Not a happy camper.
Posted on 10/16/2014 9:05:49 PM PDT by iowamark
On Oct. 12, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln must have breathed a bit easier.
Not because the war was over — it would last another six months. Not because he had been re-elected — the election remained nearly a month away. And not because Gen. William T. Sherman had begun his decisive march through Georgia — the general was still holding Atlanta. While much remained unsettled, Lincoln’s achievements as president seemed more secure that autumn day because the president learned that his old nemesis Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born chief justice of the Supreme Court, had died.
Ever since Taney had handed down the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, he and Lincoln had been bitter rivals. Taney was a well-known defender of slavery, a bias he showed most famously in that case, when the court attempted to resolve, once and for all, the contentious issue of slavery in federal territories. Taney and six other justices had done so by ruling squarely on the side of slaveholders; according to Taney, slaveholding was a constitutional right, one with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere.
Lincoln, who by then had served in Congress but was now back in Illinois, working as a politically active lawyer, disagreed strongly with the decision, and his opposition to Dred Scott fueled his political rise in the North. When he ran for Congress the next year, he debated the matter fiercely with his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln strongly implied that Taney, Douglas and other leaders had conspired to spread slavery throughout the land. And in 1860, Lincoln ran on a Republican Party platform that denounced the Dred Scott ruling as “a dangerous political heresy.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Lincoln’s ‘bodyguard’ Ward Hill Lamon is the man who is alleged to have been given the arrest warrant for Justice Taney.
And totally ignored the Northwest Ordinance which the Consititution affirmed and the 1st Congress made up of Framers of the Constitution ratified during their first session. That is even aside from ignoring the historical fact that free blacks in some states could and infact did vote in five of the thirteen states for the ratification of the Constitution.
Taney with the Scott decision set the bar for 'Activist Courts' that was not surpassed until Roe v. Wade.
When I lived in Frederick there was a high school named for him.
Some locals actually have the w in their names, too.
Allegedly is the key word. If Lamon was given an arrest warrant for Taney then why didn't he execute it?
Thanks
Not a happy camper.
Lamon said that the arrest warrant was Lincoln’s response to Taney’s Ex parte Merryman ruling finding the suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional.
Lamon claimed that Lincoln told him to execute the warrant at his own discretion unless otherwise directed. Lamon never gave any explanation for why he didn’t follow through with it.
Lincoln appointed Lamon United States Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1861 and he held that position until Lincoln’s death. Lamon was constantly in Lincoln’s company and he was the US Marshal, so he was in a position to have been given such an assignment if there ever was one. But we have only Lamon’s account that there was such an arrest warrant issued.
The real story here is the passing of the 13th Amendment. Back in the day when the government was constrained.
But again, how is it that every single biographer of Taney did not include this claim in any of their works on the Chief Justice? If there was a shred of truth behind it one would think that they would have detailed it. But none of them have.
Taney wouldn’t have known of an arrest warrant since it was never served, so it wouldn’t have been mentioned in any of his papers. Unless his biographers knew of Ward Lamon’s memoir they likely wouldn’t know of it at all.
Moreover its existence is controversial. The only mention of a warrant for Taney’s arrest is in Lamon’s memoir. It has some credence because Lamon was someone whom Lincoln would use for such a task. Lincoln had appointed him US Marshal for DC and he was around Lincoln all the time. Lincoln could certainly have been angry enough with Taney, for the Merryman decision as well as Dred Scott. But Lamon’s sole testimony is a thin thread so there’s room for doubt.
So what you're saying is there is absolutely no evidence of such a warrant other than Lamon's memoir. No documents. No witnesses to Lincoln giving the order. Nothing but Lamon's word.
It has some credence because Lamon was someone whom Lincoln would use for such a task. Lincoln had appointed him US Marshal for DC and he was around Lincoln all the time.
I guess my first question is what was Taney being charged with? Because I think the answer to that would determinewho would execute the arrest, civil marshals or army soldiers.
