When the Daily News tried to subvert the order by shipping papers south by railroad, government agents boarded incoming trains and confiscated the bundles. “The Marshal could not have known of anything peculiarly obnoxious to censure in that particular issue of the paper,” commented the Times after two thousand copies were “hauled off in a furniture car” in Philadelphia. “ . . . We are brought to the conclusion, therefore, that the Daily News is condemned, by reason of its general political tone, and that the Administration is resolved to prohibit its circulation in certain districts.” Yet this disturbed Henry Raymond not at all. Proof that the News meant to give “aid and comfort to the enemy,” he reported, was “the fact that most of the packages seized here are directed to places in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri, where there are thousands of disaffected people, who need but an evidence of sympathy from the North to precipitate secession.” The only “surprise” about the seizure, contended the Times, was the fact “that the Administration has so long forborne to defend itself against the fanatical insurrectionary crusade of the secession papers published in loyal States.” Lincoln left no fingerprints on the News crackdown, but certainly knew about it as it was occurring: he received at least one telegram from Philadelphia alerting him to the ongoing confiscation. A few days later, Raymond rejoiced anew when a U.S. marshal in upstate New York seized another eleven hundred copies of the News circuitously bound for Louisville via Albany.42
News editor Benjamin Wood tried fighting back, ludicrously insisting he had “spoken of the President and his Cabinet . . . only in terms rigorously and studiously respectful” while “mobs have been instigated against us by a vitiated rival Press, and the mother tongue exhausted upon us in coarse abuse and in misrepresentations of our sympathies and our motives.” As for his Republican press colleagues, Wood charged, they had made themselves “notorious as mere panderers to popular passion and partisan interests. The loss to the American nation of its liberty and its honors—the horrors of civil war and our national degradation—are to be laid at their door.” The “sword has been drawn,” Wood charged, “against liberty of speech and liberty of the press and a venal, bigoted Court has dared to threaten, here in our midst, the most plainly outspoken and truthful journals of the metropolis with indictment.”43
Wood’s protests did nothing to calm the uprising. Later that month, the War Department further tightened the noose by issuing General Orders No. 67. Citing an 1806 law that made “giving intelligence to the enemy” a crime punishable by death, the new directive “absolutely prohibited” the “writing, printing or telegraphing” of intelligence “respecting the operations of the army, or military movements on land or water, or respecting the troops, camps, arsenals, intrenchments, or military affairs.” Violators faced imprisonment, court-martial, even execution. For good measure, the department issued the names of 154 additional newspapers it considered dangerously opposed to the war. Regarding the watch list as a badge of honor, the Day-Book, Daily News, and Journal of Commerce published all 154 titles—as did Bennett’s Herald. When the Journal of Commerce complained that the administration aspired to “extinguish the liberty of the Press throughout the United States quite as effectively as it has been done under any of the Governments of the Old World,” the Times bristled: “Society always reserves an eminent right to protect itself against such licentious use of privilege of printing as tends to destroy its framework, and introduce immorality, confusion and anarchy . . . we are at a loss to see what right of the Press should shield the Journal of Commerce from the penalty of a crime against society.”44
Rather than perceive a general threat to a free press, some pro-war newspapers saw instead an opportunity to quash contrary views and irksome competitors. It was that newly minted patriot, James Gordon Bennett, who made one of the strongest of all the arguments for widening the dragnet, noting that thus far, for the most part, antiwar journals were merely being identified, not shuttered, while at the same time Confederate authorities were cracking down on their own dissenting press voices far more harshly. “Under the dominion of Jeff. Davis, no voice and no newspaper is allowed to whisper a word in favor of the Union. Life, liberty, conscience, and everything there are under a reign of terror which can only be compared with that of the first French Revolution. In the loyal States, on the other hand . . . the supporters and emissaries of this rebellion are still allowed a very large margin of liberty or license injurious to the public cause. . . . We hope that our Northern secession newspaper managers will soon find it most adviseable [sic] to give up their bad cause and its reasonable affiliations in every shape and form. Let them steal off and look for relief under the government of Jeff. Davis, if they cannot sustain that of the United States in this crisis, for they who are not for our government are against it.”45
Bennett and Raymond were not alone in questioning the right of anti-Union newspapers to free-press protection. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin also hailed the New York shutdowns, and added that the suppression of the hometown Christian Observer had been “a wise and judicious step,” too. Urging that its local press be subjected to even deeper scrutiny, the Bulletin demanded to know: “Does every paper rejoice over the success of our arms and sorrow in our sorrow? Let the matter be looked into.” Future censorship must be unrelenting, the Bulletin insisted, for wily editors cleverly commingled “sentiments about patriotism, religion, humanity, bloodshed, mercy and the like, the whole together meaning no more or less than treason.” Over the next few days, the Bulletin rattled the cage. Unpatriotic newspapers were doing more to threaten “destruction of the Union than a dozen Bull Run defeats. . . . Is the United States Post Office to be desecrated to the treasonable use of assisting to demoralize its own people, weaken the hands of the Government, and render war so unpopular that all volunteering will cease?”
