Lincoln arrested newspaper editors and owners. In some cases, he was able to stop them without arresting them.
In 1839, Alexis de Tocqueville had written:
"Among the twelve million people living in the United States, there is not one single man who has dared to suggest restricting the freedom of the press."
Just twenty-five years later, Lincoln, true to his Federalist and Hamiltonian roots, felt no compunction whatever about jailing during the Civil War a total of thirteen thousand Northern civilians who had expressed views critical of Lincoln or his war.
According to historian Arthur Ekirch, this was often done "without any sort of trial or after only cursory hearings before a military tribunal."
The New York City newspapers had always dominated much of the nation’s news.
Although such papers as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune supported the war, others, such as the Journal of Commerce and the New York Daily News did not. These two papers were the heart of the opposition press in the North, because their articles were reprinted in many other papers that were also critical of Lincoln’s war policies.
In May 1861 the Journal of Commerce had published a list of more than a hundred Northern newspapers that had editorialized against going to war. The Lincoln administration responded by ordering the Postmaster General to deny these papers mail delivery.
At that time, nearly all newspaper deliveries were made by mail, so this action put every one of the papers out of circulation.
Some of them resumed publication after promising not to criticize the Lincoln government. For example, the founder of the Journal of Commerce, Gerard Hallock, ”brought the wrath of government down on his head” with his “peace editorials”--appeals not to treason or even secession, but to peace. Hallock had spent thirty years of his life building the paper to its position as one of the most prominent in America, and rather than see it become extinct, he obeyed the government’s demand that he sell his ownership in the paper and withdraw from its management. With the paper’s peace editorials censored, the paper was permitted to use the mails once again.
The same technique--denying the use of the mails--was used by the Lincoln administration against the New Your Daily News, The Daybook, Brooklyn Eagle, Freeman’s Journal, and several other smaller New York newspapers.
The editor of the Daily News was Ben Wood, the brother of New York City Mayor Fernando Wood, who had denounced Lincoln as an “unscrupulous Chief magistrate” whose recent message to Congress was “an ocean of falsehood and deceit.” After being denied the use of the mails, Wood hired private express couriers and delivery boys to deliver his papers. The administration responded by ordering Federal marshals to confiscate the paper in cites throughout the Northern states. The paper then went into bankruptcy.
LOL. You guys are a joke and it is so fitting that you quote Fernando Wood on ethics --- he's the guy who taught Boss Tweed everything he knew about corruption.
Wood was a total demagogue who made a career out of appealing to the worst in people. He organized the so-called "Draft Riots", in reality race riots, by using his brothers newspaper to inflame the poor immigrants with stories about Lincoln shipping millions of free blacks to New York to take their jobs. Who Woods was really serving was not the slum dwellers of New York. His masters were the banking and shipping interests who were the major creditors of the big time southern plantation owners. They stood to lose lots of money if the Confederacy and slavery went down. Organizing riots was nothing new to him however. In 1857 when the State of New York finally stepped in to shut down Wood's totally corrupt and extremely brutal "Municipal" police goon squad, he organized riots that lasted for days and left many dead. He set the standard in NYC that bigots and charlatans like Al Sharpton follow to this day.
Woods was also a vicious racist --- probably worse that any Confederate leader. In 1864, he managed to get himself elected to Congress again and during the debates in January of 1865 on the 13th Amendment, he had this to say.
We may amend the Constitution; we may by superior military force overrun and conquer the South; we may lay waste their lands and destroy their property; we may free their slaves. But there is one thing we cannot do: we cannot violate with impunity or alter the laws of God. The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and sir, by no legislation, by no partisan success, by no revolution, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction. You may make the black man free, but when you have done that, what have you done?
It is entirely and fitting that you neo-Confederates use Woods as a source. Even though he is surely burning in hell now, he is a kindred spirit.