CHAPTER TWELVE:
The Reign of Terror in the Northern States
The Political Prisoners of Lincoln's Regime
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. On the long list of champions of human freedom, there is not one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of Executive authority. On the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such champions has been to limit and restrain it. Through all the history of the contest for liberty, Executive power has been regarded as a lion that must be caged. So far as being the object of enlightened, popular trust; so far as being considered the natural protection of popular right, it has been dreaded as the great object of danger.
Our security is our watchfulness of Executive power. It was the construction of this department which was infinitely the most difficult in the great work of erecting our government. To give to the Executive such power as should make it useful, and yet not dangerous; efficient, independent, strong, and yet prevent it from sweeping away everything by its military and civil power, by the influence of patronage and favor; this, indeed, was difficult. They who had this work to do saw this difficulty, and we see it. If we would maintain our system, we should act wisely, by using every restraint, every guard the Constitution has provided when we and those who come after us, have done all we can do, and all they can do, it will be well for us and them, if the Executive, by the power of patronage and party, shall not prove an overmatch for all other branches of Government. I will not acquiesce in the reversal of the principles of all just ideas of Government. I will not degrade the character of popular representation. I will not blindly confide, when all my experience admonishes to be jealous. I will not trust Executive power, vested in a single magistrate, to keep the vigils of liberty. Encroachment must be resisted at every step, whether the consequence be prejudicial or not, if there be an illegal exercise of power, it must be resisted in the proper manner. We are not to wait till great mischief comes; till the Government is overthrown, or liberty itself put in extreme jeopardy. We would be unworthy sons of our fathers were we so to regard questions affecting freedom.(1)
In contrast to these historically accepted principles, William Whiting made the following astonishing claim in his 1862 work entitled The War Powers of the President: "The powers conveyed in this 18th clause of Art. I., Sect. 8 [of the Constitution], are of vast importance and extent. It may be said that they are, in one sense, unlimited and discretionary. They are more than imperial...."(2) As we have seen, it was under woefully false pretenses that Lincoln invoked these so-called Executive "war powers" to meet the exigencies of a declared "insurrection" with "the exercise of belligerent rights"(3) without the consent of Congress, and, while his "fellow countrymen" were thereafter embroiled in a bloodbath which his own party had planned and instigated, he was able to quietly dismantle the Union created under the Constitution and replace it with a consolidated military government, or a "temporary dictatorship,"(4) in which the "supreme law" would be nothing short of his own will.(5) It was this fact that was announced by Republican E.C. Ingersoll in a public speech in 1862:
The President, in such a time, I believe, is clothed with power as full as that of the Czar of Russia....
If it be necessary, perhaps it is just as well for the people to become familiar with this power, and the right of its exercise, now as at any other time.
If the President should determine that in order to crush the rebellion the Constitution itself should be suspended during the rebellion, I believe he has the right to do it.(6)
According to Lincoln's Attorney-General, Edward Bates, the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizure did not extend to "political arrests." Whereas the purpose of "judicial arrests" was "to secure the presence of the accused so that he may be tried for an alleged crime before a civil court," "political arrests" in "disordered times" were "subject to the somewhat broad and as yet undefined discretion of the President as political chief of the nation." This latter species of arrest were said to be "beyond the reach of the judicial officers and subject only to the political power of the President, who may at his discretion dispose of the prisoners by orders addressed to his subordinate officers either civil or military."(7) Since, as Bates had declared in his 5 July 1861 opinion, the President "must of necessity be the sole judge both of the exigency which requires him to act and of the manner in which it is most prudent for him to employ the powers intrusted to him,"(8) what was being erected was nothing less than an unaccountable Executive dictatorship in which the liberties of American citizens and other residents in the country were subjected entirely to the political whim of one man. As seen in the previous chapter, Lincoln had been routinely suspending habeas corpus in individual cases as he saw fit since 27 April 1861. This action filled the military forts and other prisons along the Atlantic seaboard with Americans from every social class, including several Maryland Legislators, whom Lincoln suspected would vote to take their State out of the Union. Later that year, three British subjects Charles Green, Andrew Low, and an unnamed Irishman were likewise arrested and imprisoned for several months at Fort Lafayette for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Government. The report of the British Imperial Parliament of 10 February 1862 related the treatment of these prisoners as follows:
The House would remember that on Friday last [Earl John Russell] made some remarks on the case of an Englishman in America who had been taken into custody and sent to prison under the warrant of Mr. Seward. Since Friday he had received further information in reference to similar cases, but they were if possible worse than the one he then mentioned. He understood that at this moment there were no less than three British subjects who had been for four or five months confined in Lafayette prison, and they had been detained there without any charge of any sort or kind having been made against them. There had been no inquiry made into their cases. An inquiry had been asked for, but it had been refused unless they first consented to take the oath of allegiance to the Government of the United States....
