Monday, May 30, 2011

City’s links to Civil War overlooked, but relevant


http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110529/FEAT09/305299929
Excerpt: 
     "Copperheads, Knights of the Golden Circle, the Sons of Liberty – Confederate sympathy and sentiment went by several names and was usually discussed in hushed tones because it was, in a word, treason.
     The Union was at war with the Confederate States of America. To give aid and comfort to the enemy during war is treason.
     Milligan’s particular treason was to be an outspoken leader of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Lincoln found the dissent intolerable. He set aside the U.S. Constitution to silence it.
     Milligan and several others in Indiana were arrested, jailed and tried, not by a jury in an Indiana courtroom but by military tribunals at military installations. The president, in other words, suspended habeas corpus, the long-held right of the accused to appear in a public trial and defend himself."