09/15/2022
Post from my Friend Andri Gowens
During Lincoln's administration, (1861-1865) several prominent political adversaries were arrested, including Congressman Clement Vallandigham, a leading Copperhead, and at least one Federal Judge, William Matthew Merrick of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. He was placed under house arrest for defying Lincoln's suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus.
(It is said that Lincoln also secretly ordered an arrest warrant, but abandoned the proposal, for Roger B. Taney, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in response to Taney's Circuit Judge ruling in Ex parte Merryman, which found Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional. Historians are spilt on this.)
Federal judge Roger Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court (and also the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision), issued a ruling that President Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln didn’t respond, appeal, or order the release of Merryman, but during a speech, Lincoln was defiant, insisting that he needed to suspend the rules in order to put down the rebellion in the South.
(Five years later, a new Supreme Court essentially backed Justice Taney’s ruling. In an unrelated case, the court held that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus and that civilians were not subject to military courts, even in times of war.)
Lincoln had over 300 newspapers shut down, and that under the suspension of habeas corpus, his administration arrested more than 14,000 political prisoners, including news reporters, judges, and Jefferson Davis, to name a few. Anyone who disagreed with him, pretty much.
(And they had the nerve to put his likeness on Mt. Rushmore... SMH...)
I think it's worth mentioning that Jefferson Davis was imprisoned from April of 1865, until May of 1867 at Fort Monroe, Virginia. He was indicted for treason, but was never tried, because the federal government feared that he would be able prove to a jury that the southern secession of 1860 to 1861 was legal. (And it absolutely was.)
Jefferson Finis Davis,
(June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was never tried for treason because the Union thought there was a strong possibility that his case would raise troubling questions about the constitutionality of secession, and that a possible acquittal would signal that the Union’s war effort had been unjustified. Davis’ trial, which would have served as a test case for the legality of secession, was delayed for four years before ultimately being dropped.
It wouldn’t have been hard to prove that Davis committed treason.
Treason in the Constitution is levying war against the United States. It was incredibly easy for them to prove that Davis levied war against the U.S., but that all changes if Davis wasn’t a U.S. citizen at the time he did so. Many in the South, and even some in the North, believed states had the right to leave a union they voluntarily joined.
When Mississippi, seceded from the Union in 1861, that removed Davis' United States citizenship. Treason is a crime of loyalty. In order to commit it, you need to be a U.S. citizen.
(Official acts by the Union preceding and during the war, such as allowing for prisoner swaps and observing other rights of foreign governments under the law of nations, might have been used to bolster the argument for secession’s legitimacy.)
The Government decided that Davis would be tried in a regularly constituted civil court, in the place where he committed the crime.
Davis committed his crime at his desk in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and prosecutors were worried they couldn’t get a jury in Richmond to convict him.
(They feared a Military trial would be deemed unfair. They wanted the appearance of just deliberation and an outcome that a divided country could perhaps better accept. One based firmly in the Constitution’s right to due process.)
So, in the end, the Government decided, "no outcome was the best outcome,” and they released him, after two years of imprisonment.
(In other words, because they couldn't get the outcome they wanted, to hell with being fair. Let's not charge him, let him rot for a little, then release him. Absolutely disgusting...)
Davis was released on bail of $100,000, which was posted by prominent citizens including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith. (Smith was a former member of the Secret Six who had supported abolitionist John Brown.) Davis remained under indictment until Andrew Johnson issued on Christmas Day of 1868 a presidential "pardon and amnesty" for the offense of treason to "every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion" and after a federal circuit court on February 15, 1869, dismissed the case against Davis after the government's attorney informed the court that he would no longer continue to prosecute Davis.
I leave you with a few Jefferson Davis quotes:
"I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came."
"All we ask is to be let alone."
"Obstacles may re**rd, but they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people ."
"The withdrawal of a State from a league has no revolutionary or insurrectionary characteristic. The government of the State remains unchanged as to all internal affairs. It is only its external or confederate relations that are altered. To term this action of a Sovereign a 'rebellion' is a gross abuse of language."
"Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are Sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is a Sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever."
Copied from Southern Perspective page
