President Lincoln and the Constitution

President Lincoln and his cabinet

Today, most people regard Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents, a leader who saved the Union and rightfully emancipated the nation's enslaved African-Americans. But that  certainly was not the case in Lincoln's own times. And not all negative opinion came from Southern states; quite a bit of it was focused in the North as well.

"There was the real question - did Lincoln go beyond the boundaries of the Constitution as envisioned by the founding fathers?" says noted Lincoln historian and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.

Holzer, the author of 42 books on Lincoln and the Civil War, was joined at the National Archives tonight by Mark Neeley, professor of Civil War era history at Penn State University, and former Rhode Island Cheif Justice Frank J. Williams, founding chairman of the Lincoln Forum, for a discussion of Lincoln and Constitutional issues.

Holzer prefaced the Lincoln talk by pointing out that with terror suspect incarcerations at Guantanamo Bay and potential judgements by military tribunals, the question of presidential power and the limits as specified in the Constitution "continues to engage us today."

The 3 scholars agreed that on almost all the major issues that he faced, Lincoln was often "in conflict with himself" about what he was legally bound to do. For example, when confronted with the question of secession, Lincoln found out that the the Constitution was silent. He discovered that he "had no (supporting) text" to back his 1860 letter as president-elect that "no state could leave unless other states OKed it," Neeley said. "He had to do a lot of things very fast."

In another controversial move, Lincoln suspended the right of habeus corpus, a protection which calls for all prisoners to have their incarcerations approved by a judge. The president defended the decision by contending that the South's decision to wage war was "a conspiracy 30 years in the making, involved spies and saboteurs, and dissent is part of the enemies program."

The 3 scholars said they were convinced that Lincoln, who viewed the Constitution as a "mystical, sacred, almost religious object," believed he was acting according to its pecepts. As the president said himself on the issue of public safety "I do not intend to be a tyrant."

"But since Lincoln wasn't a diarist, we'll never know for sure," Neeley said.

During the question and answer session, the panel was asked what would happen if states wanted to  
secede today.

"We have the same Constitution and it still doesn't say," Holzer answered. "But they said it pretty loud with a cannon."

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