Mr. Seward’s Little Bell

(NYTimes) “My Lord, I can touch a bell on my right hand, and order the arrest of a citizen in Ohio. I can touch the bell again, and order the arrest of a citizen in New York. Can the Queen of England, in her dominions, do as much?” William Henry Seward’s boast to Lord Lyons, Britain’s envoy to the United States for much of the Civil War — and a diplomat with whom Lincoln’s secretary of state enjoyed an often fractious relationship — is almost certainly an apocryphal invention of administration critics. But it nevertheless illustrates a higher truth: Seward’s early and aggressive involvement with the wartime suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, one of the most controversial actions of the Lincoln administration. Continued

Photo: John Merryman