PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN had been in office less than two months when he took an executive action unprecedented in American history. He suspended the right of habeas corpus.
At the time, the country’s Southern states were seceding from the Union. South Carolina troops had fired on Fort Sumter. Federal troops from Philadelphia sent to shore up Washington’s defenses had been waylaid by rioting Confederates in Baltimore. Telegraph lines to Washington had been severed, isolating the capitol, which, except for increasingly restive Maryland, was surrounded by secessionist states, wrote William H. Rehnquist, a former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in his study of civil liberties in war time, “All The Laws but One.”
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