The state of this prison was very bad. In it were confined twenty-three political prisoners, and two-thirds of them were placed in irons. From this prison the light and air were excluded, the ventilation was imperfect and the atmosphere was oppressive and intolerable. The prisoners were deprived of the decencies of life, and the water supplied to them was foul and for some purposes it was salt.(9)
When Lord Richard Lyons, the British Minister, complained of these outrages to Secretary of State Seward, he received the following reply: "My Lord, I can touch the bell at my right hand and order the arrest of a man in Ohio; I can again touch the bell and order the arrest of a man in New York, and no power on earth save that of the President can release them."(10) This claimed power was enlarged in Lincoln's proclamation of 24 September 1862, in which he declared that "all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of disloyal practices... shall be subject to martial law, and liable to trial and punishment by courts-martial or military commission."(11) This proclamation was mainly intended to stem the tide of dissent in the North arising from another of his proclamations the Emancipation Proclamation which was issued in its preliminary form just two days previously.
Two days later, on the twenty-sixth of September, the office of Provost Marshal General was created within the War Department and given the authority to arrest all those suspected of such "disloyal practices."(12) Lincoln's proclamation, and the subsequent creation of what amounted to a military police force under himself as Commander-in-Chief, was directed primarily to one class of Americans the Northern Democrats (Copperheads) who had ever opposed the war policy of the Lincoln Administration. For example, the Democrats of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had issued the following press release just prior to the fall of Fort Sumter:
If this Administration wickedly plunges the country into civil war, it will be a war between the Republican party and the Southern states.... In such a conflict the Northern Democrats can have no sympathy with the Government.... If the Administration is bent upon having a fight... they created the difficulty and their partisans must carry on the war. Northern Democrats can never shoulder a musket or pull a trigger against those whose rights they conscientiously believe have been trampled upon. If this be treason, it is treason against the Chicago platform, and on behalf of the majority of the American people; treason for the Union, and against its enemies. If this is treason, make the most of it.(13)
Regardless of a complete lack of constitutional authority to do so, Lincoln and his Provost Marshals arrested and imprisoned an estimated 38,000 political prisoners(14) "representatives of the liberal professions, of the bar, the press and judicature, and many of the best classes of American society"(15) who were denied a trial before an impartial jury of their peers, as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, and subjected to the farce of a trial before a military tribunal, if they were granted the benefit of a trial at all. In mid-Nineteenth Century America, supposedly the model to the rest of the world of republican government, many subsequently languished in such places of misery as the aforementioned Lafayette and Old Capitol prisons without ever knowing the nature of the charges against them.(16) In this, Lincoln commanded what even the ancient Roman civil code, at the height of the Empire, would not allow; in Rome and her provinces, a citizen could not be punished or imprisoned who had not been charged for a specific crime, who had not been allowed to confront his accusers face-to-face with the opportunity to answer for himself, and who had not been properly condemned by lawful judicial process.(17) As noted by James Randall:
In the treatment of "disloyal" practices the government under Lincoln carried its authority far beyond the normal restraints of civil justice. To put the subject in its legal setting one must remember that in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence there is the fundamental conception of the "rule of law" the concept that government itself is under the law, that it must not be arbitrary, and that its agents are punishable or liable to damages if they wrongfully invade private rights. Against this concept there is the doctrine of "military necessity" with its maxim "necessity knows no law." Those who assume that the whole subject of governmental restraint in time of war can be dismissed by repeating such maxims are unaware of much of the nation's legal history. A government at war, according to a long line of American precedent and interpretation, must restrain itself in various ways. It must not overstep international law; it must not violate treaties; it must keep within what are called the "laws of war"; it must not ignore certain rights of enemy citizens when conducting a regime of military occupation; it must not destroy civil rights among its own people.(18)
