[359]
question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion.
The Constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur for decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is to be made from time to time; and I think the man whom, for the time, the people have, under the Constitution, made the commander-in-chief of their army and navy, is the man who holds the power and bears the responsibility of making it. If he uses the power justly, the same people will probably justify him; if he abuses it, he is in their hands, to be dealt with by all the modes they have reserved to themselves in the Constitution.
Forcible and convincing as was this legal analysis, a single sympathetic phrase of the
President's reply had a much greater popular effect:
Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him.to desert?
The term so accurately described the character of
Vallandigham, and the pointed query so touched the hearts of the
Union people throughout the land whose favorite “soldier boys” had volunteered to fill the
Union armies, that it rendered powerless the crafty criticism of party diatribes.
The response of the people of
Ohio was emphatic.
At the October election
Vallandigham was defeated by more than one hundred thousand majority.
In sustaining the arrest of
Vallandigham,
President Lincoln had acted not only within his constitutional, but also strictly within his legal, authority.
In the preceding
