Chapter 20
Democrats Disappear
The most remarkable thing about the crescendo of criticism of Lincoln in the last months of 1861 was that so little of it came from the Democratic press. With so much fault to be found with the administration’s prosecution of what many Democrats called “the present unholy war,” the silence of the anti-Lincoln editors was eerie.
The reason was fear. The Democratic press had gone to earth, driven underground by a season of violent repression. Lincoln—fearful for the fragility of what was still called “the democratic experiment,” breathing the atmosphere of suspicion that was thick across the whole of the North, and still suffering the special spike of terror from being surrounded in Washington the previous spring—had reacted in the summer and fall by presiding over a trampling of civil liberties.
In the beginning, even during the Uprising of the North after Lincoln’s call for troops, the Democratic editors had attacked Lincoln out of sheer force of habit. Some drew him in simple strokes as a bloodthirsty tyrant. The New York Evening Day Book declared, “Mr. Lincoln is evidently a believer in the savageries of old Europe, and thinks that the only way to ‘save the Union’ is to resort to the bayonet, just as Louis Napoleon ‘saves’ society in France!” The Bedford (Pa.) Gazette was another: “The so-called ‘peace policy’ of the Lincoln Administration,” it proclaimed, “has all at once been turned into one of blood and horror. … Mr. Lincoln and his partisans may learn to pray that the curse placed upon their political sins may be removed.” Maine’s Bangor Democrat protested that Lincoln “has undertaken to convert [the] Government into an instrument of tyranny,” and compared him to the hated Tories of 1776. “Abraham Lincoln,” it said, “a Tory from his birth, is putting forth all the powers of Government to crush out the spirit of American liberty. Surrounded by the gleaming swords and glistening bayonets at Washington, he sends forth fleets and armies to overawe and subdue that gallant little State [South Carolina] which was the first to raise its voice against British oppression.”
The Democratic press, however, was soon quieted by the example of the New York Herald, the lion of the pro-slavery Democratic journals in the North. On April 12, the Herald had made its sympathies visible by blazoning the new Confederate flag over its coverage of the Sumter battle. Three days later, on the afternoon of Lincoln’s call for troops, an angry mob gathered outside the Herald office, threatening to destroy the building and everyone inside unless it made a patriotic show. Panicked Herald employees sent an office boy running to buy a Union flag, and only after editor James Gordon Bennett himself unfurled it from an upper-story window and bowed repeatedly to the crowd below did the mob disperse. Bennett had made his fortune with a talent for telling which way the wind was blowing, and the experience instantaneously converted him. He was now a devoted defender of the Union, proclaiming the next day, “there will now be but one party, one question, one issue, one purpose in the Northern States—that of sustaining the government.”
In the spread-eagled fervor of these early days of the war, Northern mobs imposed their own ironclad censorship not only on the press but on free speech. One private citizen wrote that in New York it was not safe “for a man to express … doubt of the duty of northern men to march in obedience to Lincoln’s call,” and another, after twice being threatened for criticizing Lincoln, resolved to be more “prudent.”
The official crackdown followed within a month of Sumter on the evening of May 13, 1861, when Major General Benjamin Butler marched back into Baltimore with the same thousand men of the Sixth Massachusetts who had been stoned and shot at on their way through town three weeks earlier, and declared martial law. In the next few days, the first civilian prisoners—including John Merryman—were dragged off without charges to Fort McHenry. The treachery of Baltimore remained a popular theme in the Republican press in the coming weeks, and in June, Worthington G. Snethen, a columnist for the New York Tribune who had fed his readers a steady diet of “secessionist Baltimore” stories and was convinced of further plots there, arranged a private meeting with Secretary of War Simon Cameron. A few days later, Cameron gave a secret order to “seize at once and securely hold the four members of the Baltimore police board … together with their chief of police,” and at midnight on June 27, one thousand blue-coated soldiers marched out of Fort McHenry and, silent except for the crunch of their boots on the paving stones, marched through the darkened streets of Baltimore, picking up any policemen along the way who might spread word of their approach. When they reached police chief George Kane’s house at three in the morning, they rousted Kane out of bed, marched him back to the fort, and threw him in a cell with Merryman. Four days later the other members of the Baltimore police board joined him in prison, arrested on suspicion of disloyalty.
