Date | December 3, 1861 |
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Type | State of the Union Address |
Participants | Abraham Lincoln |
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The 1861 State of the Union Address was written by the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and delivered to the 37th United States Congress, on Tuesday, December 3, 1861, amid the American Civil War, which had begun earlier in the year. [1] This was Lincoln's first State of the Union Address and the first since the start of the Civil War. In regard to that war, Lincoln stated that "[t]he last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter." [1] He also announced the retirement of Winfield Scott as Commanding General of the United States Army and announced the appointment of George B. McClellan to the post about a month earlier. [1]
Much of Lincoln's address focused on commerce and relationships with foreign nations, especially in light of the Civil War. Lincoln also addressed the fact that there were now three vacancies on the Supreme Court of the United States which he had not yet nominated individuals to fill. [1] He also called for the District of Columbia retrocession, which returned land formerly within the District of Columbia to the State of Virginia, to be undone and for the District of Columbia to regain its former land. [2]
It was also in this address that Lincoln recommended reforming the United States circuit court system to ease the burden of hearing cases on the United States Supreme Court, a practice which was much later adopted.
Besides this, the country generally has outgrown our present judicial system. If uniformity was at all intended, the system requires that all the States shall be accommodated with circuit courts, attended by Supreme judges, while, in fact, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Florida, Texas, California, and Oregon have never had any such courts. Nor can this well be remedied without a change in the system, because the adding of judges to the Supreme Court, enough for the accommodation of all parts of the country with circuit courts, would create a court altogether too numerous for a judicial body of any sort. And the evil, if it be one, will increase as new States come into the Union. Circuit courts are useful or they are not useful. If useful, no State should be denied them; if not useful, no State should have them. Let them be provided for all or abolished as to all. Three modifications occur to me, either of which, I think, would be an improvement upon our present system. Let the Supreme Court be of convenient number in every event; then, first, let the whole country be divided into circuits of convenient size, the Supreme judges to serve in a number of them corresponding to their own number, and independent circuit judges be provided for all the rest; or, secondly, let the Supreme judges be relieved from circuit duties and circuit judges provided for all the circuits; or, thirdly, dispense with circuit courts altogether, leaving the judicial functions wholly to the district courts and an independent Supreme Court. [1]
Despite the challenges of the Civil War, Lincoln ended upon a note of hope for the future: "The struggle of to-day is not altogether for to-day; it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us." [1]
This address consisted of 6,987 words. [3]
Lincoln formally released his address to Congress on December 3, 1861. However, excerpts of his address appeared in the morning edition of the New York Herald (a newspaper known for being anti-Lincoln) hours before it was given to Congress, meaning that someone had leaked Lincoln's address to the press. [4] [5]
The House Judiciary Committee launched an investigation into the leak in February 1862. A correspondent for the New-York Tribune testified that the leak was arranged by Henry Wikoff, a friend of Herald editor James Gordon Bennett Sr. Wikoff claimed that he got his information from "women... members of the president's own family," implicating Mary Todd Lincoln with whom he was a close friend. [4] However, Wikoff refused to name his source explicitly, so he was jailed in the United States Capitol basement for contempt of Congress. [5] Daniel Sickles, then a Union general, visited Wikoff under pretense of being his legal counsel and convinced him to testify that the leaker was White House gardener John Watt, who confessed to the committee the next day. [5] However, Watt, who was involved in several blackmail schemes, likely confessed falsely in exchange for a job at the United States Patent Office after he lost his White House job. [4]
A few days later, Herald correspondent S. P. Hanscom testified that Wikoff had told him earlier that the leaks came from Mary Todd Lincoln. [5] Due to the implication of his wife, Abraham Lincoln became the first sitting president to testify before a committee of Congress. He testified in secret, and he said that only members of his cabinet had seen the address ahead of time, meaning nobody else, including Mary, could have leaked it. [4] The next week, the committee voted not to publish testimony about the role of "any member of the President's family." [5] As the Civil War dragged on and the matter remained unresolved, it faded from public attention. [4]
Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144 (No. 9487), was a controversial U.S. federal court case that arose out of the American Civil War. It was a test of the authority of the President to suspend "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus" under the Constitution's Suspension Clause, when Congress was in recess and therefore unavailable to do so itself. More generally, the case raised questions about the ability of the executive branch to decline to enforce judicial decisions when the executive believes them to be erroneous and harmful to its own legal powers.
Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that the use of military tribunals to try civilians when civil courts are operating is unconstitutional. In this particular case, the Court was unwilling to give former President Abraham Lincoln's administration the power of military commission jurisdiction, part of the administration's controversial plan to deal with Union dissenters during the American Civil War. Justice David Davis, who delivered the majority opinion, stated that "martial rule can never exist when the courts are open" and confined martial law to areas of "military operations, where war really prevails", and when it was a necessity to provide a substitute for a civil authority that had been overthrown. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and three associate justices filed a separate opinion concurring with the majority in the judgment, but asserting that Congress had the power to authorize a military commission, although it had not done so in Milligan's case.
Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on Saturday, March 4, 1865, during his second inauguration as President of the United States. At a time when victory over secessionists in the American Civil War was within days and slavery in all of the U.S. was near an end, Lincoln did not speak of happiness, but of sadness. Some see this speech as a defense of his pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, in which he sought to avoid harsh treatment of the defeated rebels by reminding his listeners of how wrong both sides had been in imagining what lay before them when the war began four years earlier. Lincoln balanced that rejection of triumphalism, however, with recognition of the unmistakable evil of slavery. The address is inscribed, along with the Gettysburg Address, in the Lincoln Memorial.
Horace Harmon Lurton was a Confederate soldier and later, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Elijah Hise Norton was a U.S. congressman from Missouri during the United States Civil War.
James McNair Baker was a lawyer, politician, and Senator from Florida in the Confederate Congress during the American Civil War.
Jesse Johnson Finley was an American politician and military officer who was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida after the reconstruction era. He also served as mayor of Memphis, Tennessee; an volunteer officer in the United States Army during the Second Seminole War; a member of the Arkansas Senate; a member of the Florida Senate; and a Circuit Court Judge in Florida.
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri is a trial level federal district court based in St. Louis, Missouri, with jurisdiction over fifty counties in the eastern half of Missouri. The court is one of ninety-four district-level courts which make up the first tier of the U.S. federal judicial system. Judges of this court preside over civil and criminal trials on federal matters that originate within the borders of its jurisdiction. It is organized into three divisions, with court held in St. Louis, Hannibal, and Cape Girardeau.
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's confinement under color of law. A petition for habeas corpus is filed with a court that has jurisdiction over the custodian, and if granted, a writ is issued directing the custodian to bring the confined person before the court for examination into those reasons or conditions. The Suspension Clause of the United States Constitution specifically included the English common law procedure in Article One, Section 9, clause 2, which demands that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
John Curtiss Underwood was an attorney, abolitionist politician and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Virginia and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Bland Ballard was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Kentucky.
David Davis was an American politician and jurist who was a U.S. senator from Illinois and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager at the 1860 Republican National Convention, engineering Lincoln's successful nomination for president by that party.
Robert Cooper Grier was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Samuel Nelson was an American attorney and appointed as judge of New York State courts. He was appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1872. He concurred on the 1857 Dred Scott decision, although for reasons different from Chief Justice Taney's.
George Foster Shepley was an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War, military governor of Louisiana and a United States circuit judge of the United States Circuit Courts for the First Circuit.
Ex parte Vallandigham, 68 U.S. 243 (1864), is a United States Supreme Court case, involving a former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who had violated an Army order against the public expression of sympathy for the Confederate States and their cause. Vallandigham was tried before a military tribunal by Major General Ambrose E. Burnside for treason after he delivered an incendiary speech at Mount Vernon; he then appealed the tribunal's verdict to the Supreme Court, arguing that he as a civilian could not be tried before a military tribunal.
The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, 12 Stat. 755 (1863), entitled An Act relating to Habeas Corpus, and regulating Judicial Proceedings in Certain Cases, was an Act of Congress that authorized the president of the United States to suspend the right of habeas corpus in response to the American Civil War and provided for the release of political prisoners. It began in the House of Representatives as an indemnity bill, introduced on December 5, 1862, releasing the president and his subordinates from any liability for having suspended habeas corpus without congressional approval. The Senate amended the House's bill, and the compromise reported out of the conference committee altered it to qualify the indemnity and to suspend habeas corpus on Congress's own authority. Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on March 3, 1863, and suspended habeas corpus under the authority it granted him six months later. The suspension was partially lifted with the issuance of Proclamation 148 by Andrew Johnson, and the Act became inoperative with the end of the Civil War. The exceptions to Johnson's Proclamation 148 were the States of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, the District of Columbia, and the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona.
United States ex rel. Murphy v. Porter, 2 Hawy. & H. 394, 27 F. Cas. 599, was a case decided by the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia in October 1861.
The present insurrection shows, I think, that the extension of this District across the Potomac River at the time of establishing the capital here was eminently wise, and consequently that the relinquishment of that portion of it which lies within the State of Virginia was unwise and dangerous. I submit for your consideration the expediency of regaining that part of the District and the restoration of the original boundaries thereof through negotiations with the State of Virginia.