Thus on Sept. 1, 1862, New York was highly excited all afternoon by a canard that Pope had been pushed back to Alexandria and was being beaten by the Confederates within sight of Washington. Why? asked the _Evening Post_ next day. It was because Stanton wanted all the correspondents kept away from the front, and the public was at the mercy of every rogue or coward who started a false report. The terrible disaster of Fredericksburg was concealed by the censorship in the most inexcusable way. The battle was fought on Saturday, the 13th of December. On the 14th and 15th there was no news; on the 16th the _Post_ carried the bare statement that the army had recrossed the Rappahannock, which it optimistically interpreted as meaning that the heavy rains had swollen the river and imperilled the communications. On the 17th it knew that Burnside’s forces had been flung back with terrible slaughter four days before, and it joined the chorus of the New York press in denouncing the official secrecy. The first authentic news of this battle was sent the _Tribune_ by a future owner of the _Evening Post_, Henry Villard, who obtained it by an heroic all-night ride, and bringing it to Washington, evaded Stanton’s order by sending it north by railway messenger. Similar secrecy attended the early stages of the battle of Chancellorsville, causing needless agony of mind at the North and profiting only the stock-jobbers. Just before Gettysburg rumors were afloat of a heavy blow to Hooker. C. C. Carleton, said the _Post_, tried to wire his Boston paper, “Do not accept sensation dispatches,” but the telegraph censor brusquely canceled this sensible message. The Philadelphia editors and correspondents long surpassed all others in the picturesqueness of their lies, and the _Post_ called attention to some of their masterpieces--e.g., their circumstantial story of the capture of Richmond by Gen. Keyes in 1862--as made possible by the censor’s concealment of the real facts. Nordhoff complained that some of the paper’s dispatches filed in the morning at 10:30 did not reach New York till 5 p. m., simply because the censor was out of his office or negligent. The worst count in the indictment, however, was that some great bankers got news of the battles by cipher, and used it in speculation while the people remained ignorant of the actual events.