[Heyworth]

You might mention that the New York World had, that day, published a fraudulent story claiming that the President had just called for 400,000 more troops, a story that was likely to cause renewed riots in New York like those that had devastated the city 10 months earlier. Within 48 hours, the reporter who had concocted the phony story (with supporting documentation on stolen letterhead paper) had confessed. The newspaper editors were immediately released.

[PeaRidge]

Why deal in irrelevancies? The fact remains that Lincoln had been issuing orders of this sort for quite a while.

The New York City newspapers dominated much of the nation’s news, and became frequent targets of Lincoln's misuse of his office powers. Although such papers as the 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. Thus, this action put every one of the papers out of circulation.