he letter of
the statute to render it agreeable to natural justice."

In the exercise of his supposed prerogative Lincoln sanctioned from
beginning to end of the war the arrest of many suspected dangerous
persons under what may be called "letters de cachet" from Seward and
afterwards from Stanton. He publicly professed in 1863 his regret that
he had not caused this to be done in cases, such as those of Lee and
Joseph Johnston, where it had not been done. When agitation arose on the
matter in the end of 1862 many political prisoners were, no doubt wisely,
released. Congress then proceeded, in 1863, to exercise such powers in
the matter as the Constitution gave it by an Act suspending, where the
President thought fit, the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_. A
decision of the Supreme Court, delivered curiously enough by Lincoln's
old friend David Davis, showed that the real effect of this Act, so far
as valid under the Constitution, was ridiculously small (see _Ex parte
Milligan_, 4 Russell, 2). In any case the Act was hedged about with many
precautions. These were entirely disregarded by the Government, which
proceeded avowedly upon Lincoln's theory of martial law. The whole
country was eventually proclaimed to be under martial law, and many
persons were at the orders of the local military commander tried and
punished by court-martial for offences, such as the discouragement of
enlistment or the encouragement of desertion, which might not have been
punishable by the ordinary law, or of which the ordinary Courts might not
have convicted them. This fresh outbreak of martial law must in large
part be ascribed to Lincoln's determination that the Conscription Act
should not be frustrated; but apart from offences relating to enlistment
there was from 1863 onwards no lack of seditious plots fomented by the
agents of the Confederacy in Canada, and there were several secret
societies, "knights" of this, that, or the other. Lincoln, it is true,
scoffed at these, but very often the general on the spot thought
seriously of them, and the extreme Democratic leader, Vallandigham,
boasted that there were half a million men in the North enrolled in such
seditious organisations. Drastic as the Government proceedings were, the
opposition to them died down before the popular conviction that strong
measures were necessary, and the popular appreciation that the
blood-thirsty despot "King Abraham I.," as some Democrats were pleas