I'm certainly no less an expert on it than you.
In those days, it sometimes took weeks just to elect a Speaker before business could be conducted.
Then spend a couple weeks electing a speaker - that still puts you up and running in time to pass the appropriate legislation. The war was on for three long months before Lincoln called congress.
And then there was the matter of whether rebel Representatives were going to keep their seats, to be obstructionist.
Those that had the intention of leaving had already left. Those that were staying stayed. What else is there to say about it?
One of the reasons that patriots did not have a problem with the President's action is that the Founding Fathers' Militia Aact empowered him to do what suspending the privilege would have done -- round up rebels and imprison them.
...yet nowhere in the militia act does it either say or imply he can suspend habeas corpus. Try again.
Again, most patriots did not have a problem with it
The honest ones like Curtis did.
and Curtis was a retired, with no more say-so than Jimmy Carter does today.
Carter may be an idiot and a fool but as a former president still retains media attention. The same goes for Gerry Ford, George Bush, or any other former president. Besides that, Curtis was one of the nation's leading legal minds after his retirement where he wrote extensive and influential volumes on American law. One of them was his book Executive Power, where he strongly denounced Lincoln's unconstitutional usurpation of the habeas corpus suspension power.