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
Outside of Eastern Tennessee and the Wheeling region of Virginia (which wasn't really southern to begin with - it's north of the mason dixon line) the number of union troops from the south is virtually non-existant. Save for those two states, they numbered a couple thousand on average and in some cases a couple dozen. South Carolina sent zero recorded union troops for example. Mississippi sent 500, Georgia is unknown but estimated at less than a hundred, and the rest sent a couple thousand each.
So after all your whining you still got only a couple thousand, or in some cases a couple dozen, northern troops per southern state save the two anomolies I mentioned.
Tell me more about what "you read." Tell me about the "positive good" of human slavery and how the ante-bellum South represented the pinnacle of human society.
Post your stats and sources then. We already know that a higher percentage of the southern population fought in the armies than did the northern population.
the places of worship had MANY items of value stolen/vandalized/destroyed, such as irreplaceable manuscripts,bibles, prayer books,bells,doors,baptismal fonts,silver & gold serving pieces,menorahs,stained glass windows,crucifixes,money from parishioners,etc,etc,etc.
NONE of the looted/damaged/destroyed religious items had any MILITARY,TACTICAL or other similar significance. they were just "available" & thus were taken/destroyed for "FUN & PROFIT"!
FACT!
free dixie,sw
The natural right of self-preservation. Jefferson was a big advocate. You know who Jefferson is, don't you? "No man has a right to unjustly take the life and property of an innocent other ..."
Back to your original statement. The first part is a truism. However, it has no relation to the issue. I said, in war, one had the right to destroy the enemy's war-making capacity. If you take up arms against the rightful government, either as a civilian or in uniform, you can be killed. If you have a factory thats makes munitions, or a shipyard that repairs vessels, or a ranch that supplies horses, or a farm that grows food, or any activity that is used in making war, it can be destroyed.
"But intentionally going out of ones way to wage warfare upon innocent civilians like Lincoln and his henchmen did is out of the question."
Gratuitous accusations. No one who actively supports a war effort is an "innocent."
Interesting. So by that argument, HIroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and the rest of the strategic bombing of cities during WW2 would be war crimes. Is that what you're saying?
You live in a fantasy world.
"Of the colored soldiers who joined the Union effort, more than 5,000 were recruited from the state of South Carolina."
Look up the history of the 1st S.C. Colored Volunteers.
Oh, sorry. I forgot. You don't consider Africans to be people.
That one doesn't apply either. Nice try though.
Citation? Even southern propaganda will do as a starting point.
It would all depend you how you define non-existant I guess. But then I'm often puzzled by your definitions and how much they differ from the rest of the world's.
Happily. There's a huge file at the National Archives called the Union Provost Marshall's Records. It contains most of the non-battle related military correspondences from the yankee army - the day to day routine stuff that didn't make it into the Official Records series. The UPM records are loaded with orders and reports of pillage, plunder, and death all over the south. I have a photocopy of a series of orders by Gen. Robert Milroy, one of Sherman's underlings at the time, from his activities in Tennessee. One of them is a "death list" of over 50 civilians that literally looks like something out of Stalinist russia. There are three or for others over the days following that first one where he adds a couple dozen more names to the death list. The instructions on them are explicit right down to what to steal and, in some cases, the manner in which the victim should be executed.
He gave the things to bands of soldiers under his command and they spent most of January 1865 carrying it out. They note which houses have furniture that can be pillaged, which persons on it were hunters and therefore had firearms that could be confiscated in violation of the 2nd amendment, which farms had animals that could be stolen, and directions in virtually every case to torch the place after it was stripped bare of valuables. Remember that this was in the dead of winter - January - and they burned these people out of their homes.
The "execution" methods are even more bizarre. One of Milroy's instructions tells the soldiers to hang two civilians in doorframes by a slipknot - an old medieval torture method! Another house on the list has directions to shoot the husband and then dispose of the wife "by accident" while they were there. Some of this was detailed in a recent book by Michael Bradley - "With Blood and Fire"
Your original post specifically excluded slaves. As for the blacks who fought on the northern side, identification of their states - even when they were assigned to units bearing a state name - is a very difficult process. There were blacks from Massachusetts who technically fought under units bearing the names of southern states. There were also probably southern blacks who fought under units bearing the names of northern states. The best estimates suggest that just over half of the 178,000 blacks who fought came from CSA states and the rest came from the north, so the mix was very even and widespread.
Oh, sorry. I forgot. You don't consider Africans to be people.
Taking lessons from Jesse Jackson again? Or do you simply dream up a gratuitous slander upon anybody who gets the better of you in an argument.
Each must be considered individually. A "war crime" is a further subdivided category entailing specific charges against specific persons for specific acts of unnecessary brutality. It differs from an "unjust" act of war in its specificity and relative isolation around a single perpetrator or set of perpetrators to the event.
I will say though each of the cases you mentioned falls, at minimum, into that gray area between just war and unjust practices in a war. And in saying that I'll even concede that they were strategically convenient and generally helpful to winning WWII. One thing is certain though - not one of them may be clearly cited as a morally just act, which places them all among the less-than-stellar events of WWII as opposed to countless other clearly defined and clearly just actions taken by the allies.
Word games. There is no greater act of self preservation than defense of the self and home. The right to pursue that act necessarily trumps any other act of invasion, even when the invader falsely cloaks himself in self preservation or claims to be preserving something of the larger picture.
I said, in war, one had the right to destroy the enemy's war-making capacity.
And I asked you, "who gave you that right?" Did Hitler have a "right" to destroy his enemy's war-making capacity and blow up all those ships in the atlantic? By your bizarre reasoning it sounds as if he did. Did Tojo have a "right" to blow up the war-making capacity of the americans at Pearl Harbor? By your bizarre reasoning it sounds as if he did. Sorry capitan, but simply calling an act of injustice a "right" does not make it so.
If you take up arms against the rightful government,
Rightful government! BY WHAT "RIGHT" DOES IT GOVERN ANYBODY, CAPITAN? Who gave it that "right" and where did it come from? Answer me that and we'll test your little theory.
If you have a factory thats makes munitions, or a shipyard that repairs vessels, or a ranch that supplies horses, or a farm that grows food, or any activity that is used in making war, it can be destroyed.
Pearl Harbor was used for a lot of those things in 1941. Do I take it that Japan had a "right" to destroy it?
You are puzzled by a great many things, non-seq, hence your namesake's descriptive value. Sorry I can't help you any more than that, but sooner or later you'll simply have to come to terms with your impaired mental abilities.
What part of this don't you understand?
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.
also look up the memoirs of Leticia Clark Gomez of New Orleans for (her elder sister was one of the several NUNS who was assaulted at their convent in 1863.) a 1st person account.
i know you don't want to believe what federal troops did to INNOCENTS, particuliarly Roman Catholics & Jews, "the poorest of the poor", persons "of color" (particuliarly slaves!) AND recent immigrants; nonetheless the accounts are CORRECT!
the "filth that flowed down from the north" were MUCH better at ABUSING the helpless than they were at anything else.
the highest ranking union officer, that i know of, who was PERSONALLY involved in MASS ROBBERY & THEFT was MG Benjamin "The Beast" Butler, who sent BOXCAR loads of loot home to MA.
free dixie,sw
There are ruins today to the north of the Mannassas battlefield of a house once occupied by a free black farmer. During the first battle his house was temporarily occupied by the confederates. It survived unscathed and was returned intact to its owner after the battle.
When the second battle came along his house was inside the yankee lines. They "thanked" him for its use by burning it to the ground as they pulled out.
It's funny how you'll accept any account of a yankee atrocity at face value and trumpet it far and wide, but anything that casts the south in an other-than-perfect light--like Lawrence, Andersonville, or Ft. Pillow, or the extent of slavery--is all yankee lies.
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