_The Constitution as a Rigidly Restrictive Document_: In one of the extremely rare instances in which a Supreme Court Justice has defied the Chief Executive engaged in prosecuting a war, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in 1861, presiding as Circuit Court Judge at Baltimore, demanded that the military produce in court one John Merryman, who had been arrested. When Merryman’s jailers replied to Taney that by virtue of the President’s proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus, they had been directed not to respond to the writ, the venerable Chief Justice wrote a stinging opinion informing the President that the power to suspend the writ belonged to Congress alone and could not be exercised by the chief executive. Notwithstanding his ruling, Merryman was not released and the President continued his suspension of the writ, although Congress did not validate his action until 1863.[724] Perhaps a better example of Taney’s attitude toward the relaxing of constitutional restraints in wartime is to be found in an earlier, unpublished opinion, quoted by Swisher in his biography of the Chief Justice: “A civil war or any other war does not enlarge the powers of the federal government over the states or the people beyond what the compact has given to it in time of war. A state of war does not annul the 10th article of the amendments to the Constitution, which declares that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people.’ “Nor does a civil war or any other war absolve the judicial department from the duty of maintaining with an even and firm hand the rights and powers of the federal government, and of the states, and of the citizens, as they are written in the Constitution, which every judge is sworn to support.”[725] For the other expressions of this absolutist view, we must look to opinions handed down in the immediate postwar periods of 1866 and 1946. _Ex parte Milligan_[726] involved the incarceration of a northerner suspected of Southern sympathies. Could such an individual be tried, convicted and sentenced to death by a military tribunal, in an area far behind the Northern lines, in fact, in a State which had never been invaded by the Southern armies? Scores of such instances of military trial and conviction of civilians had occurred in Northern states untouched by the war. The majority opinion for the Supreme Court disposing of this issue was written by Justice Davis and constitutes as rigid a definition of the limits circumscribing the war powers as could possibly be stated: