The Lincoln Administration and Freedom of the Press in Civil War Maryland

Abstract

Across all of American history, the accumulation of state power during times of war and national emergency has been the most destructive threat to freedom of the press. Clashes between the government and the press have occurred as early as the Quasi-War with France and recently as the War on Terror. Freedom of the press came under sustained assault during World War I and again during the Vietnam War. But perhaps the most outrageous violations of freedom of the press came during the Civil War. Although suppression of freedom of the press by the Lincoln Administration took place across a broad swath of the Union, the battle between government and press was particularly acute in border states because of their slave populations and secessionist sentiments. In particular, Maryland presented a complex challenge to President Lincoln during the Civil War. The people of the slaveholding state were sympathetic to the South, but its economy was becoming increasingly integrated with the industrial North. Most importantly, Maryland's strategic location placed it on three sides of Washington, D.C.; and its secession would leave the national capital completely surrounded by the Confederacy. Deciding that the loss of the capital would be intolerable to the war effort, the Lincoln administration suspended the writ of habeas corpus as part of a larger, deliberate campaign to keep Maryland in the Union. The suspension was the foundation upon which the administration suppressed freedom of the press in Maryland. This strategy involved imprisonment without trial of journalists and publishers, seizing their property, deportation beyond the Federal lines, shuttering of their newspapers, and barring their publications from using the mails. These events represented among the most egregious violations of civil liberties in American history.