Lincoln’s 'Great Crime': The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice

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."

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).

[Non-Seq #2777] I will point out that it is not I who labeled your hero Lerone Bennett a Marxist-Stalinist, but others.

Ah, yes. You only dredged up junk from your Brigade toilet saying "Marxist" and "Stalinist" but you did not intend to imply to the reader or lurker that -you- either agreed with, endorsed, or had even looked at what was in your cited and linked material. You merely dived into your toilet, wallowed about for a while until you had a mouthful of warm turds of thought, and then climbed out and spit them out here.

As I demonstrated in my #2761 by quoting the relevant material from -your- links, -your- links do not support -your- words that there were "positions that some haver (sic) compared favorably to Marxist policies."

As I demonstrated in my #2761 by quoting the relevant material from -your- links, -your- links do not support -your- continuing words, "and some have calles (sic) Stalinist."

-YOUR- statements were not supported by -YOUR- linked sources. Here is what you claimed, links included.

Here is a link to an Edward Zwick article called "Anti-Imperialist Writings of Edgar Lee Masters" and which details his close association with social liberals like William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. You will note about half way down that Zwick mentions that Masters joined the national committee of the All-American Anti-Imperialist League in 1928. That organization had been founded by the Communist Workers Party three years before.
Lerone Bennett has supported reparations for years, speaking in support of them before the Jet, on PBS, before a National Reparations Convention, positions that some haver compared favorably to Marxist policies, and others have calles Stalinist.
2,716 posted on 10/08/2004 8:08:21 AM CDT by Non-Sequitur

[Non-Seq] And it is not unreasonable to believe that his positions on Lincoln are a result of his belief that a handout is justified.

Bassackwards logic is unreasonable. Unless you can show the impossible, that his position on reparations pre-dated his published position on Lincoln, your position is utter bullshit. In February 1968, Ebony published Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremecist? by Lerone Bennett, Jr. That was the precursor to Forced Into Glory. That is 36 years ago, when the issue of reparations was unheard of.

It is so far back, the responses were like this, quoting from the preface to Forced Into Glory.

The New York Times and other newspapers published condemnatory editorials, and varied columnists suggested that the Republic was in danger. To meet this threat, assorted historians and freelance writers were rushed forward to the front lines to write articles proving that I was a Black Power Militant and that Abraham Lincoln always loved colored people in his own way. In an incredible article in the New York Times, called "Was Lincoln a Honky?" Herbert Mitgang said ti was racist to say that Lincoln was a racist because he opposed Black citizenship and equal rights and -- Lincoln's words -- "the niggers and white people ... marrying together."

When challenged to name so much as -one- Black author who is deemed acceptable and authoritative, in addition to all the White elitist sources given by The Brigade to talk about Black history, The Brigade came up with John Hope Franklin as that one authoritative Black author/historian.

Source: Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz by Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr.

Ernest Allen, Jr. is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Robert Chrisman is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, The Black Scholar (April 2, 2001)

All the material was quoted from John Hope Franklin by Allen and Chrisman.

http://www.umass.edu/afroam/hor.html
All whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control.
If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder," he would not have blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single group benefited from slavery. Planters did, of course. New York merchants did, of course. Even poor whites benefited from the legal advantage they enjoyed over all blacks as well as from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them."
Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century. The pattern of housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in education, the racial profiling, the inequities in the administration of justice, the low expectation of blacks in the discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that blacks have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the widespread opposition to affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by whites for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges of slavery are still with us.
And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us, hiding behind such absurdities as "we are all in this together" or "it hurts me as much as it hurts you" or "slavery benefited you as much as it benefited me," we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive manner.
Most important, we must never fall victim to some scheme designed to create a controversy among potential allies in order to divide them and, at the same time, exploit them for its own special purpose.
And as historian John Hope Franklin remarked on the legacy of slavery for black education: "laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of blacks any means of acquiring knowledge-including the alphabet-which is the legacy of disadvantage of educational privatization and discrimination experienced by African Americans in 2001."

[Non-Seq #2782] Well then, for the record let me say that just because Lerone Bennett and you support reparations for blacks as compensation for slavery I personally don't believe that that alone makes either one of you a Marxist or a Stalinist or, necessarily, a fellow traveller. OK?

