Biography
Francis Key Howard was a Baltimore newspaper editor and a grandson of Francis Scott Key. As editor of the Daily Exchange, he wrote an editorial criticizing President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law in Baltimore — including the arrests of the city's mayor, a sitting congressman, the police commissioners, and members of the city council. Just after midnight on September 13, 1861, he was arrested at his home without a warrant and held without any formal charge or trial. Howard was first confined at Fort McHenry in Baltimore — the same fort his grandfather had watched withstand British bombardment in 1814, an irony Howard noted bitterly — then transferred to Fort Lafayette in New York Bay and afterward to Fort Warren in Boston. He was imprisoned for fourteen months and released in November 1862, never having been told the basis for his detention. He recounted the experience in 'Fourteen Months in American Bastiles' (1863), which became a notable critique of the wartime suppression of civil liberties.
Additional source for this Civil War detention: John A. Marshall, American Bastile (1869), printed pages 369-370, https://archive.org/details/americanbastile00marsgoog/page/n384/mode/2up. This is a partisan retrospective account; its judgments should be read as attributed claims. The Fort McHenry roster on printed page 227 uses the form Frank Key Howard for this Baltimore Exchange editor; it refers to the same prisoner and supplies supplementary transfer provenance. Source: https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n242/mode/2up. The Fort Warren political-prisoner return dated April 15, 1862 records this individual’s commission disposition as: “Not examined.” The report date is not an exact release date. An offered parole, unaccepted order, or not-examined marker does not establish release or uninterrupted physical imprisonment through that day. Source: Official Records, Series II, Volume II, printed page 285, https://archive.org/details/cu31924079570242/page/n300/mode/1up.