Congress Rubber-Stamps Executive Tyranny
On 3 March 1863, the Republican-dominated Congress passed an ex post facto Act "relating to habeas corpus and regulating judicial proceedings in certain cases," which provided that "during the present rebellion, the President of the United States, whenever, in his judgment, the public safety may require it, is authorized to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in any case throughout the United States, or any part thereof."(19) The purpose of this Act, according to Radical Republican James G. Blaine, was to "confirm to the President by law the right which he had of his own power been exercising."(20) Concurrent with the Habeas Corpus Act was another which indemnified the President for any prior illegal acts and further relieved him from legal liability for any future arrests.(21) Lincoln issued yet another proclamation on the fifteenth of September to the effect that "the writ of habeas corpus is suspended throughout the United States... and that this suspension shall continue throughout the duration of such rebellion, or until this proclamation shall, by a subsequent one, to be issued by the President of the United States, be modified or revoked."(22) The proclamation authorized the arrest of all "aiders and abettors of the enemy," defining such as "he... who seeks to exalt the motives, character, and capacity of armed traitors; to magnify their resources, etc.," and "he who overrates the success of our adversaries or underrates our own, and he who seeks false causes of complaint against our government, or inflames party spirit among ourselves and gives to the enemy that moral support which is more valuable to them than regiments of soldiers or millions of dollars."(23) Of course, the U.S. marshals and police officers empowered by this proclamation were left to their own discretion as to what constituted "exalting the motives" of the Southern people and "overrating their success."
An objection to this rubber-stamping by Congress of the President's illegal acts was raised by thirty-six Democrats in the House who pointed out that the legislation "purports to confirm and make valid by act of Congress arrests and imprisonments which were not only not warranted by the Constitution of the United States but were in palpable violation of its express prohibitions."(24) When it was requested that this protest be entered into the House Journal, Thaddeus Stevens, another radical Republican, moved to lay the request on the table, and the motion carried by a vote of 75 to 41; all votes in the affirmative were cast by Republicans.(25) Undeterred, Indiana Democrat Henry W. Harrington introduced the following resolutions on the seventeenth of December in opposition to the previous Habeas Corpus Act:
Whereas the Constitution of the United States provides: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it"; and whereas such provision is contained in the portion of the Constitution defining legislative powers; and not in the provisions defining executive powers, and whereas the Constitution further provides: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated," etc.; and whereas the Thirty-Seventh Congress did by act claim to confer upon the President of the United States the power at his will and pleasure to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus throughout the United States without limitation or conditions; and whereas the President of the United States, by proclamation, has assumed to suspend such privileges of the citizen in the loyal States; and whereas the people of such States have been subjected to arbitrary arrests without process of law, and to unreasonable searches and seizures, and have been denied the right to a speedy trial and investigation, and have languished in prisons at the arbitrary pleasure of the Chief Executive and his military subordinates;
Now therefore, Resolved, by the House of Representatives of the United States, That no power is delegated by the Constitution of the United States, either to the legislative or executive branch, to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in any State loyal to the Constitution and Government not invaded, and in which the civil and judicial power are in full operation.
