Civil war treason trials

Another was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had donated his biggest steamship to the U. Your attempt to base a great, enduring party on the hate and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody civil war, is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. When the time came for Lincoln to make his four new appointments to the supreme court, he made sure to choose wisely.

Like all shrewd Presidents, he wanted nominees whom he could trust to uphold his policies and constitutional principles. A year later, when given the opportunity to replace Roger B. We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.

Therefore, we must take a man whose opinions are known. Aside from certain policy concerns, Lincoln also appears to have wanted to change the nature of the court from a local one to a national one.

The judges who sat on the present circuit court were all from Washington, D. For chief justice he tapped David Kellogg Cartter of Ohio. Chase to Lincoln. Lincoln or was more often appealed to for consultation and advice than Judge Cartter. While serving as U. Though utterly distraught, he still supported his other son joining the army in In he failed in his reelection bid for Congress, and his term expired on March 3, Eight days later, Lincoln appointed him to the new court.

Olin, a Republican congressman from New York since , was a firm defender of the Lincoln administration and had been the floor manager of the conscription bill in the House. Lastly, Wylie, a lawyer from Alexandria, Virginia, was reputed to be the only person to vote for Lincoln in Alexandria City in Prior to the election Wylie had received threats that he would be shot if he voted for Lincoln, but he braved the hazards and did so anyway.

Following the election, as he sat on his front porch in Alexandria, a bullet whizzed through the air and shattered the drinking glass he held in his hand. Enough was enough already, and he decided to move into Washington. Earlier in Wylie had been tapped to serve as the judge of the criminal court in D. In selecting his nominees, Lincoln consciously turned the new D. He wanted judges with national reputations and who shared his sense of the American cause, and Republicans were generally pleased with his choices.

Some of our fellow citizens would doubtless have preferred others, on personal grounds. This oath, which was required of all federal employees and appointees, demanded affirmation of past and future loyalty.

Some Democrats refused to take the oath. If he has refused simply because the Court has no right to require it, I think he has not acted prudently. The court, it seems, hoped to set a new, national, standard for loyalty. As for Judge Merrick—he put his house in the District up for rent and moved back to Maryland, where, among other things, he worked to get at least one former Confederate—Senator David Yulee of Florida—released from military prison. In the years following the war, Merrick resumed his practice as a lawyer and served as a professor of law at Columbian College what is now the George Washington University.

He also served as a delegate to the Maryland state constitutional convention; he spent one term in the Maryland legislature ; and he served one term in Congress, from to In truth, Spinner did not yet know the real punch line.

He served on that bench until his death, on February 4, This gets complex: if a person honestly and reasonably believes he or she is the citizen of a new country which declared independence from a nation to which it was once attached, takes an oath of the allegiance to that new entity , and serves in its armed forces, would those facts vitiate the intent required for a criminal treason conviction, notwithstanding a subsequent finding that, as a matter of domestic law, the new country could not separate itself from the original nation?

Moreover, can individuals still voluntarily expatriate themselves, even if that makes them technically stateless? Expatriation as a defense to treason was raised in the case of Kawakita v. United States. While a minor, he took the oath of allegiance to the United States; went to Japan for a visit on an American passport, and was prevented by the outbreak of war from returning to this country. During the war, he reached his majority in Japan, changed his registration from American to Japanese, showed sympathy with Japan and hostility to the United States, served as a civilian employee of a private corporation producing war materials for Japan, and brutally abused American prisoners of war who were forced to work there.

Held: his conviction for treason is affirmed. Importantly, the Court did appear to countenance a claim that voluntary expatriation could be a defense to treason since the duty of allegiance would cease with the termination of American citizenship. However, the Court found:. Tomoya Kawakita, in a photograph taken at his trial for treason. Source: Wikipedia.

He had a dual nationality, a status long recognized in the law. The concept of dual citizenship recognizes that a person may have and exercise rights of nationality in two countries and be subject to the responsibilities of both. Kawakita was decided in the context of then existing law among other things, the petitioner cited R. Voluntary expatriation still exists in U. It would seem that, today, criminal liability for treason would depend upon exactly when sufficient acts of expatriation occurred relative to the time the overt acts required to prove treason took place.

Is it possible to know—particularly given the state of the law in —exactly how treason trials would have played out had they taken place en masse in the post-Civil War era? He privately insinuated to one of the defense lawyers that the 14th amendment would shield Davis from prosecution.

CWT: Would losing a treason trial against Davis bolster the legitimacy of secession? RIR: I do not think so. But Richard Henry Dana Jr. Occasionally, lawyers lose faith in their ability to win a case and begin to pitch ideas against trying it, in the hopes that their client will agree in its futility. Their client of course, was Andrew Johnson. RIR: Johnson never forgave Davis for slights toward him in the Senate, and he goes into the election campaigning that treason needs to be made odious. He thought the aristocratic leadership of the South had committed treason and he wanted people hanged for that.

After the war, the Radical Republicans think Johnson is going to be more likely to hang people than Lincoln would have been. The Democrats had no interest in trying Davis.