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.) Similarly, the exigencies of the war meant thatthe executive branch of the government swelled to unprecedented size underLincoln s administration, leading Lincoln s critics to claim that Lincoln wasthe original author of big government. But these charges generally miss howdramatically the federal government shrank back to its prewar proportions after1865 and stayed that way for another half century.Congress, fully as much asthe executive branch, filled the role of big government during the war: eachwartime Congress, the 37th and 38th, doubled the number of bills passed bythe record 27th Congress of 1841 43.But once the war was over, an equallymassive retrenchment became the order of the day.30It also needs remembering how comparatively limited Lincoln s early extra-constitutional wartime gestures were.The original unilateral suspensions of thewrit of habeas corpus were only operative in areas of military confrontation;the recruiting and supplying of the armies were submitted to Congress forpost facto approval, and, despite the clamor of offended Democrats during thewar, wartime arrests and limitations of civil liberties were extraordinarily few,especially by comparison with the Red Scares and wholesale confinement ofJapanese Americans in the twentieth century s American wars.And one goodmeasure of Lincoln s cautious constitutionalism is the care with which he stroveto justify even these measures.He was meticulous in seeking out legal opinionsto support actions as commander in chief as minor as the appointment of atemperance representative as an officer or the remission of a fine imposed on arestaurant owner for selling brandy to a wounded soldier; he rigidly segregatedthose decisions which he believed as commander in chief he needed to take to best subdue the enemy from those meddling in the permanent legislativefunctions of the government. 31Like his Whig predecessors, Lincoln was troubled by any expansion ofgovernment built on nothing more than raw executive power.The adoption ofmeasures on the sole ground that I think the measure politically expedient, andmorally right bothered Lincoln. Would I not thus give up all footing uponconstitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?Would it not lose us.the very cause we seek to advance? And he submit-ted himself to the most obvious of all tests of constitutionality, the reelectioncampaign of 1864, which he could easily have suspended by bayonet, althoughit never seems even to have crossed his mind as a possibility.In fact, his onlyrecorded discussion about a response to an unfavorable electoral verdict was theextraction of a promise from all his cabinet that they would abide by the legal 120 apples of gold in a picture of silverresults.As Don Fehrenbacher remarked, he placed the principle of self-govern-ment above even his passion for the Union and affirmed his adherence to themost critical and most fragile principle in the democratic process namely, therequirement of minority submission to majority will. 32It was, in fact, a matter of frustration to the most radical members of Lincoln sown party that he seemed so unwilling to step out from behind the Constitutionand deal with the Confederate states as they thought he ought to do.Despite theclamor of Charles Sumner, Ben Wade, and Zachariah Chandler in Congress,Lincoln never seriously entertained any notion of destroying the identity of therebel states, and he aimed at a speedy reconstruction with those states identitiesintact.He issued the Emancipation Proclamation only after he had satisfied hisown mind that it could be applied strictly as a military measure, under his ownauthority as commander in chief in time of war, and only with strict applicationto those parts of the Confederacy still in actual rebellion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]