Lincoln's Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President's Mission to Destroy the Press by Jeffrey Manber & Neil Dahlstrom

Author:Jeffrey Manber & Neil Dahlstrom [Manber, Jeffrey & Dahlstrom, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Language Arts & Disciplines, journalism
ISBN: 9781402203985
Google: DNnxmAEACAAJ
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2005-11-15T23:58:59.423234+00:00

Editor Frank Key Howard was confined with three “companions” who shared “three or four chairs and an old ricketty [sic] bedstead, upon which was the filthiest apology for a bed I ever saw” and “a tolerably clean-looking mattress lying in one corner.” He “could not help being struck by an unpleasant coincidence.” Forty-seven years prior to the very day, his grandfather, Francis Scott Key, then a prisoner aboard a British warship, witnessed the bombardment that led to his writing of the “Star Spangled Banner” the following day. The irony did not escape him. “The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving, at the same place, over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.”30

A few days later, the group took the steamer Adelaide to Fort Monroe, near Old Point Comfort, Virginia, then ten days later were transferred to Fort Lafayette.

While family, friends, and colleagues wrote furiously to state and federal officials petitioning for the release of the prisoners, Lincoln at last responded. His medium, as was his tendency on matters of such importance, was a loyal newspaper: this time the Baltimore American. The president took responsibility for the wave of arrests occurring in Maryland, but told citizens that they were on a need-to-know basis. “The public safety renders it necessary that the grounds of these arrests should at present be withheld,” he wrote, “but at the proper time they will be made public.”

Of one thing the people of Maryland may rest assured: that no arrest has been made, or will be made, not based on substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion against the government of the United States. In no case has an arrest been made on mere suspicion, or through personal or partisan animosities, but in all cases the government is in possession of tangible and unmistakable evidence, which will, when made public, be satisfactory to every loyal citizen.31

On September 26, Frank Key Howard and the members of the Maryland legislature arrived at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. Howard’s partner at the Baltimore Exchange, William Wilkins Glenn, now joined them. After Howard’s arrest, two articles were courageously printed in condemnation of the arrests, and Major General Dix acted on behalf of the government in Glenn’s arrest.

Fort Lafayette was on a narrow stretch of rock in New York Harbor nestled between Staten Island and Long Island (eight miles south of New York City). Formerly called Fort Diamond, Fort Lafayette was the smallest of three forts lined up in the harbor. The thirty-foot-high octagonal walls loomed down at its new arrivals, a double line of batteries on the side facing Long Island greeting the weary group of prisoners. Above those, on the second story, sat a row of smaller twenty-four pounders, protected by a frail looking wooden roof, on top of which sat firepower the prisoners could only imagine.

On September 30, William Seward ordered the release of W. W. Glenn “on taking the oath of allegiance to the government of the United States.

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