The incident was reported closely, with healthy outrage, by the Democratic press. The August 1, 1861, issue of the Democratic Brooklyn Eagle shone a harsh light on the removal of the “State Prisoners” from Fort McHenry to Fort Hamilton in New York—eleven men “against whom no charges have been preferred.” This item was followed by a righteous attack on Lincoln reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
The Old Constitution has been superseded by a new one, and … we are now under the new Republican Constitution. The Old Constitution was a noble, liberty protecting instrument—a shield to the citizen against arbitrary and unwarrantable searches and seizures.
It contains no provision authorizing the President to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus;
No provision authorizing the President to proclaim martial law when and where he pleases;
No provision empowering the President to increase the standing army at his pleasure;
No provision to authorize the President to violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures;
No authority to arrest the citizen for circulation petitions relating to the peace and welfare of the country;
No license to military officers to stop the publication of Newspapers at their will and pleasure.
All that was reserved for the new Republican Constitution, under which the President is acting. It is under this new Constitution the propositions are made in Congress by Republicans. … This fact will be a sufficient explanation in the future for a great many other curious and startling things it may see performed by Republican officials.
The fury over the presidential excesses of the spring and early summer deepened in the discouragement after the defeat at Bull Run, which inspired new blasts at Lincoln from Democratic journals demanding peace and an end to the “effusion of blood.” By the middle of August 1861, a peace movement was in full flower, and peace meetings were held all over the North. They were thronged by Democrats stirred by sympathy for their Southern brothers, resentment of Lincoln and his party for starting the war, and belief that the South could be won back by appeal to the time-honored principles of the party of Jefferson and Jackson, with “the Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.”
These anti-war Democrats, however, felt keenly the flimsiness of their civil rights in such days of distrust. A meeting of the Association of the Democratic Editors of the State of New York on June 27 was a grim war council. The editors published a warning against any “attempt to muzzle the Democratic press by mobs and terrorism, to prevent citizens from expressing their honest opinions.”
The monster the Democratic editors feared was soon shocked into life by the passage of the Confiscation Act on August 6. It stated that any person supporting the rebellion was liable to the seizure of any property used for that aim. Zealots could now contend that any anti-Lincoln newspaper in the North was a tool of the rebellion, and its type, press, office, and paper could therefore be seized or destroyed. Within days of the passage of the Confiscation Act, the anti-Lincoln New York Daily News published a list of 154 papers opposed to this unholy war.” It was a defiant roll call of the ranks of “peace” papers in anticipation of the coming storm against them.
That storm broke immediately, spearheaded by bad-tempered ninety-day Union soldiers just then returning home from service after Bull Run. On August 8 a mob of newly-returned soldiers demolished the office of the anti-war Democratic Standard of Concord, New Hampshire, and threw the type, desks, and papers out the window and onto the sidewalk, where they set the whole pile on fire. On August 12, a mob in Bangor, Maine, pried open the offices of the Bangor Democrat with a crowbar, rushed in, threw the contents out the window, and made a bonfire of them in the town square. A week later, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a crowd of angry ex-soldiers and their friends seized the editor of the Essex County Democrat, tarred and feathered him, and rode him out of town on a rail. In Easton, Pennsylvania, a rabble gutted the offices of the anti-war Sentinel. In West Chester, Pennsylvania, a mob destroyed the Jeffersonian’s subscription lists, threw the printing type out the window, and damaged the press. In the next week, the Stark County, Ohio, Democrat was burned, and the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Farmer was smashed. By the end of August, the anti-war movement was in retreat, and many of the planned Peace meetings were being cancelled. The fury against the anti-war presses threatened to spread from the small towns to the cities. In New York City, police were detailed to guard the entrances to the Daily News.
