The Weapons of the Administration: The Boston Courier, Civil War Era.

The Weapons of the Administration: The Boston Courier, Civil War Era.
Photo by Ed Fr / Unsplash

The national narrative of the Civil War often excludes the critics of President Abraham Lincoln. Copperhead, C. Chauncey Burr, had plenty of maledictions for the President. In this case, Burr lets the Boston Courier do the work.

August Glen-James, editor


The Boston Courier thus paints the face of Lincolnism:

The Administration has two methods of dealing with those who oppose its plans. The first is, if possible, to intimidate them into silence by threats, and whenever they can, by the practice of illegal persecution and military terrorism. The second, applied to those who know their rights as citizens, and dare to assert them, is, to defame and abuse them through a subsidized press, to ruin them by false and malicious slanders, so cunningly worded as to be within the law, and so numerous as to defy contradiction.