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
Likewise contributing to the rehabilitation of Taney was the publication in 1910 of the Catron and Grier letters informing Buchanan that the two dissenting justices had forced the Court majority to undertake a broad decision instead of the narrow one originally planned. As a consequence, much of the blame for the resulting judicial disaster could be shifted from Taney to Curtis and McLean. Frank H. Hodder thought that Curtis was the worst offender of the three, but McLean's notorious presidential ambitions made him the more obvious culprit. In 1927, Beveridge confided to Hodder: "Justice Holmes told me (but this is confidential, and you cannot use it unless you find it out some other way) that the tradition in the Court is that McLean stirred up the whole mess and that Curtis probably would not have peeped if McLean had not ripped and torn around so much and blew off so loudly."
Source: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 1978, p. 590
Concurring bump. It would be impossible to write a working history of the Second World War, or even the Weimar Republic, without quoting Adolf Hitler. That isn't the same thing as collecting his pictures or burbling over his busts, portraits, personal effects, film clips, and so on.
Leni Riefenstahl, who died just a couple of years ago, might never have worked in film again if she had continued to make honorific statements about Hitler and his Thousand-Year Reich. Persons wanting to employ her (for a marine documentary she was working on three years ago, e.g.) would fairly have worried that they were supporting Hitler, however indirectly, and affording her the resources with which to reproduce her propaganda spectaculars of the 30's. But just quoting him as a source, or studying his ideas or his psychology, would certainly seem to be fair game.
If capitan adhered to his own rule, he could never make a film like The Boys from Brazil or Marathon Man, in both of which Sir Laurence Olivier used his art to shine a klieg light on what it was really like to be around a real, live, functioning Nazi -- not the safely-dead documentary ones familiar to us from newsreels.
I just did, Net Nanny.
You're the one who needs to climb down off his high horse........considering who it used to belong to, and what he used it for.
OTOH, maybe we're about to have -- again -- that whole conversation about how triumphalism and teleology don't add up to a reason for doing something, or a justification either.
Ferebacher barf alert. Chief Justice Taney's jurisprudence needs no rehabilitation. His decision was the correct one. Personally, Justice Taney considered slavery wrong, and had freed his slaves by 1827. Taney was also the first justice to wear long pants under his robe.
And this is what Chief Justice Rhequist had to say about Chief Justice Taney,
Today, when historians and legal scholars speak of the greatest Justices ever to have served on the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice Taney usually makes the list. I think I would have to agree with that assessment.
Excellent movies by the way!
Ever heard that statement about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty? Keeping an eye out for communists, nazis, and other socialist scumbags who try to infiltrate my party and government is a necessary hobby.
I post informational documentation to support my views.
No you don't. You select three or for partisan accounts, most of them by rabid left wingers, and regurgitate passages from them to no end even when those passages are shown to be in error or, worse, when you are shown to have artificially truncated them to make them sound more supportive of your position than they really are. If you tried the stunts you practice around here in virtually any university setting you would've been given the boot months ago.
It almost always comes from recognized authorities in their field.
Again, that is simply not true. Take your source on Bollman for example. Far from a recognized authority, he is a revisionist operating on the fringe of his profession by attempting to take down a 200 year old precedent with near universal acceptance in the legal scholarly field.
Then there's your sources on habeas corpus. You've got Farber, an average left of center law professor with no real distinction of any sort to his name any more than the average left of center law prof at any university has. And you've got Jaffa, who does not even hold an academic credential or formal training of any sort in the law and, by all indications, is a literature professor! Your source on Taney is even more bizarre - he's a left wing reparationist crackpot who is employed by the SPLC and whose "history" comes across as the ramblings of an agenda-driven hack (which he is) when compared to virtually any other source on Taney, be it positive (like Curtis) or negative (like Fahrenbacher). Since you have openly and wantonly professed each and every one of these persons as an "authority," thus making your argument an appeal to authority, it is far from ad hominem but rather perfectly fair game to point out that your "authorities" simply lack the credentials you assign to them.
You do pollute Free Republic. The content and demeanor of many of your ("your all") posts belongs over on DU. This is a conservative forum.
...straight from the guy who dumps untold pages of Berkleyite nutcases and SPLC-employed reparationist hacks as if they were valid "authorities" on this forum. I can see you've bought yourself a projector, capitan, but it is malfunctioning.
They always do get this way when the crosshairs start narrowing in on their secrets. The Wlat Brigade has suffered two major and public embarassments in only a few months, with the Glorious Leader outing himself as a marxist and a long time member outing himself as a neo-nazi.
With those two gone, capitan now knows that he's in the spotlight and he's drawing a lot of attention for quoting bona fide liberal's liberals as his sources and, more recently, that one of his core beliefs about US government bears uncanny resemblence to nazi political theories.
His first reaction, of course, was to project his unfortunate troubles onto others, as we saw yesterday in his repeated attempts to slap nazism on the very people who found his position so objectionable. But that didn't work so today's response is patriotism. But as Dr. Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Nobody denies that he wrote from a southern perspective. That said, his history is not marred by flagrant partisanship and in fact is still in print 130 years later. It is one of the most, if not the most, honest versions written by a contemporary to the war itself and, absent specific proof otherwise, you have no basis on which to reject his word.
