Hard to so objectively when Lincoln was visibly jailing editors and sending his troops to smash the printing presses of newspapers that continued to acknowledge secession as a right. You don't have to arrest all of them, just shut down some, arrest some more, and refuse to allow others to be delivered by the Post Office, and the rest will shut up.
That's not a fair appreciation of what happened.
"Scholars still debate whether Lincoln had the authority to invoke the Constitutional provision suspending Habeas Corpus during the early days of the war. I will not wade into the muddy waters of that debate. I am more interested in talking about what Lincoln did after March of 1863--for that is when Congress gave Lincoln legislative authority to suspend the writ. From that point forward, Lincoln faced no constitutional obstacles. He could arrest whomever he chose, without courts interfering with Writs of Habeas Corpus. What did Lincoln do at this point? Did he attempt to stifle political debate, by imprisoning his opponents? In short, did he trample on the civil liberties the Writ of Habeas Corpus was meant to protect?
A recent historical study, entitled The Fate of Liberty, says "no." The author, Mark Neely, combed through the musty boxes of arrest records from the Civil War "to find out who was arrested when the Writ of Habeas Corpus was suspended and why." Neely concludes that, throughout the war, Lincoln was guided by a "steady desire to avoid political abuse under the Habeas-Corpus policy."
According to the best estimates, about 38,000 civilians were arrested by the military during the Civil War. Who were they? Almost all fell within a few categories: "draft dodgers, suspected deserters, defrauders of the government, swindlers of recruits, ex-Confederate soldiers, and smugglers." And strikingly, most of these were Confederate citizens, caught behind Northern lines. The numbers show that very few civilians were taken from their homes and arrested. And of those few arrests, only a handful were colored by political considerations.
Indeed, Lincoln issued his most sweeping proclamation suspending Habeas Corpus not to silence political dissent, but to stop judicial interference in the draft. Early in the war, patriotic zeal was so strong that volunteers flooded into the Army. But as the war dragged on, public enthusiasm ebbed. Eventually, the government was reduced to instituting a draft. Conscription was rather unpopular, to say the least. If any of you remember the burning of draft cards during the Vietnam War, imagine that unrest multiplied several times over in the New York City Draft Riots in 1863. The problem was especially bad in Pennsylvania. Coal miners attacked men thought to be "in sympathy with the draft." State and federal courts added to the problem. They were churning out Writs of Habeas Corpus, freeing soldiers as soon as they were drafted. Lincoln observed that "[T]he course pursued by certain judges is defeating the draft."
Lincoln's response was to suspend the Writ throughout the North in any case that involved military arrest of deserters or draft dodgers. And for good measure, he threw in prisoners of war, spies, and those giving assistance to the enemy--say, by smuggling goods to the Confederate government. But his focus was always on military necessity. Lincoln never tried to suppress political dissent. He understood that a democracy only grows stronger by allowing people to voice their opposition to the government, even in the midst of war. He understood that the strength of the Union lay not only in force of arms, but in the liberties that were guaranteed by the open, and sometimes heated, exchange of ideas. And as one historian has put it, "[T]he opposition press in the North was vibrant, vigorous, and often vicious....
The President was not out to trample on the First Amendment. He was not out to crush his political opposition. He suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus in response to perceived military threats to the Union. After he, and later Congress, removed that Constitutional safeguard, the Lincoln Administration did not use its power selfishly or arbitrarily. It arrested only those people who actively supported the Confederate war machine--people like Merryman, who recruited troops to march south. And when people walked this fine line between political dissent and treason, as Vallandigham did, Lincoln tried to err on the side of free speech."
--Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/cwi/Lincoln_Fellowship/o'connor'96.htm
Walt
Complete and utter nonsense.