What Neeley's research into the "Habeas Corpus Commissioners" shows is that the suspension of civil rights didn't have to be authorized by Jefferson Davis or the Confederate Congress. All they had to do was pretend they didn't know what was going on and then, in their postwar memoirs, claim that their hands were clean. I guess that's an advantage of a state's rights system.
There is actually substantial evidence that the Gainesville executions, or at least the main figures who were hanged, were genuinely involved in a criminal plot to sabatoge the Texas and Confederate governments. The plot was connected with the same groups who perpetrated a wave of arsons and poisonings in late 1860 across northern Texas with the assistance of abolitionist agitators from Bleeding Kansas.
There were actually 150 people arrested in the Gainesville conspiracy and taken before a criminal jury of 12, of which the majority were exonerated. 2 were shot as they attempted to escape from jail while the jury was deliberating. 7 were convicted in the first round by the jury (the ones who were most likely involved in the plot). While the jury was in deliberations over the other prisoners a mob amassed and killed 14 before the authorities could intervene. The next week the abolitionists struck again, assassinating Col. William Young, who had presided over the jury, and another man. The court reconvened and convicted 19 more out of the 150, who were then sentenced to death. It's been debated ever since how far the guilt extended to some of the executed, but the fact that a criminal plot existed is beyond a doubt as is the fact that both sides in that plot used vigilante means to attack the other during the course of the trial but external to its happenings.
How many in the north? Any?
Funny you ask that. Their number goes at least into the thousands. One particularly horrendous case happened on the back supply lines of Sherman's march in 1865 under Gen. Robert Milroy in Tennessee. Milroy drafted up several lengthy lists of dozens of names, plus one large list exceeding 50, which he gave to Death Squads who then went door to door executing the people on them, often in a bizarre and tortuous way described on Milroy's orders. For example, one order directs the men to execute some victims by hanging them with a slip knot and pulling their feet until dead. Another directs them to stage an "accidental" shooting of a victim's wife. A third directs them to take the named persons prisoner and deliver them to a civilian unionist "informant" to be "disposed" of by torture as a reward for his loyalties. The "crime" of most was simply having been accused of being a confederate sympathizer, and unlike in Gainesville, NONE of them had any form of trial or conviction be it military or otherwise. Even worse, this was no vigilante act by a renegade commander. It's all spelled out on union army stationary in the national archives. I'll even give you the call numbers if you so desire. And that's just one of many cases. If you really want to, we can get into discussions of how Col. Fielding Hurst executed his prisoners, placed their heads on stakes, and used them to line a roadway in Tennessee.
It would seem that instead of suspending the Writ, the military would just declare martial law.
But it does seem that the inability to get control of the resistance going on in the South, did hurt their war effort.
I posted an article by a Peace movement that resisted the Confederacy and one of their tactics was fighting the suspension of the Writ.
In the situation that each side found themselves in, strong Executive leadership was necessary, but lacking on the Southern side.