2. Resolved, That Congress has no power under the Constitution to delegate to the President of the United States the authority to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and imprison at his pleasure, without process of law or trial, the citizens of the loyal States.
3. Resolved, That the assumption of the right by the executive of the United States to deprive the citizens of such loyal States of the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and to imprison them at his pleasure, without process of law, is unworthy the progress of the age, is consistent only with a despotic power unlimited by constitutional obligations, and is wholly subversive of the elementary principles of freedom upon which the Government of the United States and of the several States, is based.
4. Resolved, That the Judiciary Committee is instructed to prepare and report a bill to this House protecting the rights of the citizens in the loyal States, in strict accordance with the foregoing provisions of the Constitution of the United States.(26)
These resolutions were immediately attacked by the Republicans in the House and were thereafter rejected by a majority vote of 90 to 67; predictably, all votes in the negative were cast by Republicans.(27)
Why Lincoln Favored Courts-Martial
Having thus established himself as a military dictator, Lincoln naturally favored summary courts-martial over constitutional courts because such proceedings "are not based on the written law,"(28) and such courts are "not to be bound... by common-law rules,"(29) and are "in great degree devoid of the technicalities which characterize the proceedings of ordinary courts."(30) Daniel Webster had pointed out a generation before Lincoln's ascension to power that "military courts are organized to convict,"(31) and they may do so on the most frivolous of pretenses, if any pretense at all. Furthermore, it was the belief of the Republicans in power that "there is no place within the boundaries of the republic where the court martial may not take the place of civil courts and thrust aside the laws," and that "the generals in command, subject to the President, are the only judges of the necessity of the time and occasion when such court martial or order may be properly issued, and no civil court can interfere."(32) Colonel Henry Bertram of the 20th Wisconsin Volunteers added to this belief the threat that "those who complain so loudly and so lithely about the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the institution of martial law in time of actual rebellion, ought themselves to be suspended between heaven and earth by a few yards of hemp well adjusted around their necks" [emphasis in original].(33)
On 16 May 1863, a convention of Democrats assembled in Albany, New York to protest the arbitrary arrest of Clement Vallandigham who had been speaking publicly against the Lincoln regime since July of 1861.(34) The resolutions produced by this convention opened with an affirmation of the loyalty of the Democratic party to the alleged purpose of the war to "preserve the Union," and they went on to exhort the Administration to "be true to the Constitution... [to] recognize and maintain the rights of the States and the liberties of the citizen... [and to] everywhere outside of the lines of necessary military occupation and the scenes of insurrection, exert all its powers to maintain the supremacy of the civil over military law." The resolutions went on to state:
Resolved, That in view of these principles we denounce the recent assumption of a military commander to seize and try a citizen of Ohio, Clement L. Vallandigham, for no other reason than words addressed to a public meeting, in criticism of the course of the Administration, and in condemnation of the military orders of that general.
Resolved, That this assumption of power by a military tribunal, if successfully asserted, not only abrogates the right of the people to assemble and discuss the affairs of Government, the liberty of speech and of the press, the right of trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the privilege of habeas corpus, but it strikes a fatal blow at the supremacy of law, and the authority of the State and Federal constitutions.
Resolved, That the Constitution of the United States the supreme law of the land has defined the crime of treason against the United States to consist "only in levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort;" and has provided that "no person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." And it further provides that "no person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury; except in cases arising in the land and naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger;" and further, that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right of a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime was committed."(35)
Lincoln, of course, was unimpressed by the logic of these resolutions and simply justified his actions as follows:
...[T]hese provisions of the Constitution have no application to the case we have in hand, because the arrests complained of were not made for treason that is, not for the treason defined in the Constitution.... The arrests were made on totally different grounds, and the proceedings following accorded with the grounds of the arrests....
