advice of able
lawyers, saw not where else to go but to the habeas corpus. But by the
Constitution the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus itself may be
suspended when, in case of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may
require it.

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 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.

The earnestness with which you insist that persons can only, in times
of rebellion, be lawfully dealt with in accordance with the rules for
criminal trials and punishments in times of peace, induces me to add a
word to what I said on that point in the Albany response.

You claim that men may, if they choose, embarrass those whose duty it is
to combat a giant rebellion, and then be dealt with in turn only as if
there were no rebellion. The Constitution itself rejects this view. The
military arrests and detentions which have been made, including those of
Mr. Vallandigham, which are not different in principle from the others,
have been for prevention, and not for punishment--as injunctions to stay
injury, as proceedings to keep the peace; and hence, like proceedings
in such cases and for like reasons, they have not been accompanied with
indictments, or trials by juries, nor in a single case by any punishment
whatever, beyond what is purely incidental to the prevention. The original
sentence of imprisonment in Mr. Vallandigham's case was to prevent injury
to the military s