Frank Sanborn was an official and member of the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, a studied and a Theodore Parker admiring abolitionist, and also wrote admiringly about and helped finance some of John Brown’s adventures that eventually led to the Harpers Ferry debacle of murder and mayhem intended to liberate slaves, who were then expected (by Brown and his followers) to rise up in revolt against slaveholders to their freedom.

(p. 370-372)”Toward spring he [Sanborn] returned to Concord [from Quebec where he fled after being implicated in the support of Brown] and his school [a school he founded], in which Old Brown’s two youngest daughters were now pupils –tuition gratis, board paid by [George L.] Stearns. One April evening Sanborn answered a knock at his house door and admitted a young man ostensibly asking for charity but followed in by four more strangers. One of them began to read aloud a Senate warrant for Sanborn’s arrest. The first words sent his housekeeper sister Sarah to screaming bloody murder out the back door. The intruders handcuffed Sanborn and tried to hustle him out to the closed carriage that had brought them. Six-foot-four, young and strong, by bracing himself against the doorpost and wriggling and digging in his heels, he made those few yards take a long time—and Concord was rising to the rescue. The three daughters of his blacksmith neighbor scampered up and down pounding on doors. Judge [E.R.] Hoar heard the row and, as prearranged, went to his desk and began filling out a writ of habeus corpus. Sanborn’s lawyer, also a neighbor, ran up to the swirling mass the core of which was his client, asked whether he desired such a writ, was answered pantingly “By all means!”, dashed away and within minutes was back waving it with Hoar’s signature not yet dry. In order to get the prisoner’s flailing legs into the carriage door, one of the marshal’s men, who had a beard, had pinioned the ankles. Sister Sarah, presumably still screaming, siezed his beard and hauled so hard that the pain made him let go, and the legs resumed their kicking and sprawling. A young lady neighbor whipped up the carriage horse so that it started ahead and took the carriage with it from the marshals and their captive.

The marhsals refused to take notice of the writ, so the local sheriff created the bystanders a posse comitatus that, with a whooping rush, rescued Sanborn by force. Within a few days the marshal’s men were arrested as kidnappers and eventually let go only on condition that they enlist in the Union army. If they survived the war, they had every right to tell their grandchildren that it had begun for them when they were playing their parts in the greatest hullaballoo Concord had seen since the redcoats’ futile foray in 1775.”

So you see. In this instance a writ of habeus corpus was something quite different from what we view today.

Habeus corpus apparently could then be used as a very aggressive legal manuever almost as if a military-like tactic in an epic struggle.

The meaning of all words change so drastically over time, it is impossible generally, to know what those in the past meant when they used them.

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher