Lincoln's Long Shadow: Recreating the Legal Debate over Habeas Corpus, 1861-1863

In 1861, the United States of America plunged into civil war. In the early days of the war, Abraham Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus – a suspension which lasted the rest of the war and which was ratified by Congress in 1863. Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, issued a circuit court opinion finding Lincoln’s actions unlawful in Ex parte Merryman. The suspension of habeas corpus and Taney’s decision in Merryman spawned a heated debate between Northern lawyers over the lawfulness of presidential suspension of habeas corpus. A careful analysis of the understudied lawyers who engaged in this debate reveals that law mattered a great deal in the Civil War-era and that law was not merely a fig leaf for the political views of individual lawyers.