On Sept. 11, 1861, James W. Wall, a 42-year-old lawyer and former mayor of Burlington, N.J., sat down to dinner with his wife and family. Wall had recently written an open letter to the postmaster general challenging the constitutionality of the government’s attempts to silence the New York Daily News, an antiwar paper owned by Benjamin Wood, brother of the city’s Democratic mayor. A group of armed U.S.