Raynors HCA 2015-02
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 2/19/2015
A complete issue of The National Intelligencer, June 16, 1863, 4pp., disbound, minor acid burn at spine, VG. On the back page is a transcript of President Lincoln’s letter to Hon. Erastus Corning and others. In it, Lincoln explains his justification for supporting the court-martial's conviction of Vallandigham, an Ohio politician, and leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats. In small part, “Prior to my installation here it had been inculcated that any State had a lawful right to secede from the national Union, and that it would be expedient to exercise the right whenever the devotees of the doctrine should fail to elect a president to their own liking. I was elected contrary to their liking; and, accordingly, so far as it was legally possible, they had taken seven States out of the Union, had seized many of the United States forts, and had fired upon the United States Flag, all before I was inaugurated, and, of course, before I had done any official act whatever...l.Their sympathizers pervaded all departments of the government and nearly all communities of the people. From this material, under cover of “liberty of speech,” “liberty of the press,” and “habeas corpus,” they hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause in a thousand ways. ... Habeas corpus does not discharge men who are proved to be guilty of defined crime; and its suspension is allowed by the Constitution on purpose that men may be arrested and held who cannot be proved to be guilty of defined crime, ‘when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.’....”...plus, The National Intelligencer, July 11, 1863, 4pp., disbound, VG. From the back page, another 5 columns are taken with the Lincoln/Vallandigham debate. This one includes a full letter from President Lincoln to a named Ohio delegation which had petitioned to have the political bandishment of Vallandigham lifted so he can run for Ohio Governor. Lincoln’s lengthy response is, in small part “You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may override all the guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the public safety when I may choose to say the public safety requires it. This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion. ... By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is to be made from time to time; and I think the man whom, for the time, the people have, under the Constitution, made the commander-in-chief of their army and navy, is the man who holds the power and bears the responsibility of making it. ... I am unable to perceive an insult to Ohio in the case of Mr. Vallandigham. Quite surely nothing of the sort was or is intended. I was wholly unaware that Mr. Vallandigham was, at the time of his arrest, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor...Still, in regard to Mr. Vallandigham and all others, I must hereafter, as heretofore, do so much as the public safety may seem to require.” President Lincoln, who considered Vallandigham a "wily agitator" and was wary of making him a martyr to the Copperhead cause, ordered him sent through the lines to the Confederacy, and he was taken under guard to Tennessee.
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