William Marvel: Chicanery 2020

During November and early December, I logged over 6,000 miles collecting material on Democratic newspaper editors and politicians of the 1860s who opposed Abe Lincoln’s war policies. Some of them opposed the war itself. That could be dangerous amid such polarization, for “loyal” mobs from New England to the prairie periodically enforced their factional ideology with violence, roughing up antiwar editors and destroying their print shops. Federal troops also seized or ransacked newspaper offices when editorial criticism grew too strident — or too persuasive. The postmaster general went so far as to ban some Democratic journals from the mail when they questioned the aims or wisdom of the war too effectively.

Betraying their own profession, pro-administration editors welcomed forcible suppression of their competitors, and even encouraged mob violence against Lincoln’s critics. When a swarm of summer soldiers demolished the Democratic Standard office in Concord and assaulted the staff, Manchester’s Daily American published a list of other dissident newspapers, hinting that they should also be put out of business.