Following the Union rout at Bull Run in July 1861, the Lincoln administration began a campaign to silence any newspaper that was critical of the government’s policies. One of the targets of this assault on freedom of the press was The New York Daily News, owned by Benjamin Wood, brother of Fernando Wood, a congressman and Democratic mayor of New York City, who was a leading critic of Abraham Lincoln.

The postmaster general of the United States, Montgomery Blair, ordered that several newspapers be banned from the U.S.