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
Was he the idiot?
Will your beloved Lieber Code work then? As surely you know of its Article 16:
"Military necessity does not admit of cruelty - that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult."
Is the picture from wartime Vicksburg, perhaps?
"[O]ur Southern people have not gotten over the vicious habit of not believing what the don't want to believe." - Charlottesville Chronicle
Jefferson Davis, April 4, 1865 (after fleeing Richmond): "Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defence with our army free to move from point to point, and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy; operating int he interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base, and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain, but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free."
Is it a southern tendency to bluster in the face of reality? Maybe it's due to inbreeding.
Woodrow Wilson, Virginian by birth, spent his childhood in wartime Georgia:
"Because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy."
Gidiot #1501 - "Once might be an honest mistake. Twice? Maybe I could believe that. Thrice, and response of 'big deal' - outrageous and dishonest."
Same post. What a maroon.
Bands of guerrillas. Hmmmm. Maybe Milroy had a point afterall.
An interesting interpretation. I see you continue to deny the founding principles of the American nation, espoused by Jefferson.
Are you blind, capitan, or just plain dumb? That order was from Virginia in 1862. Milroy's murders of all those civilians were in Tennessee in 1865.
Justice Davis himself, author of the opinion, does not support the type of interpretation you attempt to make. It wasn't supportable in the 1860's and it's not supportable now.
The resolution being which one, exactly? (So there is no mistake about what you actually mean.)
"what i'm saying to him is that he INTENTIONALLY quotes "phony sources", the most hatefilled of union wartime propaganda & the UNsubstantiated rantings of the most extreme,leftist (some would call them COMMUNIST), southHATING REVISIONISTS out of the NE RADICAL college history departments, as if they were FACT."
Like Woodrow Wilson?
I've been called worse ... in this thread! I have posted most clearly that I believe that "atrocites" happen in wartime. They happen on both sides. Much of what are called "atrocities" are not. Claims of "atrocities" often do not stand up to close evaluation. It is easy to make an accusation, but it is not so easy to prove it ... unless of course it is Dan Rather making the claim, then we all presume it is phony on its face.
All military deaths, for all causes, totaled about 365,000 of the Union, and 135,000 for the confederacy (as per D.O.D.). Add in your 50,000 civilian "casualties" and you are just barely at half of your earlier estimate. And that includes your ever-widening definition of "wanton death."
Since you have divined that every death in the war was unjustified, then what was the purpose of describing them as "wanton." Like Rush says, "Words mean something." "Wanton" has a particular definition and you seem to use it to make emotional hyperbole. Your usage is "gratuitous."
I see it another way. Every death in the Civil War helped ensure a similar war would never again happen. Despite some of the more outrageous statements by your compatriots, indicating the the AZTLAN war is on the way and the second WBTS is imminent, the fact of the matter is that such thinking is fantasy time.
In the time period being discussed, concerning the orders of General Milroy (c 1864), was after the institution of General Order No. 100 - aka the Lieber Codes. Those superceded, and in part, included, the earlier Articles of War dating back to the first ones adopted by the United States in the Revolutionary period.
Your post of Milroy's order doesn't say the United States executed anyone by torture. I believe it says that two bushwhackers were turned over to Mr. Pittman, who, for all you or I know, may have represented the civilian authority in the area. As I said in a much earlier post, when you brought this up, it sounds to me like there were some scores being settled.
I bet you do.
I consider that the most offensive text ever written by a Supreme Court Justice. It was a statement which made defying or ignoring the Court justifiable.
Why not tell the truth? Or are you still working on that historical fiction? What did the so-called "government" of Viginia have to do with it? No such constitutional government existed at the time.
Prove Finkelman is a marxist. He's a leftie, all right, in stark contrast to the sources I often quote, who you like to call lefties, but who are not! You guys even call the "claremonsters" lefties!
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