Fresident Davis in Reply to General Sherman. 273
recommended the suspension of the writ oi habeas corpus. The rea- sons for that recommendation are fully set forth in the message. It was an application to Congress for authority to suspend the writ, and it was within the constitutional power of Congress to grant the authority. It was a measure of public defence against schemes and plots of enemies which could not be reached under the process of law. On two occasions was that extraordinary remedy resorted to, and each was by authority of Congress. But even when the writ was suspended, no head of any cabinet department kept a " little bell," the tinkle of which consigned to prison men like Teackle Wallis, George William Brown, John Merryman, Charles Howard, Judge Carmichael dragged off the bench, and which became as fear- ful to the people as the letters-de cachet of the tyrants of Paris. Martial law followed the army of the United States, and provost marshals were often the judges that passed upon the person and property of ladies, children and old men, and the venerable Chief Justice Taney was not spared the humiliation of seeing even the Supreme Court of the United States brought to understand that the civil had become subordinate to the military authority.
The conscript law in the Confederate States, and the draft in the United States, were measures adopted by the respective Congresses, and not acts of either Mr. Lincoln or myself They were both meas- ures of public defence, intended to equalize the burden of military duty, as far as it was compatible with the public defence. As well might we leave revenue to be provided by voluntary contribution, instead of by general taxation, or the roads to be worked by the willing and industrious, instead of distributing the burden equitably over the whole people. Yet the Senators that called for this "his- torical statement" will hardly hold that President Lincoln was seeking a dictatorship because he enforced the draft.
This " historical statement " might have been enlarged and ex- tended by the Senate, and made to embrace the deliberate misrep- resentation by General Sherman of the communication to him by Colonel J. D Stevenson, in regard to Albert Sidney John- ston's command in San Francisco. In a letter to Colonel William H. Knight, of Cincinnati, Ohio, dated October 28, 1884, General Sherman asserted that " Colonel J. D. Stevenson, now living in San Francisco, has often told me that he had cautioned the Government as to a plot or conspiracy, through the department commander, Al- bert Sidney Johnston, to deliver possession of the forts, etc., to men in California sympathizing with the rebels in the South, and he thinks
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