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SPEECH 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. JAMES W. WALL, OF NEW JERSEY, 
 
 ON 
 
 THE INDEMNIFICATION BILL; 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 3, 1663. 
 
 WASHINGTON: 
 1863. 
 
 
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SPEECH. 
 
 The Senate having under consideration the report of the 
 committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the 
 two Houses on the bill (H. R. No. 591) to indemnify the 
 President and other persons for suspending the privilege 
 of the writ of habeai corpus and acts done in pursuance 
 thereof— 
 
 Mr. WALL said-. 
 
 Mr. President: I look upon this bill as fraught 
 in its consequences with more terrible mischief to 
 the best interests of this country than any of the 
 dangerous projects that have sprung, like Minerva, 
 but without her wisdom, full armed , from the busy 
 brain of the chairman of the Military Committee. 
 It is more pregnant with evil for the Republic than 
 was the belly of the Trojan horse to Ilium. And 
 now is the time, here the place, " where the wild- 
 fig trees join the walls of Troy," when all those 
 who would defend the palladium of constitutional 
 liberty must meet the foe and drive him back, if 
 it is not already too late. Here, if we must per- 
 ish, we should perish together. We must fight 
 to the last, for if this bill once passes there is no 
 Latium for us to fly to. 
 
 This bill clothes the President of the United 
 States, with the aid of the conscription bill passed 
 on Sunday morning, with the panoply of the vast 
 powers and functions of a dictator. The dicta- 
 tor who in the hour of a nation's peril came forth 
 from the Roman senate, with absolute will over 
 the life, liberty, and property of the Roman citi- 
 zen, never had any more power than this bill con- 
 fers upon the President of the United States. 
 When the decree for the appointment of a dicta- 
 tor went forth from the conscript fathers of Rome, 
 they vailed the statues of Liberty that stood in 
 every market-place, in every boarium, in every 
 forum, and in every temple throughout the vast 
 
 extent of the empire. The shrouded, silent forms 
 of this goddess gave notice everywhere to the 
 Roman citizen that his absolute rights were taken 
 away. But under this bill, Mr. President, there 
 will be no such notice to the citizen of this Re- 
 public. By this bill you place at the discretion of 
 the President the grave power to suspend the 
 great writof right of the people of the entire coun 
 try at his option. You actually confer upon him 
 the functions of a legislator, the right by his own 
 volition to suspend a law; a right which I hold 
 under the Constitution belongs alone to Congress) 
 and which it has no more right to delegate to him 
 than a trustee would have a right to delegate trust a 
 power. This bill is only an embodiment of that 
 pestilential political heresy with which this war 
 commenced — and to which I shall address myself 
 presently — that the right to suspend the privilege 
 of the writ of habeas corpus was an executive and 
 not a legislative power — apolitical heresy boldly 
 sustained in this Chamber by the Senator from 
 New Jersey who preceded me, but who has now 
 gone, to enjoy his reward for having unlearned 
 the legal lessons that had been taught him, where, 
 I may say, the Democracy cease from troubling, 
 and the wearied politically are at rest — for it is a 
 life estate. I shall take occasion before I conclude 
 to allude to some of the points in his speech, for 
 the purpose of refuting them, and placing my pro- 
 test upon the record against the infamous doctrine 
 it contains, and the gross insult that it offers to 
 those great men who laid the foundations of this 
 Republic, with a view to the public happiness, by 
 securing to the citizen those absolute rights which 
 such a doctrine as this overturns at a blow. 
 
 Let this bill pass, Mr. President, and it places 
 the liberty of every citizen in the loyal States at 
 
the will of the President of the United States, with 
 no check, no control; and it reopens the iron- 
 studded doors of the casemates in your bastiles, 
 to be filled, as before, by men against whom no 
 accusation has been lodged, and who seek in vain 
 to meet their accusers face to face before the legal 
 tribunals of the land. Again will the post offices, 
 as they were before, become each like the lion's 
 mouth of Venice, where the secret informer may 
 lodge his lying accusation; and from a tribunal as 
 inexorable as the far-famed Council of Ten shall 
 come as swift and as sure the mandate that con- 
 signs him to some military dungeon of the Repub» 
 lie, which desecrates the names of those martyrs 
 to liberty, it maybe Fort Warren, it maybe Fort 
 La Fayette. This bill, if it passes, establishes in 
 tie President arbitrary power; and history in forms 
 us that arbitrary power is progressive, untiring, 
 unresting. It never halts or looks backward. As 
 one has eloquently said of it: 
 
 " Call it by what holy name you will, sanctify it by what 
 pretexts or purposes of patriotism you may, under any flag, 
 in any cause, anywhere and everywhere, it is the foe of 
 human rights, and by the very law of its being is incapable 
 of good. There is, there can be no life for liberty but in 
 the supreme and absolute dominion of law. This lesson 
 is written in letters of blood and fire all over the history of 
 nations. It is the standing moral of the annals of '•^publics 
 since their records began. It is legible upon the marbles 
 of the elder world ; it echoes in the strife and revolutions 
 of the new. Wherever men have thought great thoughts 
 and died brave deaths for human progress, its everlasting 
 truth has been proclaimed." 
 
 An encroachment upon the Constitution, strik- 
 ing arbitrarily at the personal liberty of every 
 citizen in the land, is but one of the paths leading 
 straight toward despotism. There are numerous 
 others, but they all run parallel to this. Let the 
 nation, or the nation's representatives, submit in 
 silence and indifference to such a bold usurpation 
 of power as I conceive is contained in this infa- 
 mous bill, and from that moment the manly cour- 
 age which is, the defense, and the sleepless vigi- 
 lance that is the price of liberty, is gone. Every 
 >i)<e of these pathways lies open, inviting the tread 
 of usurpation. Said the aged Selden in reply to 
 the ministers of Charles I: 
 
 " The personal liberty of the subject is the life and the 
 heart's blood of the commonwealth, and if the common- 
 wealth bleed in that master vein, all the balm of Gilead is 
 but in vain to preserve this our body- politic from ruin and 
 destruction." 
 
 Said Algernon Sidney, England's noblest mar- 
 tyr: 
 
 " He who oppugns the liberty of the subject under the 
 constitution of this realm, and in violation of it, not only 
 overthrows his own, but is guilty of the most brutish of all 
 follies." 
 
 These noble words were literally sprinkled, and 
 so consecrated, by that noble martyr's blood. It 
 
 was for their utterance he died, the noblest, proud- 
 est name upon the martyr roll. He was alike 
 inflexible to king and protector — the champion of 
 liberty against despotism — in the study, atthe bar, 
 in the prison, and upon the scaffold. To him the 
 world owes those great and eloquent discourses, 
 the first complete definition and exegesis of the 
 true nature and duties of government, full of brave 
 and noble sentiments, the well-stored armory from 
 which the fathers of our Republic drew the strong- 
 est and the sharpest shafts they shot against the 
 breast of despotism. 
 
