"The prisoners for better security against conversation shall have a canvas bag put over the head of each and tied around the neck, with a holes for proper breathing and eating, but not seeing"
About this Quote
A terse wartime directive from Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, reveals the hard edge of a government in crisis. The instruction to hood prisoners with a canvas bag tied around the neck, pierced only for breathing and eating, grows out of the frantic aftermath of Lincoln's assassination in April 1865. Fearing a broader conspiracy and further violence, Stanton centralized control and imposed extraordinary measures on the accused conspirators held at the Washington Arsenal. The goal is explicit: prevent conversation, block collusion, and shut down any exchange of signals or plans. The method is equally stark: render the prisoners unable to see, turning sight into a danger to be managed.
The bureaucratic calm of the language is part of its chill. It reduces human needs to functions: holes for air and food, nothing for vision, companionship, or dignity. The body becomes an object to be secured, the mind a potential contagion to be quarantined. Hooding here operates as more than restraint; it is sensory deprivation and social erasure, an attempt to isolate each prisoner within a private darkness that thwarts solidarity and self-possession. The measure illuminates how the Civil War state learned to fuse surveillance, isolation, and procedure into a system of control.
Stanton embodied the paradox of Union war governance: relentless efficiency in defense of the Republic, paired with an assertive indifference to civil liberties. His insistence on secrecy, tight custody, and military tribunals fit a broader landscape of suspended habeas corpus, press censorship, and preventive detention. To many contemporaries, such severity felt necessary; to others, it signaled a dangerous expansion of executive power.
The line endures because it concentrates a perennial dilemma. National security seeks certainty; civil liberty resists being reduced to breathable, feedable, but unseeing life. The order asks where a democracy draws its limits in an emergency, and whether measures devised for a singular crisis harden into a template for future ones.
The bureaucratic calm of the language is part of its chill. It reduces human needs to functions: holes for air and food, nothing for vision, companionship, or dignity. The body becomes an object to be secured, the mind a potential contagion to be quarantined. Hooding here operates as more than restraint; it is sensory deprivation and social erasure, an attempt to isolate each prisoner within a private darkness that thwarts solidarity and self-possession. The measure illuminates how the Civil War state learned to fuse surveillance, isolation, and procedure into a system of control.
Stanton embodied the paradox of Union war governance: relentless efficiency in defense of the Republic, paired with an assertive indifference to civil liberties. His insistence on secrecy, tight custody, and military tribunals fit a broader landscape of suspended habeas corpus, press censorship, and preventive detention. To many contemporaries, such severity felt necessary; to others, it signaled a dangerous expansion of executive power.
The line endures because it concentrates a perennial dilemma. National security seeks certainty; civil liberty resists being reduced to breathable, feedable, but unseeing life. The order asks where a democracy draws its limits in an emergency, and whether measures devised for a singular crisis harden into a template for future ones.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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