I hurriedly went up to the office of the first paper in which the proclamation of freedom could be printed, known as the “Evening Star,” and squeezed myself through the dense crowd that was waiting for the paper. The first sheet run off with the proclamation in it was grabbed for by three of us, but some active young man got possession of it and fled. The next sheet was grabbed for by several, and was torn into tatters. The third sheet from the press was grabbed for by several, but I succeeded in procuring so much of it as contained the proclamation, and off I went for life and death. Down Pennsylvania Ave. I ran as for my life, and when the people saw me coming with the paper in my hand they raised a shouting cheer that was almost deafening. As many as could get around me lifted me to a great platform, and I started to read the proclamation. I had run the best end of a mile, and was out of breath, and could not read. Mr. Hinton, to whom I handed the paper, read it with great force and clearness. While he was reading every kind of demonstration and gesticulation was going on. Men squealed, women fainted, dogs barked, white and colored people shook hands, songs were sung, and by this time cannons began to fire at the navy-yard, and follow in the wake of a roar that had for some time been going on behind the White House. Every face had a smile, and even the dumb animals seemed to realize that some extraordinary event had taken place . . . the jubilation that attended the proclamation of freedom by His Excellency Abraham Lincoln, I am sure has never been surpassed, if it has ever been equaled.4
Not everyone was jubilant. “The deed is done,” lamented the Chicago Times two days later, “the deed which unites the people of the South forever in their rebellion; which converts the war from a constitutional contest for the integrity of the Union to an unconstitutional crusade for the liberation of three millions of negro barbarians.” An example of “administrative madness,” echoed the New York World. But like Reverend Garnet, the racist World gave credit—or blame—where it was due: “The Tribune has its wild and wicked will.”5
While Republican journalists like Greeley applauded, and African-American editors exulted (“a day for poetry and song,” rejoiced Frederick Douglass), the Democratic press united in furious opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation, especially to its call for black recruitment. It was a measure of both increased confidence and tolerance that administration and military authorities did little to suppress such newspaper attacks, or persecute the editors who lobbed them. Despite their criticism, most anti-administration, anti-emancipation, and antiwar newspapers survived unmolested throughout 1862 and early 1863, emboldened enough to advocate for the supposedly loyal opposition during local election campaigns and to assail Lincoln’s proclamations of September and January.6
There were exceptions to the cease-fire. Sporadic censorship did break out from time to time, and from coast to coast, a chilling reminder that tolerance went only so far. Back in February 1862, Secretary of War Stanton had served up a reminder of his powers by imprisoning a New York Herald correspondent in Washington for alleged “treason and complicity with the enemy.” A gloating Henry Raymond endorsed the “justice” and “propriety” of arresting any Bennett employee, assuring Times readers that the government still remained innocent of wholesale “interference with the freedom of the Press.”7 Raymond himself had yet to embrace black recruitment, but he was a Republican. No one menaced him when he questioned the proclamation’s call for African-American troops or argued that the decree might more wisely have been issued as a purely military order to eliminate the possibility of Supreme Court review.8
Democratic editors received no such benefit of the doubt, and doubts about Union loyalty often generated harsh consequences. Around the time Lincoln signed the District of Columbia emancipation act, General Benjamin Butler suppressed the daily True Delta in recently conquered New Orleans. On another occasion, Butler lost patience with a chaplain who doubled as a war correspondent for the New York Evening Post. After berating him as a “hypocrite,” Butler sentenced him to spend hours inside a live-munitions storage tent, where the slightest move would have blown him to pieces.9 In the Far West, officials shut down the “incendiary” Oregon Democrat in March 1862, and later shuttered the Los Angeles Star for providing “aid and comfort to the enemy” after it railed against “the utter folly and wickedness of the Emancipation Proclamation.”10 In Iowa, press suppression broke out in Burlington, where a Democratic editor was hauled off to prison.11 For some, these isolated, small-town crackdowns were insufficient. When the anti-Lincoln New York Express denounced the proclamation in September, an agitated A. W. Spies wondered “how, is rebellion to be crushed while such insulting traitorous papers are allowed to be freely circulated among the people?” In a blistering letter to Secretary of State Seward, Spies vowed: “Tens of thousands in New York now stand ready to enter the printing establishments of several papers and break the heads of the editors, and are only restrained by its unlawfulness and are waiting for our weak & pukish Govt to do the needful to them.”12
Though elections had proceeded as scheduled in the fall of 1862—something of a miracle, under the circumstances—and Democratic newspapers had enjoyed their say about the candidates without interference, the threat of censorship was never far from the surface. Whether the constant worries about intimidation muffled the Democrats’ strength or motivated them to the polls, however, no one could say with certainty. Confidence could not have reigned among Democratic editors when New York Democratic congressman Benjamin Wood found himself under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee for allegedly communicating “important intelligence to the rebels.” Vehemently denying the charges, Wood insisted: “I have never communicated, and have never attempted to communicate, directly or indirectly, any important intelligence, or any intelligence, to any person, within the lines of the Southern Confederacy, whether in arms, or others.”13 To have said otherwise would have exposed his Daily News to another shutdown.