 In view of the vast powers which the Congress 
 of the United States propose to give to the Presi- 
 dent under the provisions of this bill, I would in- 
 vite attention to the following sagacious words 
 uttered by Lord Temple in the British Parliament 
 at the commencement of the last century: 
 
 " Rashly and willfully to exercise a power clearly against 
 law and the constitution is too great a boldness for this 
 country at any time, and the suspending or dispensing pow- 
 er, that edged tool which has cut so deep, is the last that 
 any monarch in his wits, in any emergency, would dare to 
 handle in England. It is a rock that English history has 
 warned against with awful beacon lights. Its exercise lost 
 one prince his crown and head, and at last drove his family 
 out of the realm. A minister or representative who is not 
 afraid of the exercise of such an iniquitous power, is neither 
 fit for sovereign or subject." 
 
 Strange and startling as the truth may appear, 
 Mr. President, this suspending power of the abso- 
 lute rights of the citizen which in peace or war was 
 considered too hazardous to use, either by king, 
 minister, or representative, has proved the easiest 
 thing for republican America in this high noon of 
 the nineteenth century. Nay, sir, more startling 
 even than this, it has even been declared treason 
 to question for one moment the right to its exer- 
 cise. That power the use of which cost one prince 
 his crown and head, and drove his family out of 
 the realm, has been sported with, and is to be 
 again, by the President of the United States, hold- 
 ing his office under a limited Constitution, and 
 where the absolute rights of the citizen were sup- 
 posed to have been placed far beyond the reach of 
 the tyrant grasp of arbitrary power. Fortunately, 
 for the time, an indignant people rose to vindicate 
 their outraged rights, and struck terror into the 
 hearts of their rulers. Pass this bill, and we shall 
 have the same abnormal acts recommenced, and 
 one by one the landmarks of the Constitution will 
 be obliterated, the laws suspended, the personal 
 liberty of the subject assailed, and provost mar- 
 shals and marshals like the cowled "familiars" 
 of the Inquisition dogging the footsteps of the citi- 
 zen and tracking him to his doom. 
 
 The time was once, Mr. President, in this Re- 
 
public, we might say of Americans, as was said 
 
 to King John by the archbishop— 
 
 « Let every Briton, as his mind be free, 
 Hi* person safe, tiis property secure, 
 His liouse as sacred as the fane of heaven, 
 Watching unseen his ever open door, 
 Watching the realm, the spirit of the laws j 
 His fate determined by the rules of right, 
 No hand invisible to write his doom, 
 No demon starting at the midnight hour 
 To draw his curtain, or to drag him down 
 To mansions of despair." 
 
 " Inviolable preserve 
 The sacred shield that covers all the land— 
 The heaven-confessed palladium of the isle— 
 To Britain's sons, the judgment of their peers, 
 tin theo great pillars : freedom of the mind, 
 Freedom of speech, and freedom of the pen, 
 Forever changing, yet forever sure, 
 The base of Britain rests." 
 The time was, sir, when this noble eulogy, pro- 
 nounced by Shakspeare on the British constitu- 
 tion, might be more aptly applied to our own. 
 The great American charter of our freedom had 
 more than confirmed to us these laws of the Con- 
 fessor, and cur people had given them as free, as 
 full , and as sovereign a consent as was ever given 
 by John to the bishops and the barons of Runny- 
 mede. The mind of the citizen was free, his per- 
 son was safe, his property secure, his house his 
 castle, the spirit of the laws his body-guard and 
 his house-guard. Would he propagate truth ? 
 Truth was free to combat error. Would he propa- 
 gate error? Error itself might stalk abroad and do 
 her mischief, and make night itself grow darker, 
 provided truth was left free to follow, however 
 slowly, with her torches to light up the wreck. 
 
 But who is it that takes a retrospective glance 
 over the stirring, awful history of the last two 
 years, but feels how the fine gold has grown dim 
 beneath the tarnishing touch of the hand of des- 
 potic power? Those great, absolute rights of the 
 citizen, which were intended to be beyond the 
 reach of arbitrary influence, the right of personal 
 liberty, of property, of free speech and a free press, 
 rudely and ruthlessly violated. Of these abso- 
 lute rights, during what was not inaptly called 
 the reign of terror, there was not one that was not 
 trampfed upon by the Executive or his subordi- 
 nates; and what was worse than all, every assault 
 that was made upon them was applauded to the 
 echo by jurists, lawyers, divines, and contract- 
 hunting renegade Democrats, whose cowardly 
 hearts either ran away with their betterjudgments, 
 or who really did not understand the very first 
 principles of the Constitution under which they 
 lived. Men were arrested and papers seized with- 
 - out warrant or oath of probable cause; prisoners 
 were held without presentment or indictment, de- 
 
 nied a speedy and public trial, nay, refused a trial 
 altogether, carried away*by force from the State 
 or district where their offense must have been 
 committed, and incarcerated for months in the 
 bastiles of theGovernment, and then set free with- 
 out being even informed of the nature and cause 
 of the accusation against them. Every constitu- 
 tional outpost was driven in, and every personal 
 guarantee of the citizen brushed away by the Ex- 
 ecutive as easily as cobwebs by the hands of a 
 giant. And this by a Government professing it 
 was fighting for the Union, the Constitution, and 
 the enforcement of the laws; for those at the cut- 
 set of this war were the proud words that glittered 
 upon your advancing standards. Doctrine's were 
 preached in high places directly at war with all 
 the fundamental principles of free government. 
 The central power, under the bald pretense of pre- 
 serving the Government, assumed a new and fear- 
 ful energy, until men went about with " bated 
 breath and whispering humbleness," not know- 
 in°- where the next blow was to fall, or who wai» 
 the next friend that was to be stricken down at 
 their sides. Of these times I may exclaim, "quo- 
 rum pars fui." 
 
