A politician destined to be embroiled in later free speech controversies—Democratic congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Dayton, Ohio—responded to these shutdowns with a vow to introduce federal legislation “to secure the freedom of speech and of the Press.” The initiative received little support. Raymond continued to mock the theory that “organs of treason” could be protected to publish at will. “The United States is now AT WAR with Secessionism,” he editorialized. “ . . . Whatever ministers to it must be destroyed; whatever stands in the pathway of our triumph must be overthrown.” The Times adamantly rejected the “vague notion afloat that freedom of speech carries with it some special and peculiar sanctity.”16
General Ulysses S. Grant—before he became a successful military commander, an early enforcer of Union newspaper suppression.
Less than a week after that comment appeared in print, one of the newly minted generals under Frémont’s command acted to suppress a newspaper in yet another Missouri district. His name was Ulysses S. Grant. On August 26, Grant moved not only against grocers supplying food to secessionists, he also ordered the shutdown of the Booneville Patriot, published some forty miles from his Jefferson City headquarters. “Bring all the printing material, type &c with you,” he directed his troops. “Arrest J. L. Stevens and bring him with you, and some copies of the paper he edits.” Stevens was no more entitled to civil rights, Grant maintained, than the other “obnoxious” Confederate sympathizers. “Give secessionists to understand what to expect if it becomes necessary to visit them again.” Just a week later, Grant reported that “some of the despatches” earmarked for telegraphing “by one of the Newspaper correspondents” accompanying his army were “so detrimental to the good of the service that I felt it my duty to suppress them,” too.17
For a time, the assault on the pro-slavery, pro-Confederate press in Missouri continued unchecked—and at both Washington and New York editorial desks, unchallenged. That same month, the military closed down two more St. Louis papers, the War Bulletin and the Missourian, charging that both were “shamelessly devoted to the publication of transparently false statements regarding military movements in Missouri.” When the St. Louis Christian Advocate came to the papers’ defense, the provost marshal warned its editors to adhere to its identity as “a religious paper” or face “the discipline of the department,” too.18 Military censorship tightened further when the army “seized and destroyed” the St. Louis Daily Evening News, and briefly detained editor Charles G. Ramsay for criticizing Frémont’s failure to rescue a federal garrison at Lexington, Missouri.19 “We are under a reign of terror,” an anonymous correspondent protested to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair after Ramsay’s arrest. “ . . . Will our President countenance such tyranny?”20 Blair dutifully forwarded the warning to Lincoln, but the president offered neither comment nor relief.
By September, suppression fever reached the Bluegrass State. On the 9th, an angry Union loyalist from nearby Indiana named Charles Fishback inflamed matters by sending Secretary of State Seward a batch of recent editorials from the Louisville Courier, a paper that Horace Greeley had earlier branded “a Secession Press.” Was it not “about time,” Fishback implored Seward, that “the editor were an occupant of Fort Lafayette or some other suitable place for traitors? The people are getting tired of sending their sons to fight rebels while such as this editor, more mischievous by far than if armed with muskets, are allowed to furnish aid and comfort to the enemy unmolested.”21 On the 18th, three days after a cabinet meeting at which the matter may well have come up for discussion, the Post Office obliged by banning the Courier from the U.S. mails. The following day, federal authorities raided the newspaper’s offices and took several employees into custody, including assistant editor Reuben T. Durrett, whom they charged with publishing “editorials of the most treasonable character.”
It was not a banner day for free speech in Kentucky. Also seized as a traitor on September 19 was the state’s former governor, Charles S. Morehead, along with one Martin W. Barr, who, it was alleged, “used his position as telegraph agent for the Associated Press to advance the insurrectionary cause.”22 The case of the ex-governor of course dominated the news, relegating the Durrett arrest to the background. In fact, because Durrett was linked to the detention of so important a politician, it became one of the first press arrest cases in which Lincoln involved himself directly, though not, as it turned out, sympathetically.
The Courier’s racist but pro-Union owner, George D. Prentice, promptly acted to absolve himself from his employee’s views but also tried to exert influence to liberate him. Prentice had previously called on Kentucky to remain neutral, and typically expected the president to bestow patronage influence on him in return. Now he wrote Lincoln twice in one day to urge leniency for Durrett. Perhaps he was “a secessionist,” Prentice conceded, “but he has never done any harm in our community. . . . I would rather give a portion of the brief remnant of my life than have his confinement protracted.” Lincoln remained unmoved. He coolly scribbled on the back of Prentice’s plea: “sent to Fort Lafayette by the military authorities of Kentucky and it would be improper for me to intervene without further knowledge of the facts than I now possess.”23
The “further knowledge” soon arrived—of a decidedly condemnatory nature—courtesy of pro-Union Kentucky Democrat Joseph Holt, secretary of war under Buchanan, but now working tirelessly to keep his home state from seceding. Holt informed Lincoln that Durrett had indeed “done everything to incite the people of Kentucky to take up arms against the General Government,” adding: “His arrest has rejoiced the hearts of the Union men, and his discharge . . . would in my judgment be a fatal mistake.” Holt enclosed a cache of Durrett “paragraphs,” in one of which the journalist asserted that Kentucky was “under no obligation to remain in the Union, but under many to leave it.”24 Durrett remained in confinement, and Lincoln rewarded Holt’s loyalty by naming him judge advocate general of the Union armies.