On January 27, 1863, in one post-election case that did unleash an uproar, General Robert Schenck, commander of the army’s Middle Department, suppressed the pro-Democratic Philadelphia Evening Journal and ordered the arrest of publisher Albert D. Boileau. “It had been recently very violent in its abuse of the administration,” attested a local pro-war diarist named Sidney George Fisher, “and was distributed in large quantities among the Army . . . which is thought to be very demoralized.”14 Authorities seized Boileau at his home and hustled him off to Fort McHenry in Baltimore a week after his daily merely published an editorial comparing President Lincoln’s 1862 Annual Message to the one just issued by his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis—“a comparison,” according to the Journal, “quite damaging to the intellectual capacity of the Federal President.”15 Assailing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Journal further sneered: “Who but a fool believes that the Union can be restored by such means?”16
Although the scathing comments were the work of an editorial writer, and may have been published without Boileau’s knowledge, General Schenck held the publisher responsible.17 Boileau’s arrest ignited an avalanche of protest from the state’s Democratic newspapers—some charging it was retaliation for their party’s success in the recent state elections, others condemning it as a “hellish” act of kidnapping. Even administration mouthpiece John Wein Forney expressed concern about the manner of Boileau’s seizure, alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to complain in the Washington Chronicle that it had been carried out “in the dead waste and middle of the night.”18 One of the imprisoned editor’s most ardent defenders turned out to be Amasa Converse, the graybeard Philadelphia editor whose Christian Observer had been run out of town by federal authorities two years earlier. On Lincoln’s fifty-fourth birthday, as it happened, Converse editorialized from his new base in Richmond to laud Boileau for maintaining “the liberty of speech and the press” in the face of Lincolnian suppression. Converse could not help reminding readers that no one had come to his defense when his own paper suffered a similar fate back in 1861.19
Such was not the case this time. The Boileau affair exploded into a political nightmare for Republicans, fueling charges of federal power run amok. Democratic legislators, journalists, and jurists had a field day questioning the legality of ignoring civil procedure in a loyal Union state whose courts were fully functioning. A federal judge in Philadelphia even proposed indicting the marshals who had arrested the editor. Democrats in the State Assembly introduced a bill to forbid the federal government from transferring any future prisoners out of the state. One legislator charged that the Boileau arrest was an act of vengeance for his paper’s earlier criticism of General Schenck’s military failures, no justification for “destroying the tranquility of a domestic fireside and invading the dearest rights of man.” The legislator, who took note that Lincoln had done “nothing” to make his own views clear after the arrest, added melodramatically that Boileau’s daughter had reacted to his arrest by going into convulsions.20 Eventually the state’s Republican governor, Andrew Curtin, had no choice but to suggest that Congress pass a law requiring speedy, impartial trials for those charged with treason.