 It was my lot to have felt the grasp of arbitrary 
 power, and within the damp, grated casemates of 
 one of the bastiles of the Government, to have 
 learned how helpless a thing is the citizen who is 
 deprived of those absolute rights, which, if t§ey do 
 not exist in your Constitution, your Constitution 
 is a miserable delusion and a snare. Having been 
 arrested without cause shown, I wasliberated in the 
 same way, after enduring personal indignities, 
 which, to a high-spirited man.eatlikeiron into the 
 soul. And from the hour of my liberation up to this 
 moment, where I stand upon this floor, the repre- 
 sentative of a sovereign State, I have been unable 
 to learn what those charges are. 1 have in vain de- 
 manded of the proper Department what were the 
 charges against me, claiming the freeman's con- 
 stitutional privilege "to be informed of the nature 
 and cause of the accusation, and to be confronted 
 with the witnesses against me." Great heavens » 
 Mr. President, is it possible that such things can 
 be, under a Constitution whose boast it has been 
 that it was for the protection of the inalienable 
 rights of men against oppression ? If this boast 
 has been in vain, then, sir, that Constitution hae 
 but a name to live, an outer seeming to beguile 
 and deceive, a Sodom apple, a hectic flush— 
 
 " Painting the cheek upon which it preys." 
 The liberty I claim, and those who act with me, 
 
6 
 
 under that Constitution is not the liberty of li- 
 centiousness; it is the liberty united with law; 
 liberty sustained by law; and that kind of liberty 
 we have always supposed was guarantied to every 
 man, rich or poor, high or low, proud or humble, 
 under all exigencies, whether in peace or war, and 
 whether that war is foreign, or the State is in the 
 fearful throes of civil strife. This is my loyalty 
 and that of my political friends on this door — the 
 allegiance, the devotion to organic laws. 1 know 
 no other loyalty, and I will not bow myself at the 
 shrine of any other. In this Republic, its Consti- 
 tution declares: 
 
 " No citizen 6liall be deprived of his life, liberty, or prop- 
 erty, without due process of law." 
 
 He may be made to part with all three by the 
 power of the Stale; but that power must look well 
 to it, sir, that in its exercise it does not transcend 
 the limits in which it is appointed it to move. If it 
 does, it becomes despotic; and then, among men 
 who know their rights, and knowing dare main- 
 tain, resistance follows as naturally as light suc- 
 ceeds to darkness. If by a simple mandate, nay, 
 by the lightning flash over the telegraph wire, of 
 any Cabinet officer, in States where the people are 
 loyal, and where the courts of law are open, you 
 or I may be torn from our homesand consigned for 
 an indefinite time to the gloomy walls of a Govern- 
 ment fortress, the same mandate or dispatch, only 
 . altered in its phraseology, may consign us im- 
 mediately to the hands of the executioner, or de- 
 prive us of our properties, confiscating them to the 
 State. If not, why not? The right to have our lives 
 secure against interference without due process of 
 law is equally guarantied in the same clause which 
 protects our liberty and our property. These priv- 
 ileges can trace their lineage back to the grassy 
 lawns of Runnymede, where they were born more 
 than six hundred years ago. They were extorted 
 then and there by the rebellious barons, and uttered 
 in glowing language that has come down to us from 
 the ages long ago, and is still sounding in our ears 
 as the sweetest note that ever came from the sil- 
 ver clarion of freedom. Listen, Senators, to the 
 music, strong and sweet as it sounded in the sol- 
 emn midnight centuries ago: 
 
 " No freeman shall be seized or imprisoned, ordisseized, 
 or outlawed, or in any way destroyed ; nor will we go upon 
 him or send upon him, except by the judgment of his peers, 
 or the law of the land." 
 
 Our fathers caught the inspiring strain, and it 
 was prolonged in that sonorous sentence in ou row n 
 once glorious Constitution: " no person shall be 
 deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due 
 
 process of law;" "due process of law," the law 
 which hears before it condemns, and punishes 
 only after conviction. 
 
 Mr. President, every arrest made during the 
 reign of terror by the President or his subordinates 
 was in direct antagonism to this fundamental prin- 
 ciple of our Constitution, violative of its solemn 
 sanctions, and, because abnormal, revolutionary; 
 for it encouraged, nay, sanctified resistance. I re- 
 member well, sir, the excitement in Europe when 
 the King of Naples, the infamous Bomba, seized 
 a few young men of the first families by military 
 force, who were engaged in plotting against his 
 throne, and immured them in those horrid dun- 
 geons, blasted out of a rock, in that State fortress 
 which, like La Fayette in the bay of New York, 
 is the only dark and hateful thing upon the bright 
 waters of the beautiful bay of Naples. The mil- 
 itary guard, without warning, without accusation, 
 just as was done with the members of the Mary- 
 land Legislature and the Baltimore prisoners, sur- 
 rounded their houses at the midnight hour, and 
 they were torn suddenly from the luxurious com- 
 forts of their splendid homes, to be immured in 
 those awful prison-houses, wet with " the ac- 
 cursed dew of dungeon damp," sunk far below 
 the surface of the waters of the Neapolitan bay. 
 They were suspected of treasonable practices. 
 Their offense had that extent, no more. A cry of 
 horror went up from almost every nation in Eu- 
 rope, and from the then un trammeled press of 
 the American Republic. England remonstrated 
 through the manly, eloquent appeal of her indig- 
 nant Gladstone. France raised her voice in de- 
 nunciation of the outrage; while republican Amer- 
 ica shuddered as she thanked God "that no such 
 outrage could ever stain her national escutcheon." 
 We professed to know then what liberty was 
 worth; and as we sent cheering wtrds to those 
 brave spirits engaged in the work of Italian lib- 
 eration, we told those rebellious children of the 
 sun, " it is worth all your struggles, every sacri- 
 fice, and oceans of blood." The vengeance of an 
 oppressed people soon rose to vindicate the race 
 and punish the oppressor. In vain were her dun- 
 geons filled and her hearthstones desolate. The 
 bright dream of "Italia Libera" remained, the 
 scattered manna upon which the concealed enthu- 
 siasm of a whole nation fed itself, and to-day Na- 
 ples is redeemed, disinthralled. The Bourbon's 
 family is in exile, and the people's king rules over 
 the warm hearts that welcomed him to the throne. 
 Vengeance is certain, sooner or later, to overtake 
 the oppressor; and the Nemesis of retribution. 
 
with the flaming sword, follows swiftly after the 
 tyrant. 
 
 But the objection of the danger to the public 
 liberty and safety is not the only objection to this 
 bill. It is by its own title an indemnity bill, and 
 proposes to shelter behind the protecting aegis of 
 its strange legislation the unlawful acts of the 
 President and his subordinates. In other words, 
 it proposes to legalize an illegality. It is the le- 
 gislative power sheltering the executive branch of 
 the Government from the consequences of its ab- 
 normal, unconstitutional acts. You might as well 
 attempt by legislation to screen the judiciary from 
 the consequences of malfeasance in office. If one 
 department can thus protect the other, I ask, what 
 becomes of official responsibility and the obliga- 
 tions of official oaths? 
 
