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Because the politicians and the press - not the military - were urging it.
Some of Lee's officers were urging the troops to take to the hills and continue the fight with guerrilla tactics. Lee told them to surrender peacefully, hand in their weapons and go home.
A radical group of pro-slavery southerners were known as â??Fire-Eatersâ??. They were the politicians urging the southern states to become a separate nation. These individuals did much to weaken the fragility of the Union and made it their goal to create a separate Confederate nation.
The terms were remarkably generous. He just told Lee's army to hand in their weapons, sign the parole, and go home - and if they did that, they would not be persecuted, and Lee would not be arrested. It silenced those Confederate officers who were urging the men to take to the hills and conduct guerrila operations.
In Schenck v United States 1919, the US Supreme Court coined the term "clear and present danger" to cover "free speech" cases that could reasonably result in harm or danger.Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were members of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia during World War I. They printed leaflets with the messages, "Do not submit to intimidation", "Assert your rights", "If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain." They were urging men to refuse the draft.Jury trials convicted Schenck and Baer of violating Section 3 of the Espionage Act of 1917 and they appealed to the US Supreme Court. They argued that the Espionage Act of 1917 went against the First Amendment if people are forbidden to exercise free speech in speech and text. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr wrote:"..when a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.""The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.