While Abraham Lincoln suppressed more than 300 newspapers during the Civil War, Jefferson Davis took pride in not suppressing any. On the contrary, media historian Debra Reddin van Tuyll writes in an unpublished paper, Confederate leaders often stepped in and protected journalists from would-be censors in the military. ...The Wilson Quarterly is a good publication from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars with a generally liberal bent and not some neo-Confederate rag. But I'd have to say this article is pretty credulous.
Jefferson Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus (as did Lincoln) and imprisoned some critics, according to van Tuyll, but he never went after the press. Press freedom was a foundation of the U.S. Constitution, and, Davis asserted, the Confederacy "alone has remained true to the original principles of the United States." To a friend, he reportedly said, "It is a dangerous thing to interfere with the liberty of the press, for what would it avail us if we gain our independence and lose our liberty?"
Let's put it another way. The Confederate administration had less formal restrictions on what white people could write about war-related issues than was the case in the Union. The portion of the Southern population that was African-American, virtually all of them slaves, had no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. It was a serious crime to even teach a slave how to read. There certainly weren't any slaves newspapers being legally published.
Debate among whites over the desirability of slavery had begun to be suppressed in the slave states after the Virginia legislature's debate over the issue in 1831-2. That ban wasn't absolute. And especially in the border states, there's was some open debate about the phasing out of slavery right up until the Civil War.
The Wilson Quarterly article is the sort of thing that can be twisted by neo-Confederates to argue for pseudohistory, that Lincoln was a dictator and the Confederacy was a freer, more benign government. The neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com site has a whole King Lincoln Archive of propaganda along those lines.
The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist did a book called All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (1998) about Lincoln's wartime abridgements of civil liberties. Rehnquist was a very conservative Justice and not one whose jurisprudence I admire. But that book actually does a decent job of putting those measures into some perspective. One of the important arguments that he makes was that many of the measures that were held legally to be invalid were actually new measures that Lincoln was trying. The country had never faced a civil war situation and there were no precedents at the time for some of what Lincoln did. The Constitutional government was six decades old at the time of the Confederate revolt.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south
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