That’s an interesting quote. When was it written???
Essentially he wasn’t pretending that what he was doing was Constitutional. He was admitting openly that it was unConstitutional.
That to me would be understandable given that half of Washington’s senators and representatives were no longer in Washington but down in Richmond shooting at you.
It’s a wonder anything functioned during those years.
"Soon after the first call for militia it was considered a duty to authorize the commanding general in proper cases according to his discretion, to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or in other words to arrest and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety. This authority has purposely been exercised but very sparingly. Nevertheless the legality and propriety of what has been done under it are questioned and the attention of the country has been called to the proposition that one who is sworn to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' should not himself violate them. Of course some consideration was given to the questions of power and propriety before this matter was acted upon. The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it? But it was not believed that this question was presented. It was not believed that any law was violated"
Please note that at the end of that paragraph, Lincoln states his belief that no law was in fact violated. However, as DiogeneLamp has indicated, he clearly raised and discussed the notion that it might occasionally be necessary to sacrifice compliance with a single law to protect the greater body of laws of which the single law is but a part.
Essentially he wasn’t pretending that what he was doing was Constitutional. He was admitting openly that it was unConstitutional.
That's the way I see it.
It’s a wonder anything functioned during those years.
And things really haven't function properly ever since. Lincoln created the first Federal Juggernaut, and Massive government has been with us ever since. Teddy Roosevelt Expanded it. Wilson expanded it again, and FDR expanded it further, and then Johnson turned it into a cancer.