“Undoubtedly permitted a very large number of arbitrary arrests … ‘Must I shoot a simple soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?’.
#War of rights how to shoot free#
Of those instances Zechariah Chafee Jr., the noted free speech scholar, offered the following measured assessment: There were, however, instances in which President Lincoln did find it necessary to abridge the five freedoms otherwise secured by the First Amendment. Hence, Lincoln’s toleration co-existed with occasional flurries of intolerant mob rage.
Of course, sometimes Union soldiers and others sympathetic to Lincoln took matters into their own hands, as when Ambrose Kimball, editor of the Essex County Democrat, was tarred and feathered by a frenzied Massachusetts mob for printing anti-Union stories and editorials. Thus, the “Copperhead press” was routinely antagonistic and even vitriolic in its protests. “After the Civil War began,” write scholars Thomas Tedford and Dale Herbeck, “officials in both the Union and the Confederacy permitted a surprising degree of freedom of expression.” President Abraham Lincoln allowed his critics - including Northerners opposed to the war (“Copperheads”) - wide latitude in railing against his policies. Posted on Februby Freedom Forum Institute
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