In handing out their top honors next month, Academy Award voters seem set to implicitly condone the suspension of civil liberties, unlawful imprisonment and blatantly unconstitutional actions by a president who used wartime as an excuse for dictatorial acts.

That president was Abraham Lincoln, and Oscar voters are absolutely fine with “Lincoln” sanitizing his record.

But why the double standard? Voting members of the Academy are lining up to announce they won’t support “Zero Dark Thirty,” which they insulted last week by denying its director Kathryn Bigelow a Best Director nomination she was all but universally considered to have earned. Liberal actors Martin Sheen and Ed Asner have already stepped forward to protest the movie, which they believe advocates torture. Bigelow has said that the film honestly dramatizes various methods that were used by the CIA in the search for Osama bin Laden and stresses that “depiction is not endorsement.”

“Zero Dark Thirty” never comes close to making a moral defense of illegal acts, though it implies that in wartime some disquieting acts may be necessary. “Lincoln,” by completely ignoring unsavory facts, takes far more liberties with history. But Oscar voters know little about the Lincoln administration, so they’re much easier to mislead about what happened 150 years ago.

Brooking no dissent

Immediately after the Civil War broke out, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus — the constitutional right every detained American enjoys to demand his day in court. Lincoln’s action gave him free rein to lock up without trial anyone labeled “disloyal,” indefinitely.

When John Merryman of Maryland was jailed for Confederate sympathies, the chief justice of the Supreme Court demanded he be given due process. The Constitution does grant the power to suspend habeas rights in the event of “invasion or rebellion,” but the Supreme Court (in this case, the chief justice, in an independent ruling) decided that such power resided not with the president, but with Congress. Lincoln simply ignored the order. Merryman remained imprisoned without trial for seven more weeks before he was released.

Three months after Merryman’s arrest, in the same state, Lincoln’s men were fooled by a false rumor that a majority of Maryland legislators were preparing to vote to secede. So they arrested several of them.

Lincoln went on to trash the First Amendment, issuing a declaration through Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that illegalized any “act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or in any other disloyal practice.”

An estimated 10 to 15 thousand Americans were arrested under this order. One Missouri man was arrested for saying, “I wouldn’t wipe my a – – with the Stars and Stripes.” In New Hampshire, a 58-year-old physician was arrested for predicting that three-quarters of the state’s men would be killed in the war and go to hell. He wasn’t let out of jail until he promised to take a loyalty oath and posted a $10,000 bond.

In Illinois, Dr. Israel Blanchard, a Lincoln supporter who even tried to join the Union Army, was arrested based on nothing other than the false claim of a man who said he had seen the doctor at a meeting of a pro-Confederacy group. Blanchard spent several weeks in jail. Others were arrested for singing Confederate songs or wearing Confederate buttons.

Lincoln’s troops shut down more than 300, mostly Democratic, newspapers. The editor of the Philadelphia Evening Journal was arrested after comparing Lincoln to Jefferson Davis and released only after he recanted. The Secretary of War approved the destruction of the office of a Democratic paper in Washington, DC, The Sunday Chronicle, the day after it ran an article he didn’t like. The paper’s editors were arrested.

When two related newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce, published a bogus story about a supposed draft of an additional 400,000 men, Lincoln directly ordered the papers be shut down and their printing presses seized. Lincoln even shuttered the Independent Telegraph System for transmitting the story.

‘Unlimited’

powers

Lincoln imposed martial law in some areas. In Missouri, where only 17,000 voters out of 165,000 supported Lincoln in 1860, his Republican supporters used the Union Army to close Democratic newspapers, marginalize the Democratic Party and disenfranchise its voters. Lincoln won more than 70% of the state’s votes in 1864.

Historian James G. Randall, who won the Bancroft prize for his Lincoln scholarship, wrote, “No president has carried the power of presidential edict and executive order (independently of Congress) so far as [Lincoln] did . . . It would not be easy to state what Lincoln conceived to be the limit of his powers.”

In “The Age of Lincoln,” historian Orville Vernon Burton agreed, saying Lincoln wielded “broad, warlord-like powers,” adding that Republicans used “federal marshals, Pinkerton detectives and agents of the newly formed US Secret Service to silence political opponents as well as Confederate spies. While Lincoln took an unprecedented hands-on approach to war-making, goading and advising his generals on tactical points, he demonstrated little desire to intervene when his commanders abridged civil liberties.”

