"Even those of you who did not major in history probably know that Abraham Lincoln was elected President in November of 1860, and was inaugurated as President on March 4, 1861. Between the time of his election and his inauguration, the seven states of the deep south -- South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas -- had seceded from the Union and elected Jefferson Davis as their President. For the first six weeks of Lincoln's administration, the cabinet debated what to do about the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. In mid-April, the Confederate shore batteries opened up on the fort, and the garrison surrendered the next day. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, and the four states of the upper south -- Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas -- seceded and joined the original seven states of the Confederacy. The Civil War had begun. Washington, D. C. went from being an interior capital to a capital on the very frontier of the Union, exposed to possible raids and even investment and capture by the Confederate forces.
"Lincoln, fully aware of this danger, was most anxious that the 75,000 volunteers for whom he had called would arrive in Washington and defend the city against a possible Confederate attack. Many would come from the northeast -- Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. But all of the rail connections from the northeast into Washington ran through the city of Baltimore, 40 miles to the northeast. Herein lay a problem; there were numerous Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore and the city itself, at that time, had a reputation for unruliness -- it was known as "Mob City." To complicate matters further, it was necessary for passengers enroute from the northeast to Washington to change stations in Baltimore.
"Shortly after troops from the northeast began arriving in Baltimore on their way to Washington, a riot broke out while soldiers were in transit from one station to another. A hostile crowd pelted the troops with stones. The troops in turn fired shots into the crowd. Several soldiers and several bystanders were killed.
"That night, the chief of police of Baltimore, who was an avowed Confederate sympathizer, and the Mayor of Baltimore, who was a less open one, spearheaded a group of Confederate sympathizers who took matters into their own hands. They blew up the railroad bridges leading into Baltimore from the north. As a result, troops bound for Washington had to be sent on a circuitous journey by ship from a point on the Chesapeake Bay above Baltimore to Annapolis, from which they traveled to Washington by land. In response to the situation in Baltimore, Lincoln, at the behest of his Secretary of State, William H. Seward, took the first step to curtail civil liberty -- he authorized General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of the Army, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus at any point he deemed necessary along the rail line from Philadelphia to Washington. Scott took full advantage of this authority, and several weeks later, federal troops arrested a man named Merryman, whom authorities suspected of being a major actor in the dynamiting of the railroad bridges. He was he confined in Fort McHenry, and immediately sued out a writ of habeas corpus.
"The day after Merryman sought the writ, Chief Justice Roger Taney, who was sitting as a circuit judge in Baltimore, ordered the government to show cause why Merryman should not be released. A representative of the commandant of Fort McHenry appeared in court for the government to advise Taney that the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended, and asked for time to consult with the government in Washington. Taney refused, and issued an arrest warrant for the commandant. The next day, the marshal reported that in his effort to serve the writ he had been denied admission to the fort. Taney then issued an opinion in the case declaring that the President alone did not have the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus -- only Congress could do that -- and holding that Merryman's confinement was illegal. The Chief Justice, knowing that he could not enforce his order, sent a copy of it to Lincoln.
"Lincoln ignored the order, but in his address to the special session of Congress which he had called to meet on July 4, 1861, he adverted to it in these words: Must [the laws] be allowed to finally fail of execution even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces less that one be violated?
"Lincoln, with his usual incisiveness, put his finger on the debate that inevitably surrounds issues of civil liberties in wartime. If the country itself is in mortal danger, must we enforce every provision safeguarding individual liberties even though to do so will endanger the very government which is created by the Constitution? The question of whether only Congress may suspend it has never been authoritatively answered to this day, but the Lincoln administration proceeded to arrest and detain persons suspected of disloyal activities, including the mayor of Baltimore and the chief of police."
These are excerpted from Rehnquists remarks to the Director's Forum, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 17, 1999.
The most reasonable and compelling information is totally rationalized away by the neo-confederates.
There is plenty of leeway in the record for President Lincoln to have done everything he did, with very few exceptions. There was both precedent for some things he did, and no precedent to prohibit him in others. As he said, nothing was done that went outside the powers of Congress. Those that love the United States won't carp over what president Lincoln did in the hour of need.
Walt