Yet thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals, I was slow to adopt the strong measures which by degrees I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the Constitution, and as indispensable to the public safety. Nothing is better known to history than that courts of justice are utterly incompetent to such cases. Civil courts are organized chiefly for trials of individuals, or, at most, a few individuals acting in concert, and this in quiet times, and on charges of crimes well defined in the law.... Again, a jury too frequently has at least one member more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor. And yet, again, he who dissuades one man from volunteering, or induces one soldier to desert, weakens the Union cause as much as he who kills a Union soldier in battle. Yet this dissuasion or inducement may be so conducted as to be no defined crime of which any civil court would take cognizance.
Ours is a case of rebellion... and the provision of the Constitution that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in case of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it," is the provision which specially applies to our present case. This provision plainly attests the understanding of those who made the Constitution that ordinary courts of justice are inadequate to "cases of rebellion" attests their purpose that, in such cases, men may be held in custody whom the courts, acting on ordinary rules, would discharge. Habeas corpus does not discharge men who are proved to be guilty of defined crime; and its suspension is allowed by the Constitution on purpose that men may be arrested and held who cannot be proved to be guilty of defined crime, "when, in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." This is precisely our present case a case of rebellion, wherein the public safety does require the suspension. Indeed, arrests by process of courts and arrests in cases of rebellion do not proceed altogether upon the same basis.... In the latter case arrests are made not so much for what has been done, as for what probably would be done. The latter is more for the preventive and less for the vindictive than the former. In such cases the purposes of men are much more easily understood than in cases of ordinary crime. The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy; much more if he talks ambiguously talks for his country with "buts" and "ifs" and "ands."
...[T]he Constitution is not, in its application, in all respects the same, in cases of rebellion or invasion involving the public safety, as it is in times of profound peace and public security.(36)
In other words, any man who did not openly and unconditionally pledge his allegiance to the Lincoln Administration and its unconstitutional war against the Southern people and its usurpation of the rights of the Northern people, was guilty of this newly defined "treason" and subject to arrest without warrant and imprisonment without trial in a lawful court. The outrage of the Democrats was certainly justified:
The President not only admits that citizens have been deprived of their liberty on mere partisan conjectures of their possible intentions, but he confesses that these conjectures have had nothing to rest upon. "The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his government is discussed, cannot be misunderstood." Was anything so extraordinary ever before uttered by the chief magistrate of a free country? Men are torn from their homes and immured in bastiles for the shocking crime of silence! Citizens of the model republic of the world are not only punished for speaking their opinions, but are plunged into dungeons for holding their tongues! When before, in the annuls of tyranny, was silence ever punished as a crime?...
Few among us ever expected to live to see such things done; and nobody, we are sure, to see them so unblushingly confessed. What must be Mr. Lincoln's appreciation of the public sentiment of the world, when he thus comes before the country with a paper containing statements which sound more like the last dying speech and conversation of a tyrant than like the justification of the elected ruler of a free people?
The courts, of course, cannot punish this dreadful crime of "standing by and saying nothing." Mr. Lincoln admits this, and assigns a very good reason: "Because," says he, "the arrests complained of were not made for treason that is, not the treason defined in the Constitution." It is a tolerably safe position, that silence, "to stand by and say nothing," is not "the treason defined in the Constitution"; it is a treason which our fathers never thought of providing against; they guaranteed free speech, but they never imagined that free silence could ever stand in need of protection. So far from silence being "the treason defined in the Constitution," it is "a treason" invented by Abraham Lincoln. It was reserved for him, in the last half of the enlightened nineteenth century, to hit upon this refinement, which had escaped the acuteness of all preceding tyrants [emphasis in original].(37)
Another of the men thus arrested by Lincoln's minions was Francis Key Howard, the editor of the Baltimore Exchange and grandson of the author of the national anthem, who described his imprisonment at Fort McHenry in the following words:
When I looked out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant coincidence. On that day forty-seven years before my grandfather, Mr. F.S. Key, then prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry. When on the following morning the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, the Star-Spangled Banner. As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before. The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.(38)
As pointed out by General Benjamin Butler, "The Lincoln Government was rarely aided, but was usually impeded by the decisions of the Supreme Court," and therefore one of the reasons Lincoln suspended habeas corpus was "to relieve himself of the rulings of the court."(39) As was discussed in the previous chapter, Lincoln even signed an order to arrest the eminent and aged Chief Justice Roger Taney himself for his bold declaration in Ex parte Merryman that "the president has exercised a power which he does not possess under the Constitution." Former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis' liberty was also imperiled when he wrote a blistering critique of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 entitled Executive Power:
When the Constitution says that the President shall be the commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States... does it mean that he shall possess military power and command over all citizens of the United States; that, by military edicts, he may control all citizens, as if enlisted in the army and navy, or in the militia called into actual service of the United States? Does it mean that he may make himself a legislator, and enact penal laws governing the citizens of the United States, and erect tribunals, and create offices to enforce his penal edicts upon citizens?...
