set the speech down in his own hand, giving Villard the manuscript to telegraph at the first station.

This was typical of AP's coverage of the Lincoln administration and the ensuing war, a coverage that was to produce countless beats from the first authentic story of the Union policy toward the South to the flash on Lincoln's death. The government itself, lacking adequate telegraph facilities, commandeered the AP system. In the 12 years since its founding the AP had grown up so that a New York Herald man wrote: "The special correspondents of the several New York papers are nearly if not quite as numerous as the agents of the AP."

One of the agents, as AP reporters were then called, Lawrence A. Gobright, in Washington, summarized an AP man's creed. He said: "My business is to communicate facts; my instructions do not allow me to make any comment upon the facts. My dispatches are sent to papers of all manner of politics. I therefore confine myself to what I consider legitimate news, try to be truthful and impartial."

Today, more than 80 years later, that creed still holds, for AP men covering the war news and all the news.