Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah on the Charge of Piracy Part 41

"_Mr. Madison_: This has not removed the difficulty. The same act might be treason against the United States, as here defined, and against a particular State, according to its laws.

"_Dr. Johnson_ was still of opinion there could be no treason against a particular State. It could not, even at present, as the Confederation now stands--_the sovereignty being in the Union_; much less can it be under the proposed system.

"_Colonel Mason: The United States will have a qualified sovereignty only. The individual States will retain a part of the sovereignty._ An act may be treason against a particular State, which is not so against the United States. He cited the rebellion of Bacon, in Virginia, as an ill.u.s.tration of the doctrine.

"_Mr. King_: No line can be drawn between levying war and adhering to the enemy, against the United States, and against an individual State. Treason against the latter must be so against the former.

"_Mr. Sherman_: Resistance against the laws of the United States, as distinguished from resistance against the laws of a particular State, forms the line."

_Mr. Ellsworth_, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, closed the debate in these memorable words:

"The United States are sovereign on one side of the line dividing the jurisdictions; the States, on the other. _Each ought to have power to defend their respective sovereignties._"

Now, if your honors please, it will probably be attempted to be answered to the argument, that by section 10 of article 1 of the Const.i.tution of the Union, the States are forbidden to enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, or to grant letters of marque and reprisal; or, without the consent of Congress, to enter into any agreement or compact with another State; or to engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay. This does not conflict with, but, on the contrary, confirms, the views I have presented, for the following reasons:

The prohibition against entering into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, and against granting letters of marque and reprisal, has clearly no reference whatever to the relations which the States of the Union sustain to each other. It refers solely to their relations towards foreign powers.

I beg to cite, upon that subject, from Grotius, Lib. 1, chap. 4, sec.

13. He says:

"In the sixth place, when a King has only a part of the sovereignty, the rest being reserved to the people, or to a Senate, if he encroaches upon the jurisdiction which does not belong to him he may lawfully be opposed by force, since in that regard he is not at all sovereign. This is the case, in my opinion, even when in the distribution of the sovereign power the power of making war is a.s.signed to the King. _For the grant of such a power must in that case be understood only in its relation to wars with foreign powers, those who possess a part of the sovereignty necessarily having at the same time the right of defending it_; and when a necessity arises of having recourse to forcible resistance against the King, he may, by right of war, lose even the part of the sovereignty which incontestibly belonged to him."

I say, then, in the next place, that if any of the States, having come into collision with any of their sister States, or with the General Government, and being threatened with invasion or overthrow in the contest, resort to letters of marque as a means of weakening their adversary, and thereby preventing or r.e.t.a.r.ding the threatened invasion, their right to do so is not at all affected or impaired by that provision of the Federal Const.i.tution. The right of resistance includes it as well as every other means of rendering resistance effectual.

So also with regard to the prohibition against entering into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, which is coupled with the prohibition against granting letters of marque in the first paragraph of the tenth section. That that prohibition is restricted to compacts or agreements with foreign powers, is manifest from the whole structure of the section.

The second paragraph of the section provides that no State shall, without the consent of Congress, enter into any agreement or compact with another State. It follows that, conceding the invalidity of the State acts of separation from the Union, which the whole of the preceding argument admits, the Confederation of the States claiming to have separated is not valid against the authority of the Union; but the individual States, in ratifying the Const.i.tution of the so-called Confederate States, have done more than to make an agreement or compact with each other. Each one of them, separately, has conferred upon the same agent the authority to issue the commission in question, as its act.

Moreover, this second paragraph of the tenth section strongly confirms the doctrine of the right of forcible resistance of the States in the Union. It permits a State, without the consent of Congress, to engage in war when actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay. This, it will be remembered, is in the paragraph of the section imposing restrictions upon the States, and clearly justifies forcible resistance, rising even to the dignity of war, by one State, to aggressive invasion, from another or others, when the danger is so imminent that it will not admit of delay.

The same paragraph also permits individual States to keep troops and s.h.i.+ps of war, in time of war. The word "troops" here is evidently used in the sense of regular troops, forming an army, in contradistinction to the ordinary State militia.

To apply, then, these principles to the facts of this case: The President of the United States had, by proclamation, on the 15th April last, called for military contingents from the various States of the Union, to put down resistance to the exercise of federal authority in the State of South Carolina and other Southern States.

