So you think you know American history - read what you never learned and don't want to know!
Headlines are so contentious these days, even vicious, one way or the other. But, in fairness, nobody can rightly say that Joe Biden is the first president in our history to weaponize federal agencies to censor political speech, or even to indict or imprison his political opponents. Abraham Lincoln was.
Most Americans find it hard to reconcile that with everything else that we’ve learned about Lincoln. But in fact there’s a long train of abuses across the Lincoln administration, with ample documentation that’s always been available — just ignored. A good place to start is John A. Marshall’s American Bastile: A History of the Illegal Arrests and Imprisonment of American Citizens in the Northern and Border States on Account of Their Political Opinions During the Late Civil War (Philadelphia 1883).
Then there are the private letters, diaries, and memoirs that relate how the Lincoln administration posted armed troops at the polling places across the North, ready to arrest anybody who picked up a Democrat ballot. How Lincoln soldiers kicked in the doors of opposition candidates at midnight and dragged them away to military prisons a thousand miles away, without charge or habeas corpus, leaving Republicans to run unopposed. How they smashed the presses of opposition — or even just accurate — newspapers. Posted armed guards in churches to ensure that only the sermons written by the Secretary of War were proclaimed from the pulpit — and pistol whipped any clergyman who strayed, dragging him bloody through the congregation and off to those same distant prisons.
