Now that's a newspaper war

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 128.

On July 27 the paper came out with a defiant edition heaping scorn on the “rabble” that had attacked their previous offices. Early that evening a mob of boys began throwing stones at the paper’s new building, and they were soon joined by a crowd of laborers that by morning reached two thousand. At one point in the night the editor of the rival Baltimore Sun had appeared along with a cannon that some men had dragged to the scene and, said one witness, “appeared almost deranged” as he urged the men to fire it. Only the hesitant intervention of a militia officer stopped that.

Among the defenders of the newspaper’s building was General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a Revolutionary War hero and stalwart Federalist, in town from his native Virginia to arrange for publication of his war memoirs. The mayor and other town officials finally arrived at dawn and urged the Federalists to surrender to protective custody with the promise that they and the newspaper building would be protected. Lee accepted. The mob immediately destroyed the newspaper offices as they left.

That night the mob returned, stormed the jail, and beat and tortured Lee and the others, dripping hot candle wax in their eyes and stabbing them with penknives to see if they were still alive, leaving most of them for dead in a heap in front of the jail. General James M. Lingan, an elderly veteran of the Revolutionary War, was killed, stabbed in the chest after his pleas for mercy were ignored. Lee never recovered from his injuries; his face was swollen for months afterward, his speech halting the rest of his life, and he died an invalid six years later. Another of the mob’s victims, John Thomson, was stripped, tarred and feathered, and dumped in a cart; one of the mob tried to gouge out his eyes, and another tried to break his legs with an iron bar; another threw some flaming tar and feathers on him, and he was severely burned; then they threatened to hang him if he did not give them the names of everyone in the house who had tried to defend it against the attack.