He is general-in-chief; but can a general-in-chief disobey any law of his own country? When he can, he superadds to his rights as a commander the powers of a usurper; and that is military despotism....
Whence, then, do these edicts spring? They spring from the assumed power to extend martial law over the whole territory of the United States; a power, for the exercise of which by the President, there is no warrant whatever in the Constitution; a power which no free people could confer upon an executive officer, and remain a free people. For it would make him the absolute master of their lives, their liberties, and their property, with power to delegate his mastership to such satraps as he might select, or as might be imposed on his credulity, or his fears. Amidst the great dangers which encompass us, in our struggles to encounter them, in our natural eagerness to lay hold of efficient means to accomplish our vast labors, let us beware how we borrow weapons from the armory of arbitrary power. They cannot be wielded by the hands of a free people. Their blows will finally fall upon themselves.(40)
The Lincoln Regime Persecutes the Church
Lincoln and his military satraps even dared lay their hands upon the churches in the North and in the occupied portions of the South. One example of many was the arrest of J.R. Stewart, a clergyman of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Virginia on 9 February 1862 by the order of the State Department in Washington, D.C. The alleged ground of the arrest was that Stewart refused to pray for the President of the United States;(41) his congregation was also accused of "habitual mockery of the Stars and Stripes and their insolent bearing toward Union citizens and U.S. soldiers."(42) However, the true purpose, as revealed by the perpetrators of the crime, was "to intimidate and compel the clergy of the Border States to withdraw the support and consolation of the Christian religion from a stricken people, who fled to it as their only hope, and who used it to strengthen themselves to great endurance."(43)
The account of the arrest, which should be sufficient to arouse the indignation of any Christian people, is as follows: Stewart, who was known to privately withhold support for the war policies of the Lincoln Administration, made it known in a letter to the State Department that "being an American citizen, he could not allow the State to dictate to the Church what petition should be asked of the Great King," and that "it would be better to die than to allow the Church to be used as a political tool."
A communion sermon was preached which alluded to the historical fact that all things held most dear by his congregation were "blood-bought," the most sacred of which was the atoning death of the Lord Jesus Christ which they would henceforth celebrate. In Stewart's audience were two Government agents, who were assigned to take note of anything that could be used as a pretense for his arrest. When the sermon had been thus illustrated, one of the agents spoke to the other: "All precious things are 'blood-bought'; that means that freedom is blood-bought; it means the Magna Charta is blood-bought; it is aimed at the President's proclamation. Write it down as treason. Damn the priests! I intend to make them preach and pray my way. We'll see which has the longest sword, their master, or ours!" To this, the second agent added, "If I break this fellow down, all the rest will cave in."
Soldiers from the Eighth Illinois Cavalry, under the command of Captain John Farnsworth, were then ordered by the State Department to invade the church on the following Sunday, surround the minister as he prayed, and compel him by sabres thrust against his breast to speak only as commanded. Ignoring the martial throng about him, Stewart began his prayer: "From all evil and mischief; from all sedition, privy conspiracy...." The congregation responded, "Good Lord, deliver us."
