Authors look at Lincoln's efforts to control media (Did Lincoln order trashing of newspaper of

In the opening months of the Civil War, a pro-Southern newspaper editor in the Philadelphia suburb of West Chester was forced to cease publication when an angry mob destroyed his equipment and federal marshals later ordered him to shut down.

Did President Abraham Lincoln ultimately issue the directive to stop the newspaper from operating?

Neil Dahlstrom, an East Moline native, and Jeffrey Manber examine the question in their new book, “Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press” (Sourcebooks Inc., 356 pages).

The book focuses on a little-known figure of the Civil War, John Hodgson, who was the editor of the Jeffersonian in West Chester, Pa. Like some other editors of Northern newspapers, he believed that the South had every right to secede from the Union. He ultimately took the government to court in his fight to express his views that states’ rights were paramount to national government.

The attack on Hodgson’s newspaper came during a wave of violence that took place in the summer of 1861 when a number of Northern newspapers sympathetic to the Southern cause were attacked and vandalized by pro-Union thugs.

The book is Dahlstrom’s second historical non-fiction work published in less than a year. He and his brother, Jeremy Dahlstrom, are the authors of “The John Deere Story: A Biography of Plowmakers John and Charles Deere,” which was released last April by Northern Illinois University Press.

Like “The John Deere Story,” his latest book is the result of extensive research. He and Manber combed archives and libraries in the United States and England in recounting the events surrounding the “Summer of Rage” in 1861 when the Republicans around Lincoln systematically went after editors and writers of antiwar newspapers.

Some were tarred and feathered, they write, while some were thrown into federal prisons and held without trial for months at a time. Others were forced to change their opinions and take pro-Union stands.

Dahlstrom, 29, graduated from United Township High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Monmouth College and a master’s degree in historical administration from Eastern Illinois University. A resident of Moline, he is the reference archivist for Deere & Co.

Manber has written extensively on America’ s role in shaping technology and our relationships with Russia. He was Dahlstrom’s boss when they worked at the Space Business Archives, Alexandria, Va.

Manber became interested in Lincoln’s relationship with the press after listening to a radio report on the subject, his co-author said. After coming across an article on Hodgson written in the 1960s, he began researching Hodgson’s life, eventually inviting Dahlstrom to join him on a book project.

“Lincoln was a man who understood the press and continually manipulated its chief editors to support his policies. He was the politician who helped create the modern American journalist, which continues to hold incredible influence over public opinion,” they write.

In an interview, Dahlstrom said he gained much respect for Lincoln during the course of his research. The disintegration of the Union was uncharted territory for an American president, he said, and, while Lincoln had advisors, the ultimate decisions rested on his shoulders alone.

“What impressed me most about Lincoln as president was that he really represented the people. He always did what was for the best of the people, who were near and dear to him,” he said.

Rights are not granted from the Federal Government to the states. The Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation which preceeded it) clearly established that the states were granting rights and powers to the federal Government, NOT the other way around. Furthermore, the Constitution was amended (Amendment X) in such a way to EXCLUDE the Federal government from exercising ANY powers which were NOT granted to it by the States.

The Constitution refers to powers delegated to the United States by the Constitution, not the states. And one of those powers delegated to the United States was the power to admit states or deny them admission. Once allowed to join, the Constitution delegated to the United States the power to approve or disapprove any change in the status of the state. States cannot combine or split without Congressional approval. They cannot change their borders by a fraction of an inch with Congress' say-so. Implicit in this surely is the power to approve leaving the Union altogether.

I beg you, please spend some time studying contemporary writing from the 18th century. Start with the Federalist Papers. Try to understand the framework which our founders attempted to leave to us. It'll help make sense of some of our earlier history, if you were to do so.

I've read the Federalist papers. I've read the debates on the Constitutional convention. And I've read a lot of Madison's writings, and who better than he would know what the founders intended? And where you and your buddies try and confuse the issue is by claiming the right to secede and the right to unilaterally secede are the same thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Secession with the approval of the other states may be a right allowed the states. Unilateral secession is not. Nobody agreed with that. Not Madison, not Hamilton, nobody.

Then how do you explain that the State of New Hampshire had an established Anglican Church, supported by tax dollars, until sometime after 1810 - More than 20 years after the Federal Government was created, well past the passage of the First Amendment?

I'm not aware of the matter ever being brought before the Supreme Court.

I think, if you were to look at law commentaries of the day, you'd find that the laws made under the Constitution were far more limited in scope than your position would suggest they were.

Reading the decisions of the Marshall Supreme Court would indicate otherwise.

The Constitution allows the states to exercise a great deal of sovereignty over matters within their borders. Outside those borders, however, the Constitution makes it clear that there are limits on what they can do. Rather than asking which is sovereign, one might ask which is supreme. And the Constitution makes it clear that it is.

I'm terribly sorry, Sir, but under the original design of our government, the Constitution is supreme only in areas under which it has jurisdiction. The Congress was not intended to legislate in areas to which it had not been granted power to do so by the States, who were the sovereigns. I worded my questions specifically the way I did for a reason: Under our present condition, the federal government is our Sovereign, to which we all owe Allegiance. This is in diametric opposition to the way in which this nation was designed to operate, and in which this nation operated up until the Civil War.

To deny the sovereignty of the States is to deny that the American form of government exists at all! Is that seriously what you are proposing?

