Replies

"The success of the Maryland policy became a political byword and was celebrated, beyond the borders of Maryland, throughout the war, Thus in 1863, a Loyal Publication Society pamphlet on the War Power of the President explained the necessity of military arrests rather than reliance on the courts by pointing to that familiar example:

When the traitors of the loyal state of Maryland were concocting their grand scheme to hurl the organized power of that state against the government, probably not a handful of them was known to be guilty of any act for which he could ever have been arrested by civil process. And whatever their offenses against the laws might have been, and whatever the fidelity of the courts in that jurisdictlon, the process of civil law would have been far too slow to prevent the consummation of the gigantic treason which would have added another state to the rebellion.... Courts could not have suppressed this unholy work, but the summary imprisonment of those few men saved the state of Maryland to the Union cause.

Republicans would later enjoy substantial bipartisan agreement on the necessity of the early arrests in Maryland.
William K. Seward thought they worked, too. When an old associate of Seward came to Washington to plead for the release of a political prisoner from Kentucky held in Fort Lafayette, the secretary of state readily admitted that no charges were on file against the prisoner. When asked whether he intended to keep citizens imprisoned against whom no charge had been made, Seward apparently answered: "I don't care a d—n whether they are guilty or Innocent. I saved Maryland by similar arrests, and so I mean to hold Kentucky."

The earliest days of the Lincoln administration taught the president and his cabinet lessons they never forgot. In fact, these days left fiercely indelible marks on them. This was especially true of Seward. in 1864, when the artist Francis B. Carpenter unveiled his huge historical canvas commemorating the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, the secretary of state scoffed at It. He told the artist, at a party given at Gideon Welles's residence, that he had been wrong to choose emancipation as "the great feature of the Administration."

Seward told him [Welles recalled] to go back to the firing on Sumter, or to a much more exciting one than even that, the Sunday following the Baltimore massacre, when the Cabinet assembled or gathered in the Navy Department and, with the vast responsibility that was thrown upon them, met the emergency and its awful consequences, put in force the war power of the government, and issued papers and did acts that might have brought them all to the scaffold.
The first suspension of the writ of habeas corpus occurred the very week after that fateful Sunday cabinet meeting. Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, did not care for Seward, but he remembered those days just as the secretary of state did:

Few, comparatively, know or can appreciate the actual condition of things and state of feeling of the members of the Administration In those days. Nearly sixty years of peace had unfitted us for any war, but the most terrible of all wars, a civil one, was upon us, and it had to be met. Congress had adjourned without making any provision for the storm, though aware that it was at hand and soon to burst upon the country. A new administration, scarely acquainted with each other, and differing essentially in the past, was compelled to act, promptly and decisively.

And act they did."
-- "Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberty" by Mark Neely.
Walt