inenced about the time of the Massachusetts election, CHAPTER furnished new matter of clamor to the opposition. XV. Holt, who had lately removed from New York to be- 1800. come publisher of the Bee, an opposition newspaper recently established at New London, in Connecticut, and indicted, at a former term, under the Sedition Law, was April 17. now found guilty of a libel tending to defame the president and to discourage enlistments into the army, and was sentenced to three months' imprisonment and a fine of $200. A trial which excited greater attention was that of Thomas Cooper, already mentioned as one of Duane's intended counsel in the question of breach of the privileges of the Senate. An Englishman by birth, Cooper had been educated as a barrister; but, not restricting himself to the law, in which he was well read, he had also turned his attention to metaphysics, politics, and the sciences, especially the then new science of chemistry, in experimenting in which he had spent a considerable part of his inherited fortune. Having embraced the new doctrine of the rights of man with great zeal, he had rendered himself obnoxious in England, and, in consequence, had emigrated to America at the same time with his friend Priestley. Not meeting with much success in the practice of the law, for which, notwithstanding his talents and learning, his irritable and supercilious temperament and speculative turn of mind but ill qualified him, he had applied, through Priestley, to Adams for an office. Failing in that application, he had established a newspaper in one of the back counties of Pennsylvania, and had advocated in it, with great zeal, the election of McKean. The whole current of Cooper's sentiments at that time made him sympathize with the opposition, though probably his own private disappointment some XV. CHAPTER What sharpened his resentment against Adams in particular, whom he had charged, in the article for which 1800. he was indicted, with having, by the unnecessary and unbecoming violence of his official communications, such as might justly have provoked a declaration of war, saddled upon the nation, in time of peace, the expense of a permanent navy, and threatened it with that of a permanent army, to be supported by loans at eight per cent. He had also charged the president, in the same article, with having interfered to influence a court of justice "in the melancholy case of Jonathan Robbins, a native citizen impressed by the British, and delivered up, at the president's request, to a mock trial by a British court martial"-" an interference without precedent, against law, and against mercy;" "a stretch of power which the monarch of Great Britain would have shrunk from." The indictment found against Cooper for this article was very likely intended to punish him for his late aid to Duane in insulting the Senate. Cooper set up the truth in defense, and summoned a great number of witnesses, chiefly members of Congress, none of whom, however, were examined. What he principally relied upon was a number of extracts from the president's answers, which had been collected in a volume, to the various addresses he had received; though, being unauthenticated, the court told him they could not be evidence. But he claimed to offer the printed copy on the ground that, having applied to the president for authenticated copies of these answers, a note had been received from the president's secretary declining to afford him any information on the subject. The jury found him guilty, and Chase, who presided at the trial, and who treated Cooper throughout with much delicacy, sentenced him to six months' imprisonment and a fine of $400. Before this same court came on the second trial of CHAPTER XV. Fries for high treason. At the former trial the council for Fries had argued at great length to the jury that 1800. the offense was not treason, but riot; and had cited a great number of English cases to support that distinction. Considering those cases as wholly irrelevant, the definition of treason depending not on English cases, but on the express terms of the Constitution of the United States, Chase reduced his view of the law to writing, and handed it to the prisoner's counsel, as that by which the course of the trial must be governed. Having no hope of the acquittal of Fries, and wishing to lay a foundation for an appeal to executive clemency, the prisoner's counsel put on an air of great indignation at this restriction on their right to argue the law to the jury, and though Chase immediately withdrew the obnoxious paper, they refused to appear any further in the case, and secretly advised their client to procure no other counsel. Fries was again found guilty, but was presently pardoned by the president, as well as two others convicted of the same offense an act of clemency very much clamored at by some of the ultra Federalists as having been dictated by a mean desire of popularity, in a case where a stern example was needed. But surely, at this day, none will be inclined to complain at Adams's unwillingness to be the first president to order an execution for treason an act of authority which, thank God! none of his successors have yet found occasion to exercise. Having finished the Pennsylvania circuit, Chase, who was a great partisan of Adams's, and who was accustomed to mingle a good deal of politics in his charges to grand juries, proceeded to Richmond. There he pro- June cured the indictment of Callender for certain passages of a recent publication, called the "Prospect before us," CHAPTER filled with abuse of Washington as well as of Adams. XV. It was afterward proved by autograph letters, produced 1800. by Callender himself, that Jefferson, in spite of his dis claimers to Madison and others, not only contributed While the opposition smarted under these applications of the law, and used them, too, with great effect for electioneering purposes, they found great comfort in the judg ment which had overtaken Cobbett in the already-mentioned libel suit brought against him by Dr. Rush. That suit had been brought to trial on the very day of Washington's death; singular coincidence, as Cobbett remarked, that while the father of his country was perishing under the lancet, he, Cobbett, should be mulcted in a XV. verdict of $5000 for having exposed and ridiculed the CHAPTER dangerous practice of excessive bleeding. Shippen, who presided at the trial, certainly pushed the law, in his 1800. charge to the jury, to the utmost extreme; and Cobbett insisted that it was for this charge that Shippen was rewarded with the post of chief justice. In anticipation, it would seem, of what was to happen, Cobbett had stopped his paper, which, notwithstanding its circulation, having but few advertisements, had never proved profitable, and had removed to New York. His property at Philadelphia was seized and sold on execution, and subsequently an attempt was made to imprison him at New York. But he easily found bail, and the judgment was afterward paid by a subscription among the British residents in America. Upon the recognizances for his good behavior already mentioned, which McKean, by an exceedingly doubtful stretch of his legal authority, had, required him to give, a suit had been commenced two years before. Upon this suit, also, judgment of forfeiture was presently obtained, and the sureties were obliged to pay, but were subsequently indemnified by Cobbett. Meanwhile, this indefatigable pamphleteer was not idle. He issued at New York a series of pamphlets called the "Rush Light," in which he took ample vengeance upon all parties concerned in his prosecution. Before the end of the year he returned to England, whence he hurled another quiver full of arrows at his American enemies, in ten octavo volumes, which had a large circulation on both sides of the Atlantic, containing a collection of his American pamphlets, with the spiciest of his Porcupine editorials. With that untiring energy for which he was remarkable, availing himself of his American experience, he soon commenced the first complete report of British Parliamentary debates ever published, at the same time |