Chief Justice Taney's showdown with the new President in the opening stages of the civil war, over Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, is a much-discussed incident in US constitutional history (and in our military history, too). An article last year in Military Law Review offered an important revisionist account of the MERRYMAN case. For a link, click here. It is a defense of Lincoln's behavior in this matter, an effort to undermine the common idea that Lincoln was running roughshod over the rule of law by ignoring a duly issued order. Seth Barrett Tillman argues in essence that Taney never ordered Merryman released, although he did issue an opinion that seems to advise the President to do so. Further, Taney was acting out of line there, because judicial advisory opinions are not contemplated in the US constitution, and are inconsistent with "separation of powers norms." "In short, Lincoln had every reason to believe that there was ...
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My recent reading includes a review, by friend Henry, of SLAVISH SHORE, a new book from Harvard University Press about the life of Richard Henry Dana Jr. Dana argued the Prize Cases before the US Supreme Court in February 1863. At issue: when is a war a war? when is a blockade a blockade? was Lincoln's action in pursuing a war through the imposition of a blockade lawful? As Henry explains it: "A blockade is a war measure, and a President is authorized under his war powers to impose a blockade only when Congress has declared war against another nation....Lincoln denied that the Confederate states were a nation, he insisted that they were mere insurrectionists and traitors. No one questions that Lincoln could have closed the ports, as opposed to blockading them, but Britain had 'made it clear that it would not accept American "closure" of Southern ports that would expose British shippers to arrest as common smugglers.'" In that last half sentence, ...
My reading list lately includes Cherie Priest's 2009 steampunk novel BONESHAKER. It is "steampunk" in that it has sci-fi elements and a Victorian setting. It is also an alternative-history novel (Stonewall Jackson survived his wound at Chancellorsville, and due to his tactical brilliance in subsequent campaigns the Union was incapable of bringing the civil war to a satisfactory conclusion -- it was still underway in the late 1870s.) There are zombies in this novel, (called "rotters"), there are humans who manage a wary co-existence with the rotters ("doorknobs"), there are dirigibles, a mysterious dead grandfather and an even more mysterious (probably dead) father: all good stuff. The son/grandson of these two mysterious men is Ezekiel Blue, or Ezekiel Wilkes, [depending on point of view] or just Zeke. He goes in search of evidence that his father wasn't the evil man that he is generally held to be, or to have been, amongst the residents of th...
On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed. Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs." The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebellum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan. Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp. Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others. On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I n...
A recent issue of The Wall Street Journal included a review of a new book by historian Gerard Magliocca, pictured here. Magliocca is the author of American Founding Son , a biography of John Bingham, apparently the leading figure in the creation of the 14th amendment. The reviewer is Allen Guelzo. I'll simply offer what I regard as a candidate for the title "money quote": "Even so, as the author concedes, it is hard to peg Bingham as a radical. He opposed secession, but he also rejected radical abolitionist Rep. Thaddeus Stevens's campaign to 'territorialize' the Confederate states. Bingham designed the 14th amendment to clarify the constitutional meaning of U.S. citizenship and allow that meaning to include the newly freed slaves, but he waffled on whether this should include voting rights. And he drew a shade over the close of his congressional career with his anti-Catholicism and his involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal, in which a du...
On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed. Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs." The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebellum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan. Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp. Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others. On a trip through Virginia a few years ago,...