Description
In Might 1865, the overall month of the Civil War, the U.S. Army arrested and prosecuted a sitting congressman in a military trial within the border state of Maryland, regardless that the federal criminal courts within the state were functioning. Convicted of aiding and abetting paroled Confederate soldiers, Benjamin Gwinn Harris of Maryland’s Fifth Congressional District used to be imprisoned and barred from holding public administrative center.
Harris used to be a firebrand–effectively a Confederate serving in Congress–and had long advocated the constitutionality of slavery and the fitting of states to secede from the Union. This primary-ever book-length analysis of the extraordinary trial examines the present opinions in Southern Maryland and within the War Department regarding slavery, treason and the Constitution’s guarantee of property rights and freedom of speech.