Boileau turned out to be the wrong hero for any sustained campaign against suppression, for he apparently had little interest in editorial content and no intention of becoming a martyr to freedom of the press. After languishing at Fort McHenry for six days, he offered up an almost embarrassingly abject apology for the editorial “and other criticisms of like dangerous character,” and vowed not to write, print, or publish any future articles “tending to the support or encouragement of the rebellion.”21 Then, shortly after regaining his freedom, Boileau cut his ties to the Evening Journal altogether and was heard from in the press no more. But his successors at the paper intensified their criticism of the Lincoln administration, convinced—correctly as it turned out—that the Boileau affair made it unlikely that Pennsylvania’s Democratic editors would again be spirited to remote federal forts without a fair trial. Other Keystone State newspapers would face suppression in the future, but no editor would ever again be transported out of its jurisdiction.
Around the same time as the Boileau affair, the House Judiciary Committee belatedly asked Postmaster General Blair to justify his long-standing policy of denying objectionable newspapers access to the U.S. mails. No doubt speaking for the entire Lincoln administration, Blair proudly responded that freedom of the press was not a “license that is guaranteed.” In a frank defense of his actions, Blair argued that newspapers could no longer “aim blows at the existence of the government, the Constitution, and the Union, and at the same time claim its protection.”22 War Department solicitor William Whiting, whose legal opinions Lincoln respected, was also heard from on the suppression issue in 1863. In his influential pamphlet, War Powers of the President, he argued: “If freedom of the press cannot be interfered with, all our military plans may be betrayed to the enemy.” In Whiting’s view, the “Civil Rights of Loyal Citizens in Loyal Districts are modified by the Existence of War.” Confederates believed—and behaved—no differently. In September 1863, Georgia troops sacked the offices of the North Carolina Standard in Raleigh, after which its supporters retaliated by destroying the printing press at the rival State Journal—and all over a gubernatorial election.23
• • •
Like a disease tamed but not cured, instances of suppression fever had bubbled up even as Lincoln was scribbling his earliest emancipation draft the previous summer—in, of all places, the president’s own home state. Illinois was under no particular threat from either Confederate armies or sympathizers, but in July 1862, without generating much attention, military authorities there banned the circulation of the Quincy Herald, asserting that its anti-Union editorials encouraged the Rebels. This was followed by the arrest of the staff of the Paris Democratic Standard. Around the same time, a mob sacked the offices of the anti-administration Bloomington Times. Facing a similar fate, the editor of the Jerseyville Democratic Union abandoned his paper and fled town. Under such threatening conditions it was perhaps understandable that the late Stephen Douglas’s onetime press advocate, James Sheahan, formerly editor of the Chicago Times, devoted his new job at the Chicago Morning Post to “supporting the war policy of the government without giving up the democratic point of view.”24 Like Douglas, Sheahan was a Unionist first. And extolling Unionism seemed the only way an “opposition” paper could now survive in Illinois unmolested.
Sheahan’s former paper was now operating under the management of virulent antiwar Democrat Wilbur Storey, who had assumed the helm at the Chicago Times in 1861 with the financial backing of Cyrus McCormick of reaper fame and fortune. Storey launched his new career as a provocateur by declaring: “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news, and raise hell.”25 Crucial to Storey’s hell-raising was a virulent racism and an unrelenting hatred of a president he called an “irresolute, vacillating imbecile.”26 The paper’s hostility intensified in March 1863, when Congress passed and the president signed the nation’s first Conscription Act. The equally hostile New York Caucasian responded with the headline, “Lincoln to Be Impeached.”27
Like the racist Caucasian, the Chicago Times unequivocally opposed the draft and indeed any military recruitment, especially of African Americans. In response, pressure from pro-administration forces mounted against the West’s leading “Copperhead” newspaper—“Copperhead” being the serpentine new term for Peace Democrats opposed to the war, emancipation, and involuntary military service. In early 1863, both the local YMCA and the Chicago Board of Trade launched boycotts of the Times. Then the Chicago & Galena Railroad banned its sale on all trains. And by February, two military commanders in Tennessee prohibited it from circulating in their encampments.28 Unwilling to tone down his attacks, Storey defiantly intensified his criticism when General Ambrose Burnside, now commanding the Department of the Ohio, launched a broad new effort to curtail dissent within his jurisdiction. Burnside’s latest crackdown was aimed specifically at muzzling the outspoken Copperhead politician Clement Vallandigham. The ex-congressman (and onetime newspaperman) had long and vocally opposed the “despotism” of “King Lincoln” and what he called the “wicked and hazardous experiment” of waging war without congressional consent.29 In the wake of Democratic gains throughout the state in the 1862 elections, an emboldened “Valiant Val” now contemplated a race for Ohio Governor in the fall of 1863.
