Habeas Corpus Suspension Act Summary

This document is an Act of Congress passed in 1863, giving President Abraham Lincoln the power to suspend habeas corpus. The principle of habeas corpus (exercised in the form of a writ, or court order) ensures that a person arrested for a crime is officially charged and brought before a judge and jury in a timely manner. During the Civil War, this principle was set aside in favor of the ability to hold political prisoners during wartime, but also dictated that they would be released at the end of the war. The bill was initiated in the House of Representatives late in the year in 1862; in January 1863 the Senate passed its version, the two versions were reconciled in committee, and Lincoln signed the final bill into law on March 3, 1865. The act stayed in effect until the war ended in May 1865. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, formally overturned the act with Proclamation 148, issued on December 1, 1865, except in the former Confederate states.

At the moment in history when Abraham Lincoln first set aside the writ of habeas corpus, on his own authority as president in 1861, pandemonium was breaking out in America, North and South. So on April 27, 1861, fearing that Confederate sympathizers would block the movement of Union troops from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus along Philadelphia–Washington train route, allowing military authorities to arrest and detain any “disloyal persons.” Besides the intrusion upon civil liberties, this action was problematic because the president’s constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus was very much in question: the part of the US Constitution that provides for such suspensions–”when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”–appears in article 1, section 9, which discusses limits on the powers of Congress, not the executive branch. The president’s action was challenged later that year when a man named John Merryman from Baltimore, Maryland, was arrested; Merryman challenged his arrest and his case went to the US circuit court in Maryland. That court, led at the time by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, ruled that the president’s suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional, but the president ignored the ruling. Thus, the president’s supporters in Congress were keen to weigh in and add congressional authorization to the measure. When the bill was passed into law, it was the first time in the history of the United States that habeas corpus had been suspended.

The Thirty-Seventh Congress of the United States was in service from March 1861 to March 1863 and produced a variety of legislation aimed at helping ensure Union victory in the Civil War. The legislature was called into special session by departing president James Buchanan in March of 1861 to address the threat of rebel secession, and it was still in session in April, when the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter occurred, officially marking the beginning of the Civil War.

The secession of the Southern states and departure of their lawmakers from Washington left Congress with only two-thirds of its usual members, and the Republican Party enjoyed a majority in both the House and the Senate. The recent decline of the Whig Party and the Know-Nothing Party bolstered Republican Party support. At this point in history, the Republican Party was the more radical and liberal political organization, while the Democratic Party generally favored conservative policies.

The Thirty-Seventh Congress passed a number of laws, some war-related and some not, with far-reaching effects on American history. It passed the first-ever revenue act, the Revenue Act of 1861, designed to fuel the Union war effort by collecting income tax from citizens. While the income tax was repealed after the Civil War, it was eventually reinstated and became the foundation of federal government funding in the United States. In addition, the Thirty-Seventh Congress passed the National Bank Act in 1864, a revision of the previous year’s National Currency Act, which was initially meant to reject the proliferation of Confederate currency but also established a single accepted currency for the country as a whole. The Thirty-Seventh Congress also laid some of the groundwork for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by passing in 1862 a law abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.

The legislative history of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act began in December 1862 with a bill introduced in the House by Republican Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, initially intended to indemnify, or hold harmless, Lincoln for his own legally dubious suspension of habeas corpus the year before. The Senate put forth its own version of the bill that did not make reference to the president’s action, and this is the version that went to conference committee for a final compromise between the two houses. Key to passage of the final bill was the support of Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee; he was able to overcome the filibusters of several Senate Democrats and shepherd the bill to final passage on March 3, 1862, a day before the Congress adjourned.

In order to cope with the fragmenting of the country during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln took action, although it was an extreme action that had never been taken before in the United States. By proclaiming a suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, he set in motion a chain of events, including the congressional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus laid out in this document. The president’s declaration of suspension, however, was an integral part of easing the mobilization of Northern troops. When Congress passed its own suspension two years later and it was signed into law, the suspension played a role in ensuring that anti-Northern expressions and actions stayed at a low level. This document shows the grave concern of Congress concerning the progress of the Civil War and how the North would fare if sympathy for the Southern cause were allowed to spread freely. But the law also contains safeguards for the same people it intends to punish, thus not allowing civil liberties to be completely overrun for an indefinite period of time.

The opening paragraph of this document states that during the Civil War, or “present rebellion,” the president may suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus anywhere in the country he sees fit, meaning that an officer detaining a person under the suspension need not respond to such a writ if a court issues one. The Suspension Act does, however, state that there is a time frame for the suspension, and that as soon as the president decides that it is no longer necessary or the Civil War ends, the suspension of habeas corpus will be lifted.

While the first paragraph is generally straightforward, the following six paragraphs spend nearly two thousand words further explaining the details by which someone can be held without trial, held with a trial, and the limits of imprisonment. Section 2 states that all circuit court and district court judges must be provided with a list of all the people in their jurisdiction being held by federal authorities, except prisoners of war (who are subject to military rather than civilian law). Any person being held by federal authorities whose name does not appear on the list is to be freed. If prisoner on the list is brought before a grand jury, and the grand jury does not indict (formally charge) him or her, the prisoner is to be set free; this is provided that the prisoner swears allegiance to the United States and pledges not to act in support of the rebellion. The courts retain the power to release the prisoner on his or her own recognizance, meaning the person’s release is conditional on continued good behavior. Thus, while detained persons lost their right to question their initial detention, the rest of the judicial process, including indictment by grand jury, was intended to be preserved.