See Federalist no 33, specifically:

But it is said that the laws of the Union are to be the SUPREME LAW of the land. But what inference can be drawn from this, or what would they amount to, if they were not to be supreme? It is evident they would amount to nothing. A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe. This results from every political association. If individuals enter into a state of society, the laws of that society must be the supreme regulator of their conduct. If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies, and the individuals of whom they are composed. It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a goverment, which is only another word for POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union, like the one we have just before considered, only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it EXPRESSLY confines this supremacy to laws made PURSUANT TO THE CONSTITUTION; which I mention merely as an instance of caution in the convention; since that limitation would have been to be understood, though it had not been expressed.

From Abe Lincoln own mouth in 1848:

"Any people any where, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they inhabit."

It can be argued that the legal basis for secession could be found it the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment says that any power not delegated to the federal government by the states, and not prohibited to the states by the Constitution, remained a right of the states or the people. The Constitution doesn't say anything specific on secession and the states never delegated to the federal government any power to suppress secession. So secession remained a reserved right of the states. This is partly why President Buchanan all the first 7 states to leave in peace.

Some may recall that Virginia, New York and Rhode Island included a clause in their ratifications of the Constitution that permitted them to withdraw from the Union if the new government should become oppressive in their eyes. It was for this reason that they joined the Union. Virginia citied this when it seceded in 1861. Also since the Constitution is based on the concept of co-equally and no state can have more rights than another, the right of secession citied by these 3 states must extend equally to all states.

The list of people who supported the principle that the American states had the legal right to secede is impressive. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Lloyd Garrison, William Rawle, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Also that the New England states threated secession several times in the early 1800's. The legitimacy of secession had been taked for granted in all parts of the country for years by the time of the "Civil War."

Now you can have your a** back.

Don't start calling me names because you are angry that your grandpappy's side lost the war. I have relatives who fought on both sides of the conflict, but unlike you I've gotten over things that happened 150 years ago. If you want to tell me that The Constitution did not strenghthen the weak government that existed under the Articles of Confederation,then I will in turn tell you that you nothing about the subject. I realize that their were people in the debate who wantred power to reside in the states. The fact is the constitution was ratified to strengthen a weak federal government, otherwise they would have kept the AOC if they wanted states to be stronger than the federal government. The Federal Government could not even raise an Army under the AOC.

This issue, and the argument you and other posters raised that the founders would not have defined cecession as an illegal act is adressed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #15:

"It is a singular instance of the capriciousness of the human mind, that after all the admonitions we have had from experience on this head, there should still be found men who object to the new Constitution, for deviating from a principle which has been found the bane of the old, and which is in itself evidently incompatible with the idea of GOVERNMENT; a principle, in short, which, if it is to be executed at all, must substitute the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword to the mild influence of the magistracy."

"There is nothing absurd or impracticable in the idea of a league or alliance between independent nations for certain defined purposes precisely stated in a treaty regulating all the details of time, place, circumstance, and quantity; leaving nothing to future discretion; and depending for its execution on the good faith of the parties. Compacts of this kind exist among all civilized nations, subject to the usual vicissitudes of peace and war, of observance and non-observance, as the interests or passions of the contracting powers dictate. In the early part of the present century there was an epidemical rage in Europe for this species of compacts, from which the politicians of the times fondly hoped for benefits which were never realized. With a view to establishing the equilibrium of power and the peace of that part of the world, all the resources of negotiation were exhausted, and triple and quadruple alliances were formed; but they were scarcely formed before they were broken, giving an instructive but afflicting lesson to mankind, how little dependence is to be placed on treaties which have no other sanction than the obligations of good faith, and which oppose general considerations of peace and justice to the impulse of any immediate interest or passion."

"If the particular States in this country are disposed to stand in a similar relation to each other, and to drop the project of a general DISCRETIONARY SUPERINTENDENCE, the scheme would indeed be pernicious, and would entail upon us all the mischiefs which have been enumerated under the first head; but it would have the merit of being, at least, consistent and practicable Abandoning all views towards a confederate government, this would bring us to a simple alliance offensive and defensive; and would place us in a situation to be alternate friends and enemies of each other, as our mutual jealousies and rivalships, nourished by the intrigues of foreign nations, should prescribe to us."

"But if we are unwilling to be placed in this perilous situation; if we still will adhere to the design of a national government, or, which is the same thing, of a superintending power, under the direction of a common council, we must resolve to incorporate into our plan those ingredients which may be considered as forming the characteristic difference between a league and a government; we must extend the authority of the Union to the persons of the citizens, -- the only proper objects of government."

"Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation. This penalty, whatever it may be, can only be inflicted in two ways: by the agency of the courts and ministers of justice, or by military force; by the COERCION of the magistracy, or by the COERCION of arms. The first kind can evidently apply only to men; the last kind must of necessity, be employed against bodies politic, or communities, or States. It is evident that there is no process of a court by which the observance of the laws can, in the last resort, be enforced. Sentences may be denounced against them for violations of their duty; but these sentences can only be carried into execution by the sword. In an association where the general authority is confined to the collective bodies of the communities, that compose it, every breach of the laws must involve a state of war; and military execution must become the only instrument of civil obedience. Such a state of things can certainly not deserve the name of government, nor would any prudent man choose to commit his happiness to it."

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