 I hold, sir, that the remedy is provided by the 
 Constitution, article second, section four, in case 
 the President is guilty of any official misconduct. 
 By that article he is made liable to impeachment 
 for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and 
 misdemeanors. The President may violate his 
 official duty in three ways: 1. By refusing to ex- 
 ecute the laws and treaties of the United States. 
 2. By usurping a power not confided to him by 
 the Constitution, although in some cases this may 
 amount to treason. 3. By an arbitrary and cor- 
 rupt use of an authority lawful in itself, but which 
 was intended to be exercised with a yingle view 
 to the public good, to answer the purposes of a 
 selfish intrigue. In England the king is not con- 
 stitutionally answerable for any of his official con- 
 duct; but it is presumed that he always acts by 
 Ihe advice of his ministers, and they are held 
 personally responsible for all political measures 
 adopted during theiradministration. Some of them 
 have suffered capitally for such alleged miscon- 
 duct. It is on this account, in part, that minis- 
 ters send in their resignation as soon as they find 
 that the majority of Parliament is against them. 
 Buthere it is different. The President is answer- 
 able for his own official conduct, and is liable to 
 impeachment for any default in the discharge of 
 his sworn duty. To say that any coordinate 
 branch of this Government could shield him from 
 the consequences of such acts would be an absurd- 
 ity, and tend to annihilate the whole system upon 
 which this Government was founded. 
 
 Again, this bill, if I understand it, not only 
 proposes to shelter the President from the conse- 
 quences of illegal acts— for the provisions of the 
 bill really amount to this, if fully carried out— but 
 to protect and shelter those of his subordinates 
 
 whom he may have commanded to perform uncon- 
 stitutional or illegal acts. Now, Mr. President, 
 if there is one fundamental principle of law better 
 established than any other, it is this: that, within 
 the limits of their respective powers, all officers, 
 from the President of the United States down- 
 wards, ought to be submitted to and obeyed; but 
 if they shoxdd overstep the limits of their official au- 
 thority, if they should usurp powers not delegated 
 to them by the Constitution , or by some law made 
 in pursuance of it, they would cease to be under 
 the protection of their offices, and would be rec- 
 ognized merely as private citizens for any act of 
 injustice or oppression they might commit, and 
 liable to a civil or criminal prosecution in the same 
 manner as a private citizen, with this distinction: 
 that if the wrong-doer has availed himself of hie of- 
 ficial character, or of the opportunities which his 
 office affords him, to commit acts of injustice or op- 
 pression, it will be considered as a great aggrava- 
 tion of his guilt in a criminal prosecution, and will 
 be a ground for a jury to find exemplary damages 
 in a civil action. This is the principle that runs 
 through all the cases; and all the indemnity bills 
 that Congress might pass from now to the crack 
 of doom would not disturb the force and efficacy 
 of that principle, in the mind of a high-minded, 
 intelligent jurist, who had a professional reputa- 
 tion to guard, however it might affect those imi- 
 tators of the Crawleys and Vernons of the first 
 Charles's day, who have crawled to judicial po- 
 sitions by base servility and disgusting obse- 
 quiousness, and who might be willing to exclaim, 
 as they did in the ship-money case— 
 
 '< That the king, pro bono publico, may charge his subjecto 
 both in their properties and persons for the safety and de- 
 fense of the kingdom, notwithstanding any act ot rar'ia- 
 ment, and may even dispense with law in case of necessity. 
 The attempt of the President to shelter his sub- 
 ordinates from responsibility upon the sic vole, 
 sic jubeo principle, is only another phase of the 
 delusion under which men's minds have been la- 
 boring. He certainly ought to be lawyer enough 
 to know that the Supreme Court has decided in 
 2 Cranch, 119— 
 
 ••That if the President should mistake the construction 
 of an act of Congress or of the Constitution, and, in c»- 
 sequence of it, should give instructions not warranted by 
 the act or the Constitution, any aggrieved party might re- 
 cover damages against the officer acting under such in- 
 structions, which, though given by the President, would fur- 
 nish no justification or excuse." 
 
 I admit that in general, when a particular duty 
 devolves upon the President, but the means to be 
 used in discharge of it are not pointed out, he 
 may adopt those which are most proper for that 
 purpose, provided they art not repvgnant to the Con- 
 
8 
 
 stitution or prohibited by acts of Congress. Thus, 
 in time of war, he has the right to use all the cus- 
 tomary means to carry it into effect, but he can- 
 not override the Constitution in doing it. It would 
 not, perhaps, be a sufficient foundation for an im- 
 peachment if the President should make use of the 
 discretion intrusted to him by the Constitution or 
 laws of the United States imprudently and inju- 
 diciously; for, in any such case, the people must 
 be eontent with the honest exercise of such ability 
 as they see fit to elevate to this high office. But 
 they havearightto expect, nay, demand, integrity 
 and fairpurposes and intentions, and that the civil 
 rights guarantied to them by their fathers shall 
 be scrupulously preserved. Many very honest 
 citizens think that in a time of war or rebellion 
 the President becomes by some political legerde- 
 main invested with all the functions of a dictator, 
 and holds the lives, liberties, and properties of the 
 citizen in his all-powerful grasp. Within the 
 sphere of his constitutional duties the President 
 may justly claim the support of all good citizens; 
 but when he transcends the powers conferred on 
 him by the Constitution to strike down the liber- 
 ties of the subject, he must expect, nay, he invites 
 opposition. Some Senators, on the other side of 
 this Chamber, seem to think that the test of loy- 
 alty is to be found in a blind adhesion to the Presi- 
 dent and his administration; but I would say to 
 them that my loyalty is akin to that so well de- 
 scribed in those lines of Cowper: 
 
 " We too are friends to loyalty : we love 
 The king who loves the law, respects its bounds, 
 And reigns content within them." 
 
 As to the responsibility of high officials, there 
 are very many in the community who labor under 
 the erroneous idea that the office protects the 
 transgressor. The legal authorities are all the 
 other way. Both the authorities in this country 
 and England point but one way upon this subject. 
 In England the responsibility of an official who 
 usurps power has never been questioned, and the, 
 loftiest officials have been held to a just retribution 
 for their wrongs, and governors admitted to be 
 viceroys in effect have been made to answer for 
 their assumptions of power, not only in their es- 
 tates, but with their lives. What said Chief Jus- 
 tice Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden, in overruling 
 a motion for a new trial made by the defendant in 
 an action of trespass for arresting the plaintiff on 
 a warrant from Lord Halifax, the Secretary of 
 State? 
 
 " tf the jury had been confined by their oath to consider 
 ttoe mere personal injury only, perhaps twenty pounds dam- 
 
 ages would have been sufficient; but the small injury done 
 the plaintiff and the lowness of his station did not appear 
 to the jury in that striking light in which the great point of 
 law touehins the liberty of the subject appeared to them 
 on the trial ; they saw a magistrate over all the king's sub- 
 jects exercising arbitrary power, violating* Magna Charta, 
 and attempting to destroy the liberty of the kingdom by in- 
 sisting upon the legality of general warrants in a tyrannical 
 and severe manner. These are the ideas which struck the 
 jury and induced them to give these heavy damages. I think 
 they have done right. To enter a man's house and drag him 
 from thence by means of an unconstitutional warrant is 
 worse than the Spanish Inquisition — a law under which no 
 Englishman would wish to live an hour. It was a most dar- 
 ing public attack made upon the liberty of the subject." 
 