In the course of his remarks the Chief Justice took occasion to assert, that for more than a century previous to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, negroes, whether slave or free, had been regarded as “beings of an interior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect;” that consequently such persons were not included “people” in the general words of that instrument, and could not in any respect be considered as citizens; that the inhibition of slavery in the territories of the United States lying north of the line of 30 degrees and 30 minutes, known as the Missouri Compromise, was unconstitutional...”...and at the same time, invented the concept, "your mouth is writing checks your ass can't cash".
I had thought that the only source for the Taney arrest warrant was the Lamon manuscript, but author Charles Adams says that there are two other corroborating accounts.
One is found in the 1887 book ‘Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of War’ by Baltimore mayor George Brown. Brown spoke with Taney after the Merryman decision and Taney said that he knew that his own imprisonment had been a subject of discussion but that the danger had passed.
The second source is a Supreme Court Justice, Benjamin Robbins Curtis, who served on the Taney Court but who bitterly disagreed with Taney’s Dred Scott decision to the point that Curtis resigned from the Court. However in his 1879 memoir he praised Taney for his brave stand on Merryman against “the rash minister of State” who nearly committed a great crime.
The previously mentioned Mayor Brown explained that the crime Curtis referred to was the intended imprisonment of Taney. The “minister of State” was Seward, who hated Taney, and Brown believed that Seward was the driving force urging Lincoln to arrest Taney.
Jackson was intolerant of interstate discontent and proposals to divide the Union into ideologically homogeneous republics. His response to sectional feuding was to paper over very real differences by force of personality and try to ensure that agrarian interests were not trampled by equally empire-minded bankers like Nicholas Biddle.
My own personal opinion was that he erred in thinking that the federal government would always be guided by Jeffersonians by himself (n/w/s his own two death-matches with the ineffably Yankee John Quincy Adams, who dreamed up the Civil War as a way to "reorganize" [purge] the South and Southern States' politics). He hadn't the imagination, I think, to see the consequences of a host of Quincy Adamses taking over the federal government and using it as a sword.
So, do you think Jackson was basically a good-guy, lead astray by that wicked John Quincy Adams, or was he instead the unacknowledged father of Abraham Lincoln?
I have never seen claims that JQA did any such thing. He was of course a leading proponent of the expansion and eventual abolition of slavery.
The quote above, if from him, is certainly true. Unless slavery were to endure forever, the South and its politics would eventually have to be reorganized, since the South and its system was admittedly and proudly based on its peculiar institution.
But I'm unaware of any evidence he wanted this to occur via a war.
Repeat: We were not to have a "national" government.
But Adams's formula, which was 100% about coercion of the States and their People(s), contemplated just such a recasting of the Union, and yes, he did want to use rebellion to justify force. Hence, Yankee politics became all about picking a fight with the South. For the Northern insiders who knew what was going on, that is.
Notice that Jackson didn't mention actual secession such as that enacted by the several States 30 years later. He glided past it and discussed only force and resistance to the laws, as triggers for his armed wrath.
Contemplate for a minute a congressional Act, passed by narrow majorities of Yankees and signed by a Quincy Adams or a Lincoln, to turn the Carolinas into a "national" fallow-field and burn out everyone who lived there, for the pleasure of the "national" majority. Or vice versa, an Act passed by Southerners against New England, to turn the Boston States into a "national" stonemeadow for cows.
Sort of like what Slick did to Utah, 15 years ago. Remember that?
Think that would pass muster with the Framers or the People who ratified the Constitution, as "the law of the land", and Militia resistance to its enactment as "resistance to the Laws of the Nation" or some such formula?
Come on, think about it. Quincy Adams launched a sectional conspiracy to make war. And he articulated it (according to his most recent biographer) just as a young Illinois congressman took his seat in the House of Representative several rows behind him.
Articulated it in private, of course.
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