Page:Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.djvu/55

Rh from the odious acts of 1798. A single further example, while it may be regarded as extreme, will yet throw some additional light on a type of political opinion which was not uncommon. In early times in Indiana a political libel suit was tried in the Franklin Circuit Court. The principal allegation was that the defendant had called the plaintiff an old Federalist. The issue was made up on this as an agreed statement of facts, and proof was taken as to whether the offence constituted a libel. The chief witness was an old man named Herndon, who had moved to Indiana from Kentucky. He swore that he considered it libelous to call a man a Federalist; that he would shoot a man who called him either a horse thief or a Federalist; that he would rather be called any thing under heaven than a Federalist; and regarded a thousand dollars as the least measure of damages; that he considered the term as equivalent to Tory, or enemy of his country, and from the earliest days of Kentucky such he believed to have been the common acceptation of the term. Other witnesses coroborated this testimony and the jury found a verdict to the effect that "to call a man a Federalist was libelous," and fixed the damages at one thousand dollars.

Such an occurrence seems impossible in days of calm retrospect, but the bitter invectives and unfounded statements that filled the harangues of the time were well calculated to distort the judgment and fill the minds of men with erroneous and totally false ideas.