 Pass this bill, Mr. President, and you not only 
 confer upon the President an authority which I 
 conceive you have no power to confer, but you 
 also, by your legislation, give to him and his sub- 
 ordinates assurance that they may do the like 
 again, and escape the punishment that should al- 
 ways be meted out to violations of constitutional 
 law. It does really seem to me, sir, when I listen 
 to Senators on the other side defending acts which 
 they admit to be abnormal, and insisting that the 
 public necessities demand the sacrifice, as if those 
 gentlemen were trying to persuade us that the best 
 way to preserve our liberties would be to give 
 them up, and that the surest mode of securing a 
 government of law would be to suffer arbitrary 
 power to destroy it. "The dearest interests of 
 this country," said Junius — and I adopt his ner- 
 vous language — "are its laws and its constitu- 
 tion. Against every attack upon these, there will, 
 I hope, be always found among us the firmest 
 spirit of resistance, superior to the united efforts 
 of faction and ambition." 
 
 Mr. President, this bill, in leaving it discretion- 
 ary with the President at any time and place and 
 at his own option to suspend the privilege of this 
 great writ, in fact gives countenance and support 
 to that political heresy that the right to suspend 
 the writ exists in the President of the United States, 
 and not in Congress. This bill does not suspend 
 the privilege of the writ; it leaves it for the Presi- 
 dent to do, whenever he thinks the public exigency 
 demands it. It certainly could never have been the 
 intention of the framers of the Constitution to au- 
 thorize the Executive to suspend the privileges of 
 the writ at his option. If this was a novel question, 
 that had never been mooted before, one might well 
 understand how there might possibly be some 
 variance in men's opinions. But when it is con- 
 sidered that in 1807 it had a most thorough and 
 exhausting discussion in Congress; that it had 
 been before the judicial tribunals of the country, 
 and frequently the subject of discussion by com- 
 mentators upon the Constitution and by states- 
 men; that up to the year 1861 there was an entire 
 

 
 unanimity of opinion as to where the powerto sus- 
 pend the privileges of this writ rested, namely, in 
 the legislative department of the Government, we 
 can only be astonished that there should be any 
 difference of opinion about it. But now we are 
 told that the peculiar legal optics of modern states- 
 men and lawyers have been enabled to discover 
 that which the keen, searching, patriotic vision 
 of the men who framed the. Constitution failed to 
 see. That which the luminous perception of Mar- 
 shall, Kent, Story, and Curtis could not discover, 
 has been reserved for the keener optics of Bates 
 and Lincoln. 
 
 It appears to me, Mr. President, that the true 
 spirit of the habeas corpus clause in the Constitu- 
 tion is as clear as sunlight to any man who will 
 study the debates both at the time of the forma- 
 tion of the Constitution and when it was submitted 
 to the States for theiradoption. There were mem- 
 bers in the Convention who were in favor of mak- 
 ing the enjoyment of the privilege of the writ ab- 
 solute at all times, in the same manner that it was 
 intended the liberty of the press, of speech, and 
 of religion should be enjoyed. There were others 
 again who favored limitations of time and suspen- 
 sion on certain conditions. The clause itself, there- 
 fore, appears to me to have been a mean between 
 extremes of opinion, and was intended to recon- 
 cile conflicting views. There is very little light 
 thrown upon the subject by the discussion in the 
 Convention ; but the peculiar position occupied by 
 the clause in the Constitution is significant, and 
 if not conclusive is certainly suggestive of the 
 particular department upon which it was intended 
 to confer this power. But if from the proceedings 
 of the Convention and the debates in that body 
 nothing satisfactory can be gleaned upon the sub- 
 ject, much may be learned from the after debates 
 in the State conventions. We shall give but one 
 reference upon this subject, although we might 
 quote many others. Governor Randolph, of Vir- 
 ginia, who had much to do with the fashioning of 
 our Constitution, in a speech in reply to Patrick 
 Henry in the Virginia convention, who had as- 
 sailed the Constitution because it conferred the 
 power to suspend the privilege of the writ of ha- 
 beas corpus upon the Legislature, said: 
 
 " I contend, Mr. President, that the habeas corpus in this 
 Constitution is at least on as good and secure a footing as 
 in England. In that country its suspension depends upon 
 the Legislature and not upon the Crown. That great writ 
 of right can only be suspended here in the same way, by 
 the Legislature in cases of extreme peril, never by the Ex- 
 ecutive." 
 
 Our fathers very justly conceived that in dan- 
 
 gerous, critical times like the present, the people 
 would be willing to part with a portion of their 
 freedom temporarily; but the warning voice of 
 history had clearly indicated to them that suoh 
 loss to be endurable must rest in the discretion of 
 their representatives, and not in the breast of one 
 man. They had studied the causes of revolu- 
 tionary action too closely not to know that this 
 one-man power would not be tolerated for a mo- 
 ment except by those who, to use the language 
 of Thomas Jefferson, were born with saddlesA>n 
 their backs and bits in their mouths, that tyrants 
 might ride and spur them by the grace of God. 
 
 The men of our early day, Mr. President, had 
 a perfect horror of conferring arbitrary power 
 upon a single individual. For them arbitrary 
 power in whatever shape it appeared, whether 
 under the vail of legitimacy, skulking in the dis- 
 guise of State necessity, or presenting the shame- 
 less front of usurpation, was the sure object of 
 their detestation and hostility. They might give 
 this tremendous power to suspend the privileges 
 of this writ to the law-making authority, because 
 the act of suspension was a legislative act, and 
 because in this way due notice would be given to 
 the citizen when the exigency arrived; but to 
 leave it optional in the discretion of one man, 
 however exalted or honest he might be, to strike 
 down the liberty of the citizen without warning, 
 as has been done, this these haters of tyranny 
 would never have consented to. They believed, 
 in the language of Burke, in his speech on the 
 impeachment of Hastings: 
 
 " It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in rell 
 gion, it is wickedness in polities to say that any one man 
 in a free State should possess arbitrary power over the lib- 
 erty of the citizen, either in peace or war." 
 
 It was unquestionably the grand aim of the 
 framers of the Constitution of the United States 
 to establish a Government which would not only 
 be nominally free, but substantially so. It was 
 with this view they reared those barriers to polit- 
 ical maladministration which had been unfolded 
 to their observation, and were the gathered wis- 
 dom of a thousand years. They knew that the 
 safety of the people was the supreme law, but 
 they believed the Constitution. They believed 
 that above that Constitution there was no law; 
 outside of it there was no security. 
 
