Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/585

Attitude of Stevens totmrd Conduct of Civil JJ'ar 575 conquest would destroy state equality, subvert the Constitution, and prevent the Union/ (3) In the third place, a corollary to this view, the constitutional limits set to congressional and executive power must be the same in war as in peace. Secession, rebellion, and war had made no change as to the power that Congress could exercise within the states, be they the states of the Confederacy or the states of the Union. The President's powers were not increased. Therefore his executive orders, his proclamations, his military emancipation, his suspension of habeas corpus, his arbitrary arrests, must all be tested by the terms and canons of the Constitution as in times of peace. " The Union as it was ; the Constitution as it is," was the maxim of the party. In the view of these constitutionalists, the Union was to be saved only by, through, and under the Constitution — nothing more nor less. They idealized the Constitution. To them the Constitution was identical with the nation. Without it there could be no Union. The Constitution gone, the republic is dead. The war was for the preservation of the Constitution and for that alone; it was against the Constitution and because it was binding on all that the South- erners were rebels. These conservatives denounced the antislavery advocates as being indifferent as to whether or not their policies were in harmony with the Constitution, and this fact made the hated abolitionists — as they called all antislavery men — as guilty criminals as the secessionists themselves. In the view of this party almost everything that the President or Congress proposed or did, for the effective and vigorous prosecu- tion of the war, was unconstitutional. Confiscation of slave prop- erty was unconstitutional ; retaining fugitive slaves within our lines was unconstitutional ; the military emancipation of Fremont and Hunter was unconstitutional ; the use of slaves as contraband was unconstitutional ; Lincoln's plan of compensated emancipation was unconstitutional ; enlistment of negro troops was unconstitutional ; the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional ; the draft was unconstitutional ; the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was unconstitutional ; military arrests were unconstitutional ; suspending or in any way reinstituting state governments at the South was un- constitutional ; Lincoln's appointment of military governors and his beginnings of reconstruction were unconstitutional. No exercise of power was constitutional except what was unmistakably granted by a strict construction of the Constitution interpreted as in times of peace. Instead of the war's having made all the difference in the 'Pendleton's resolutions, Congressional Globe, July 31, 1861.