Since our subject was habeas corpus, I didn't mention Lincoln's other transgressions that were enumerated by Davis. Thank you for adding them to our conversation.
One that has always struck me as particularly onerous was the arrest of elected officials of a state legislature for action that they might take in the future. Were they guilty of a thought "crime"? Where does the Constitution allow arrests for thought "crimes" or the possible future "crime" of doing what authors of the Federalist papers agreed the Constitution allowed them to do?
Congress again debated the question in December 1862, and again the question was authorizing and indemnifying President Lincoln's suspensions of habeas corpus -- not censuring or revoking them -- and this time the result was the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.
I included the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 in my post, but I didn't talk about the almost two years that Congress took to pass it.
I think you are mixed up about Vallandigham's actual sentence. Here was the sentence pronounced by the military court:
And the Commission do therefore sentence him, the said CLEMENT L. VALLANDIGHAM, a citizen of the State of Ohio, to be placed in close confinement in some fortress of the United States, to be designated by the Commanding Office, of this Department, there to be kept during the continuance of the war.
II. The proceedings, finding and sentence in the foregoing case are approved and confirmed, and it is directed that the place of confinement of the prisoner, CLEMENT L. VALLANDIGHAM, in accordance with said sentence, be Fort Warren, Boston Harbor.
The sentence was set aside by Lincoln who imposed exile. Where does the Constitution give Lincoln the power to exile people? I suspect both sides exiled a few prisoners to the other side during the war.
... the US Supreme Court wisely ruled that it could not address the matter without Congressional approval. After the war was safely won, then the Supreme Court reasserted itself, in a different case (Ex Parte Milligan- 1866) by ruling that military courts could not be used when civil courts were operational.
Why did the Supreme Court flip-flop? In the Vallandigham situation, the Supreme Court knew that Lincoln was in power. His administration had arrested a Maryland judge for ruling against Lincoln's position on habeas corpus and had threatened to arrest Taney for his Ex Parte Merryman order. Taney's possible arrest had been mentioned by Taney and another Supreme Court Justice as well as Lincoln's marshal Lamon. Once Lincoln was dead, the Supreme Court perhaps felt freer to rule, as they did unanimously, that military courts like the one that convicted Vallandigham could not be used against civilians where civil courts were functioning.
During the war, the South had a court system that did help protect civilians against the military. Did the North? From the Nov 24, 1864 Daily Picayune of New Orleans:
Can Civilians be Tried by Military Courts?
There is no longer a question among us; the military courts of the Federal army having exercised the power to do so without rebuke or effective resistance from the civil tribunals. Not so in the Confederacy. Below we give an article from the Houston, Texas Telegraph, reviewing the decision of Judge Moise, of the C. S. District Court of Louisiana, who discharged from custody a W. McKee, charged with cotton frauds on Red River, last spring. Judge Moise seems quite independent of the military power.
Our readers have seen the announcement of the sentence of A. W. McKee by a court martial in Louisiana to be shot, and of the decision by Judge Moise, of the Confederate States District Court in Louisiana, that the court martial had no jurisdiction over McKee, and releasing him from their bonds, to answer any civil offense for which he might be prosecuted.
...the military jurisdiction was denied, on the ground that the constitution only gives to Congress the power "to make rules for the Government and regulation of the land and naval forces," and every other citizen being, by the constitution, entitled to trial by due course of the law of the land.
Doubtless, you refer to Maryland.
rusty: "The sentence was set aside by Lincoln who imposed exile.
Where does the Constitution give Lincoln the power to exile people?"
Of course I agree that exiling a copperhead Ohio congressman to the Confederacy was the most cruel, inhumane and doubtless unconstitutional punishment imaginable. ;-)
As for the legalities, I'd suppose that since the worthy congressman was tried in a military court, then the Commander in Chief has some authority to modify or commute its sentences:
rusty: "During the war, the South had a court system that did help protect civilians against the military."
And you can cite examples of this in Union sympathizing areas of, for example, East Tennessee?