rites, "that from the
legal point of view the President should have rescinded the sentence and
released Vallandigham." Lincoln, he adds, "stands responsible for
the casting into prison of citizens of the United States on orders as
arbitrary as the lettres-de-cachet of Louis XIV." Since Mr. Rhodes,
uncompromising Unionist, can write as he does upon this issue, it is
plain that the opposition party cannot be dismissed as through and
through disunionist.

The trial of Vallandigham made him a martyr and brought him the
Democratic nomination for Governor of Ohio*. His followers sought to
make the issue of the campaign the acceptance or rejection of military
despotism. In defense of his course Lincoln wrote two public letters in
which he gave evidence of the skill which he had acquired as a lawyer
before a jury by the way in which he played upon the emotions of his
readers.

* Edward Everett Hale's famous story "The Man Without a
Country", though it got into print too late to affect the
election, was aimed at Vallandigham. That quaint allegory
on the lack of patriotism became a temporary classic.

"Long experience [he wrote] has shown that armies cannot be maintained
unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death.
The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this
punishment. 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?
This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or
brother, or friend into a public meeting, and there working upon his
feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is
fighting in a bad cause for a wicked administration and a contemptible
government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I
think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is
not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy."

His real argument may be summed up in these words of his:

"You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may override all
the guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the
public safety--when I may choose to say the public safety requires it.
This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as
struggling for an arbitrary prerogative, is either simply a question
who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the
public safety does require in