[nc] Well then, just for the record let me say that just because your Brigade Commander and you support Socialism and Communism, I personally don't believe that that alone makes either one of you a Stalinist or Sado-Masochist or, necessarily, a fellow traveller. OK?

[nc] Also, just for the record, had I voiced support for reparations you would have quoted me doing so. I have seen little need to digress to discuss at length something that is not relevant and is not happening. The entire issue has absolutely nothing to do with anything I have posted by Lerone Bennett, Jr., and is just smoke being thrown by Non-Sequitur to obfuscate the fact that he is unable to discuss the relevant issues on the merits.

[Non-Seq #2777] I will point out that it is not I who labeled your hero Lerone Bennett a Marxist-Stalinist, but others.

[nc] Well then, just for the record let me say that others did not label Lerone Bennett a Marxist-Stalinist, Non-Sequitur did. The links provided by Non-Sequitur do not support the claim made by Non-Sequitur.

[nc] Indeed, when the Brigade comments on African-American history or issues, from the Brigade's sources one might begin to think that they believe original source material for African-American studies is either the Old Testament or the Talmud. And so we are treated to the African-American expertise of David Horowitz, Harry Jaffa, et al. Were I to seek knowledge of Irish history and affairs, I would expect some of the sources to be Irish. I would be unlikely to ask a Jewish philosopher about the events at Burntollet bridge, or how to pronounce Maghera. I would not seek out Dr. Jaffa to enlighten me about the Rossville flats or Free Derry corner. And if I seek knowledge of African-American history and affairs, I would expect some of the sources to be African-American. Not so with The Brigade. You have your close-minded little group of sources, and your sources do not include African-Americans.

It is not that there is any shortage of African-American sources. There are conservative, intellectual African-American sources. For some strange lily-white reason, The Brigade does not include such sources, not even when purporting to propound knowledge of African-American history and affairs.

One need not dredge up David Horowitz. One need not wrongly label anyone a Marxist or Stalinist. One may readily find African-American intellectuals who oppose reparations. One may do just fine quoting such African-American luminaries as Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, A.B. in Economics, magna cum laude, Harvard College, 1958; A.M. in Economics, Columbia University, 1959; Ph.D. in Economics, University of Chicago, 1968.

Dr. Walter E. Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College, Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College.

LINK

Thomas Sowell
January 4, 2002
The reparations fraud
Self preservation is said to be the first law of nature, and this applies not only to human beings but also to organizations and movements. The March of Dimes was set up to fight polio but it did not disband when polio was wiped out by vaccines. Nor did civil rights organizations disband after civil rights laws were passed. The fatal mistake made by those who imagine that they can appease movements and organizations with concessions is that concessions are incidental trophies for those who receive them, but unmet grievances are fundamental to their continued viability.
Back in the 1930s, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought that he could buy off Hitler with concessions to avoid war. More recently, both Israel and the Clinton administration discovered that offering even the most extraordinary concessions could not buy off Yasser Arafat. For either Hitler or Arafat to have made a lasting peace would have been to say that his grievances had now been met -- and that would have been a devastating blow to the movement which provided his power.
Against this background, it may be easier to understand why a demand can be made and a crusade launched to get something that everyone knows in advance will not be given -- reparations for slavery. No way are millions of white, Asian, and Hispanic Americans going to pay reparations for something that happened before their ancestors ever set foot on American Soil. Even those whites whose ancestors were here before the Civil War know that most of those ancestors -- whether they lived in the North or the South -- owned no slaves.
Seen in this light, the demand for reparations may seem like an exercise in futility. However, seen as a source of a lasting unmet grievance, it is a stroke of genius to keep blacks separated from other Americans and an aggrieved constituency to support black "leaders" in politics, organizations and movements.
This demand also mobilizes a certain amount of support or sympathy among whites, especially those in the media and in academia, where such support or sympathy costs nothing, and allows those who give it to relieve their own sense of guilt, while risking other people's money -- and national cohesion. Some white politicians can also benefit at little or no cost to themselves by expressing sympathy with the reparations cause or even voting for meaningless apologies for what others did centuries ago.
For these various groups, reparations is a win-win issue. For everyone else, including the vast majority of blacks, it is a lose-lose issue.
Blacks have already begun suffering losses from con men who have asked them to sign up for their individual shares of the reparations -- and have then stolen their identity and used it to defraud them. But this is just a down payment on the losses from this futile crusade.
In a democracy, a minority that is no longer even the largest minority cannot afford to alienate, much less embitter, the majority which ultimately holds the political power in the country. Too often, unending demands and grievances from black leaders and spokesmen create the impression that most blacks want something for nothing. In reality, most blacks lifted themselves out of poverty before the civil rights laws or the welfare state programs took effect.
Not only do most whites not know this, neither do most blacks today, for their leaders have taken credit for this progress by depicting it as the fruits of their civil rights movements and political efforts. But the poverty rate among blacks fell by half between 1940 and 1960, before any of the major federal civil rights legislation or the vast expansion of the welfare state under President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.
Between 1940 and 1960, black males' number of years of schooling doubled. How surprising is it that doubling your education raises your income? In short, most blacks raised themselves out of poverty, but their leaders robbed them of this achievement and the respect it deserved -- in the eyes of blacks and whites alike -- by making it seem like a concession from the government and a product of agitation.
Pointing blacks in a direction from which little can be expected, and away from the enormous opportunities open today in the economy, is a formula for personal frustration, even if it benefits "leaders." But then, that frustration is itself a benefit to "leaders," who need a constituency with a sense of grievance.

