Davis therefore possessed the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for a total of only sixteen months. During most of that time he exercised this power more sparingly than did his counterpart in Washington. The rhetoric of southern libertarians about executive tyranny thus seems overblown. The Confederacy did not have the North’s problem of administering captured territory with its hostile population. Nor did the South have as large a disloyal population—sizable though it was—in its disaffected upland regions as the Union contained in the border states. These areas accounted for most
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