Opposing Lincoln

"Denying Lincoln tackles the issue of the limits of dissent in wartime, using as a case study the arrest and trial by military commission of the leader of the Copperhead opposition to the Lincoln administration, Clement Vallandigham, who was convicted and sentenced to prison for a speech delivered on May 1, 1863. President Lincoln altered the sentence of the commanding general, Ambrose Burnside, and banished Vallandigham into the Confederacy, while also issuing one of the strongest defenses of presidential power in war time: the June 12, 1863, Corning Letter. While Vallandigham made his way through the South and into Canada, his attorneys asked for habeas corpus from the local federal district court. The US Supreme Court justices handed down their 1864 decision of Ex parte Vallandigham denying his request for habeas corpus, thereby deferring to Lincoln-at least in wartime. Two years later, in peacetime, the Court changed its tune in Ex parte Milligan. The Vallandigham case raises fundamental questions about the breadth of presidential power, the role and power of the lower and appellate federal courts, and the evergreen question of the limits of political dissent"--