 The Senator from New Jersey who preceded 
 me on this floor, in an elaborate speech that he 
 delivered while here, stated that the language of 
 the habeas corpus clause in our Constitution was 
 new and peculiar; and that in discussing where 
 
10 
 
 this power of suspension resided, we must set 
 aside the analogies of English history altogether. 
 What he meant to convey by this idea I am at a 
 loss to know. He must have been strangely 
 oblivious to English precedents, where the use of 
 this clause may be found almost in the very words 
 used by Mr.Pinckneyhimself,who doubtless bor- 
 rowed them from thence. He is no less unfortu- 
 nate when he attempts to show that the analogies 
 of English history must be excluded, and have no 
 bearing upon the point in issue. Any school-boy, 
 with but a smattering of English history, could 
 have told him better. All his ingenuity will fail 
 to convince the people of New Jersey that their 
 fathers had no reference to and no thought of 
 those eventful centuries of strife between the king 
 and the people, amid whose fierce throes this 
 great privilege was born. Why, there never was 
 a time in English constitutional history when the 
 power of suspending this writ did not exist some- 
 where. There can be no manner of doubt on this 
 point. The controversy always was, where does 
 it reside, in the Parliament or in the Crown? The 
 formal contest for this discretion to imprison and 
 detain without trial marked the change in the Eng- 
 lish Government from monarchy to aristocracy, 
 and thence to democracy, as this power over the 
 lex terra has resided in one or other of these de- 
 partments of the Government from the Conquest 
 to this time. The personal liberty of the subject 
 was a natural, inherent right, which could not be 
 surrendered or forfeited unless by the commission 
 of some great and startling crime. This was a 
 doctrine coeval with the first rudiments of the 
 English constitution, and handed down from An- 
 glo-Saxon ancestry, notwithstanding their Danish 
 struggles; asserted afterwards and confirmed by 
 the Conqueror himself; and though sometimes 
 much impaired by the ferocity of the times and the 
 occasional despotism of jealous, exacting princes, 
 yet established on the firmest basis by the pro- 
 visions of Magna Charta and a long succession of 
 statutes on through the grand struggle over the 
 Petition of Right, until it culminated in the great 
 habeas corpus act of Charles II, justly styled a sec- 
 ond Magna Charta. 
 
 It would require something more than Senator 
 Field's dictum to make good such a false and 
 forced position as this. The history of England 
 for centuries is against him; the sentiments of all 
 her historians are antagonistic to his position ; and 
 lastly, the declarations of the men who assisted 
 in framing our Constitution stand in his way. 
 During the struggle between the monarch and the 
 
 Commons in 1628, in reference to a royal grant of 
 
 a declaration of rights, Charles I took the very 
 
 ground sustained by Mr. Field and the Senators 
 
 on the other side of the Chamber: 
 
 "That there might be times of rebellion, times of danger 
 to the State, when the safety of the commonwealth and 
 the necessities of the hour might demand the unrestricted 
 exercise of the royal prerogative, and, for the time being. 
 the liberty of the subject inu6t give way." 
 
 This, too, was the obsequious language of the 
 House of Lords who, at that time, stood by the 
 king against the freedom-loving House of Com- 
 mons. Let us glance for a momentet the history 
 of those times; carry our minds back to the age 
 of those stern, unyielding men who, in spite of 
 the terrors of the royal frown, then and there es- 
 tablished a barrier against the encroachment of 
 the king's prerogative. Let us listen to their very 
 words, to learn if we cannot catch, from those 
 who resisted usurpation then, some traces of that 
 spirit which, more than a century after, on this 
 side of the Atlantic, manifested itself in the bear- 
 ing and actions of the men of 1787. Let us see, 
 sir, whether, as Mr. Field says, the analogies of 
 English history can be set aside in considering 
 that clause in our Constitution forming, if rightly 
 respected , the great bulwark of the freedom of the 
 citizen. Said Sergeant Ashley, in that memora- 
 ble debate constituting a landmark in history: 
 
 " Divine truth informs us that kings have their power 
 from God, and are representative gods; the Psalmist calling 
 them the children of the Most High. Can we conceive, 
 then, that so exalted a person as the kin,' iialh so far com- 
 mitted the power of the sword to inferior magistrates, that 
 he hath not reserved so much supreme power as to commit 
 an offender to prison without showing cause, and without 
 warrant? I contend, therefore, that for offenses against the 
 State, in times of rebellion or in critical emergencies, the 
 king or his council hath lawful power to punish by impris- 
 onment without showing cause. The martial law, though 
 not to be exercised in times of peace, when recourse may 
 be had to the king's courts, yet in times of invasion or other 
 times of hostility, when an army royal is in the field, and 
 offenses are committed requiring speedy resolution, and 
 cannot expect the solemnities of legal trial, then such im- 
 prisonment, execution, or other justice done by the law- 
 martial is warranted by the king." 
 
 Th'e language used by Mr. Field, the Attorney 
 General of the United States, and others, is but the 
 echo of the degrading servility and baseness of 
 this celebrated advocate of the divine right of kings. 
 We do not know whether a grateful master ever 
 conferred upon him a judgeship for his services; 
 but we have no doubt he obtained a substantial 
 reward. 
 
 But even such crouching at the king's footstool 
 by the obsequious, politic sergeant, was more than 
 even the Lord President of the committee of the 
 House of Lords could stomach, for he told the 
 Commons: 
 " That whi»« at tb.ii Uw conference liberty was glvea 
 
11 
 
 bv the Lords to the king's counsel to speak what he thought 
 fit for his Majesty's service, yet Mr. Sergeant Ashley had no 
 authority from them to speak such servile words as he had 
 done." 
 
 And how did the manly, noble spirits who at 
 that early day had the courage to resist the claim 
 of king and counsel to arrest and imprison the 
 subjec^ without cause or accusation, answer? 
 
 Said Sir Edward Coke, with his usual quaint- 
 ness and directness: 
 
 "As the center of the greatest circle is but a little speck, 
 ■o the weightiest matter ever lies in a little room. It was a 
 wonder for him to hear that the liberty of the subject could 
 be thought incompatible with the regality of the king. In 
 one point the king's attorney had come close to him. He 
 was glad he had awaked him. Because a king is trusted 
 with greater things, such as war, money, pardons, &c, 
 therefore he should at some times have absolute power 
 over the liberty of the subject. We emphatically deny his 
 conclusion ; for the liberty of the subject is far more than all 
 these ; it is maximum omnium humanorum bonorum— the 
 very sovereign of all human blessings. No citizen can thus 
 hold his liberties as tenant at will to the sovereign. Mr. 
 Speaker, there is no such a tenure to be found in all Lit- 
 tleton." , 
 
 " What, "said the king's counsel, " can you ar- 
 rest none without process or original writ? The 
 suspected fellows may run away." To whom 
 Coke answered: 
 
 " The law gives process and indictment, and therefore 
 gives all the means that any emergency can demand." 
 Said William Mason: 
 
 " It hath been solemnly and clearly resolved by the House 
 that the commitment of a freeman, without expressing the 
 cause of commitment, is against the law. If you give this 
 power by reason of the necessities of the State, you will 
 iprin" a leak which may sink all our liberties, and open a 
 gap through which Magna Charta and the rest of the stat- 
 utes may Issue out and vanish. We must never relinquish 
 to the Crown this right to interfere with our liberties." 
 