There, however, the rage against the anti-war Democratic papers conjured no mobs. Instead, it percolated through the courts. On August 16, a New York grand jury asked formally whether “certain newspapers”—specifically the New York Daily News, Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Freeman’s Journal, and the Brooklyn Eagle—could be charged with a crime for their opposition to the war. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair twisted the grand jury’s question into an indictment, and on August 22 issued an order to bar the Five newspapers from the mails. In the days when the better part of these big-city newspapers’ circulation was distributed by the mails to readers across the country, Blair’s order was a death sentence.
On August 28, the New York Herald led with the headline “AN ACCOUNTING,” and listed the names of eighteen casualties in the Democratic press in the previous month: seven “Northern papers destroyed by mob,” two “Northern secession papers suppressed by civil authority,” two more “Northern secession papers died,” four “Northern secession papers denied transportation in the mails,” and three “Secession papers changed to Union.” A Cincinnati editor complained privately to Simon Cameron, “All who do not shout hosannas to Abe Lincoln and endorse his unconstitutional and unholy war upon the people of the South are denounced as tories. … The people behind Lincoln know perfectly well that it is not and never has been unlawful to discuss or to denounce the measures of the government in times of peace or war.”
But the casualty list grew. On August 29, the New York Day Book closed. On August 31, the rural Pennsylvania Carbon Democrat was destroyed. On September 7, a Westchester, New York, grand jury named the local Yonkers Herald, the Highland Democrat, the Eastern State Journal, and the German language Staats Zeitung and National Zeitung as “disseminators of doctrines which, in the existing state of things, tend to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the Government.” Postmaster General Blair barred the Baltimore Exchange from the mails on September 10. Its editor, F. Key Howard, struck back in print the next day, crying, “The course which a despotic and foresworn administration has pursued towards us will not in the slightest degree influence our conduct. … As we have violated no law we can afford to despise Mr. Lincoln’s warnings or menaces.” By the time he wrote this, however, Howard was nearly alone in defying the Lincoln administration. By September, most Democratic editors feared for their livelihood, if they didn’t fear for their lives.
Out of that fear, criticism of Lincoln’s administration went below ground in the States. The Toronto Globe commented on the crackdown, “This is not only an exceedingly foolish way of proceeding—it not only insures its own punishment by encouraging a race of journalists who will never speak the truth except when likely to please, but it does more than almost anything else to lower the American people in the estimation of all civilized nations.” Southern newspapers trumpeted the suppression of the Northern Democratic press as new evidence of Lincoln’s “reign of terror,” reporting that “journals are suppressed for denouncing the actions of the Government,” and that truthful Northern papers “are gutted and destroyed by Northern mobs, or suppressed by Northern officials, and their editors arrested or imprisoned without the privilege of a hearing or the hope of redress.” Here was proof that “no Neapolitan despotism or Spanish Inquisition ever exceeded in the measure of its cruelty, the present Dictatorship at Washington.”
The foreign press could throw brickbats from a safe distance; but, as the serpent of suspicion coiled around the North, few there dared to oppose the mob violence that Lincoln silently endorsed, and few dared to question Lincoln’s grim doctrine that, since without the government there could be no freedoms, citizens now must give up their freedom to oppose the government.
During the gagging of the Democratic press and the earlier political arrests, Lincoln himself had remained completely in shadow. The active part was always taken by mobs, by local officials, or by Cabinet members. Lincoln was obscured, too, by the chaos of the crackdown, with orders flying in all directions from Federal marshals, district attorneys, city police, even private citizens. In September, however, there was a fresh, very ugly, very public slew of political arrests in Maryland, and in that episode Lincoln was briefly glimpsed.