"Bless all Christian rulers and magistrates," Stewart continued, "and give them grace to execute justice and maintain truth." At this point, the officer in charge of the unruly mob wrested the Bible from the minister's hands and threw it to the ground shouting, "You are a traitor! in the name and by the authority of the President of the United States, I arrest you!" Stewart calmly stood, faced the officer, and motioning to his congregation, he said, "Let these go, take me; but before I yield myself up to you, I summon you to appear before the bar of the King of kings, to answer the charge of interrupting his ambassador, while in the house of God, and in the discharge of his duty."(44)
Stewart was then escorted to prison by two armed sergeants, while the young females of his family were seized and dragged through the streets to the delight of the gathered mobs of "loyal" citizens. The office of the newspaper which reported these atrocities was subsequently burned to the ground, as was that of the religious journal, The Southern Churchman. Stewart was finally exiled from his home, and spent the duration of the war ministering to the wounded and dying on the battlefields, and in the prisons and hospitals. Such monstrous acts of tyranny were all perpetrated with the full knowledge and direction of Lincoln's Administration, and were commenced by the finger of William Seward as it nonchalantly touched the infamous "little bell."
We close this chapter with the following warning from Stephen D. Carpenter a warning which went largely unheeded by his contemporaries:
From the foregoing evidence... we cannot escape the general conclusion that it is the purpose of those in power and those who control the Administration, to plunge us into despotism to finally destroy this old Union, and to build up a government on its ruins, in accordance with the early motives of a privileged aristocracy, or limited monarchy. The Union as it was, we need never look for again. So the despots in power tell us, and if they can prevent it, that fabric of free government reared by the combined wisdom and through the mutual sacrifice of a race of heroes and statesmen, will never be permitted again to shed the luster of its glory on a people that will soon lament the entire loss of liberty....
Our government is undergoing a revolution at the North as well as at the South. The party in power... have put themselves on record in favor of a different government from that of our fathers. They spit upon and deride the Constitution. But they knew they could not change this government to that of a military despotism, except by and through the means of military power. Hence, they have stricken down the civil and erected the military standard. We are now virtually under martial law. We can exercise no civil functions that do not suit the pleasure of the Military Dictator. This is the land-mark we have reached to-day. No man can deny this fact, and if this power is not exercised in every particular, it only shows that the historian was correct when he asserted as a general maxim that "new born despotism is both timid and cautious, and seldom reaches its altitude at one bound, but chooses rather to approach it by slow but sure degrees." It is a shrewd policy to allow the people for a while some of their rights, lest a counter revolution might be inconvenient and troublesome [emphasis in original].(45)
Endnotes
1. Daniel Webster, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, pages 121-122.
2. William Whiting, The War Powers of the President (Boston: John L. Shorey, 1862), page 29. Whiting was a lawyer from Boston who served as Solicitor General for the War Department from 1862 to 1865. His book, War Powers of the President, was written as an apologetic for Lincolns unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Of course, Whitings thesis failed from the outset because Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, to which he traced these alleged Executive war powers, begins with these words: The Congress shall have Power....
3. William E. Birkhimer, LL.B., Military Government and Martial Law (Kansas City, Missouri: Franklin Hudson Publishing Company, 1914), page 48. William Birkhimer was a Major-General in the U.S. Army and was detailed by the U.S. War Department as Acting Judge-Advocate of the Department of the Columbia. His book is considered to be the authoritative textbook on the subject. Before the second edition was published in 1914, Judge-Advocate General George B. Davis wrote in a letter to the author dated San Francisco, Calif., July 1, 1904: "The original work is the most complete treatise on the subject in the English language, and embodies the views which prevail in Anglo-Saxon countries on the subject of martial law and military occupation." Davis went on: "I hope the revision will appear in the near future, so that the work can be used in the instruction of officers of the Army in connection with the government of occupied territory and the restoration of order in communities in which military force has been employed with a view to secure the execution of the laws." Birkhimer took ill when the manuscript for the second edition was delivered to the printer, so Major Daniel H. Boughton, U.S. Army, LL.B, head of the Law Department of the Infantry and Cavalry School and Staff College, took upon himself the task of revising and correcting the proof-sheets and preparing the index.
