Posted on 08/20/2004 5:43:21 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861
Imagine that America had a Chief Justice of the United States who actually believed in enforcing the Constitution and, accordingly, issued an opinion that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional because Congress did not fulfill its constitutional duty in declaring war. Imagine also that the neocon media, think tanks, magazines, radio talk shows, and television talking heads then waged a vicious, months-long smear campaign against the chief justice, insinuating that he was guilty of treason and should face the punishment for it. Imagine that he is so demonized that President Bush is emboldened to issue an arrest warrant for the chief justice, effectively destroying the constitutional separation of powers and declaring himself dictator.
An event such as this happened in the first months of the Lincoln administration when Abraham Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Roger B. Taney after the 84-year-old judge issued an opinion that only Congress, not the president, can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln had declared the writ null and void and ordered the military to begin imprisoning thousands of political dissenters. Taney’s opinion, issued as part of his duties as a circuit court judge in Maryland, had to do with the case of Ex Parte Merryman (May 1861). The essence of his opinion was not that habeas corpus could not be suspended, only that the Constitution requires Congress to do it, not the president. In other words, if it was truly in "the public interest" to suspend the writ, the representatives of the people should have no problem doing so and, in fact, it is their constitutional prerogative.
As Charles Adams wrote in his LRC article, "Lincoln’s Presidential Warrant to Arrest Chief Justice Roger B. Taney," there were, at the time of his writing, three corroborating sources for the story that Lincoln actually issued an arrest warrant for the chief justice. It was never served for lack of a federal marshal who would perform the duty of dragging the elderly chief justice out of his chambers and throwing him into the dungeon-like military prison at Fort McHenry. (I present even further evidence below).
All of this infuriates the Lincoln Cult, for such behavior is unquestionably an atrocious act of tyranny and despotism. But it is true. It happened. And it was only one of many similar constitutional atrocities committed by the Lincoln administration in the name of "saving the Constitution."
The first source of the story is a history of the U.S. Marshal’s Service written by Frederick S. Calhoun, chief historian for the Service, entitled The Lawmen: United States Marshals and their Deputies, 1789–1989. Calhoun recounts the words of Lincoln’s former law partner Ward Hill Laman, who also worked in the Lincoln administration.
Upon hearing of Laman’s history of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and the mass arrest of Northern political opponents, Lincoln cultists immediately sought to discredit Laman by calling him a drunk. (Ulysses S. Grant was also an infamous drunk, but no such discrediting is ever perpetrated on him by the Lincoln "scholars".)
But Adams comes up with two more very reliable accounts of the same story. One is an 1887 book by George W. Brown, the mayor of Baltimore, entitled Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1887). In it is the transcript of a conversation Mayor Brown had with Taney in which Taney talks of his knowledge that Lincoln had issued an arrest warrant for him.
Yet another source is A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Judge Curtis represented President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate; wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case; and resigned from the court over a dispute with Judge Taney over that case. Nevertheless, in his memoirs he praises the propriety of Justice Taney in upholding the Constitution by opposing Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He refers to Lincoln’s arrest warrant as a "great crime."
I recently discovered yet additional corroboration of Lincoln’s "great crime." Mr. Phil Magness sent me information suggesting that the intimidation of federal judges was a common practice in the early days of the Lincoln administration (and the later days as well). In October of 1861 Lincoln ordered the District of Columbia Provost Marshal to place armed sentries around the home of a Washington, D.C. Circuit Court judge and place him under house arrest. The reason was that the judge had issued a writ of habeas corpus to a young man being detained by the Provost Marshal, allowing the man to have due process. By placing the judge under house arrest Lincoln prevented the judge from attending the hearing of the case. The documentation of this is found in Murphy v. Porter (1861) and in United States ex re John Murphy v. Andrew Porter, Provost Marshal District of Columbia (2 Hay. & Haz. 395; 1861).