Undaunted, Durrett’s sympathizers pressed on for his release through other channels. To no avail, they wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Chase on October 10, arguing that Durrett was a “harmless man” who “hardly knew which side he was on,” and again petitioned Lincoln for mercy by pointing out that his confinement had left the journalist’s family “financially ruined.” Only in October did Lincoln finally tell Seward: “I am willing if you are that any of the parties may be released”—that is, if the president’s reliable Kentucky allies James Guthrie and James Speed agreed that “they should be.” Yet not until Durrett himself wrote Seward in December to protest his innocence and complain bitterly about conditions in prison was his case finally reopened. Seward finally relented, ordering the journalist’s release providing he agree to do nothing “hostile to the United States.”25
Durrett swore to a standard oath of allegiance on December 9 and at last became a free man—after ten weeks inside a series of federal prisons without trial—and only after Prentice again reminded Lincoln of “the importance of the Journal as an agency in this struggle.” For good measure, Prentice added that he could sustain the paper only if Lincoln awarded him contracts to supply the army with weapons, animals, and food. Few 1861 suppression episodes better illustrated the dangers facing Border State editors who opposed the Union, or the rewards expected by those who supported it. At least Lincoln could console himself in the belief that “I understand the Kentucky arrests were not made by special direction from here.”26 This was small consolation to Durrett, who was still languishing in prison when his employer began securing lucrative government contracts.
Equally chilling incidents took place in Northern states that had voted strongly for Lincoln in 1860, and posed no danger of abandoning the Union. Though unsanctioned by the government, these attacks, most of them spontaneous, were seldom restrained by local authorities, and rarely punished by local courts. Nearly all the aggression reflected shame and fury over the humiliation at Bull Run. In much the same way
official Washington attempted to place undeserved blame for that fiasco on the London Times, residents of Northern towns and villages long accustomed to tolerating both Republican and Democratic newspapers now unleashed their pent-up rage on Democratic newspapers that questioned military recruitment or mocked the soldiers’ performance on the battlefield.
On August 19, Edward Everett, the still respected Massachusetts statesman who had stood unsuccessfully for vice president on the 1860 Constitutional Union ticket, published a widely reprinted article assailing “Northern Secession Journals.” Everett insisted that it was “an absurdity . . . under the venerable name of the liberty of the press, to permit the systematic and licentious abuse of a government which is tasked to the utmost in defending the country from general disintegration and chaos.”27 Perhaps it was no coincidence that the very next day, a mob destroyed the office of the Sentinel, a Democratic weekly published in Horace Greeley’s old training ground of Easton, Pennsylvania. Around the same time, another infuriated crowd invaded and sacked John Hodgson’s pro-Democratic, antiwar Jeffersonian in West Chester. The mob pitched Hodgson’s printing press out the window, hurled subscription records into the street, and christened the pile of papers and account books with the contents of a chamber pot. The assailants, unconvincingly described by the local Republican paper as unknown strangers “from the country,” were never brought to justice.28
Another dramatic Pennsylvania suppression incident—this of the official variety—involved a supposedly “obnoxious” Philadelphia publication called the Christian Observer, whose Presbyterian affiliation did not inhibit its openly pro-secession, pro-slavery bias. “Such piety,” complained another paper, “is the worst act of infidelity to God and the cause of good government, and has been tolerated too long.”29 Authorities did not much worry about the Observer’s influence on Philadelphians, but the paper enjoyed substantial readership in nearby Maryland. A month after Bull Run, its feisty, sixty-six-year-old editor, Amasa Converse, published what he claimed was an authentic letter from an unnamed Virginian charging that Union forces recently on the march there had committed “gross, brutal, fiendish, demonic outrages” meant to “ravage the country, pillage the houses and burn them, outrage the women, and shoot down for amusement . . . even children.”30
That was all the provocation federal authorities needed. Just before noon on August 22, a U.S. marshal stormed the headquarters of the Christian Observer, confiscated type, and evicted staff. Converse appealed the suppression case directly to Lincoln, claiming he was but a poor old man who had always promoted “harmony, good will,” and “the preservation of the Union,” adding: “I cannot believe that you would justify the proceeding if you knew the facts.” But the editor’s protest—that “every American citizen wherever he might be, and however humble,” should be “more secure than in any other part of the Globe, in his rights of speech person and property”—fell on deaf ears. With no hope of reopening in Baltimore, Converse picked up and relocated to the Confederate capital of Richmond—so much for being a good Union man—where he reestablished his paper in friendlier surroundings. Lincoln never replied to the editor’s insistence that “freedom of the press I have always believed was one of the great bulwarks of our national safety.”31 On the contrary, by refusing to intervene on his behalf, Lincoln implicitly accepted the argument that national safety required that hostile journals like the Christian Observer be muzzled—especially if they enjoyed substantial circulation in the Border Slave States he was trying to keep within the Union.
