Although Lincoln justified the prolonged detention of these men on grounds of “tangible and unmistakable evidence” of their “substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion,” the government never revealed the evidence or brought any of the prisoners to trial. Some of them, probably including Mayor Brown, were guilty of little more than southern sympathies or lukewarm unionism. They were victims of the obsessive quest for security that arises in time of war, especially civil war.