Those States had, by their Legislatures and Conventions of their people, decided that a proper case for resistance to the federal authority claimed to be exercised within their borders had arisen, and had authorized and commanded such resistance.

The 5th section of the Act of July 13th, 1861, and the President's Proclamation of August 16th, under that Act, concede that the resistance was claimed to be under authority of the State governments; that that claim was not disavowed by the State governments; and Congress thereupon legislated, and the President exercised the authority vested in him by the Act, on the a.s.sumption that such was the fact,--prohibiting commercial intercourse with those States, authorizing captures and confiscations of the property of their citizens without regard to their political affinities, and placing them, as we contend, in all respects, upon the footing of public enemies.

They were, moreover, threatened with immediate invasion. The Proclamation of the President a.s.signed, as their first probable duty, to the military contingents called for from other States, to repossess the Federal Government of property which it could not repossess without an actual invasion of the discontented States.

The Congress of the Union was not then in session. It had adjourned, after having omitted to confer upon the Federal Executive the power to resort to measures of coercion, which had been under discussion during its sitting.

The commission in question was issued as one of the measures of forcible resistance to this exercise of federal power, claimed--whether rightfully or wrongfully, is not the question here--to be unlawful by the governments of all the States against which it was directed, and to which those governments enjoined forcible resistance upon, and authorized it by, their citizens.

I contend, therefore, that whether the action of the Federal Government or of the State government was justifiable or unjustifiable, no citizen of any of the States which authorized and enjoined such resistance is criminally responsible, whether he espoused one side or the other in the unhappy controversy, either to the General Government or to the government of the State of which he is a citizen, so long as he acted in good faith, and in the honest belief that the government to which he adhered was acting within the legitimate scope of its const.i.tutional powers. We contend that every sovereign has necessarily power to defend its sovereignty, and to decide the mixed question of law and fact as to whether it has been infringed; that there can be no sovereign, or defence of sovereignty, without subjects to whom the sovereign's mandate and authority are a protection; and that as one sovereign cannot lawfully punish another, who is his equal, by personal pains and penalties, for resistance, after he is subdued, so neither can punish the subject of both who, in good faith and under honest convictions of duty, adhered to either in the struggle.

Now, if your honors please, I pa.s.s to the next proposition, which is:

That the defendants, who are citizens of the States calling themselves Confederate States, cannot be convicted under this indictment, if they in good faith believed, at the time of the capture of the Joseph, that the political _status_ of those States, as members of the Federal Union, had been legally terminated, and that they had thereby ceased to be citizens of the United States, and made the capture in good faith, under the commission in evidence, as a belligerent act,--such States being, as they supposed, at war with the United States.

It is not necessary for me, if your honors please, to enlarge upon that. I rely, for that proposition, on the same authorities that I have already cited to the point, that robbery or piracy cannot be committed, unless it is committed with felonious or piratical intent. But I say, with reference to the validity or invalidity of those acts of separation from the Union, that the counsel for the prisoners, whatever their private convictions may be, are not at liberty to concede their invalidity, so long as that concession may affect the lives of their clients. Their validity has been maintained by some of the ablest lawyers of the country, and in the Senate of the United States itself, and by all the authorities, legislative, executive and judicial, of the States which have adopted them. If, as they undoubtedly did, the prisoners _bona fide_ believed in their validity, the argument in favor of the protection afforded by the commission, or, by what comes to the same thing, the absence of criminal intent, becomes so much the more irresistible. And even though wholly invalid, such illegal action could not deprive the citizen of the State of the s.h.i.+eld and protection afforded him by the action of the State government authorizing resistance, and regarded as still continuing a member of the federal Union.

The next proposition is:

That under the state of facts existing in South Carolina, as established by the public doc.u.ments and other evidence in the cause, those administering the Government of the so-called Confederate States const.i.tuted the _de facto_ Government which replaced the Government of the United States in those States before and at the time of the commission of the acts charged in the indictment; and the defendants who are citizens of those States were justified by overpowering necessity in submitting to that Government, in yielding their allegiance to it, and thenceforth in actively aiding and supporting it; and that the capture of the Joseph, having been a belligerent act in a war between such _de facto_ Government, and the people of the States which had submitted to its authority on the one side, and the United States on the other, such defendants cannot be convicted under this indictment.

Now, with reference to that, allow me to call your honors' attention to but a single authority, in addition to those which I cited in my opening remarks to the Jury. It is the case of _The United States_ vs.

