Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 June 1871 — The Milligan Trial. [ARTICLE]

The Milligan Trial.

It will bo remembered tlia| ing Ibo summer of IfMM a treasonable military organization wn« discovered to be in existence in the United States, known as the Sons of Liberty or Knights of the Golden Circle, whoso ramifications extended all over the country and whose members and lodges were to be found in every State, North and South.' The object of that organisation was to co-operate with the leaders of the Southern Confederacy in their resistance to the Government. In Indiana there was sfearcely a county without its lodge. Tlic State was divided by the Order into military districts which were placed uuder the command of generals. One of these was Lambden 1\ Milligan, who subsequently became one of the most prominent among them. At that time a conspiracy was formed to • assassinate Governor Morton, rclease the rebel prisoners at Camp Morton, seize upon the arsenal at Indianapolis and inaugurate "civil war in the Northwest, To aid the Sons of Liberty in developing their plans, the Confederate Government sent officers from their armies to Indianapolis and Chicago to take command of the prisoners confined in the military prisons at those places and co-operate in overturning tho State Governments and transferring them to Jeff Davis’s Confederacy. Just as this scheme was about to be put into execution its most prominent leaders were arrested, and among them was Mil ligau. lie was tried before a military commission and so clear was the proof against him that ho was sentenced to be hung, but through the intercession of friends his sentence was commuted by the President to imprisonment for life m the Ohio penitentiary. After serving in that institution some time he was taken out on a writ of habeas corpus, and the court ordered his release. Milligan brought Buit in the U. S. Circuit Court at Indianapolis against Alvin P. Ilovey and the members of the Military Court which tried him, claiming SIOO,OOO damages for false arrest and imprisonment. Here is this man known to have been a major general in a treasonable organization, the fact proven, (and proof offered to the court that ho was regularly commissioned by the hostilo Confederate Government), appealing to tho courts of tho government he attempted to destroy for damages because he was arrested and prevented from actually committing a premeditated crime! Was there ever a more cheeky piece of impudence? Demanding damages, not because he was innocent of the offence charged, but on the purely technical plea that the court which tried him teas not of Competent jurisdiction. We fail to discover the difference between this Milligan and the regular Confederate soldier, so far as guilty participation in treason is concerned, and although his pleadings may be in accordance with certain fine-spun abstract theories, or, more exactly speaking, quibbles of law, he was just as deserving of the death penalty as either of the implicated assassins of President Lincoln. And if a military commission had authority to sit in Cincinnati and try, Confederates who were captured while in the act of ■assisting the Sons of Liberty and Knights of the Golden Circle—lndiana ancl Illinois Ku-Kluxes—in their plans to release the rebel prisoners imprisoned in those States—plans fully matured, with details arranged and the time for their execution fixed upon—wc can not see why they did not also have equal jurisdiction to try and seutence the equally guilty parties who induced those Southern emmissarios to coine here, who harbored them and couneilcd and plotted with them while they were here, and who were ready to assist them in consummating I their bloody design of precipitating the horrors of civil war upon the Northwestern States. If the one was a traitor to the Government, what was the status of his Northern ally? If the one was in the Confederate service, in what

service waa the other engaged ? If treason consists in giving aid and comfort to the enemy in times of war, is not the party who councils with him as much in his'Servioe as though his plots were in process of execution? Had this convicted traitor Milligan not been interrupted, had he not been omestsd and the treasonable Order of jrjuch he was a member broken ujJ |>y the military officers who ferreted it out under tbe

advice and wTlh tlic consent and assistance of Governor Morton, there is not a doubt hut that a formidable rebel army would have been turned loose on Indiana soil, fully organized, armed andcquijqml for offensive and defensive operations, and the desolation that followed Sherman’s awful inarch to the sea would have left its mark in fire and blood wherever their footsteps turned. And. because the people were saved from this terrible calamity, Milligan claims that ho was damaged SIOO,OOO. Since the foregoing was w ritten the jury has found a verdict for tho plaintiff with damages of $5. By this verdict the gentlemen of the jury say in effect that the mihtury commission was not a court of competent jurisdiction to try Milligan, hut that ho being guilty of the charges alleged against him is entitled to only nominal damages. Tho defendants filed an appeal to the United States supreme court.