Taney ruled against Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus.
Isn't it clear that the Supreme Court cannot dictate to the President on matters central to the President's duty to fulfill his office? If the President violates the Constitution, the constitutional recourse is impeachment. A President who judges that a certain action is both constitutional, and essential to the maintenance of the republic, would be derelict in his formal duty if he deferred to the judicial branch and did not perform the action.
Let's be honest. The disagreement is not about the Constitutionality of Lincoln's actions, but about whether the Union was really at stake and whether it was a good thing that Lincoln preserved it. Those who say no, particularly to the second question, tend to say that Lincoln was assaulting the Constitution. Those who judge, with Lincoln, that the Union was in peril and that it was the president's sacred duty to preserve it, find little difficulty in seeing how his actions were Constitutional and necessary and wise. We should not let the matter be diverted into a proxy argument over Constitutional legality, when that matter clearly cannot be settled apart from the broader question of the nature of the federal union, and the president's duty to preserve it, and other related questions.
Taney ruled against Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus.
Taney was certainly in favor of using judical power to circumvent the legislative branch. The Dred Scott decision showed that.
Don't you think it strange that with all the people detained under President Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus, that no single case came before the whole court?
If i did, it has not made the splash in CSA glorification that Ex Parte Merryman did.
In any case, the current Chief Justice has opined that the question of whether the president may or may not suspend habeas corpus has never been definitively answered to this very day.
The consensus among legitimate historians is that President Lincoln bent the rules, but he never broke them. And habeas corpus is not an issue that threatens his reputation.
Walt
According to James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom), John Merryman was a lieutenant in a secessionist cavalry unit that had burned down bridges and torn down telegraph wires in April 1861. His arrest was not ordered by Lincoln; it was made by army officers who were rounding up Confederate guerillas/spies in Maryland.
Taney's decision in the case was issued not on behalf of the U.S. Supreme Court, but rather just in his role as the senior judge of the federal circuit court in Baltimore. In his opinion, Taney suggests that Article I of the U.S. Constitution [which contains the habeas corpus suspension provision] "is devoted to the legislative department of the United States, and has not the slightest reference to the executive department." Taney is clearly erroneous about that. Section 7 of Article I, for example, states as follows:
"Every bill which shall have passed the House of Representives and the Senate, shall, before it becomes a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approves it he shall sign it..."
Moreover, there are numerous others references in Article I to the powers of individual states, and when a provision therein is intended to be limited to Congress, specific reference is made therein to "Congress shall have power" or language to that effect. In fact, Section 9 therein (which contains the provision for suspending habeas corpus) contains one specific reference to what Congress can do (in the first paragraph), but the rest of that section contains no references limiting its applicability to Congress, which strongly suggests that those restrictions apply to all branches of Congress (and arguably to individual states as well).
According to McPherson, "several prominent constitutional lawyers rushed into print to uphold the legality of Lincoln's position [on the suspension of the writ of habeus corpus]". Taney made a weak attempt to have his order to free Merryman enforced by U.S. marshals, but ultimately he complained that he had "exercised all the power which the constitution and laws confer upon [him], but that power has been resisted by a force too strong for [him] to overcome", so he merely called for the President "in fulfillment of his constitutional obligation to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed,' to determine what measures he will take to cause the civil process of the United States to be respected and enforced."
This last statement makes it clear that Taney either lacked the courage of his convictions or (more likely) was just making his latest attempt to please his Confederate friends. Don't forget that this was the same Taney who issued the infamous Dred Scott decision. As McPherson points out, Taney's "main theme of his twenty-eight year tenure on the Court was the defense of slavery." Taney also had a well known grudge against the Lincoln administration even before inauguration, and according to McPherson, Taney had stated that he would refuse to administer the oath if William H. Seward were to be elected (because Seward had accused him of colluding with President Buchanan and the Southern Democrats in issuing the Dred Scott decision).
To summarize, the habeas corpus provision is rather ambiguous and a strong argument could be made that the President is entitled to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during a rebellion, particularly when Congress is not in session or does not object. In any event, in the case of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Congress specifically approved of and ratified his decision.
Keep in mind that when the rebellion broke out in 1861 Congress was not in session, and organizing a special session was not easily done at that time given the state of communications and transportation. The fastest route from California and Oregon then was by ship and overland through Central America. Congressmen also had families, jobs, and responsibilities at home which made it quite difficult for them to drop everything and head for Washington, and the Confederate guerillas in Maryland were doing all they could to cut off Washington from the rest of the Union. Lincoln and the Union military leaders were responding to rumours of an imminent attempt by Maryland secessionists to act in concert with Confederates in Virginia to seize, plunder, pillage, and burn Washington to the ground, so using his suspension of habeas corpus and arrest of suspected rebels as some kind of proof that Lincoln was a "dictator" is utterly ridiculous.
DiLorenzo and his Confederate-glorifying cohorts are masters at lifting sensational sounding tidbits out of historical context and using them to try to morph Lincoln into Joseph Stalin's evil twin, and apparently there are enough delusional neo-Confederates out there to make such a blatant smear campaign profitable. Don't expect any rational minds to fall for it, though.