How does the South fare in their protection of civil rights?
Southern Rights, Confederate Wrongs
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=8642948837872
Neely challenged this consensus by examining the available arrest records, court opinions, and other documents related to Confederate wartime arrests of civilians; in other words, he applied basically the same methodology which worked so well in Fate of Liberty. Focusing particularly on cases involving suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, declarations of martial law, draft evasion, and other expressions of dissent, he found that the Confederate record was not much different from that of the Union. Confederate authorities, Neely argues, used much the same pragmatic, flexible approach characteristic of the Lincoln administration. "Though Confederate measures taken for internal security, when noticed at all, have been assumed to be necessary, and, if anything, too mild, there is evidence of political repression," Neely wrote (p. 132). People in the Confederacy were arrested for their political beliefs, jailed without benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, and subjected to the sometimes not-very-tender mercies of martial law and military rule.
Given the South's self-proclaimed role as a champion of individual rights, one might have expected an outcry of protests, or at the very least a robust conversation about civil liberties among Southern politicians, lawyers, and newspapermen. But Neely argues that this was not the case. Most white Southerners quietly acquiesced in the suspension of the writ, declarations of martial law, and other such measures. Neely identified a "longing for order in the South, released by independence from the North and quite at odds with region's fabled desire for liberty or 'southern rights'" (p. 34). He was struck by the contrast with the North, where Lincoln's various attempts to curb antiwar protests triggered a boisterous debate about civil liberties in wartime. "It seems remarkable that there are no celebrated cases challenging the power of the Confederate government to interfere with the daily lives of its citizens," he wrote, "Confederate history does not have its equivalent of Ex parte Merryman or of General Andrew Jackson's fine for contempt" (p. 62). The Confederacy was no different from the North; it wanted to win the war. "Southern society was, at bottom, American and much the same as Northern society. It consisted of people who valued both liberty and order. They did not bridle more than normally at restrictive measures taken by the government to fight a war for national existence" (p. 79).
At its heart, Southern Rights is about what Neely perceives as an overweening Confederate streak of hypocrisy; the very title of his book is a statement of irony. Neely is impatient with what he characterizes as the "strident" and "noisy" posturing of Confederates on matters of civil liberties and individual rights. He is also deeply distressed by a tendency among Confederate historians to take Southerners' declarations of libertarianism at face value. "Antebellum politicians exaggerated sensitivity about southern rights as a means of combating northern power," Neely wrote, "but historians should not exaggerate as well" (p. 79
I suppose you could call that "balanced".
Mark Neely is a member in good standing of that revisionist school that labors to heap moral burdens on the South, its People, and its leaders , splicing this historical rewriting into contemporary PC political drives to erase Southern culture, values, and memories, while vilifying Southerners as Southerners, because they're Southerners.
Stands to reason you'd bring him in here sooner or later. But we know who he is.
But why don't you just save us all some time in pawing over these middlemen, and get Kweisi Mfume and Pinchy Sulzberger in here themselves, to tell us all what lowlife scumbags we are? Save a few steps.
You will have to sell that on a different street corner.
Mark E. Neely, Jr., is Director of the Lincoln Museum.
His best-known book is The Fate of Liberty. The cover commentary asserts, "Neely depicts Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus as a well-intentioned attempt to deal with a floodtide of unforeseen events..."
Neely himself states:
Lincoln fashioned an able defense of the April suspension of the writ of ahbeas corpus but left the more recent expansion of the suspension unexplained. (p. 13)
On page 27, Neely buries the affair of Judge Merrick in a paragraph. All Neely can find is "Merrick was never arrested, but Seward's order violated the Constitution's stipulation that judges' compensation 'shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.'" Black's law dictionary says, "All that is required for an 'arrest' is some act by officer indicating his intention to detain or take person into custody and thereby subject that person to the actual control and will of the officer; no formal declaration of arrest is required."
In these early months of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration overcame its fears of public reaction to restrictions on civil liberties, instituted a novel internal security system, and came to believe that it worked. Not every historian today would credit it with saving Maryland for the Union, but that conclusion became almost a truism in Lincoln's day. (p. 29)
As usual, the Lincoln administration's internal security system betrayed no signs of corruption in the water-torture affair. (p. 112)
Of course, there is one whole chapter entitled The Irrelevance of the Milligan Decision. (pp. 160-184) You remember that one, it is the one that was mangled by Gordon Kwok. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of a military tribunal to try a civilian when the civilian courts were open and functioning was UNCONSTITUTIONAL. In the states where the civilian courts were open and operating, ALL such military tribunals were UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The trial of Clement Vallandigham was UNCONSTITUTIONAL. During the war, the Court did not hear his case. The Milligan case was decided along that same argument made by Vallandigham.
Here is some high-class bovine scatology: "No one has described courtroom procedures or precedents that dictated the conduct of these commissions." Earth to Neely -- such procedures and procedents do not exist, they must be prescribed for the specific commission. So, for example, all may recall Donald Rumsfeld prescribing procedures for military tribunals for unlawful combatants fairly recently. A military tribunal is NOT a court-martial. Neither is an Article III court, i.e., a creature of the Judicial Branch of government. Each is a creature of the EXECUTIVE Branch of government, which is why the procedures were recently being prescribed by the Secretary of Defense.
Perhaps the most famous of American military tribunals was eight persons accused of complicity in the assassination of Lincoln. Blatant perjury was introduced. The defendants were prohibited from testifying in their own defense. Exhibit #1, entered as "portrait of Booth," was identified as the assassin but later revealed to be a picture of Edwin Booth. In the jury room, prosecuting attorneys "assisted" the jury in their deliberations.
"The Dred Scott decision was meant to deprive slaves taken into a Territory of the chances of liberty under the United States Constitution." (p. 176). The decision was "designed" to answer the case presented to the Court. It was decided 7-2.
On pp. 179-80, Neely expends two pages on John W. Clampitt and his 1881 defense of military tribunals directly contrary to the United States Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan. On page 180, Neely asserts, "Clampitt's defense of trials by military commission was significant, for when he spoke of their use in capital cases, he definitely knew what he was talking about." I note that the condemnation of such tribunals by the U.S. Supreme Court was more significant than an article written by John W. Clampitt.
The Supreme Court, in Milligan said, quite clearly,
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. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.
Neely, at page 184 states, "Historians, not realizing how muddled the law was before 1866, have repeatedly misinterpreted the constitutional history of the Civil War mainly by making the choices seem clearer than they appeared to the protagonists as the time. Such distinctions were clearer to the justices in 1866 than to the hard-pressed Lincoln administration between 1861 and 1865." Acting as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney seemed to have phrased himself quite clearly in the Merryman case.
In reaching Lincolnian heights of rhetorical bovine scatology, Neely at page 224 defends Lincoln with this Award-winning performance:
Although the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus is surely helpful in maintaining free speech, a free press, and trial by jury, it is not identical with them, and its relation to maintaining the laws of evidence seems downright obscure. Lincoln was not speaking of the actual writ, something that could be issued by Democratic judges or Republican judges, something that could aid the freedom of fugitive slaves or help slave-catchers. He was speaking of a mythical writ that is ever liberating and that is always and everywhere a cornerstone of freedom.
Earth to Neely: Lincoln did not suspend some mythical writ, he suspended the actual writ.
If this is how one is "critical" of Lincoln, one can only wonder what a Lincoln apologist might write.