 In a subsequent debate upon the same subject, 
 Sir Edward Coke said: 
 
 " I know that prerogative is part of the law, but sover- 
 eign power is no parliamentary word. Take we heed what 
 we yield unto. Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will 
 have no sovereign." 
 
 These were the sentiments of the men who 
 wrested the Petition of Rightfrom the first Charles, 
 and compelled him to say, let right be done, as 
 ia desired . The object of these bold men was the 
 preservation of personal liberty, in conformity to 
 the express language of Magna Charta — 
 
 "That no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned but by 
 the lawful judgment of his equals, or the law of the land." 
 
 Now, sir, the privilege of the writ of habeas cor- 
 pus at that time existed ^at common law. It was 
 the remedy for such as were unjustly imprisoned 
 to obtain their liberties. Many abuses, however, 
 having been introduced in the mode of granting 
 it, other statutes were passed. Early in the reign 
 of the first Charles, the courts, relying on some 
 pretended precedents, determined that they could 
 not, upon the habeas corpus, either bail or deliver 
 a prisoner, though committed without any cause 
 assigned, in case he was committed by the special 
 command of the king or by the lords of the privy 
 council. This, sir, drew on the parliamentary in- 
 quiry which resulted in the Petition of Right, to 
 which reference has just been made. The statute 
 passed in conformity with that petition enacts 
 "that no freeman shall hereafter be so imprisoned 
 or detained." But in the following year, Selden 
 
 and others were committed by order of the lords 
 in council, pursuant to his Majesty's command, 
 under a general charge of notable contempts and 
 stirring up seditions against the king'and Govern- 
 ment. This gave rise to great excitement in the 
 public mind, and to another statute in the sixteenth 
 year of the same king. But the habeas corpus act 
 of the next reign, originating in the oppression of 
 an obscure individual, was considered as another 
 Magna Charta by Englishmen. Thus, sir, you 
 will note this significant fact, that flagrant abuse 
 of powerby the Crown or its ministers was always 
 productive of a popular struggle, a struggle that 
 proclaims either that the exercise of such power 
 was contrary to law, or, if legal, restrains it for 
 the future. In speaking of the great habeas corpus 
 act passed in the reign of Charles II, Sir William 
 Blackstone, writing several years before our Con- 
 stitution was formed, and whose invaluable work 
 had been studied thoroughly by the men who 
 framed that Constitution, says: 
 
 " This writ is of great importance to the public ; for if it 
 vyere once left to the power of any, even the highest magis- 
 trate, to imprison arbitrarily whenever he or his officers 
 thought proper, then there would soon be an end of all other 
 rights and immunities. Some have thought that unjust at- 
 tacks even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the 
 magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than 
 such as are made upon the liberty of the subject. To be- 
 reave a man of life by violence, to confiscate his estate with- 
 out accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an 
 act of despotism as would at once convey the alarm of tyr- 
 anny throughout the kingdom ; but confinement of the per- 
 son by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings 
 are unknown and forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, 
 and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary power; 
 and yet when the State is in imminent danger, even this is 
 sometimes a necessary measure; but the happiness of our 
 constitution is that it is not left to the executive power 
 when the danger of the State is so great as to render this 
 measure expedient, for it is the Parliament only can au- 
 thorize, when it sees proper, the Crown, by suspending the 
 habeas corpus for a short and limited lime, to imprison sus- 
 pected persons without giving any reasons therefor." 
 
 And yet, with this array of historical facts star- 
 ing him in the face, with all these English analo- 
 gies encouraging them to imitate, if not improve 
 upon, the noble lessons they should have taught 
 them, the late Senator from New Jersey and other 
 apologists for executive usurpation endeavor to 
 convince their readers and hearers that these 
 proud incidents in history had nothing to do with 
 originating this habeas corpus clause in our Con- 
 stitution. 
 
 No, no, Mr. President, the men of our consti- 
 tutional Convention were familiar with the his- 
 tory of the civil polity of the world. But more 
 thoroughly had they studied the contest that had 
 been going on for centuries in the mother country 
 between the Crown and the people. Our fathers 
 had been protestants against prerogative and its 
 usurpations. They had felt the weight of its iron 
 hand rest heavy on their loins, and they determ- 
 ined to throw it off. They knew how the flood 
 of usurpation had attempted to overwhelm their 
 fathers, and they placed this habeas corpus clause 
 in the Constitution of the new Government they 
 were framing that it might stand there for all time 
 as the great breakwater against the efforts of arbi- 
 trary power. 
 
 In the argument of my predecessor, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, I find he asserts " that when the habeas cor- 
 
12 
 
 pus clause was inserted in the Constitution the 
 United States had no writ of habeas corpus." He 
 lays down this self-evident proposition as though 
 it was some'startling truth. It is true that at this 
 time the United States had no writ of habeas cor- 
 pus, because there was no such Government as the 
 United States. But if by this he meant to convey 
 the idea that the colonial governments did not rec- 
 ognize the existence of the writ, or that the States 
 did not, I take issue with him. The old constitu- 
 tion of his own State, adopted two days before the 
 Declaration of Independence, and a dozen years 
 before the Constitution, contains this clause: 
 
 "The common law of England, as well as so much of 
 the statute laws as have been heretofore practiced in this 
 colony, shall remain in force until they shall be altered by 
 a future law of the Legislature." 
 
 And most of the State constitutions adopted 
 after the Declaration contain similar clauses. 
 
 But Mr. Field caps the climax of folly and 
 presumption when he declares that all experience 
 teaches that the only safe depositary of this power 
 to suspend the privilege of the great writ is the Ex- 
 ecutive which the Constitution has made for us, 
 standing upon the only basis of the Constitution, 
 with no other support than the integrity and pa- 
 triotism of the man who has been elected to it by 
 the people. Heaven preserve us if this be so! 
 We have seen judges torn from the very seat of 
 judgment by this Executive. We have seen the 
 absolute rights of the citizen made a delusion and 
 a mockery of, and the whole land startled by 
 usurpation after usurpation, directed, controlled, 
 and justified by this very Executive. 
 
 The late Senator from New Jerseyappearsin his 
 very elaborate speech to have a very strange mode 
 of deriving the power in the President to suspend 
 this writ, from the peculiarphraseology of the two 
 sentences: 
 
 " All executive power shall be vested in the President of 
 the United States; and all legislative power herein granted 
 shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." 
 