_The General Parkhill_, decided by Judge Cadwalader, in the United States District Court, in Philadelphia, in July, 1861. He says:

"The foregoing remarks do not suffice to define the legal character of the contest in question. It is a civil war, as distinguished from such unorganized intestine war as occurs in the case of a mere insurrectionary rebellion.

"Civil war may occur where a nation without an established Government is divided into opposing hostile factions, each contending for the acquisition of an exclusive administration of her Government. If a simple case of this kind should occur at this day, the Governments of the nations not parties to the contest might regard it as peculiarly one of civil war. As between the contending factions themselves, however, neither could easily regard their hostile opponents in the contest otherwise than as mere insurgents engaged in unorganized rebellion. Thus, in the language of Sir M. Hale, every success of either party would subject all hostile opponents of the conqueror to the penalties of treason. A desire to prevent the frequency of such a result was the origin of the rule of law, that allegiance is due to any peaceably established Government, though it may have originated in usurpation. The statute of 11 H. 7, c. 1 (A.D. 1494), excusing an English subject who has yielded obedience, or who has even rendered military service to a Ruler who was King in fact, though not in law, was declaratory of a previous principle of judicial decision."

After referring to Bracton, c.o.ke, Hawkins, and Foster, the learned Judge proceeds:

"It has already been stated that a King in whose name justice was administered in the Courts of law was usually regarded as in actual possession of the Government.

"Civil war of another kind occurs where an organized hostile faction is contending against an established Government, whose laws are still administered in all parts of its territory except places in the actual military or naval occupation of insurgents or their adherents.

"In such a case the question has been, whether a place in the actual military occupation of the revolutionary faction, or of its adherents, may, under the law of war, be treated by that Government as if the contest was a foreign war and the place occupied by public enemies. In the case of a maritime blockade of such a place, the affirmative of this question was decided in England, in the year 1836. It had previously been so decided by the Supreme Tribunal of Marine, at Lisbon (3 Scott, 201; 2 Bingh., N.C., 781)."

Judge Cadwalader then refers to Grotius (Proleg., sec. 23), citing with approval the statement by Demosthenes of the rule of public law in the case of the invasion by Deiopeithes, the Athenian commander in the Chersonese, of the dominions of Philip of Macedon, who had sent a military force to the relief of Cardia, when sought to be reduced to submission by Deiopeithes--that wherever judicial remedies are not enforceable by a Government against its opponents, the proper mode of restoring its authority is war,--and continues:

"This doctrine is of obvious applicability to civil war of a third kind, which occurs where the exercise of an established Government's jurisdiction has been revolutionarily suspended in one or more territorial Districts, whose willing or unwilling submission to the revolutionary rule prevents the execution of the suspended Government's laws in them, except at points occupied by its military or naval forces. The present contest exemplifies a civil war of this kind. It was also, with specific differences, exemplified in the respective contests which resulted in the independence of the United Netherlands and of the United States."

He then proceeds:

"Within the limits of two of the States in which so-called ordinances of secession have been proclaimed the execution of the laws of the United States has not been wholly suppressed. They are enforceable in the Western Judicial District of Virginia, and perhaps in the adjacent Eastern Division of Tennessee. In the other nine States which profess to have seceded, including South Carolina, those laws are not enforceable anywhere.

"The Const.i.tution of the United States prohibits the enactment by Congress of a bill of attainder, and secures, in all criminal prosecutions, to the accused, the right to a speedy public trial, by Jury of the State and District wherein the crime shall have been committed, which District must have been previously ascertained by law. Therefore if a treasonable or other breach of allegiance is committed within the limits of one of these nine States, it is not at present punishable in any Court of the United States. This was practically shown in a recent case (Greiner's case, _Legal Intelligencer_, May 10, 1861). War is consequently the only means of self-redress to which the United States can, in such a case, resort, for the restoration of the const.i.tutional authority of their Government.

"The rule of the common law is, that when the regular course of justice is interrupted by revolt, rebellion, or insurrection, so that the Courts of justice cannot be kept open, civil war exists, and hostilities may be prosecuted on the same footing as if those opposing the Government were foreign enemies invading the land.

The converse is also regularly true, that when the Courts of a Government are open, it is ordinarily a time of peace. But though the Courts be open, if they are so obstructed and overawed that the laws cannot be peaceably enforced, there might perhaps be cases in which this converse application of the rule would not be admitted. (1 Knapp, 346, 360, 361; 1 Hale, P.C. 347; Co. Litt. 249 _b_.)"

