The Struggle over the Federal Courts: States' Rights and Treason

The federal courts during the 1790s gained a measure of respect, but great prestige lay in the future. John Jay, the nation's first chief justice who had earlier resigned his post, declined reappointment in 1801 because he had no faith that the Supreme Court could ever acquire enough "energy, weight and dignity." ²⁹ The justices heard only about one hundred cases during the first decade of the Court's existence. The lower courts were busier. Even in Kentucky, on the edge of American civilization, the federal courts competently handled a large volume of casework. ³⁰

Efficiency and prestige aside, the emerging Jeffersonian Republican opposition flayed the federal courts for their conduct. For example, the Supreme Court in Chisholm v. Georgia ( 1793) rekindled fears that federal judges would undermine state authority. Two citizens of South Carolina brought an action in federal court against the state of Georgia to recover a debt. Georgia refused to appear, contending that as a sovereign entity it could choose the time and the forum in which it would be sued. There is little doubt that the states had played fast and loose with their debt, and that active enforcement by the federal courts would have brought a swarm of creditors down on them. The Supreme Court ruled against Georgia, and Justice James Wilsons ruling sent a shudder through emerging Republican ranks. "As to the purposes of the Union," the Federalist Wilson concluded, "Georgia is not a sovereign state." ³¹ The Eleventh Amendment, which went into effect in 1798, affirmed that states could not be sued by nonresidents without their permission. The quickly adopted amendment repaired constitutional understandings, but it did not curb the growing political clamor against the federal courts.

Divergent attitudes toward the course of U.S. economic and foreign policy exacerbated the political controversy surrounding the courts. Federalists wanted strong commercial ties with England and a prosperous trading economy, and, as the leaders of an insecure nation in a hostile world, they developed something of a bunker psychology that assumed that the rule of law had to buttress their claims. They treated opposition to their policies from the pro-French and agrarian Jeffersonian opposition as treasonous and those persons who refused to cooperate as traitors deserving of severe punishment.

There was reason for concern, because some Americans decided to take the law into their own hands. Settlers in western Pennsylvania in 1794 and 1795, for example, forcefully opposed collection of an excise tax (a tax placed on domestic consumption of goods) on distilled whiskey, their principal cash crop. Many small farmers, locked in competition with large producers, refused to pay the federal excise tax collectors who inspected their stills. The government then forced the recalcitrant farmers to make the arduous journey across the mountains to stand trial in the federal circuit court in Philadelphia. The small farmers rebelled. They menaced exciseman, wrecked the stills of those large producers who did cooperate, and even threatened to burn Pittsburgh.

Federalists organized a national army larger than that which had fought the Revolution in an effort to make an example of the rebellious farmers. Within three weeks the uprising ended. A federal grand jury in Philadelphia indicted more than thirty men for treason. Two were convicted, although President Washington ultimately pardoned both on the dubious grounds that they were mental incompetents.

Their trials nonetheless dramatized the insensitivity of the Federalists to political opposition. These trials were the first instances in which the meaning of treason under

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the Constitution was defined. In United States v. Vigol ( 1795) and United States v. Mitchell ( 1795), Justice William Paterson charged the jury that treason amounted to "levying war" against the United States by widespread armed opposition to the execution of a U.S. statute. The blatant partiality of the Federalist judges during the trials promoted the very behavior that Federalists sought to prevent: the rise of organized opposition to the national government. Some members of the emerging Jeffersonian Republican party, for example, denounced Justice Paterson for blithely charging the jury in the Mitchell case that "[u]pon the whole, . . . the prisoner must be pronounced guilty." ³²

Federalist judges flashed their political teeth four years later when the same federal circuit court in Pennsylvania heard yet another case of alleged treason. In this instance, John Fries, a former revolutionary war soldier, had led a local militia that released prisoners held by a federal marshal. The Fries' rebels protested a federal tax imposed on houses to pay for the costs of putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. Fries was tried twice, and in both instances the Vigol and Mitchell precedents were invoked. At the second trial (the first had ended in conviction, but Fries won a new trial because of alleged bias by one of the jurors), Justice Samuel Chase, an ardent Federalist, acted from the bench as counsel for Fries. The defendant's attorneys, correctly concluding that both judge and jury were hostile to their client, withdrew from the case. Chase "proceeded in . . . a steamrolling manner" that culminated in a guilty verdict. ³³ "The end to all punishment," Chase informed Fries as he sentenced him to death, "is example; and the enormity of your crime requires that a severe example should be made to deter others from the commission of like crimes in the future." ³⁴ Subsequently, President John Adams, who was troubled by the political excesses of the trial and the broad definition given to treason, pardoned Fries.

Chase, like other Federalist jurists, believed that the new national courts had to coerce political stability. If the laws could not be obeyed, Chase concluded, "there must soon be an end to all government in this country." ³⁵ But Chase's actions merely confirmed for Jeffersonian Republicans that the Federalists had turned to the courts in order to crush their political opponents.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 838