4. United States Senate, A Brief History of Emergency Powers in the United States: A Working Paper (Special Committee on National Emergencies and Delegated Emergency Powers, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session; Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July, 1974), page 15.
5. Birkhimer, Military Government, page 54.
6. E.C. Ingersoll, excerpt from a speech delivered at Bryan Hall, Chicago, Illinois in 1862; quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 101; Edmonds, Facts and Falsehoods, page 193.
7. Bates, letter to Simon Cameron, 30 December 1861; in Official Records: Armies, Series II, Volume II, pages 182-183.
8. Bates, 5 July 1861 opinion; ibid., page 25.
9. Report of the British Imperial Parliament in relation to the arrest of British subjects in America, 10 February 1862; ibid., pages 213-214.
10. Seward, letter to Lord Richard Lyons, 6 January 1862; quoted by Edmonds, Facts and Falsehoods, page 213. See also Official Records: Armies, Series II, Volume II, pages 214-215.
11. Lincoln, quoted by Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Executive Power (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1862), page vi.
12. Curtis, ibid., page vii.
13. Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Patriot Union, 9 April 1861.
14. John J. Lalor (editor), Cyclopedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States (Chicago, Illinois: Rand McNally, 1881), Volume II, pages 432-434.
15. Official Records: Armies, Series II, Volume II, page 214.
16. John A. Marshall, American Bastile (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Thomas W. Hartley and Company, 1881); Mahoney, Prisoner of State.
17. The Holy Bible, Acts 16:37-38, 19:38-39, 25:16, 25:27.
18. Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, pages 387-388.
19. Statutes at Large, Volume XII, page 735. Following the war, this Act was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in The Justices v. Murray (1869), 76 U.S. 274.
20. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, Volume I, page 455.
21. Franklin Pierce, Federal Usurpation (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1908), page 47.
22. Lincoln, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 254.
23. Lincoln, quoted by Pierce, Federal Usurpation, page 48.
24. Quoted by Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, Volume I, pages 455-456.
25. Blaine, ibid., page 456.
26. Resolutions submitted to the House of Representatives by Henry W. Harrington on 17 December 1863; quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, page 255.
27. Carpenter, ibid.
28. Birkhimer, Military Government, page 526.
29. Birkhimer, ibid., page 539.
30. Birkhimer, ibid., page 534.
31. Daniel Webster, quoted by Edmonds, Facts and Falsehoods, page 211.
32. Janesville (Wisconsin) Gazette, 9 June 1863.
33. Henry Bertram, Wisconsin State Journal, 18 April 1863.
34. See Vallandigham's response to Lincoln, 10 July 1861.
35. The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1863 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870), Volume III, pages 799-800.
36. Lincoln, ibid., pages 800-802.
37. New York World, quoted by Carpenter, Logic of History, pages 222-223.
38. Francis Key Howard, quoted by Marshall, American Bastile, pages 645-646.
39. Butler, Butler's Book, page .
40. Curtis, Executive Power, pages 23, 30. Curtis' expose of the unconstitutionality of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is especially interesting in light of the fact that, not only did he view the war against the Southern States as justified, but he had also been the author of one of the two dissenting opinions in the 1857 Scott v. Sandford case before resigning from the Supreme Court. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), page 59.
41. S.W. Morton to F.W. Seward, 9 February 1862; Official Records: Armies, Series 2, Volume II, page 213.
42. Morton to William H. Seward, 12 February 1862; ibid., pages 217-218.
43. Marshall, American Bastile, pages 92-93.
44. Marshall, ibid., page 94.
45. Carpenter, Logic of History, page 241.
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