ABSTRACT
Democrats like Ohio politician Clement L. Vallandigham, orators, and editors alike, faced serious challenges to their right to express themselves freely during the Civil War. Author Shelby Foote claimed that three hundred newspapers faced suppression from 1861 to 1865. This chapter looks at Civil War press suppression in the Mid-Atlantic region, and no state's newspapers faced a greater degree of government constraints than did Maryland's. It was a slave state that stayed in the Union, but within its borders lived a substantial number of citizens who supported the secessionists in the South. Even those Marylanders who were not pro-secession were only marginally for the Union's effort to put down the rebellion. The means for making such suppression legal, in the minds of Lincoln and his aides, was the passing of the First Confiscation Act in August 1861 and the president's interpretation of the Constitution allowing him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
