Biography
Dennis A. Mahony was an Irish-born newspaper editor and Democratic politician in Iowa, best known as editor of the Dubuque Herald. A sharp critic of President Abraham Lincoln and the Union conduct of the Civil War, he was arrested on August 14, 1862 by a U.S. marshal for publishing editorials alleged to be disloyal — part of the wartime suppression of dissenting political speech. He was transported from Dubuque to Washington, D.C., and held at the Old Capitol Prison without trial for roughly three months. He was released on November 10, 1862 after signing a loyalty oath, never having been tried or convicted. In 1863 he published 'The Prisoner of State,' a memoir of his arrest and confinement that became a widely cited account of Civil War-era restrictions on the press and political dissent in the North. He had earlier served in the Iowa House of Representatives and as sheriff of Dubuque County.
