region where the crime had been committed was one which needed the lesson. The sentence stood until the morning of the execution. Then a large and eminent delegation came to the White House and brought to bear upon the president a very considerable pressure. Lincoln, however, would take no action without reviewing again the papers in the case. He instructed Stoddard to look for the papers. Stoddard did so, and could not find them. Lincoln suggested to the delegation to go to the War Department. They went, but returned with the information that the papers were not at the War Department, they had been sent to the White House at the president's own request and had not been returned. Further search failed to disclose the documents, and the delegation went away sorrowful. Hardly had they left the White House when a telegram was handed to the president. Lincoln thus remarked:

"What did you say? A telegram? You don't tell me! Has that man been actually hung? It's a pity about his papers! It seems to me—well, yes, I remember now. I know where—well, if I did; I guess I wouldn't. Not now. But if they are ever called for again, and they won't be, they ought to be where they can be found. Certainly, certainly. But it is just as wel! that one murderer escaped being pardoned by Abraham Lincoln. Narrow escape, too. The merest piece of luck in all the world.”

CHAPTER XIX

RADICALS AND COPPERHEADS

LIKE all men conservative by nature but committed by conviction to a polity of progress, Abraham Lincoln won severe criticism from two widely divergent groups. Politics prover

bially makes strange bed-fellows. The administration of Lincoln produced a working coalition between some of the ultra anti-slavery men in the North and others who represented diametrically opposite political convictions.

Mention has already been made of the political reaction of 1862, in which the northern states quite generally receded from their whole-hearted allegiance to Lincoln, and sent to Congress a largely increased Democratic minority. Note has also been taken of the partial recovery, not in congressional representation, but in popular confidence in the administration, as shown in the results of the elections of those few states that chose governors in 1863. This increase in confidence did not mean that the people were less weary of the war, or that the men in the North who opposed the war were less bitter in their opposition.

In various northern states, and especially in southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, were organized societies known as the "Knights of the Golden Circle," "Sons of Liberty," "The Order of the Star," and the "Order of American Knights." These secret bodies enrolled large numbers of men, some of whom were thoroughly disloyal to the Union, and others of whom professed to be loyal to the government, but opposed to what they counted the tyranny or the radical abolition policy of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was not greatly disturbed by the so-called Copper

head movement. He treated it, according to his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, with "good-humored contempt." "Nothing can make me believe," he said, "that one hundred thousand Indiana Democrats are disloyal."

In all probability he was right. Yet there were enough disloyal Indiana Democrats to make the Knights of the Golden Circle a formidable organization. Governor Morton, of Indiana, did not share Lincoln's complacent view, and Governor Richard Yates, of Illinois, was almost equally disturbed.

These Copperhead organizations had for their purpose the discouragement of enlistment and the encouragement of desertions, the impeding in every practicable way of measures in the North for the putting down of the rebellion, and in general the giving of aid and comfort to the Confederate Army. Plans were made for the capture of the prisons in the North where Confederate soldiers were confined, for the destruction of arsenals and armories, and for other bold and terrible deeds. These larger and more heroic exploits did not get beyond threat and rumor; but there was secret and active propaganda, hostile to the government, that manifested itself in literally thousands of communities, and the personal abuse which was heaped upon Abraham Lincoln seems at this day all but incredible.

In a number of cities an opposing secret organization called the Union League was established. This society had its permanent monument in some northern cities in Union League Clubs.

He

A part of this hostility to Lincoln was not without apparent cause. Those reckon without knowledge of his character who assume that Lincoln was only a mild and irresolute man. was by nature mild, and he was so cautious as to appear, and at times to have been, irresolute. But he was also a man of inflexible will. When he had definitely committed himself to a course, he could not only be consistently loyal to it, but very stubbornly earnest in his refusal to swerve.

Very early in the war Lincoln saw that some drastic measures

would be necessary. Foes of the Union were everywhere, and especially in Washington. The District of Columbia lay partly in Virginia, which had seceded, and the rest in Maryland, whose legislature in 1861 protested against the war as unconstitutional and unjust, and expressed a desire for the immediate recognition of the Confederate states. In the opening weeks of the Civil War, Washington was virtually in a state of siege. Lincoln knew that neither in Washington nor anywhere else in the North was there assurance of safety from the insidious work of those who were seeking the overthrow of the Union.

Further, Lincoln knew that if he waited until guilty men committed overt acts of treason before causing them to be arrested, the arrest would in many cases be impossible or would come too late to prevent the success of dangerous plots. He placed men in charge of Federal prisons who were capable of resisting very great pressure. Some of these wardens were charged to keep themselves inside the prison walls where they would be free from the possibility of reach by the civil courts. He appointed Ward Hill Lamon commissioner of the District of Columbia, and kept him in that position in spite of most emphatic demands for his removal. He knew that Lamon was a man of courage, and not overnice in his methods when drastic policies needed to be enforced.

In order the more fully to protect this policy, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The Old Capitol prison in Washington was kept moderately full of people against some of whom no formal charges were ever brought. These people and their friends, many of them very respectable people, made vociferous protest, and the president in general maintained a sphinxlike silence. He knew that the winning of the war made it necessary that some harsh things should be done.

Lincoln was himself so firm an advocate of adherence to the law and of loyalty to the Constitution as to be an object of perplexity and wonder to some even of his friends who observed him giving his adherence to policies that seemed so arbitrary and

of such questionable legality. They reminded Lincoln how in times of peace he had said things strangely inconsistent with his present methods. Lincoln replied that when a man was sick he sometimes needed medicine, which would be very harmful to a well man, and that some things were necessary in times of war which a country could not tolerate in times of peace.

Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus brought upon him not only the severe criticism of Congress and the press, but the official disapproval of the Supreme Court. Roger B. Taney still sat as chief justice of that dignified body. He was so old and in such frail health that Lincoln feared that he would die between the time of the election of 1860 and the inauguration in 1861. But Justice Taney lived so long that Lincoln grew to cherish unfeigned alarm concerning the fate of some of his war policies when they came up, as they were certain to come, for review before the Supreme Court at the end of the Civil War. He did not have to wait until the end of the war for his break with Mr. Justice Taney. On May 25, 1861, John Merryman, a citizen of Baltimore, was arrested charged with treason, and was committed to the custody of General George Cadwalader, then commanding Fort Henry. Chief Justice Taney, then resident in Baltimore in the house of his sonin-law, Mr. Campbell, issued, in chambers, a writ of habeas corpus calling upon General Cadwalader to produce the body of John Merryman before Justice Taney in the room of the circuit court of Baltimore.

It would appear from this distance that Justice Taney went somewhat widely out of his way to discover trouble for himself. The Supreme Court was not sitting, and the justice was not in the capital. But Judge Taney believed that the executive and military powers were overriding the functions of the legislative and judiciary powers of the government. So he issued the writ of habeas corpus directing the United States Marshal for the District of Maryland to produce in court the body of the imprisoned man.