Originally posted by SirLoin
It's ok George..We forgive you for spying on & censoring people that don't agree with you.
Or maybe Lincoln's just pointing out that he suspended Habeas corpus on April 27, 1861, had it overturned in US Circuit Court and told (later) Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney to jam it.
Oh yeah, he declared martial law as well, trying civilians in military courts; this included Congressmen opposing him. For example, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, who was forcefully taken from his Dayton, Ohio home in the middle of the night by 67 armed federal soldiers, thrown into a military prison without due process, convicted by a military tribunal, and deported (to Canada).
Why did Vallandigham get arrested you ask?
Vallandigham was appalled and outraged at Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and his arrest of thousands of Northern political opponents; the trial of civilians by military tribunals even though the civil courts were operating; arbitrary arrests without warrants or charges; military edicts that prohibited criticism of the Lincoln administration; the arrest of all of the editors of opposition newspapers in Ohio; and the mobbing and demolition of opposition newspapers by Republican Party activists or federal soldiers.
Vallandigham’s "act of treason" was to make a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives (which was repeated to his home constituents) in which he condemned the Lincoln administration’s "persistent infractions of the Constitution" and its "high-minded usurpations of power," which were designed as "a deliberate conspiracy to overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead." (See The Record of Hon. C. L. Vallandigham: Abolition, the Union, and the Civil War, Wiggins, MS: Crown Rights Publishers, 1998).
Starting a war without the consent of Congress, Vallandigham said, was the kind of dictatorial act "that would have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last two hundred years." Echoing Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, he railed against the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the consent of the owners; the subversion of the Maryland government by arresting some twenty legislators, the Mayor of Baltimore, and Congressman Henry May; censorship of the telegraph; and the confiscation of firearms from private citizens.
Yah, that Bush guy..... he's a baddie.