Section 3 preserves the right of indicted prisoners to post bail or be released upon their own recognizance pending their trial, and section 4 establishes that the order of the president may be used as a defense in any court action brought regarding searches, seizures, arrests, or imprisonments undertaken during the war. Section 5 concentrates on lawsuits filed against arresting officials. It covers civil or criminal suits against any type of arresting official which pertain in any way to acts committed during the Civil War. It states, most importantly, that federal officials can have cases against them removed from state to federal courts (where they were more likely to get a sympathetic hearing). If the court finds in favor of the federal official, that official “shall recover double costs.” Essentially, this provision allows any person to challenge their arrest after the fact, but at great difficulty and potential cost to themselves.

Sections 5 and 6 both mention a “writ of error,” which only comes into effect when a person believes that a mistake was made in their case and they appeal it. In section 5, a provision states that a writ of error will only work in the favor of the defendant of a lawsuit. In section 6, it is made clear that a writ of error for a case can make its way to the Supreme Court. This ability to appeal a case all the way to the Supreme Court, if there are grounds for such a process, is an inherent part of the judicial system and provides one more check on the power of the legislative and the executive branches of the government. The final provision of this document, section 7, establishes a two-year statute of limitations on court challenges to arrests or seizures undertaken during the war.

The United States was in flux during the early stages of the Civil War, and slaveholding border states like Maryland, while nominally loyal to the Union, were dubious allies. Especially in cities like Baltimore, pro-Southern violence had broken out on a number of occasions, forcing President-elect Lincoln himself to move through the city in disguise in February 1861 to avoid possible attack; on another occasion, Union troops were attacked by a mob as they marched through the city. If Maryland were to change its mind and join the Confederacy, the national capital in Washington, DC, would be cut off from the rest of the Union. It was in this uncertain atmosphere that President Lincoln first took matters into his own hands to declare habeas corpus suspended by presidential proclamation in April 1861. Two years later, Congress sought to confirm the president’s (disputed) authority by passing its own suspension.

Congress knew that a law granting the president authority to suspend habeas corpus would need to be carefully worded so that all parties involved were protected. This protection would be especially necessary after the act was repealed and imprisoned people could speak out against their treatment. In order for this to be possible, Congress wrote provisions intended to protect defendants from governmental abuse. The judicial system was also protected through its inclusion in this process, for even though arrested individuals were not brought directly before the court, the government and its officials were still held accountable through the furnishing of information to district judges concerning all detainees and their arrests.

While overall, the removal of civil liberties during wartime is generally seen as a poor way of dealing with dissent and unrest, it is clear that during the Civil War, Congress and the president knew of no other way to handle the chaotic events that were erupting throughout the United States. The best avenue of action they could find required the imprisonment of those in Union territory who would take action against it, but they made sure that in writing this act, they put limits on how far the act could reach and how long it would last. In doing so, they protected the people as best they could, while simultaneously curtailing some of their freedoms.

When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861 shortly after taking office, he asserted that he was acting within his constitutional authority as president to do so. Although the Constitution’s “suspension clause,” as it is known, appears in the section on the limits to the powers of Congress, the clause says habeas corpus “shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion, but it does not specify who would be doing the suspending–Congress or the president. Lincoln argued that the Founding Fathers could not have meant to restrict that authority to Congress, when the very sort of emergency situations the clause describes might prevent Congress from assembling. Lincoln stood by this argument, even ignoring a US circuit court ruling against him on the matter, but many people found his argument specious. Therefore, some Republicans in Congress wanted to lend the weight of congressional authority to the measure, and managed to pass the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act at the last minute over Democratic filibusters.

This act did not itself suspend habeas corpus, but merely authorized the president to do so. Meanwhile, Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus and declared martial law across the Union the year before, but he issued another suspension in September of 1863 under the authority of the above act, to deal with resistance to the 1863 Enrollment Act, a draft imposed on all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five.

Among the more prominent arrests and detentions following passage of the act was that of former Ohio Democratic congressman Clement Vallandigham, who refused to comply with General Ambrose Burnside’s order to stop agitating against Lincoln and the war. Vallandigham was arrested and tried by a military tribunal in May 1863, and his application for a writ of habeas corpus was rejected by a US circuit court in Ohio. He was sentenced to prison, and Lincoln commuted his sentence to banishment to the Confederacy. Vallandigham’s case went to the Supreme Court, which did not deal directly with the issue of the suspension of habeas corpus, instead ruling in 1864 that it had no authority in any case to issue such a writ to a military commission.

The legitimacy of presidential suspensions of habeas corpus–or any suspension of habeas corpus for that matter–continues to be a hotly debated issue with relevance in the twenty-first-century United States. In 2006, for example, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, suspending habeas corpus for non–US citizens identified as unlawful enemy combatants; debates around this and other government actions related to habeas corpus routinely look back for precedent to the actions of Lincoln and the US Congress during the Civil War.

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