During the 1860 election campaign the Wide Awakes “was a paramilitary campaign organization affiliated with the Republican Party”. The following editorial is concerned that the Republican-led federal government is wide awake to punishing dissenting opinion.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch October 11, 1862:
The horrors of Fort Lafayette–a Bold voice at the North.
The New York Weekly Caucasian, published by the former proprietors of the Day Book and News, has not yet been suppressed by the Lincoln Government, though, from the following article, we should think its season will be brief:
Few people know, or even think, of the suffering men, pining for liberty, in Fort Lafayette, and none realize how cruelly and harshly they are reported to be treated. …
opinions have consequences
A few days since some Black Republican speculators in the substitute business, who had violated the orders of the War Department, were sent to Fort Lafayette. The Abolition papers, however, made a great howl over it, and they have been released. There are, however, scores of better men and truer patriots in there than those released, in whose behalf not a word is uttered. There is Judge Carmichael, of Maryland, Guilty of what! Why, of the gross crime (1) of telling the Grand Jury of his county what the law in relation to arrests was. For months has Judge C. suffered the horrors of the Bastile, for simply doing his duty. Is it possible, therefore, that the recent Republican outburst of indignation against arbitrary arrests proceeds from any regard for the principles of civil liberty? No, it is the grossest hypocrisy. They wish only Democrats to be imprisoned. If they are sincere, why do they not ask for the release of Dr. Edson B. Olds, of Ohio, now in the fort, for simply expressing an opinion against the Administration?–How many more good and true men are also in the same gloomy prison walls, against whom no charges are preferred, we can only conjecture. We hear every day of men arrested in different parts of the country. They are spirited away, their friends and their families know not whither. Some dark and no some prison vault receives them, and they are buried alive! Where is D. A. Mahoney, Esq., of the Dubuque Herald, the central organ of the lowa Democracy? Where is Mr. D. Sherwood, editor of the Fairfield (Iowa) Union, recently snatched from his family by the Lincoln Kidnappers? Where is Judge Allen, member of Congress recently elected from Southern Illinois? We might increase this list indefinitely, but it is not necessary.–If there is but one man unjustly deprived of his liberty, it ought to arouse every American to instant action. The principle is the same. Our liberties are overthrown, and the rights of the individual are left to the whim or caprice of some upstart official. There is a day of retribution coming, however, for the murderers of liberty and the persecutors of Democrats amongst us. As Mr. Valiandignam says in his excellent speech, which we publish this week, “the measure they have meted out to us shall be measured to them again.” Yes, that it will, “shaken down and pressed together.””The arrest of Dr. Olds,” chuckles the Abolition tyrants of the Evening Post,”and the summary squelching of Charles Ingersoll, show that the Government is wide awake!” Yes, indeed, it is wide awake. It can conquer unarmed men, and that seems to be about the extent of its victories. It can send posses of kidnappers to the houses of quiet citizens in the North, gag them, and bind them, and immure them in forts and fortifications; but it has not the ability, with hundreds of thousands of troops, to keep the Confederates from besieging the National Capital. It can wreak a petty vengeance upon some individual, who has had too much honesty to bend before its usurpations; but it is incompetent to save the country from the calamities which menace it. It loves duplicity and deceit, and pays a high premium for them, in the person of the renegade Democrats who go over to it for plunder and pelf; but it especially hates manliness and honesty, and persecutes every individual who possesses enough of these qualities to tell it of its faults or rebuke its follies. It has finally convicted itself of party favoritism by releasing from imprisonment men of its own party and retaining Democrats in custody, though the offences charged were the same in both cases. Dr. Olds, of Ohio, is charged with discouraging enlistments, yet he is imprisoned, while Black Republicans are released! It is no wonder that some of its own party papers are calling for the resignation of a President who has allowed the Government to degenerate into an organization which would seem to exist, just now, mainly for the persecution of those who have intelligence enough to see the truth, and manliness enough to utter it.
New York weekly Caucasian, “An Anti-abolition, Democratic Union paper”, was published from 1861-1863.
Edson Baldwin Olds had been a Democrat Representative from Ohio mostly during the early 1850’s.
Richard Bennett Carmichael was a Maryland judge who got into trouble for instructing a grand jury to indict the federal officers who arrested hecklers at a Unionist rally. In May 1862 federal troops entered Carmichael’s courtroom. the judge was pistol whipped and dragged off. He was detained in various prisons until December 1862.
