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Welles was certain that Lincoln regretted what had been done, and indeed, the president ordered Secretary of War Stanton to allow the Chicago Times to resume publication. But on June 11, 1863, Lincoln sent to the New York Tribune a reply to the Corning protest, strongly defending his limitation of civil liberties. He accused Vallandigham of giving speeches that actively discouraged enlistment and promoted desertion, which was why, Lincoln claimed, he came under military jurisdiction. In an oft-quoted sentence, he asked, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” But Lincoln went well beyond this one case. He condemned persons guilty of disloyalty, among whom he identified individuals who actively aided the Confederacy as well as those who dared to raise the issue of freedom of speech or who did not avow support for the war effort. Not only the outright critic, but the man who “talks ambiguously” in support of the Union or “stands by and says nothing” assisted the enemy. Two weeks later, Lincoln addressed a similar letter to another group who condemned violations of “free thought, free speech, and a free press.” “Your attitude,” Lincoln responded, “encourages desertion, resistance to the draft, and the like.”35

Lincoln was no dictator. Elections took place as scheduled throughout the war, and the Democratic press continued to criticize the administration in the harshest terms. But neither did he possess a modern sensitivity to the importance of civil liberties. He believed that actions that in normal times would violate the Constitution became legal in wartime, emancipation itself being a salient example. His stance reflected how the war, which created a newly empowered nation-state with an unprecedented impact on Americans’ everyday lives, also inspired an upsurge of patriotism and a new identification of democracy and liberty with national authority. “One nation—one government—one universal freedom” would be the war’s result, declared a writer in the Continental Monthly. This frame of mind flowed easily into the equation of dissent with treason and of patriotism with unquestioning support for government policies. Republicans harped on these themes in political campaigns. One 1863 pamphlet, entitled Unconditional Loyalty, declared that in times of crisis, the “first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens” was “to rally round the president—without question or dispute.” Given his own intense nationalism, it is not surprising that Lincoln seemed to share this outlook. Of course, by 1863, support for the nation and the president also meant support for emancipation. “If we are not now abolitionists, in the old sense,” the political essayist Sidney George Fisher wrote in his diary in October 1863, “we are emancipationists and wish to see slavery destroyed since it has attempted to destroy the nation.”36

Lincoln designed his public letters to influence public opinion, not just respond to a few individuals. He had already done this in his reply to Horace Greeley in 1862 and would do so again in August 1863, when he sent a letter to James C. Conkling declining an invitation to speak at the Illinois Republican Convention. Lincoln crafted the language with care and instructed Conkling to “read it slowly.” He was mortified when a copy appeared in a number of newspapers “botched up.” The Conkling letter offered a sharp rebuke to those “dissatisfied with me about the negro” and a long defense of the Emancipation Proclamation and black military service. Borrowing language from a letter he had recently received from General Grant, Lincoln called these policies “the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” He directly challenged criticism of the proclamation’s legality: slaves were property, he wrote, and “the law of war” enabled a commander in chief to seize property “when needed.” He celebrated the patriotism of black soldiers, contrasting it with the disloyalty of his white critics:

Negroes, like other people, act