nforcement of the laws against insurgents,
Congress alone could stamp an insurrection with the character of war and
thereby authorize the legal consequences which ensue a state of
war.[1224] Inasmuch as the Court finally conceded that the blockade had
been retroactively sanctioned by Congress, that part of its opinion
dealing with the power of the President, acting alone, was really
_obiter_. But a similar opinion was voiced by Chief Justice Chase on
behalf of a unanimous Court, after the war was over. In Freeborn _v._
The "Protector,"[1225] it became necessary to ascertain the exact dates
on which the war began and ended in order to determine whether the
statute of limitation had run against the asserted claim. To answer this
question the Chief Justice said that "it is necessary, therefore, to
refer to some public act of the political departments of the government
to fix the dates; and, for obvious reasons, those of the executive
department, which may be, and, in fact, was, at the commencement of
hostilities, obliged to act during the recess of Congress, must be
taken. The proclamation of intended blockade by the President may
therefore be assumed as marking the first of these dates, and the
proclamation that the war had closed, as marking the second."[1226]

The Power To Raise and Maintain Armed Forces

PURPOSE OF SPECIFIC GRANTS

The clauses of the Constitution which give Congress authority "to raise
and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy" and so forth, were
not inserted for the purpose of endowing the National Government with
power to do these things, but rather to designate the department of
government which should exercise such powers. Moreover, they permit
Congress to take measures essential to the national defense in time of
peace as well as during a period of actual conflict. That these
provisions grew out of the conviction that the Executive should be
deprived of the "sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies"
which Blackstone attributed to the King under the British
Constitution,[1227] was emphasized by Story in his Commentaries. He
wrote: "Our notions, indeed, of the dangers of standing armies, in time
of peace, are derived in a great measure from the principles and
examples of our English ancestors. In England, the King possessed the
power of raising armies in the time of peace according to his own good
pleasure. And this prerogative was justly esteemed dangerous to the
publi