Doing the will of the people is one thing. Doing what needs to be done in the face of, or in spite of it, is another. If Murtha, Harry Reid and others of their ilk had been around during the Civil War - and there were a few among northern Democrats - Lincoln would have had an even more trying time between incompetent generals, the staggering loss of life (we lost more in a single day at Antietam than we have in four years in Iraq) and an opposition party that labelled him an ape, a buffoon, and a dictator. All because they weren’t getting their way, whch was to placate the South, blame the North for their troubles, even allow a more palateable form of slavery, to preserve the Union at all costs, even if meant compromising the Constitution.

And before the critics come out of the wood work, yes, Lincoln did suspend habeus corpus, and he did so in the context of imposing martial law over the state of Maryland - and thereby Wasington itself and the B&O railroad - that we were very close to loosing to Southern control.