The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus

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Description

In April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the military line between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. This allowed army officers to arrest and indefinitely detain persons who were interfering with military operations within the area. When John Merryman, a rich Marylander suspected of burning bridges to prevent the passage of U.S. troops to Washington, used to be detained in Fort McHenry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, declared the suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional and demanded Merryman’s immediate release. Lincoln defied Taney’s order, offering his own forceful counter-argument for the constitutionality of his actions. Thus the stage used to be set for one of the crucial dramatic personal and legal confrontations the country has ever witnessed.

The Body of John Merryman is the first book-length examination of this much-misunderstood chapter in American history. Brian McGinty captures the tension and uncertainty that surrounded the early months of the Civil War, explaining how Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus used to be at the start a military action that only due to this fact become a an important constitutional battle. McGinty’s narrative brings to life the personalities that drove this uneasy standoff and expands our working out of the war as a legal―and not only a military, political, and social―conflict. The Body of John Merryman is an extraordinarily readable book that illuminates the contours of one of the crucial significant cases in American legal history―a case that continues to resonate in our own time.

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