To Suppress or Not to Suppress: Abraham Lincoln and the Chicago Times

TO SUPPRESS OR NOT TO SUPPRESS: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE CHICAGO TJMES Craig D. Tenney A great deal has been said and written in recent years about governmental attempts to restrain the press. A roughly equal amount has been said and written about press responsibility. It might be well to remember that, when viewed against other periods of national history, recent attempts to influence, if not dictate, press treatment of the government are comparatively mild. The physical operation of the press is not threatened or affected directly as it was in earlier periods when national concern about the First Amendment was considerably less intense than it is presently and an administrations willingness to move, oftentimes harshly, against its journalistic opponents was not nearly so restrained. A case in point is the suppression of the Chicago Times in 1863 at the height of the Civil War. No sooner had Major General Ambrose E. Burnside imposed the suppression than President Abraham Lincoln ordered him to lift it, and followed that directive with yet another telling Burnside he might let the suppression stand temporarily. While a few historians have mentioned the Times affair and the first Lincoln directive to Burnside,1 none has mentioned the second. Professor James G. Randall, who made a thorough and careful study ofthe constitutional problems besetting the Civil War president, seemed notably impressed by Lincoln's restraint in dealing with opposition newspapers and by his overall respect for press freedom. Instances of administration actitivies against the press, Randall said, "were not sufficiently numerous to argue a general repressive policy."2 But of the newspapers against which action was taken, and there were many,3 1 See, for example, Justin Walsh, To Print the News and Raise Hell—A Biography of Wilbur F. Storey (Chapel Hill, 1968), pp. 174-83: Robert S. Harper, Lincoln andthe Press (New York, London, Toronto, 1951), pp. 258-62; Harold L. Nelson, ed., Freedom of the Press from Hamilton to the Warren Court (Indianapolis, New York, 1967), pp. 230-32. 2 James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, rev. ed. (Urbana. 1964). p. 46. 3 Records of many government actions against the press may be found in The Warof the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies [cited hereafter as OR] (Washington, 1880-1901), ser. 2, 2: passim. Civil War History, Vol XXVII, No. 3Copyright © 1981 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/81/2703-0004 $01.00/0 CHICAGO TIMES249 Randall observed that their utterances "were so vicious that suppression or the arrest of their editors seemed but mild forms of punishment."4 Journalism historians Edwin and Michael Emery, in taking much the same approach, observe that Lincoln had "definite ideas about freedom of expression" when he rescinded the suppression of the Times.5 Study of the suppression, however, indicates it was not a tender regard for the First Amendment that guided Lincoln's hand in signing the order lifting the suppression. It was something more basic to the president's nature—a regard for politics. One would think that had the president been even moderately favorable toward general press freedom, he would have acted much earlier in the war when Secretary of State William H Seward, Secretaries of War Simon Cameron and Edwin M. Stanton, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, as presidential agents or surrogates, were moving decisively against the opposition press.6 That Lincoln did not act then would easily and naturally be viewed by cabinet officers, other bureaucrats and by generals in the field as a tacit approval of future repressive action against those publications and editors who bitterly opposed the administration and its war policies. Lincoln apparently never did anything generally to stifle such perceptions, choosing instead to handle such matters on a case-by-case basis. With Burnside, one case involved the arrest of former Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham in May 1863. Another involved the suppression of the Times less than a month later. That the two cases were part of the same cloth is indicated in a report Burnside submitted some time after taking command of the Military Department of the Ohio in late March 1863.7 He had...