f the country. Journals and periodicals, violently
denunciatory of the course pursued by the Government, all at once made
their appearance in New York and elsewhere. A peace convention was
called to meet in Philadelphia. Mr. Vallandigham, nominee of the
Democratic party for Governor of Ohio, eloquently denounced the whole
policy of endeavoring to subjugate the sovereign States of the South;
and Judge Curtis, of Boston, formerly Associate Judge of the Supreme
Court of the United States, published a pamphlet in which the Federal
President was stigmatized as a usurper and tyrant. "I do not see,"
wrote Judge Curtis, "that it depends upon the Executive decree whether
a servile war shall be invoked to help twenty millions of the white
race to assert the rightful authority of the Constitution and laws of
their country over those who refuse to obey them. But I do see that
this proclamation" (emancipating the Southern slaves) "asserts the
power of the Executive to make such a decree! I do not perceive how it
is that my neighbors and myself, residing remote from armies and their
operations, and where all the laws of the land may be enforced by
constitutional means, should be subjected to the possibility of
arrest and imprisonment and trial before a military commission, and
punishment at its discretion, for offences unknown to the law--a
possibility to be converted into a fact at the mere will of the
President, or of some subordinate officer, clothed by him with this
power. But I do perceive that this Executive power is asserted.... It
must be obvious to the meanest capacity that, if the President of
the United States has an _implied_ constitutional right, as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, in time of war, to disregard
any one positive prohibition of the Constitution, or to exercise any
one power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
because in his judgment he may thereby 'best subdue the enemy,' he
has the same right, for the same reason, to disregard each and every
provision of the Constitution, and to exercise all power _needful in
his opinion_ to enable him 'best to subdue the enemy.' ... The time
has certainly come when the people of the United States _must_
understand and _must_ apply those great rules of civil liberty which
have been arrived at by the self-devoted efforts of thought and action
of their ancestors during seven hundred years of struggle against
arbitrary power."

So far had reached