When the pro-disunion Philadelphia Evening Argus closed its doors before it, too, could be suppressed, the Bulletin gloated: “The list of killed or wounded among the Democratic newspapers is constantly swelling.” To critics who argued that “the freedom of the press is a palladium of liberty,” the Bulletin offered this striking response: “If they are encouraging those who are making war against it; if they are doing their utmost to trail our flag in the dust—it is perfectly idle to talk of the freedom of the press . . . a traitor has no rights.”46 Here the Bulletin hinted at something few other papers were willing to admit: Democratic affiliation alone had become almost tantamount to treason. On the other hand, Republican fealty, as local editor John Wein Forney had learned to his advantage, attracted official favor. In that vein, Jesper Harding, publisher of the pro-Lincoln Philadelphia Inquirer, earned appointment during the crackdowns as collector of internal revenue for the City of Brotherly Love, while Forney continued to urge additional patronage aspirants on the White House. To one disgusted Richmond journalist, “the servile press” in the “Yankee states” had created a truly unholy alliance with the “Lincoln Government to suppress freedom of speech throughout Yankeedom. In proportion to the atrocity of each violation of liberty are the shouts of these slaves of despotism.”47
Although he arrived at the conclusion that censorship was justified with more difficulty and less enthusiasm, Horace Greeley, too, eventually began warning against the “Dangers of Too Much Toleration.” Though he cautioned New Yorkers not to take the law into their own hands, and questioned whether a minor daily like the Daily News could truly stir a “mutiny,” Greeley ultimately conceded that it was “possible to be too tolerant in the fear of abridging freedom.” Suppression that in peacetime might constitute “persecution,” he declared, amounted in wartime to “precaution.” The Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press, but common sense required “all who would exercise it” to understand “that abuses of it will subject the offenders to punishment.”48 The comment prompted Bennett to suggest that Greeley’s post–Bull Run criticism of Winfield Scott should be treated as treason as well. “The only way to stop his mischief,” the
Herald sneered, “is to suppress the publication of the Tribune, which has done and is doing a thousand times more good to the enemy than the Daily News and all its tribe have ever done or could ever do.”49 Suppression had become a byword. Bennett’s mock threats against the Tribune never gained traction, but facing seizure and censure with no support from pro-administration editors, the New York Daily News had little choice but to shut down. Unable to reopen his paper for two years, editor Wood focused his attention on his congressional duties and directed his literary talents toward producing a turgid anti-suppression novel he called Fort Lafayette; or, Love and Secession.50
In fact as well as fiction, the Fort Lafayette of Wood’s title, a grim citadel squatting just off the Brooklyn coastline, became “home” to so many unindicted Confederate and pro-Confederate war prisoners—editors along with blockade runners—that it acquired a new nickname: the “American Bastille.” By mid-September, authorities added to its growing population of journalists the New York Daily News’s Philadelphia correspondent, William H. Winder (brother of a Confederate general), incarcerating him for “treasonable communication with the enemy” after he called on Pennsylvania citizens to resist joining the army.51 Winder later produced an exposé of his own: a book called Secrets of the American Bastille.52
After Thurlow Weed conducted a tranquil 1861 inspection tour of Fort Lafayette, the New York Times rosily maintained that the facility was “very comfortable . . . more like a hotel than anything else, where the proprietor is rather strict.”53 Missouri editor Reuben Durrett no doubt came closer to the truth when he complained to Secretary of State Seward that at Fort Lafayette he “was compelled to sleep upon a bag of straw half a foot shorter than myself without a pillow and blanket,” and that “the food given me there was raw pork, tough beef and bread . . . served upon a board table which the dirty cook swept with the same broom with which he swept the floor.”54
