Taney Arrest Warrant The Taney Arrest Warrant is a conjectural controversy in Abraham Lincoln scholarship . The argument is that in late May or early June 1861 President Lincoln secretly ordered an arrest warrant for Roger B . Taney , the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court , but abandoned the proposal . The arrest order is said to have been in response to Taney ' s Circuit Judge ruling in " Ex parte Merryman , " which found Lincoln ' s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional . As McGinty ( 2008 ) concludes , if there was such a plan to arrest Taney it would have been both reckless and inflammatory on Lincoln ' s part , for it would have dramatically escalated political tensions . McGinty , like all of Lincoln ' s major biographers , concludes there never was any arrest warrant . History and evidence . The single primary source document is a manuscript written in the 1880s by Ward Hill Lamon , Lincoln ' s friend , bodyguard , and United States Marshal for the District of Columbia during his administration . According to the manuscript , which is a brief history of " Ex Parte Merryman " by Lamon : The warrant was never served , according to Lamon , for reasons that are not given . The manuscript dates from the 1880s and resides in the collection of Lamon papers at the Huntington Library . Taney ' s own memoir , completed from his unfinished autobiography by Samuel Tyler in 1872 , refers to the Chief Justice ' s fears of arrest . According to Tyler , as Taney " left the house of his son - in - law , Mr . Campbell " " en route " to his courtroom " remarked that it was likely he should be imprisoned in Fort McHenry before night , but that he was going to Court to do his duty . " Lamon ' s story emerged during the early 1970s in " A More Perfect Union " by Harold Hyman . Some recent writers have accepted the story as credible including Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in " Emancipating Slaves , Enslaving Free Men " . For a time in the 1980s and 1990s , it was believed that a second corroborating document by Francis Lieber referred to the warrant . This was the result of a mistaken numerical citation in an earlier work . The error was discovered by John Rodehamel , a manuscripts librarian at the Huntington Library . Once informed of this error , Jeffrey Hummel described Lamon ' s unsupported account as " not credible . " That President Lincoln considered , and then rejected , the possibility of arresting Taney is briefly mentioned in The Civil War produced by Ken Burns and aired on Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS ) Public television stations . Controversy . One criticism is that Lamon is an unreliable source , remembered for lending his name to a ghost - written 1872 biography of Lincoln by Chauncey Black . The biography was received unfavorably by Robert Todd Lincoln , the president ' s son , and was denounced for a lack of discretion . On the other hand , the habeas corpus manuscript was written in the mid - 1880s around the time Lamon was working on his second book , " Recollections of Abraham Lincoln , " incomplete when he died ( Lamon ' s daughter edited the completed portions of it for posthumous publication ) . This second book is highly regarded among Lincoln scholars and is the main source for many well - known Lincoln anecdotes and quotes . The Taney warrant story does " not " appear in this second book . Another criticism is that no copy of the warrant or other documentation has been found to support Lamon ' s story . During Lincoln ' s administration several prominent political adversaries were arrested , including Congressman Clement Vallandigham , a leading Copperhead , and at least one other federal judge – William Matthew Merrick of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia – was placed under house arrest for defying the suspension . Several northern newspapers also publicly called for Taney ' s arrest after the Merryman ruling .