Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/274

264 wrote to the governor of South Carolina, "because of the quarter from whence they came, and where they could not be ascribed to any political waywardness." Rodney, the attorney-general, undertook to overrule Justice Johnson's law, and wrote, under the President's instructions, an official opinion that the court had no power to issue a mandamus in such a case. This opinion was published in the newspapers at the end of July, "an act unprecedented in the history of executive conduct," which in a manner forced Justice Johnson into a newspaper controversy. The Judge's defence of his course was temperate and apparently convincing to himself, although five years afterward he delivered an opinion of the whole Supreme Court in a similar case, "unquestionably inconsistent" with his embargo decision, which he then placed on technical ground. He never regained Jefferson's confidence; and so effective was the ban that in the following month of December the Georgia grand-jury, in his own circuit, made him the object of a presentment for "improper interference with the Executive."

If the conduct of Justice Johnson only stimulated the President's exercise of power, the constitutional arguments of Federalist lawyers and judges were unlikely to have any better effect; yet to a Virginia Republican of 1798 no question could have deeper