The New York Times
May 28, 1861
The controversy between Chief Justice Taney and Gen. Cadwallader is in all respects unfortunate. A collision of civil and military authority is always to be, if possible, shunned; because the majesty of law must, in all cases, succumb to the necessities of war, and the respect which the magistracy must assert for itself in a period of peace, is impaired by the sight of a fruitless struggle for supremacy at a period when military law is in the ascendant. In the case of John Merriman, the interposition of Chief Justice Taney can only be regarded as at once officious and improper. If the questions of right in the matter had to be tested, there were other legal authorities, whose intervention would have been quite as effectual as that of the Chief Justice, before whom, should the case give rise to litigation, it may eventually come for final adjudication. The issue, moreover, was one to which the State of Maryland was a party, and which therefore should have been raised by a magistrate of that State. In thus energetically interposing, Judge Taney presents the ungracious spectacle of a judicial and a military authority of the United States at variance, the soldier eager to punish, and the jurist to exculpate a traitor. The antithesis might have been very easily avoided; and an impression that the zeal of the Justice might have been less fervent, had not the prisoner been a citizen of his own State a neighbor, and a personal friend, would not have countenanced.