Page 118 - Dragon Flood

destination: the small, two-story office building at 12 South High Street, the home of the
prospering West Chester Jeffersonian...

Nearly as the courthouse clock struck midnight, according to newspaper accounts in West
Chester and Philadelphia after the fact, the unidentified mob crashed through the front
door of the building proudly owned by the Hodgson family and swarmed into the brick
office building of West Chester’s only remaining Democratic newspaper. Quietly, and with
little attention, the men quickly and systematically destroyed the press equipment and
anything else they stumbled upon. They callously overturned office furniture - chairs,
tables, and desks - and smashed the small wood and metal type blocks. So intent were the
men on putting the newspaper out of circulation that they made the effort to destroy even
the huge cylinder printing press, the paper’s very lifeblood. It is not easy to destroy a solid
cast-iron press in the thick of night; whomever these men were, we can say they were
strong and determined to shut down Hodgson for good.

They quickly climbed the narrow steps in the rear of the building, destroying the paper’s
most vital business records as if dumping the foul-smelling refuse of a chamber pot into
the alley below. Subscription lists were ripped into pieces and thrown through the
shattered front window, the bundles catching on the jagged shards of glass that jutted
from the wooden frame...

Such destruction is not a Christian act. It is Satan who comes to “kill, steal and destroy.” It
says something about the nature of a government that will sanction such actions. No effort
was ever made to rein in the mobs who repeated this scene across the Northern states. The
government turned a blind eye, giving tacit approval to the silencing of all opposition
voices.

The government’s involvement was not merely one of failing to act to protect the rights and
property of its citizens. In the same month of April 1861 Lincoln suspended the privilege of
the writ of habeas corpus.

The writ of habeas corpus guarantees the right of a citizen to be charged with a specific
crime if arrested, a basic constitutional guarantee...

The chief justice of the Supreme Court, appalled at the extreme use of executive power,
soon weighed in on the question. On May 27, 1861, eighty-four-year-old Chief Justice
Roger Taney ruled that military arrest... violated the privilege of the writ of habeas
corpus... Taney... wrote that the president “cannot suspend the privilege of the writ of
habeas corpus, nor authorize any military officer to do so. Only Congress has that
power...”

But Lincoln would not be pressured by the Chief Justice, and he ignored the ruling.
[Source: Ibid]

This was followed later that summer with one of many confiscation acts written by Congress
and signed into law by Lincoln.