LINK

Walter E. Williams
July 12, 2000
Reparations for slavery
If the November elections put Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, we can expect John Conyers, D-Mich., to introduce legislation that would set up a committee to decide who would qualify for reparations for slavery, whether they should be compensated in cash, land or some other payment, and how much each black person would receive. City councils in Chicago, Houston, Detroit and several other cities have already called for Congress to hold hearings on reparations.
First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. I'd also agree that were it possible slave owners should make reparations to those whom they enslaved.
The problem, of course, is both slaves as well as their owners are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living. Reparations advocates, however, want today's blacks to be compensated for the suffering of our ancestors.
If we acknowledge that government has no resources of its very own, and that to give one American a dollar government must first confiscate it from some other American, we might ask what moral principle justifies forcing a white of today to pay a black of today for what a white of yesteryear did to a black of yesteryear? We might also recognize that a large percentage of today's Americans, be they of European, Asian, African or Latin ancestry, don't even go back three or four generations. Are they to be held accountable and taxed for slavery and why?
Then there's the fact that white slave owners aren't the only villains in the piece. In Africa, Moslems dominated the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. Africans also engaged in slave trade with Europeans. In fact, there was plantation slavery in some parts of Africa, such as the Sudan, Zanzibar and Egypt. Thus, a natural question arises: Do reparations advocates hold those who sold blacks into slavery subject to reparations payments? After all slavery, of the scale seen in the western hemisphere, would have been all but impossible without the help of Africans and Arabs. Incidentally, President Clinton apologizing for slavery in Africa, of all places, is stupid -- apologizing to descendants of slave traders for slavery in America.

LINK

Walter E. Williams
February 7, 2001
Does America owe reparations?
Johnny Cochran and a group of successful trial lawyers plan to bring class-action suits against the federal government and some private companies they say profited from slavery. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has already introduced HR 40, titled "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act." HR 40 has 48 co-sponsors and a number of them, such as Jim Traficant, D-Mich., and Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., are white. Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice would demand that slave owners make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. Since both slaves and slave owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach.
* * *
The reparations movement would be little more than an amusing side-show were it not for the damage it can do to blacks. It misallocates time and resources that could be more fruitfully spent elsewhere.
There's a growing black-owned and operated private school movement that addresses the fraudulent education of the public school system. Resources of the reparations movement could be used to add more private schools. High-powered reparations lawyers could use their legal skills to make court challenges of numerous state and local monopolistic regulations that stop people from getting into business, such as taxi licensing laws, cosmetology regulations, and restrictions on jitney and limousine operations.
I'd like to see lawyers bring class action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit and New York for producing fraudulent education -- certifying youngsters as high school graduates when those youngsters can't perform at seventh- and eighth-grade levels.
There's a reparations issue completely ignored: Blacks as well as whites live on land taken, sometimes brutally, from Indians. Do we blacks owe Indians anything?

LINK

WALTER WILLIAMS: There is no tooth fairy or Santa Claus giving the government money for reparations. Now... So that means that the only way that the government can give one American citizen one dollar is to first, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, take it from some other American.

=======================

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.