When Lincoln made free speech illegal

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 4, 2004]

In "The American Gulag," on the Lew Rockwell site, Thomas DiLorenzo takes to task the notion promoted recently by some writers that, if "sainted" Abraham Lincoln suspended constitutional rights during the Civil War, then this practice should be acceptable. To many, the very fact that such precedent was set by "Father Abraham" himself justifies governmental acts of tyranny -- even Franklin Roosevelt's incarceration of Japanese-American citizens. DiLorenzo writes:

The tens of thousands of Northern citizens who were imprisoned without due process by the Lincoln administration (as many as 38,000 by one estimate in the Columbia Law Journal) were overwhelmingly plain citizens from all walks of life who simply expressed doubt over the administration's unconstitutional and despotic policies, including the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers and the mass arrest of political dissenters by the military. Tens of thousands of Northern political prisoners spent months in a series of gulags, such as Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, which came to be known as "the American Bastille."

The Lincoln administration cast a very wide net indeed in rounding up any and all political opponents in the Northern states. Anyone overheard questioning virtually anything the administration had done, let alone publishing critical articles or editorials in newspapers, could land in prison without any due process. In fact, Lincoln himself even argued that those who simply remained silent and did not actively support his administration should also be subject to imprisonment.

Here is a Lincoln reflection on the subject, from the Collected Works of Lincoln:

The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy; much more if he talks ambiguously – talks for his country with "buts" and "ifs" and "ands."

DiLorenzo continues:

Thus, in Lincoln's opinion anyone who did not openly and publicly support his administration and its policies was a traitor, susceptible to being prosecuted as such, and hanged if found guilty. What could possibly be more tyrannical than punishing silence as a crime with a death sentence? Could Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or Alexander Hamilton have ever even entertained such thoughts? Madison (the "father of the Constitution") was president during the War of 1812, which coincided with a very serious New England secession movement led by Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering. It culminated with the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, yet Madison never implemented any such repression, nor is there evidence that he even considered it.

During Lincoln's administration, most of the opposition press was shut down, as editors and publishers were imprisoned. DiLorenzo elaborates:

As Dean Sprague writes in Freedom Under Lincoln: "When an editor of a newspaper wished to attack a Peace man [i.e., a critic of the Lincoln administration] he would suggest him as a candidate for Fort Lafayette. When a Union man heard a Peace speech, he knew it was not necessary to interfere. He would simply pass by with the remark that the speaker had better watch out or he would end up in Fort Lafayette." That, presumably, would intimidate the peace advocate sufficiently to shut him up for good.

Free speech was illegal for the duration of the Lincoln administration. That's how modern historians and propagandists get away with lying to the public about the alleged "unity" of Northern opinion during the war. Of course there was relative "unity"; dissenting opinions were violently censored and the purveyors of those opinions imprisoned.

Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner," would hardly have envisioned that one day his grandson, Francis Key Howard, would be imprisoned for over a year, for questioning the suppression of habeas corpus. DiLorenzo writes that the grandson was "imprisoned near the very spot" where his grandfather composed the nation's national anthem, and elucidates further:

The political prisoners in Fort Lafayette ranged from mayors, state legislators, ex-governors, business owners and newspaper editors, to "common traders and impoverished farmers." These men were naturally bitter about their circumstances and were outspoken about it. Consequently, writes Sprague, "Fort Lafayette was the only place in the country where a man could speak freely."

DiLorenzo observes that through the destruction of his key opponents and congressional critics, Lincoln effectively destroyed the system of states rights, making it less possible for states to fend off "unconstitutional federal usurpations of power." He concludes:

Francis Biddle [Attorney General under Franklin Roosevelt], once remarked that the Constitution "has not greatly bothered any wartime president." This of course is untrue with regard to Lincoln's predecessors, none of whom would ever have dreamed of declaring themselves to be uncompromising dictators no matter what dangers the nation faced.

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