Carefully combing through the voluminous Confederate Secretary of War files, Neely discovers case after case of political prisoners arrested on suspicion of disloyalty and/or Unionist sentiment. The Confederate government, and states within the Confederacy repeatedly and blatantly jailed thousands of white and black Southerners, without formal charges, trial or legal counsel, often on the mere suggestion of Unionism or disloyalty to the Confederacy. Since the Confederacy never established a judiciary branch, the state court system retained a great deal of authority, especially in the Border South like Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina, where Confederate officials believed the greatest danger of political dissent occurred.
Neely also uncovers a little known group of Southern lawyers who worked as "habeas corpus commissioners," providing what would seem to be legal protection for individuals' liberties. However, Neely discovers that these commissioners wielded considerable power by quietly ensuring that the Confederate government could continue to arrest citizens without formal criminal charges and keep them imprisoned for months, even years. If one of these so-called commissioners did not recommend a prisoner's release, that person might remain incarcerated indefinitely. The commissioners' reports were not made public and Congress provided little oversight of their activity. After the war, the existence of these commissioners was completely and conveniently forgotten, even by the commissioners themselves. Their existence and their reports remained essentially lost in the Secretary of War papers until Neely found them filed alphabetically by the individual names of the commissioners. Neely asserts that most Confederate citizens apparently accepted the curtailment of civil liberties, the issuance of passports for travel, the prohibition of alcohol, and the presence of guards and military posts throughout the South as necessities of war. There is little evidence of protest or even concern among loyal Confederates that thousands of civilians were being arrested and imprisoned for their political beliefs without being formally charged with any crime. Nor did lawyers, of whom there were many in the South, challenge the Confederate government's authoritarian tendencies. Most Confederates' desire for societal order, Neely reasons, was stronger than their desire for individual liberty.
Even in Arkansas, where General Thomas C. Hindman declared martial law and temporarily ruled ruthlessly, there were few outspoken critics. Hindman did what Neely maintains Davis wanted to do, and later attempted to do, throughout the Confederacy: silence dissenters and focus all available manpower on mobilizing for war. In the end, Neely sees more similarities than differences between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as wartime presidents. As the bloody war progressed, both leaders believed that their respective constitutions came second to winning the war. After the war, Davis and other purveyors of the Lost Cause left out this unpleasant part of Confederate history, instead vilifying Lincoln as dictator and championing the Southern nation as the true defender of civil liberty. Neely challenges common assumptions concerning Southern Unionists too, maintaining that ideology, idealism, and selflessness played important roles in determining political allegiances, not materialism, class consciousness, ignorance, isolation, cowardly behavior, or greater affinity with the industrializing North. In East Tennessee, for example, he finds Unionists more strongly attached to the pastoral, traditional life style than secessionists who lived closer to railroads and were more directly connected to the burgeoning market economy.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3729/is_200107/ai_n8958586
Thanks!
Just think if the Confederates had won, the South would have continued slavery possibly until World War One, European nations may have had aggressive ideas in terms of attacking the Northern states with full Confederate assistance, and today's Neo-Confederates would be as happy as clams in a clam bed.