it, they became suspicious and pulled the proclamation from its pages, destroying thousands of copies which carried the fake document. As a result, only two newspapers, the Journal of Commerce and the New York World printed the proclamation in their morning editions on May 18, 1864. When editors at the Journal and World realized on the morning of May 18 that no other papers had published the announcement from the president they realized they had been fooled and began to recall their papers. The financial nature of the hoax was soon uncovered by General John Dix, and Secretary of State William Seward issued an announcement that afternoon denouncing the proclamation as a fake. Howard and Mallison were eventually arrested on May 21. Howard remained imprisoned until August 23, when Lincoln ordered he be released at the behest of Howard's family friend Henry Ward Beecher. Mallison remained in jail another month, until Lincoln ordered him released on September 20 after Mallison wrote him an appeal expressing "sincere regret at my folly." In the immediate wake of the publication of the proclamation on May 18, the Lincoln administration reacted with uncharacteristically harsh measures. The president ordered General Dix to arrest Manton Marble and William Prime, editors of the World and Journal respectively, and to occupy their newspaper offices with federal troops. Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton went on to order the arrest of the New York staff of the Independent Telegraph Company, and closed the company offices in Baltimore, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. The Washington company offices were also closed and searched, and the superintendent was interrogated and imprisoned. The next day Edwin Stanton also had several journalists in Washington arrested; Henry Villard, Adams Sherman Hill, and Horace White. Marble and Prime were released on May 21, and their papers resumed publishing on May 23. The telegraph closings were also rescinded after several days, and the telegraph staff, along with the unfortunate Washington reporters were released. The cause of the harsh measures the Lincoln administration took in the wake of the hoax appears to be that Lincoln and Stanton believed that the proclamation was the result of a major security breach. By complete coincidence, at the same time Howard and Mallison were concocting a false proclamation calling for 400,000 new soldiers, Lincoln was drafting a genuine proclamation that would also call for hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. Upon hearing