The second ruling contained a letter from Judge W.M. Merrick, the judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, explaining how, after issuing the writ of habeas corpus to the young man, he was placed under house arrest. Here is the final paragraph of the letter:
After dinner I visited my brother Judges in Georgetown, and returning home between half past seven and eight o’clock found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the Provost-Marshal. I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o’clock. Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house. Thus it appears that a military officer against whom a writ in the appointed form of law has first threatened with and afterwards arrested and imprisoned the attorney who rightfully served the writ upon him. He continued, and still continues, in contempt and disregard of the mandate of the law, and has ignominiously placed an armed guard to insult and intimidate by its presence the Judge who ordered the writ to issue, and still keeps up this armed array at his door, in defiance and contempt of the justice of the land. Under the circumstances I respectfully request the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court to cause this memorandum to be read in open Court, to show the reasons for my absence from my place upon the bench, and that he will cause this paper to be entered at length on the minutes of the Court . . . W.M. Merrick Assistant Judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia
As Adams writes, the Lincoln Cult is terrified that this truth will become public knowledge, for it if does, it means that Lincoln "destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end."
Exactly right.
August 19, 2004
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country’s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004).
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
free dixie,sw
I pinged him and asked for an explanation way back up the thread, but he blew me off and just kept posting. What the hell kind of deal is that?
Now, his attention having been called to this stuff three times previously (nolu chan, 4ConservativeJustices, and me), he does it again.
This sucks.
Yeah, that's right, dude. Still talking about you over here.
Northern policy-makers soon theorized their practice. Here Francis Lieber has pride of place. Lieber, a German immigrant who had fought in the wars against Napoleon, was – out of some combination of liberalism, romanticism, and nationalism - extremely sentimental about the state (which Nietzsche, by contrast, called the coldest of cold monsters). Thus Lieber could write in 1838 that "the state stands incalculably above the individual, is worthy of every sacrifice, of life, and goods, of wife and children, for it is the society of societies, the sacred union by which the creator leads man to civilization, the bond, the pacifier, the humanizer, of men, the protector of all undertakings...."Out of this pseudo-Hegelian waffle comes the notion that freedom can be realized only within the modern abstract state; in the US, this meant the allegedly indestructible union. Along with this perilous modification of liberalism came, in practice, a legal-positivist approach to the laws of war, embodied in General Orders No. 100, which Lieber wrote for Lincoln’s War Department.
Section 15 of these Orders reads: "Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of war....." Naturally, the decision as to which persons it was "whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable" was best left to commanders in the field, or their superiors.
A cynic might well say that this "code" allowed for the after-the-fact justification of anything a commander might claim had been "necessary" to achieve military objectives. One such cynic was James Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, who commented: "[I]n this code of military necessity... the acts of atrocity and violence which have been committed by the officers of the United States and have shocked the moral sense of civilized nations are to find an apology and defense." Further, "a military commander under this code may pursue a line of conduct in accordance with principles of justice, faith, and honor, or he may justify conduct correspondent with the warfare of the barbarous hordes who overran the Roman Empire...."
...
Given the assumption of a right to win, the property and even the lives of enemy civilians began to weigh much less than they had in the older rules of war. Faced with such matters, Lincoln apologists typically resort to what historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel calls the Hitler-Stalin-Mao test. Clearly, Sherman’s March falls far short of that.
For one such historian, the fact that Northern soldiers did not directly shoot civilians is a sufficient proof of the humanity of the war. This is all well and good, but one would like an explanation for the roughly 50,000 missing Southern civilians of all colors and creeds. They seem to have perished from causes attendant on the war, once it became a war against property and economic resources.
In July 1862, Lincoln rather typically told Southern unionists, who were complaining of Northern seizures of property that "broken eggs cannot be mended" – a statement which puts him directly in the line of Jacobin-Bolshevik political ruthlessness. As a result of all this, Lincoln has become "famed for his compassion," in historian James M. McPherson’s words. It would appear that Lincoln’s myth has long since outrun the facts.