Almost at once, his nascent campaign collided with the new effort by Burnside to restrict dissent. On April 13, Burnside issued General Orders No. 38, banning all public statements sympathetic to the enemy.30 General Milo S. Hascall, serving in nearby Indiana, immediately interpreted the order as an invitation to silence the Democratic press in that state, too. “All newspapers and public speakers that counsel or encourage resistance to the Conscription Act, or any other law of Congress passed as a war measure,” he announced, would be “treated accordingly.” Though Hascall left big-city journals alone, he soon shuttered small Democratic papers in the towns of Winamac, Columbia City, and Huntington, while bullying many more into silence.31 Only when Indiana’s Republican governor raised objections was the general’s campaign halted. Military authorities eventually transferred Hascall to the Army of the Ohio, but not before his own General Orders No. 9 quieted press dissent in Indiana.32
Meanwhile, eager to test the limits of Burnside’s offensive, Vallandigham arranged to address a Democratic rally at Mount Vernon, Ohio, on April 30. There he provocatively denounced Lincoln and the war he insisted was being waged for “the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.”33 Six days later, in the middle of the night, Burnside’s soldiers dragged Vallandigham from his Dayton home and placed him under arrest even as the town’s church bells tolled in sympathy.34 The arrest set off a small riot. An incensed mob set fire to the pro-Republican Dayton Journal. When a pro-Confederate “butternut” tried to slice the hose being used to douse the blaze, Union troops shot him dead. This latest outbreak of violence prompted Burnside to arrest the editor of t
he Democratic Dayton Empire. Union soldiers tore “the insides out of” that paper’s headquarters.35
Convicted after a quick hearing before a military tribunal at Cincinnati, Vallandigham was ordered to be confined in a military prison for the duration of the rebellion, but on May 19, Lincoln commuted the sentence and banished his critic to the Confederacy, hoping he would disappear.36 A month afterward, inflamed Ohio Democrats indeed chose the exiled Vallandigham as their candidate for governor. “Free Speech! Free Press! Free Men!” roared the New York Herald in announcing his nomination.37
One Ohio newspaper that supported Vallandigham—the aptly named Columbus Crisis—paid a stiff price. Even earlier, a mob had tried unsuccessfully to burn down its offices. After editor Samuel Medary announced his backing for the exiled Vallandigham’s gubernatorial candidacy, a Union general banned the paper from the mails. Worse threats followed, especially after Medary vowed to continue his campaign for “the liberty of the press” by practicing it “freely.” When a pro-Vallandigham Ohio army captain tried to distribute the paper to his troops, he was arrested. The following year, even though his influence was on the wane, Medary, too, was arrested for “conspiracy against the Union.” He died before facing trial.38
For weeks, Lincoln worried anxiously about the tense Ohio situation, especially once sympathy for Vallandigham metastasized beyond the Buckeye State. In one example, outraged Democrats convened a mass meeting in mid-May at Albany, Thurlow Weed’s home base. They issued a series of resolutions denouncing the administration over the Ohio crackdown, particularly its disregard for “the liberty of speech and of the press,” forwarding a copy to Lincoln on the 15th.39 The president pondered his response for nearly a month.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 56