Now, if your honors please, the last proposition with which I am compelled to trouble you is:

That the Acts of Congress and the Proclamations of the President since the outbreak of the present struggle evidence the existence of a state of war between the Federal Government and the States calling themselves the Confederate States from a time anterior to the performance of the acts charged in the indictment, in which all the citizens of those States are involved and treated as public enemies of the Federal Government, whether they had any agency in initiating the conflict or not; and that the natural law of self-preservation, under these circ.u.mstances, justified the defendants, who are citizens of those States, in the commission of the acts charged in the indictment, as a means of weakening the power of destruction possessed by the Federal Government.

Now the counsel on the other side, from the intimation which he gave when he addressed the Court, intended to treat that subject of a _de facto_ Government, or whatever it was, on the footing of men under duress, not in danger of their lives, joining with rebels and aiding them in a treasonable enterprise. Your honors will perceive that was not the footing on which we put it at all. It was the footing on which it stood at one time, when rebellion first broke out, when forts were seized--acts which it is no part of the duty of counsel on this trial to justify or say anything about, because there is no act connected with that part of the struggle which is in evidence on this trial. But on that I wish to refer to what Judge Cadwalader said in another case--that of _Greiner_--which undoubtedly the learned counsel for the Government had in his mind when he drew that distinction. Shortly before the late so-called secession of Georgia, a volunteer military company, of which _Greiner_ was a member, by order of the Governor, took possession of a fort within her limits, over which jurisdiction had been ceded by her to the United States, and garrisoned it until her ordinance of secession was promulgated, when, without having encountered any hostile resistance, they left it in the possession of her Government. A member of this company, Charles A. Greiner, who had partic.i.p.ated in the capture and detention of the fort, afterwards visited Pennsylvania, at a period of threatened if not actual hostilities between the Confederate States and the United States. He was arrested in Philadelphia, under a charge of treason. Your honors will very readily perceive what a difference there was between that case and this. Judge Cadwalader applies the rule in reference to that; and, speaking of this doctrine of allegiance due to a Government in fact, he says:

"This doctrine is applicable wherever and so long as the duty of allegiance to an existing Government remains unimpaired. When this fort was captured, the accused, in the language of the Supreme Court, owed allegiance to two Sovereigns, the United States and the State of Georgia (see 14 How. 20). The duty of allegiance to the United States was co-extensive with the const.i.tutional jurisdiction of their Government, and was, to this extent, independent of, and paramount to, any duty of allegiance to the State (6 Wheaton, 381, and 21 Howard, 517). His duty of allegiance to the United States continued to be thus paramount so long at least as their Government was able to maintain its peace through its own Courts of Justice in Georgia, and thus extend there to the citizen that protection which affords him security in his allegiance, and is the foundation of his duty of allegiance.

Though the subsequent occurrences which have closed these Courts in Georgia may have rendered the continuance of such protection within her limits impossible at this time, we know that a different state of things existed at the time of the hostile occupation of the fort. The revolutionary secession of the State, though threatened, had not then been consummated. This party's duty of allegiance to the United States, therefore, could not then be affected by any conflicting enforced allegiance of the State.

He could not then, as a citizen of Georgia, pretend to be an enemy of the United States, in any sense of the word 'enemy' which distinguishes its legal meaning from that of traitor. _Future cases may perhaps require the definition of more precise distinctions and possible differences under this head. The present case is, in my opinion, one of no difficulty, so far as the question of probable cause for the prosecution is concerned._"

Having decided that, in the present state of things, he could not commit the prisoner for trial, to be conveyed to Georgia, because there were no Courts of the United States there, and because it would be a violation of the Const.i.tution of the United States--that he could not have a speedy trial--he decided that, under a subsequent act of Congress, he had a right to require the prisoner to find sureties to be of good behavior towards the United States.

I have thus ended what I had to say upon this subject, with but one single exception.

A great deal will be said, undoubtedly, on the part of the prosecution, here, with reference to this being a revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States in the States which have taken these steps. I have only to ask, in reference to that--conceding it, for the sake of argument, in its fullest extent--what was the adoption of the Const.i.tution of the United States but a revolutionary overthrow of the previously existing Confederation? It was done by nine States, without the consent of four, whose consent was necessary, and the Government of the United States went into operation; and it was a long time before at least two of them came in under the new Government.