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Lincoln either directly closed the newspapers, or instructed the US Mail not to deliver the papers of the establishments he personally opposed.

"You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce... and prohibit any further publication thereof... you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command, the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers... and you will hold the persons so arrested in close custody until they can be brought to trial before a military commission."

Order from Lincoln to General John A. Dix, May 18, 1864, on the establishment of his military dictatorship over the First Amendment.

There are some on this thread that will take immediate offense to the term "dictatorship". To make all of a group (editors, proprietors, publishers) criminally responsible for the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech of a few is nothing less than dictatorial.

Thank you for your post. I've been very busy the last few days and haven't had time to look anything up. I remember reading a book on the BOR that went into it in some detail and remember specifically a passage that referred to Fed troops breaking up a printing press and hauling the editor off to military prison. We go back and forth and on and on about the unCivil war but all we know is filtered through our perceptions and those that wrote the original accounts.

You might mention that the New York World had, that day, published a fraudulent story claiming that the President had just called for 400,000 more troops, a story that was likely to cause renewed riots in New York like those that had devastated the city 10 months earlier. Within 48 hours, the reporter who had concocted the phony story (with supporting documentation on stolen letterhead paper) had confessed. The newspaper editors were immediately released.