Did Abraham Lincoln Lie About His Belief In The Freedom Of Free Speech?

Harold Holzer won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and four other awards in 2015 for his book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press.

On February 21st, at Washburn University’s Bradbury Thompson Alumni Center, people gathered to hear the 70 year old lecturer speak about President Abraham Lincoln and suppression of the media during the Civil War.

He spoke about conflicts between United States Of American presidents and the media, dating back to George Washington, who threw newspapers on the floor and jumped up and down on them because people weren’t treating him “like a god” anymore.

Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also battled the press according to Holzer.

Most of the lecture centered on Lincoln and extreme measures that Lincoln took to suppress the media.

Holzer stated,

“Lincoln believed that in the case of rebellion, contingency trumped the Bill of Rights and before his inaugural, even though he insisted that the freedom of the press was necessary for a free government, he responded to secession and open warfare by assuming extraordinary and unprecedented powers to hit back against critical newspapers and journalists.”

Holzer said that he found 200 incidences in which newspapers and their editors were blocked. And in some of those cases the newspaper was banned from the U.S. mail, people were arrested and imprisoned, press equipment was seized and destroyed and publications were suspended.

“The 1864 campaign and the things Lincoln did to gain re-election remind me that Abraham Lincoln may have initiated surprising and unprecedented crackdowns on liberty of the press because he believed that there was no way to save the Constitution without sacrificing a part of it temporarily,” 

Holzer said.

At the end of his talk, Holzer closed with, 

“Lincoln cracked down on fake news, much more than any president before him and any president after him.

Nothing we are seeing is new, and it’s always been there, and I think probably as we continue and debate current events, it’s good to remember that history is complicated and Lincoln set standards in more ways than sometimes we even like to imagine.”