Despite the growing threat of exile to the Brooklyn purgatory, some press resistance continued. Unwilling to bow to pressure, James A. McMaster tried to continue publishing the New York Freeman’s Journal. On September 14, however, formally charged by Seward with “editing a disloyal newspaper,” McMaster was arrested (after a struggle) in his office and imprisoned at Fort Lafayette, where he remained for a month until agreeing to swear to the oath of allegiance.55 There he may have met, among other fellow journalists, such recent arrivals as Henry A. Reeves, editor of Long Island’s Green Port Watchman, ambiguously charged with publishing “secessionist teachings.” Detectives seized him in September as Reeves attempted to flee by boarding a train bound for upstate New York. That same day, a Burlington, New Jersey, newspaper contributor named James W. Wall joined the fort’s prison population, too, arrested after writing a letter criticizing Postmaster General Blair for his “high-handed, unconstitutional act in stopping certain newspapers from being circulated through the mails.”56 Though Wall was the son of a U.S. senator (a friend of Blair’s father, no less, during the days when the elder Blair served as publisher of the Washington Globe), kinship could not save him from serving thirteen days at the American Bastille without formal charge. It did not help his case that he had also contributed “obnoxious and dangerous” columns to the New York Daily News that allegedly “exulted over the defeat of the U.S. troops at the Battle of Bull Run.”57 In October, officials in upstate Malone, New York, arrested editor Francis D. Flanders (along with his attorney brother, Joseph) and shipped him to the fort as well, after his Franklin Gazette editorialized that “the Southern States had a right to secede.” Local Unionists complained that the twins were inhibiting efforts to recruit volunteers.58 Francis’s wife took over the paper after his arrest.
Before the turbulent 1861 summer ended, the New York Day-Book suspended its daily edition, prompting the Times to rejoice (taking a swipe at Bennett in the bargain): “No newspaper in the country, except possibly the Herald and News, did more to encourage the Southern people to plunge into the Maelstrom of secession, by . . . misrepresenting the sentiment of the North, than the Day Book.”59 Day-Book editor N. R. Stimson later resumed publishing, but only his weekly edition, finally owning up to its retrograde principles by renaming it The Caucasian. But the postal ban limiting its widespread circulation remained in effect.60
Facing similar ruin, the Brooklyn Eagle recanted and reformed its editorial policy. Playing the role of sacrificial lamb, managing editor Henry McCloskey resigned in September, falling on his sword in his farewell editorial: “Having so long exercised the unrestrained expression of opinion which American citizens have enjoyed, he may have transcended the limits within which the present national administration is disposed to confine political discussion.” After McCloskey’s departure, Irish-born Thomas Kinsella took over as editor, and in one of his first editorials, maintained: “The pretence that we desire to subjugate anybody but rebels, is now amply refuted.”61
Meanwhile, another grand jury in neighboring New Jersey filed a presentment of its own with the federal circuit court at Trenton. Following New York’s lead, it charged five allegedly disloyal Garden State papers—the Newark Evening Journal, Warren Journal, Hunterdon Democrat, New Brunswick Times, and Plainfield Gazette—with “thwarting” the government’s efforts at “self-preservation.” While the jurors stressed, “We cherish a due respect for freedom of the press,” they called on readers at the very least to “withhold patronage” of the papers.62 The editor of the largest of these, the antiwar Newark daily, managed to escape formal prosecution—but only until 1864, when authorities arrested him for treason. Nor was the widening purge limited to English language newspapers. Yet another grand jury, this one in Westchester County, New York, issued a presentment recommending the suppression of two local German papers, the National-Zeitung and the Staats-Zeitung. And back in Manhattan, angry residents circulated a petition denouncing the French language Courier des Etats-Unis. Not even Lincoln’s home state of Illinois was immune from suppression fever. There, a Republican daily in Peoria successfully agitated to ban the anti-administration German language Demokrat from the U.S. mails.63