 To the first clause he gives a general construc- 
 tion; to the last a special and limited, insisting 
 that while Congress is confined by the terms of 
 the grant specially to the exercise of only such 
 powers as are enumerated, the executive power is 
 beyond and above the Constitution; or, in other 
 words, the President neither in peace or war has 
 any limits set to his authority. His will must be 
 the law, and his sworn duty is to define what is 
 necessary and proper, while the duty of the people 
 %ver whom he sways the scepter is to obey. This 
 is certainly the fair interpretation to be given to 
 the conclusions of Mr. Field's singular logic: 
 
 " If you give the powers to Congress, they should be spe- 
 cially named in the grant; but not so with the Executive, 
 inasmuch as the •power, from its very nature, is an executive 
 power.'' 
 
 In other words, in plainer English, the people's 
 representatives, in the exercise of their powers, 
 are confined strictly to the words of the grant; 
 whereas the Executive takes any and all power 
 by implication. Well, surely this is a novel mode 
 of interpretation, and an interpretation which I 
 hardly think the good people of New Jersey would 
 be willing to adopt. It is in accordance, however, 
 with the base servility of the times, and most cer- 
 tainly entitles its author to a place on the United 
 
 States bench, where he can elaborate more fully 
 this peculiar dogma, and, if necessary, aid the 
 embodiment of the war power at the other end 
 of the avenue in carrying out and consummating 
 his peculiar edicts. We had always supposed 
 that " the short term for which the President was 
 elected, and the narrow limits to which his power 
 was confined, manifested the jealousy and appre- 
 hension of future danger which the framers of the 
 Constitution felt in relation to that department of 
 the Government." At least so once said Chief 
 Justice Marshall. But a greater than Marshall is 
 here in the person and theories of the late Sena- 
 tor from New Jersey. He has seen a marvelous 
 light, which certainly was not vouchsafed to the 
 eyes of the men, who laid the foundations of this 
 Government, and who certainly, if we are not 
 presuming, understood the true theory and sys- 
 tem of our Government much better than Mr. 
 Field. 
 
 Mr. Field appears really to me, throughout the 
 whole course of his speech and his singular posi- 
 tions, to have presented us with a very good imi- 
 tation of the Q.uack in Moliere's play of" The 
 Sick Man in Spite of Himself. " Geronte in that 
 play, in amazement, says to the Q.uack: 
 
 " My dear doctor, you reason well, but there is one thing 
 that staggers me in your lucid explanations. I always 
 thought, till now, that the heart was on the left side and the 
 liver on the right. 
 
 "Quack. Ay, sir, so they were formerly, but we hav* 
 changed all that. The college proceeds on an entirely new 
 method. 
 
 "Geronte. I ask pardon, sir. 
 
 "Quack. Not at all. Oh, there is no harm done. You 
 are not obliged to know as much as we do." 
 
 It may be that this is the case with the unen- 
 lightened people of New Jersey. They are not by 
 any means obliged to know as much as Mr. Field; 
 and I fervently trust that they never may, and 
 will never consent to indorse and subscribe to any 
 of the teachings of that school. If they do, their 
 liberties are gone. 
 
 I turn from such an atrocious sentiment to the 
 sentiments of Daniel Webster, who understood 
 so fully where existed the limits within which ex- 
 ecutive power could move, and upon whose well- 
 defined lines were written the warning words — 
 thus far shalt thou go and no further. In his speech 
 on Jackson's protest, he said: 
 
 " Who is he that belies the blood and libels the fame of 
 his ancestry by declaring that the security for freedom rests 
 in executive authority; who is he that invokes the execu- 
 tive power to come to the protection of liberty ; who is he 
 that charges them with the insanity and recklessness of 
 putting the lamb beneath the lion's paw? No, sir; no, sir. 
 Our security both in war and in peace is in our watchful- 
 ness of executive power. Sir, I will never trust executive 
 power to keep the vigils of liberty." 
 
 These are right royal words, and I would have 
 them written upon the walls of all the private and 
 public seminaries of the land, that our youths might 
 be taught early to fear the advance of arbitrary 
 power. I would have them writtenabove the altars 
 of the churches, that the priests and theircongre- 
 gations might learn what lawful authority meafrs, 
 of which they prate so much and know so little. 
 I would have them engraved upon the door-posts 
 of these Houses of Congress, that the represent- 
 atives of the States and the people might be taught 
 in what way the rightsand liberties of this people 
 
13 
 
 are to be guarded from encroachment. Mr. Pres- 
 ident, when we contrast the Argus-like vigilance 
 of such men as Henry, Martin, Barbour, of the 
 revolutionary era, and contrast their indignant 
 protests against executive encroachment and their 
 jealousy of executive power with the thoughtless 
 indifference and wretched subserviency of men 
 who profess to be statesmen and patriots, we may 
 well stand aghast at the fearful degeneracy of the 
 times. 
 
 Can it be possible that these disinterested pa- 
 triots of our early day were mistaken, and that 
 the men of our day, whose chief patriotism seems 
 to consist in supporting themselves out of the cof- 
 fers of a straitened Treasury, could thus strangely 
 discover the true theory of this Government? 
 Our modern political philosophers would incul- 
 cate that when the Government is in a hand-to- 
 hand conflict with revolted States, we must put 
 all confidence in the executive head of this nation ; 
 nay, that we must permit him to execute power, 
 even if it savors of despotism, on the Jesuitical 
 principle that the end justifies the means. Now, 
 on the contrary, Mr. President, 1 hold that it is 
 at just such times as these when the mind of the 
 true patriot should be most distrustful, when his 
 eye should be the most watchful, and when, with 
 the arm'ed force surrounding the Executive, he 
 should be the more suspicious of the authority 
 that controls it. But when, instead of confining] 
 
 the exercise of power within the well-defined lines 
 of the Constitution, he finds it breaking down all 
 the guards and fences that surround him, and in- 
 vading those sacred precincts where the liberty of 
 person, of speech, and of thought were supposed 
 to be guarded with more than Argus-like vigilance, 
 the true patriot should arraign such despotic at- 
 tempt, although all the terrors of imprisonment, 
 nay, of death itself, should surround him. 
 
 It is a libel upon the spirit of our forefathers, 
 it is a libel upon the men who framed our Con- 
 stitution, to suppose that any such authority can 
 exist in the Federal head of this Government. In 
 the m'idst of the gloom of the present, with the 
 eye of faith methinks I can see around us and 
 above us some faint harbingers of hope for the 
 future. As Columbus sailed toward that new 
 world he gave to Castile and to Leon, while mu- 
 tiny was in the vessel, and around him the dreary 
 waste of waters murmuring only despair, we are 
 told that flowers and carved woods came float- 
 ing around his vessel, while resting on his mast- 
 heads were birds of the most gorgeous plumage. 
 So to us, sir, in the midst of the gloom of the pres- 
 ent, come here and there these harbingers of the 
 firmer land to which we are sailing. God hasten 
 our coming, that we may once again, that we may 
 once more plant our feet upon its firm foundations, 
 the land of constitutional freedom, the hope of the 
 world. 
 
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