Early targets of Union press crackdowns: Francis Key Howard (left), imprisoned at Fort McHenry; and Amasa Converse (right), driven from Philadelphia.
This ultimately proved to be administration policy even if the “disloyal” newspapers were published as far from the Mason-Dixon Line as New York. By late July, even the anti-Republican Herald was deploring what Bennett called “the licentiousness of expression” rampant in the city’s “secessionist papers.”32 In rare form, Bennett assailed the “pious and oily old hypocrite” who ran the New York Journal of Commerce, and lambasted the “weeping and wailing Jeremiah of the Daily News” for expressing “unspeakable horror” over “the warlike usurpations of Abraham Lincoln . . . which are all moonshine.” Never one to miss an opportunity to stick the knife into Henry Raymond, he added: “The little fidgety tricksters of the Times, although they no longer demand that ‘Honest Abe Lincoln’ shall be superseded in his office . . . can still discover nothing but rottenness and roguery at Washington.”33
August proved the cruelest month for New York’s anti-administration sheets. On the 16th, a federal grand jury for Manhattan’s Southern District filed a “presentment”—in legal terms, a formal notice of suspected illegality—with the U.S. Circuit Court. It inquired whether “certain newspapers” in the city, “ . . . in the frequent practice of encouraging the rebels now in arms against the Federal government” had overstepped freedom of the press and now deserved “the employment of force to overcome them.” The document identified five specific targets. All of them supported the Democratic Party, opposed Lincoln, and questioned the need to recruit volunteers to put down the rebellion: N. R. Stimson’s pro-Confederate New York Day-Book; James H. Van Evrie’s white supremacist Freeman’s Journal; the pro-Democratic Brooklyn Eagle; Gerard Hallock and William C. Prime’s anti-Republican Journal of Commerce; and the Daily News, the Democratic organ run by the pro-secession mayor’s own brother, the newly elected Democratic congressman Benjamin Wood.34 Announcement of the presentment proved remarkable enough to find a place in the annual Confederate States Almanac, a publication otherwise devoted to Southern battlefield victories.35
The grand jury foreman who signed his name to the document, a prominent Manhattan broker named Charles Gould, was animated by something other than his interpretation of the Constitution. A well-to-do Seward admirer, Gould had become a humanitarian activist on war matters, organizing Union rallies and campaigning for an improved ambulance corps to correct the “cruel and criminal neglect of maimed men” at Bull Run. In other words, Gould was a loyal Republican through and through—a political warrior for the Union. Administration censors could not have hoped for a better advocate.
As if to prove the point, Gould later signed a public letter “supporting the Government in prosecuting the war” and criticizing “unjust attacks of a portion of the press” that undermined those efforts.36 On at least one other petition, Gould’s name appeared alongside that of Henry Raymond. Although fellow New York elite George Templeton Strong disliked Gould—he thought him the “embodiment” of “corrupt, mercenary, self-serving, sham-patriotism”—Strong judged the grand jury action against newspaper “nuisances” wholly “consolatory.” To such loyalists, Northern pro-peace newspaper editors ranked no higher in mid-1861 than Southern traitors.37
Gould and his fellow grand jurors were not alone in these sentiments. Raymond, too, agreed, branding the five papers charged as “open and avowed advocates of secession,” and there was abundant evidence in print that he was correct. The virulently racist Van Evrie, author of an 1854 tract that judged “Negroes” an “inferior race” and slavery their “normal condition,” had recently insisted in the Freeman’s Journal that abolitionist “madmen” in Washington had no right to wage war without congressional approval, and that “no outward pressure of the bayonet can . . . ‘save the Union.’ ” The Day-Book had similarly railed against the “coercive policy” of “the rash and foolish Lincoln.” And Ben Wood’s Daily News had savaged “the dictatorship of ‘Honest Old Abe’ ” and his “Bloody Administration.” Recently, Wood had likened Lincoln to Henry VIII and warned that his policies would provoke “murder, massacres,” and “negro insurrection.” The City’s Common Council responded by voting to withhold municipal advertising from the Daily News, but the mayor—editor Wood’s brother—vetoed the bill.38
The Bull Run defeat took the debate beyond politics. “The Grand Jury are aware that free governments allow
liberty of speech and of the Press to their utmost limit,” Gould conceded in the August 16 presentment, “but there is necessarily a limit. If a person in a fortress or an army were to preach to the soldiers submission to the enemy, he would be treated as an offender. . . . If the utterance of such language . . . through the Press is not a crime, then there is great defect in our laws, or they were not made for such an emergency.” The panel urged the judge to guide them toward the logical next step: bringing formal charges against the Democratic editors.39
Official Washington did not wait for the court to rule (in fact, the presiding judge never formally responded to the presentment). The very same day, Lincoln announced stringent new rules banning all “commercial intercourse” with the Confederacy, an order widely interpreted to apply to distributors of all products, including news.40 Apparently concluding that the new ruling together with the Gould presentment were sufficient grounds for punitive action, the New York City postmaster declined to accept the five named dailies for further mail shipments to subscribers. Then on August 21, Postmaster General Blair made the order national by totally banning all five from the U.S. mails, declaring them “dangerous, from their disloyalty.”41
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 46