Is it any wonder that so many Lincoln worshipers end up espousing Stalinism?
It's the kind of deal perpetrated by a known liar and fraud who believes that his lie is justified by the end that it promotes, viz. Lincoln's pristine image.
Very true, and very sick. As far as I'm concerned he has wholly forfeited his write to turn to a moral argument against slavery as his trump card. Even the most avid confederate will concede the sinfulness of slavery and make no effort to try and defend it. But he excuses away and even CELEBRATES a much greater sin than slavery, a sin against human liberty. He celebrates and defends murder in the most brutal and despotic forms, and that is a sin against human life itself making it necessarily more severe in effect than a sin against human liberty. He has no claim upon any moral argument anymore and I will happily point that out to him whenever he tries to use one out of convenience to his idol.
Your and Gianni's points can't be made often enough.
Lincoln's theory of the war was that he was acting as a constitutional officer of the Union in defense of same, and that everything he did was justified by his constitutional powers to suppress insurrection (pace for the moment the argument that secession wasn't insurrection).
And yet, as your quote of Stromberg shows, Lincoln then turned to one of the most dangerous creatures on earth, a German totalitarian romantic, to write a "pseudo-Hegelian waffle" justifying, as James Seddon dourly noticed, Union "warring-down" tactics after the fact.
What resulted resembles nothing in American political theory, and just reading it as posted (thanks to nolu chan, who keeps bringing these things concretely to our attention and forbidding our interlocutor to keep up his favored tactic of referring to them in the comfy-gauzy Lincolnian abstract) one has to wonder whether Washington and Jefferson wouldn't spin in their graves to hear such a document read out.
Bet it wouldn't bother Hamilton much, though. He was a broken-eggs kind of guy, just like Lincoln.
Finally, that was an excellent shot you excerpted at totalitoady James McPherson, performing his Squealer portrayal in panegyricising Lincoln's compassion.
and evidently all these unionist loonies think TORTURE,MURDER,MASS RAPES,ROBBERY,ARSON,LOOTING,DESTROYING CHURCHES/SYNAGOGUES are all just A-OK, to "preserve the union" of the UNWILLING!!!!
what NICE, CIVIL folks they are!!!!
as on CPT of Rhode Island Infantry said:
"What we did was done for the good of the Union, though it will LIKELY be remembered on the Last Day of Judgment against me. i will plead with the Almighty that i was ORDERED to do those things against my usual nature,which would otherwise cause me to BURN eternally".
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free the southland,sw
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but then, that's what we southrons have grown to expect from the REVISIONIST, arrogant, dishonest, hateFILLED damnyankees & unionist loonies on FR.
free dixie,sw
FACT!
free dixie,sw
A proper spanking has been applied ;o)
"dear sir, i read your comments concerning looting and destruction of Catholic churches in the southland during the Civil War.
i was born & raised up in this parish as a Catholic & was an altar boy & am now an adult layman here.
one of my "volunteer jobs" while attending secondary (parochial) school was to read, condense,copy & collect archives of our parish. ======>
on the evening of December 23, 1863, a group of bluebelly cavalry came to Mass, asked that they might worship with the congregates & were admitted. thereafter, according to the records, they then ROBBED EVERY PERSON of their valuables, vilely assaulted several parishioners & the PRIESTS, rode horses into the sanctuary shooting wildly, pulled down the statues of the Mother of God and other blessed saints, spat upon HER, all the while screaming :KILL THE PAPISTS!
the parish records state that the group of "soldiers" fled into the night with their ill-gotten gains."
NOTE: i do NOT know this person, so i cannot at this time give you either a source for or more information about the alleged incident. (in fairness to all/my correspondent, i have asked him for additional information by e-mail. when/if i receive such additional information, i will post same, asap.)
for a FREE dixie,sw
All lost on our friend, I'm afraid.
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free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
see 1434.
see 1434.
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