As the summer of 1861 had waned, fears for the safety of Washington had waxed. General McClellan, newly installed, was convinced that waves of rebels would overwhelm Washington at any moment. In this atmosphere of dread, a sensational document surfaced and made the rounds of high offices in early September—a copy of what was purported to be Jeff Davis’ personal plan to “cross two columns over the Potomac” and invade Maryland. According to this document, the signal for the attack would be the passage of an ordinance of secession by the Maryland legislature, scheduled to convene on September 17. Secretary Seward’s son Frederick described a carriage ride he took about this time with his father, Lincoln, and McClellan. The official purpose of the ride was to inspect the military camps in Georgetown, but young Seward reported that the party’s carriage rattled ten miles past Georgetown to General Banks’ headquarters in Rockville. There the President and his small party withdrew to an isolated grove of trees, where they made plans to intercept the Maryland lawmakers’ approach to the legislative session on the 17th and have secessionist members “quietly turned back toward their homes.” Since each legislator’s views were already well known, Seward remembered Lincoln remarking that there would be little difficulty “separating the sheep from the goats.”
Lincoln then faded from view, and in the following days, the plan to “quietly turn back” the secessionist legislators grew harsher. On September 11, Secretary of War Cameron sent two orders. One was to General Banks to arrest any or all of the members of the Maryland legislature to prevent an act of secession. The second was to General Dix in Baltimore to arrest conspicuous secessionists there.
At midnight the next night, police fanned out across Baltimore and dragged fifteen men from their beds and locked them up in Fort McHenry, including Mayor Brown, Congressman Henry May, ten members of the Maryland legislature, and three newspaper editors, including the defiant F. Key Howard. Less than a week later, when the legislature convened in Frederick, Maryland, twenty-one more state legislators, secretaries, clerks, and printers were rounded up and thrown in jail.
The teeming prisoners were all Democrats. They were all held without charges in Federal prisons. If ever there were a time for protest by the press, this was it. Instead, Democratic editors applauded politely in editorials like this one from the Chicago Times:
The action of the government in the matter of the arrests in Maryland is right, and that it has been taken will reanimate the courage of loyal citizens everywhere. It indicates that the day of trifling is past, and that rebels wherever found, and whatever their position, are to be treated as rebels. No doubt the Legislature of Maryland were bent on mischief. … The action of the government has nipped the scheme in the bud, and proclaimed to all other Maryland rebels what sort of a rod is in pickle for them. The government should continue to go forward after this same fashion. It is the only right thing to do wherever the Federal power is omnipotent.
What was at work was something more than a survival instinct on the part of the Democratic editors. They had heard rumors of Lincoln’s distaste for the Confiscation Act on August 6, and they had read with glee Lincoln’s repudiation of Frémont’s emancipation proclamation in Missouri. They were seduced by the illusion that Lincoln might be one of them after all. There was, for a time, the strange sound of wooing from the Democratic press. On November 22, the Chicago Times dropped to a knee and blurted out a proposal:
Mr. Lincoln will, before the lapse of much more time, have to choose between political parties, and depend upon the party which he shall choose for the support of his administration. And the parties between which he will have to choose are the democratic and abolition parties. … If Mr. Lincoln has not already chosen, he will choose the democratic party. … He may rely on its support, and it is a reliance that has never failed any President.
Lincoln would disappoint them, of course. His first duty had been to uphold the Constitution, and to that end he had courted the support of Northern conservatives—the Democrats, the Border State men, and the conservative Republicans. But the conservatives could only prevail, and the old institutions could only remain intact, if the war were short.
When victory receded over the coming months, Lincoln would cast them off and embrace a hard, relentless war. Then the Democratic editors would see Lincoln in a harsh, new light, and they would be twice as loud in denouncing political arrests, which by the end of the war would total at least 14,400. (Translated into the population of the present day, the number of arrests would be nearly 150,000 citizens.) The Democrats would anoint themselves the “habeas corpus party,” and in the elections of 1862 and 1864 the outcry over the loss of civil liberties would harden into one of their bitterest and most persistent indictments of Lincoln’s term.