Perhaps most chilling were the unauthorized, unofficial, and largely unpunished attacks on journals and journalists by civilians and frustrated soldiers in the North, even in New England. In Connecticut, such a fate awaited editors William Pomeroy and Nathan Morse of the Bridgeport Daily Advertiser and Weekly Farmer, who had argued in May that the South was “resisting a rebellion; one initiated by the Abolitionists and Republicans of the North!” Much criticism followed—from resident celebrities like showman P. T. Barnum and inventor Elias Howe, among others—but initially no censorship or violence. That was before Bull Run. On August 24, a month after the battle, a crowd of five hundred Unionists disrupted a pro-South “Peace Meeting” in suburban Stepney, then stormed back to downtown Bridgeport and broke into the offices of the Daily Advertiser. The marchers hurled printing presses and type into the street, and stomped them into scrap. Co-editor Morse escaped unharmed only by crawling to safety through a third-floor window. Not far away, expecting a similar uprising, armed men stationed themselves inside the offices of the Democratic Hartford Times, “determined to defend it while life lasted,” and vowing to sack the three local Republican papers if attacked.64
In early August, a New Hampshire regiment returning from Bull Run leveled the antiwar Democratic Standard in Concord, burning its property in the street. A similar invasion destroyed the Bangor Democrat in Maine after that paper likened the secessionists of 1861 to the revolutionary patriots of 1776 and urged readers to oppose “this unholy and unjustifiable war.” Editor Marcellus Emory was eating his dinner about half a mile away when he heard the first clanging of fire bells. “After finishing my meal,” he recounted, “I set out to return to my office. Soon after I met two gentlemen in a buggy, who informed me that my office had just been sacked, and all my property thrown into the street.” Hastening to the scene, Emory found a mob of two thousand men “engaged in heaping my tables,
stands, cases and other material” into a large fire burning in the middle of Market Square.” When he plunged into his ransacked headquarters in an attempt to secure his account books, he heard “demonic cries for my blood . . . ‘Hang him! Tar and feather him! Kill him.’ ” With four years’ toil “swept away” by “mob violence,” the editor mourned: “Thus hath the freedom of the press been stricken down here in Maine, not from any patriotic impulse, but through the wicked instigation of a band of politicians who would willingly subvert all law and order for the maintenance of a mere party dogma.”65
The most harrowing New England incident of all occurred on the evening of August 19, when rowdies in Haverhill, Massachusetts, stormed the home of Ambrose Kimball, editor of the Essex County Democrat. There they disarmed him, hauled him off to a local inn, and threatened him with bodily harm unless he recanted his antiwar editorials. Kimball refused, so his attackers stripped him to his undergarments, swathed him in tar and feathers, and dragged him through town tethered to a wooden rail—an old vigilante tradition, but now a brutally ironic desecration of the symbol of opportunity closely associated with the country’s rail-splitter president. After toting Kimball through the streets and back to his newspaper office, his assailants demanded that he give three cheers for the Union, and then deposited him at the hotel where the humiliation had begun. There, a defeated Kimball finally fell to his knees, held up a trembling hand, and meekly declared: “I am sorry that I have published what I have, and I promise that I will never again write or publish articles against the North, and in favor of secession, so help me God.” Indifferent local authorities took months to bring charges against six of the ruffians involved in the attack, and when they finally did so, the town of Haverhill rallied to their defense. No one was ever punished. Kimball abandoned his paper and emigrated to Iowa.66
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 47