Frank Key Howard

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Key Howard was a Baltimore newspaper editor who found himself imprisoned inside the very fort that had made his family famous. On the 13th of September 1861, just after midnight, U.S. Major General Nathaniel Prentice Banks arrived at Howard's home without a warrant and placed him under arrest. The order had come from General George B. McClellan, acting on the direct policy of President Abraham Lincoln.

  Howard's grandfather was Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" while watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Now, forty-seven years later, his grandson would be held in that same fort as a political prisoner of the American government. The crime that put him there was an editorial. He had written critically about Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

  Howard spent fourteen months in confinement without trial, without formal charges, and without ever being told what he had done wrong. How did an American journalist end up a prisoner for criticizing his president? And what does his story reveal about the limits of civil liberties in wartime?

• 2. A Family and a Fort

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  Howard was born on the 25th of October 1826, into a family woven into the founding fabric of the American republic. His grandfather Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics that would become the national anthem. His other grandfather, John Eager Howard, had served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War.

  When soldiers took Howard to Fort McHenry on that September night in 1861, the coincidence was not lost on him. Looking out from inside the fort the following morning, he described in his own words being struck by what he called "an odd and not pleasant coincidence." On that very day forty-seven years before, his grandfather had been a prisoner aboard a British ship, watching the bombardment of the same fort. Key had emerged from that experience to write the song. Howard emerged from a sleepless night to find himself a prisoner in the place that song had immortalized.

  Howard later recorded his reflection that the flag his grandfather had so proudly celebrated now waved, as he put it, "over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed." He was then transferred out of Fort McHenry, first to Fort Lafayette in Lower New York Bay off the coast of Brooklyn, and then to Fort Warren in Boston.

• 3. Maryland on the Edge

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  Maryland in 1861 was not safely in the Union column. It was one of five border states whose loyalties were genuinely contested at the start of the Civil War. The Baltimore riot of 1861 had already turned violent, and Lincoln moved quickly to shore up control of the state.

  On the 27th of April 1861, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, a constitutional protection that requires the government to justify a person's imprisonment before a court. He extended the suspension to portions of midwestern states, including southern Indiana.

  The first person arrested under this order was Lieutenant John Merryman of the Baltimore County Horse Guards, a unit composed of southern sympathizers that had formed that same year. Merryman was accused of treason for destroying bridges and telegraph lines to block Union troops from marching through Baltimore toward Washington, D.C.

  That case went to court and the court ruled against Lincoln. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, sitting as a circuit judge in Maryland, issued a ruling in Ex Parte Merryman that Lincoln's suspension was unconstitutional. Taney, it happens, was married to Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key, making him Howard's great-uncle by marriage. Lincoln chose to ignore the ruling, citing the precedent of President Andrew Jackson's earlier defiance of federal courts.

• 4. The Editorial That Ended Freedom

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  Howard edited the Daily Exchange, a Baltimore newspaper that was openly sympathetic to the Confederacy. His arrest rested on an editorial he had published criticizing Lincoln's behavior in Maryland.

  The editorial touched on several specific grievances. Howard had written against the suspension of habeas corpus. He had also criticized the Lincoln administration's declaration of martial law in Baltimore. And he had objected to the imprisonment without charge of a striking roster of local officials: Baltimore mayor George William Brown, sitting U.S. Congressman Henry May, all of the police commissioners of Baltimore, and the entire city council.

  Howard was told by the arresting officer that the order for his arrest had come from Secretary of State William Seward. In the book he later wrote about his imprisonment, he noted this detail as especially significant. The arrest was not the act of a military court responding to battlefield conditions. It was, as he understood it, an instruction from civilian leadership to silence a journalist who had pointed out what a federal court had already confirmed: that what Lincoln was doing was unconstitutional.

  After his arrest, Howard spent the full fourteen months of his confinement without being given a trial and without ever being formally told what crime he was alleged to have committed.

• 5. Fourteen Months in American Bastiles

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  By December 1862, Howard had completed a book about his time as a political prisoner. It was published in 1863 under the title Fourteen Months in American Bastiles. The title's plural was pointed: Howard did not experience one prison but three, spread across the eastern seaboard.

  The book's reception was itself a measure of how charged the moment was. Two of the publishers who sold the book were subsequently arrested.

  Howard died in London on the 29th of May 1872, at the age of forty-five. He was in London when he died, far from Baltimore and the fort where his imprisonment had begun. His family's connection to the national anthem gave his story an irony that did not require any embellishment. The man who criticized the government for imprisoning people without charge had himself been imprisoned without charge, inside the very monument to American freedom that his grandfather's words had made permanent.