President Lincoln's Nemesis

[David Lockmiller]

The Washington Post reported today:

The House on Tuesday passed legislation to remove statues of Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol and replace the bust of Roger B. Taney, the U.S. chief justice who wrote the 1857 Supreme Court decision that said people of African descent are not U.S. citizens. A bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney is displayed in the old Supreme Court chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. The legislation would replace the bust of Taney, which sits outside the old Supreme Court chamber on the first floor of the Capitol, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice.

The Washington Post article does not mention President Lincoln's Civil War challenge from his old nemesis.

Team of Rivals, page 354-55:

Receiving word that the mobs intended to destroy the train tracks between Annapolis and Philadelphia in order to prevent the long-awaited troops from reaching the beleaguered capital, Lincoln made the controversial decision. If resistance along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia made it "necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety," Lincoln authorized General Scott to do so. In Lincoln's words, General Scott could "arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to public safety." Seward later claimed that he had urged a wavering Lincoln to take this step, convincing him that "perdition was the the sure penalty of further hesitation."

Lincoln had not issued a sweeping order but a directive confined to this single route. Still, by rescinding the basic constitutional protection against arbitrary arrest, he aroused the wrath of Chief Justice Taney, who . . . blasted Lincoln and maintained that only Congress could suspend the writ.

Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief executive, he was responsible for ensuring "that the laws be faithfully executed." An insurrection "in nearly one-third of the States" had subverted the "whole of the laws." [President Lincoln continued.] "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" His logic was unanswerable.