Type of trial - Debate

[Thomas Thorne]

I think any civil trial in Washington DC in 1865 would have resulted in a hung jury for all the conspirators. What would the northern public reaction have been if the obviously guilty Louis Powell had escaped justice? Who might have become Powell's Jack Ruby or mob of Jack Rubys?

Critics of the military commission have failed to differentiate Milligan who treasonous activities took place in the backwaters of rural Indiana far from any battlefield from the facts of the Lincoln Assassination. Modern theorists would describe it as a decapitation strike against the National Command Authority in the most heavily fortified city on earth in wartime by unlawful combatants who wore no uniform and therefore enjoyed none of the protections of the soldier.

Certainly the 19th century obsession that war should be confined to men with uniforms was preferable to the Total War doctrine of the 2 World Wars. Yet the prophecy that the "Wars of Peoples would be more terrible than the Wars of Kings" first came true when leaders like Sherman and Sheridan realized that the will of the Southern population would have to be broken as much as the will of the Confederate armies.
Tom