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| Jefferson City, Missouri, 1861 |
- At Jefferson City, the capital city of Missouri, Governor Claiborne Jackson puts out a call for 50,000 volunteers for the pro-Southern Missouri State Guard, to defend the state from the unlawful Federal takeover of the state’s cities and territory. Then he promptly begins preparations to evacuate the state government from Jefferson City and join the newly assembled State Guard troops near Boonville, Missouri./1861
- At the Second Wheeling Convention in western Virginia, the delegates pass a resolution thanking General McClellan, the Indiana and Ohio Militias, and the 1st Virginia Infantry (US) commanded by Colonel R.F. Kelley for coming to northwest Virginia. In a statement revealing their rejection of republicanism for national centralization, the convention rebukes the common idea throughout the rest of Virginia that these military units are invading the state, “but on the contrary, we declare Virginia soil to be American soil, and free to the march of American soldiery and sojourn of American citizens, from all and every portion of American territory.”/1861
- In response to a letter from former US President and New Hampshire Democrat Franklin Pierce to Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Roger Taney, Taney today thanks Pierce for his support of the Court’s decision in Ex Parte Merryman in which the Court declared Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus unconstitutional. Taney writes that in the case of John Merryman, his duty was clear and that he was forced to meet that duty “directly and firmly, without evasion” regardless of the consequences. Taney adds that he is concerned about the delirium into which the country seems to have been thrown and wishes that Lincoln would let the Southern states go their way and avoid a useless war. “I hope … that the North, as well as the South, will see that a peaceful separation, with free institutions in each section, is far better than the union of all the present states under a military government, and a reign of terror preceded too by a civil war with all its horrors, and which end as it may will prove ruinous to the victors as well as the vanquished. But at present I grieve to say passion and hate sweep everything before them.”/1861
 Image via Wikipedia |
| SCOTUS Chief Justice Roger Taney |
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