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.
