On the 17th of December, 1866, the Supreme Court rendered its decision in the Milligan case, which had reached that tribunal on a certificate of disagreement between the two judges of the United States Circuit Court for Indiana. Milligan, a citizen, not in the military or naval service, had been arrested in October, 1864, by General A. P. Hovey, commanding the military district of Indiana, for alleged treasonable acts, had been tried by a military commission, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged on the 19th day of May, 1865. He petitioned the court for a discharge from custody under the terms of the Habeas Corpus Act passed by Congress March 3, 1863. He affirmed that, since his arrest, there had been a session of the grand jury in his district and that it had adjourned without finding an indictment against him. The act of Congress provided that the names of all civilians arrested by the military authorities in places where the courts were open should be reported to the judges within twenty days after their arrest, and that if they were not indicted at the first term of court thereafter they should be set at liberty. This question had been pretty thoroughly thrashed out in the Vallandigham case, but it had been imperfectly understood; President Lincoln had gone astray in that labyrinth, and judges on the bench had differed from each other in their interpretation of an unambiguous statute. The most commonly accepted opinion was that the act of 1863 was not applicable to Copperheads, or, if it was, that it ought not to be obeyed. The Supreme Court was unanimous in the opinion that Milligan must be discharged, since the law was plain and unequivocal, but there was a division among the nine judges of the court as to the power to try persons not in the military service, by military commission. Five judges held that Congress could not abolish trial by jury in places where the courts were open and the course of justice unimpeded. Four judges maintained that Congress might authorize military commissions to try civilians in certain cases where the civil courts were open and freely exercising their functions, although Congress had not actually done so. The five judges constituting the majority were Davis (who wrote the opinion of the court), Clifford, Nelson, Grier, and Field. The four who dissented from the argument, but not from the judgment, were Chief Justice Chase (who wrote the minority opinion), and Judges Wayne, Swayne, and Miller. Davis's opinion is not surpassed in argumentative power or in literary expression by anything in the annals of that great tribunal.