“They Cannot Expect . . . That a Loyal People Will Tolerate the Utterance of Such Sentiments”: The Campaign against Treasonous Speech during the Civil War

On the basis of two sworn statements charging him with disloyalty, Isaac Thomas, a resident of Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, was arrested and incarcerated in Moyamensing Prison in September 1862. Thomas, a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher, had previously so offended his neighbors with his language that they had thrown him out of a store. Thomas’s most recent affront to community sentiment, according to one witness, was his insistence that if he volunteered for military service at all, he would enlist in the Confederate army. Although Thomas never acted on his provocative statement, one of his accusers concluded that it was not safe to leave the man at liberty. William Stavely, who denounced Thomas independently in a letter to the deputy US marshal, concurred, writing that Thomas had “rendered himself obnoxious to all Union loving citizens in this neighborhood and the patience of the community is worn out.” Such a man should be taken from his familiar surroundings, punished, and put somewhere where he could do no harm.

Thomas, in jail with only a general sense of why he had been arrested, wrote two letters, one to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the other to Abraham Lincoln, begging for an immediate hearing or a discharge. “I know not my accuser, nor the special charge,” Thomas declared, but he felt sure that he was “the victim of some perjured villain’s malice.” Insisting that he was “as loyal as any man in the nation,” Thomas feared the consequences of prolonged imprisonment in what he described as a “loathsome place.” “For God’s sake don’t let me die a lingering death in a felon’s cell, guilty of no crime. Give me a hearing for God’s sake,” he pleaded.¹

The secret accusations and imprisonment of Thomas, who sat in jail without hope of a trial, highlights some aspects of the North’s efforts to deal with issues of loyalty and disloyalty during the Civil War. Earlier (and later) efforts to deal with perceived threats during national emergencies have been described by one historian as “subversion panics.” Although the specific responses have differed over time, they have tended to dramatize and demonize those suspected of being disloyal and to resort to violence and incarceration to punish them. During the American Revolution, Congress prompted state assemblies and extralegal committees of safety to act against loyalists, while several states, including Pennsylvania, passed their own treason laws to deal with the threat. Mobs took aggressive measures, tarring and feathering those suspected of disloyalty. In 1798 the Sedition Act targeted those who wrote or expressed “any false, scandalous,” or “malicious” statements against the government, and a small number of citizens were arrested, tried, and jailed. Now, with the outbreak of the rebellion in 1861, the allegiance of citizens was again uncertain, as many Americans had family, economic, and social ties to both North and South. Furthermore, emotions were high, and Judge Levi Hubbell of Minnesota may have been expressing the sentiments of many others when he stated in 1861, “We must starve, drown, burn, shoot the traitors.” In a speech in Boston in August that same year, the Honorable Joseph Holt, President James Buchanan’s attorney general, and, in 1862, Lincoln’s judge advocate general, identified disloyalty as one of the most fearful obstacles to the Union’s successful prosecution of the war and applauded the measures Lincoln had taken to “subdue this fatal source of weakness and defeat.”²

Because the records are incomplete, it is impossible to be sure how many Americans like Thomas were caught up in the Union effort to exterminate disloyalty during the Civil War. Scholars believe that between thirteen thousand and thirty-eight thousand civilians were arrested for possible subversion in the North. Their estimates exclude those apprehended local and state officials for whom no sure statistics exist. Surviving records suggest that 1862 was the peak year for arrests and incarcerations, but the pattern of denunciations, investigations, and imprisonment persisted on a smaller scale until...