One such commander, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, was enabled under martial law to impose his infamous General Order No. 38, which made it illegal to speak out against the war. A notable victim, Clement Laird Vallandigham, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio, was arrested for giving anti-Lincoln speeches and sentenced to prison for the duration of the war. After an outcry, Vallandigham was deported to the South, though since he didn’t consider himself a member of the Confederacy either, he demanded to be treated as a Confederate prisoner of war.

The Lincoln administration even came very close to arresting a former president, Democrat Franklin Pierce, based on a false story that tied him to a pro-Confederacy group. The hoax was dreamed up by a fellow Democrat who wanted to prove that Republicans were so caught up in the hysteria of searching for traitors that they would fall for any scurrilous story. The secretary of state initially fell for the ruse and angrily demanded that Pierce defend himself, then covered up his involvement when he learned the truth.

Almost as infamous as General Order No. 38 was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s General Order No. 11, which expelled “The Jews, as a class . . . from the Department,” meaning an area stretching from Mississippi to Illinois.

The order was in effect for two weeks until Lincoln himself apparently rescinded it through Gen. Henry Halleck. But Lincoln’s reasoning was less than a robust condemnation of prejudice: Halleck told Grant, “the President has no objection to your expelling traders & Jew pedlers [sic], which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms prescribed [sic] an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” (To his credit, Lincoln later appointed the first rabbi to serve as a military chaplain.)

The president’s position on blacks was not as enlightened as “Lincoln” makes it appear either: In 1858, Lincoln said, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality.”

Torture in the

Civil War

Does “Zero Dark Thirty” condone torture? Some think it does, but the film is a queasy, disquieting experience. It’s anything but a whitewash. It invites adults to think for themselves. “Lincoln,” by contrast, paints its central character as a folksy but brilliant charmer who never did anything worse than cut a few patronage deals to get the 13th Amendment passed.

Don’t think torture wasn’t an issue during the Lincoln years. In the Civil War, the administration was as focused on finding and punishing deserters from the Union army as the Bush administration was in deterring and capturing terrorists. Many innocent persons, often British subjects, were mistakenly swept up in the dragnet, and they were often stripped naked and subjected to blasts of cold water for up to two hours, long enough to break the skin. This treatment was described as “usual” by those administering it. Some prisoners were handcuffed and suspended by the wrists.

Notified of all this, Lincoln’s lieutenants, including his Dick Cheney, Secretary of State William Seward, reacted with a shrug. Were it not for the fact that some of those victimized were British citizens, generating diplomatic paperwork, “the torture of these civilians by the military would never have been recorded . . . there was no impulse to correct the abuse; indeed, no one saw it as an abuse,” notes historian Mark E. Neely Jr. in his authoritative Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties,” which has more detail on most of the examples of Lincoln administration misfeasance cited in this article.

Neely, who for 20 years was director of the Lincoln Museum, notes wryly that hardly any books other than novels have delved into what he calls “the dark side of the Civil War,” though literary critic Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore,” painted Lincoln as a tyrant comparable to Vladimir Lenin. And the ever-mischievous Gore Vidal wrote in his novel, “Lincoln,” “For the first time, Seward understood the nature of Lincoln’s political genius. He had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer.”

“The skimpiness of the serious literature,” writes Neely, “suggests that historians have been more or less embarrassed by Lincoln’s record on the Constitution . . . Historians have, to put it simply, shied away from the subject.”

To quote one of my forebears, writing on May 16, 1863 in what was then the New York Evening Post, “No governments and no authorities are to be held as above criticism, or even denunciation. We know of no other way of correcting their faults, or restraining their tyrannies, than by open and bold discussion.” First the exigencies of wartime, then Lincoln’s martyrdom, shut down that kind of debate, apparently permanently.

Whitewashing history

“Zero Dark Thirty” is an honest film that is promoting open and bold discussion. “Lincoln,” for all the (tedious) detail of its many scenes of negotiation and minor compromising that simply add a new layer of hard-headed shrewdness to the existing Lincoln legend, is at its core simple-minded Spielbergian sentiment that makes Americans feel warm, fuzzy and righteous.

“Zero Dark” challenges the audience; “Lincoln” flatters it.

Steven Spielberg has suckered the public into believing there once a time when it was always obvious which side of the issue was right and saints wielded the levers of power. There wasn’t, and they didn’t.

kyle.smith@nypost.com