In the exercise of his supposed prerogative Lincoln sanctioned from beginning to end of the war the arrest of many suspected dangerous persons under what may be called “letters de cachet” from Seward and afterwards from Stanton.  He publicly professed in 1863 his regret that he had not caused this to be done in cases, such as those of Lee and Joseph Johnston, where it had not been done.  When agitation arose on the matter in the end of 1862 many political prisoners were, no doubt wisely, released.  Congress then proceeded, in 1863, to exercise such powers in the matter as the Constitution gave it by an Act suspending, where the President thought fit, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.  A decision of the Supreme Court, delivered curiously enough by Lincoln’s old friend David Davis, showed that the real effect of this Act, so far as valid under the Constitution, was ridiculously small (see Ex parte Milligan, 4 Russell, 2).  In any case the Act was hedged about with many precautions.  These were entirely disregarded by the Government, which proceeded avowedly upon Lincoln’s theory of martial law.  The whole country was eventually proclaimed to be under martial law, and many persons were at the orders of the local military commander tried and punished by court-martial for offences, such as the discouragement of enlistment or the encouragement of desertion, which might not have been punishable by the ordinary law, or of which the ordinary Courts might not have convicted them.  This fresh outbreak of martial law must in large part be ascribed to Lincoln’s determination that the Conscription Act should not be frustrated; but apart from offences relating to enlistment there was from 1863 onwards no lack of seditious plots fomented by the agents of the Confederacy in Canada, and there were several secret societies, “knights” of this, that, or the other.  Lincoln, it is true, scoffed at these, but very often the general on the spot thought seriously of them, and the extreme Democratic leader, Vallandigham, boasted that there were half a million men in the North enrolled in such seditious organisations.  Drastic as the Government proceedings were, the opposition to them died down before the popular conviction that strong measures were necessary, and the popular appreciation that the blood-thirsty despot “King Abraham I.,” as some Democrats were pleased to call him, was not of the stuff of which despots were made and was among the least blood-thirsty men living.  The civil Courts made no attempt to interfere; they said that, whatever the law, they could not in fact resist generals commanding armies.  British Courts would in many cases have declined to interfere, not on the ground that the general had the might, but on the ground that he had the right; yet, it seems, they would not quite have relinquished their hold on the matter, but would have held themselves free to consider whether the district in which martial law was exercised was materially affected by the state