ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a sketch of press freedom in the time of William H. McCardle, and will add some contour to our fairly thin understanding of the way American journalists of the 1860s viewed their own First Amendment rights. It suggests that the tenor of the Reconstruction era—a time when the "angry scars" of the Civil War had not healed and many aspects of American society were yet deeply partisan—made it exceedingly easy to conflate the defense of a right to free speech with support for the content of that speech. Economic, cultural, and racial divisions that had led to the war became further and differently pronounced during the years of Reconstruction, as the federal government struggled to fold the devastated South back into the Union and the Congress fought bitterly over the terms of reunification.