I seem to recall the you and your neo-reb buddies had all sorts of problems with the supposed bias of the author of the Union version of events.
Your union author was an extreme partisan who admittedly based his history on the claims of a propagandist Wide Awake-controlled newspaper. It was something akin to a history of the occupation of Iraq based upon accounts in the newspaper of Muqtada Al-Sadr. Naturally, it was also replete with outrageous and inflamatory claims as well as factual errors.
Moore's version, though admittedly southern, is a far more tempered and credible account by a witness to many of the events he described. If you take issue with those descriptions you are free to produce evidence to the contrary. But on that you cannot and have not.
For somebody who has been making so many demands of others to state their positions on Hitler, you've been oddly silent on your own position. So how 'bout an answer, capitan? Hitler said:
"[I]t is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states."Now - do you either agree or disagree with this statement?
I read something interesting the other day. As late as 1868 the Republican Party Platform called for voting rights for blacks in the southern states but NOT in the northern states, who they said could go about denying the right to vote all they wanted!
"The guaranty by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of suffrage in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States." - Plank 2, Republican Party Platform of 1868
Don E. Fehrenbacher
"Chief Justice Taney's jurisprudence needs no rehabilitation. His decision was the correct one."
I was wrong. Dred Scott hasn't been universally condemned. 4ConservativeJustices has spoken.
"Personally, Justice Taney considered slavery wrong, and had freed his slaves by 1827."
"The strong feeling that governed [Taney] were no doubt a mixture. Love for the South and pride in his own southern heritage mingled with emotions of a negative sort. One finds, to be sure, no evidence of the suppressed moral anxiety that some scholars have discovered as the eruptive source of mounting southern hysteria. The study of Taney's character and behavior con tributes nothing to the "guilt thesis." On the other hand, his private letters do lend support to recent emphasis on southern fears, especially the fear of slave uprisings. Indeed, by the late 1850's Taney had plainly been caught up in a pattern of reciprocating apprehension that C. Vann Woodward calls "paranoia" and "counterparanoia."
"Besides fear, the was indignation. The counterpart of Taney's love for the South was his growing hostility to its northern critic. He liked to single out Massachusetts, once home of African slave traders, but now the center of abolitionism, as the epitome of northern selfishness and hypocrisy. Taney, above all in the late 1850's, was fiercely anti-antislavery. We must not be misled by his physical weakness or gentle mien. Wrath, says an ancient Greek poet, is the last thing in a man to grown old. The Dred Scott opinion, defensive in substance, but aggressive in temper, was the work of an angry southern gentleman.
"From a study of Taney's private emotional responses to the sectional controversy, one can learn something about the coming of the Civil War. Like the chief Justice, a majority of southerners had no significant economic stake in the institution of slavery, but they did have a vital stake in preservation of the southern social order and of southern self-respect. In the end, it may have been the assault on their self-respect - the very language of the antislavery crusade - that drove many southerns over the edge.... With increasing frequency and bitterness in the years that followed, southerner protested that they were being degraded by northern sanctimony. Taney's Dred Scott decision ... is a document of great revelatory value. In the very unreasonableness of its arguments one finds a measure of southern desperation." (Pg 560-561, deleting comments concerning Justice Daniel)
Wrong as usual. He was a nordic occultist who despised Christianity.
Then why do you post so much content from left wing haters, and that not to denounce them but rather to use their arguments in making your own?
If you want to continue to pollute FR with false syllogisms ("CR supports Lincoln, Hitler studied Lincoln, therefore CR is a Nazi")
Show me where I've made that argument as I have not. To the contrary, I have posted an inquiry to you seeking a determination of your position on Hitler's statement in light of other disturbing comments you made to LG. A primary purpose of this inquiry derives from the fact that two of your close associates have recently fallen into zot territory for their espousal of marxist and nazi positions, thus asking the same determination of you is a fair inquiry.
That you cannot even bring yourself to make a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether you agree with Hitler's political theories speaks volumes in itself.
He did so for propaganda value. Lincoln employed the same tactic even though virtually all who knew him including several of his closest friends and his wife openly admitted after his death that he was not a Christian and that he had religious beliefs falling somewhere in between a loose form of deism and atheism.
As for Hitler's occultism, evidence suggests that it started at a very young age, most notably when he first saw a medieval lance in an austrian museum that he believed to have been the Spear of Destiny (the spear that pierced Christ's side). Instead of interpreting it as an alleged Christian relic, he accepted it as an occultist source of power premised loosely upon the nordic legend in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal. Reports suggest that Hitler became maniacal in his obsession over the lance, which he thought possessed some ancient nordic occult power of conquest and victory.
It's a problem a lot of Lincoln lovers face.
ROTF! Who'd a thunk it? Racist yankees [*fainting*}
I'm glad we got that straight ;o)
See #404. Not everyone thinks the decision was wrong. It upheld decades of PRIOR decisions on the same subject, as well as the opinion and LAWS of numerous federal Congresses. The only ones who got their panties in a wad were yankees, who were terrified that they might actually have to live next to a black.
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