Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/565

 By the deputy marshal, whose term of office depended on the pleasure of the judge, jurors are selected— not taken from the jury list of the State, as the law requires; not even drawn or balloted for—to attend the United States Court at Brownsville; all from Galveston, a distance of several hundred miles. They are taken from this distant place, that is the home of Judge Watrous, and of his confederates. Hale and League. These Cavazos suits had been pending in Galveston, and adjudications been had on some of them. They were a subject of notoriety there; and had naturally given rise to much popular discussion and conversation with reference both to the questions and the interests involved.

Thus it appears that to accomplish the purpose of the judge more fully, the citizens of four counties were dishonored and deprived of important civil privileges, and the law was violated.

They were not taken from different parts of the State, as is the custom in the United States Courts, but from the narrow circle of the judge's own home and neighborhood. A schooner is chartered by the deputy marshal, to carry them to the court at Brownsville. There are also selected by the deputy marshal a company of strolling players to serve as jurors, and placed on board this schooner. Judge Watrous himself is a compagnon de voyage.

Honorable Senators may imagine the scene, the small, coasting, gulf schooner, freighted with jurymen and players, and the United States district and circuit judge.

I have, in a brief manner, referred to the collusion in the Cavazos suit, which Judge Watrous knew, and which he countenanced, to the prejudice and betrayal of at least one of the defendants, Mr. Jacob Mussina. The evident position of matters, and the reports of the committees on the subject, from which I have read, show that Mussina was without any power to enforce his rights, and without any chance to obtain them in the determination of this case in Judge Watrous' court. He then applied for redress to the courts of his domicile in Louisiana; and finding the parties there who were accused in the committee's report referred to, as having colluded in the Cavazos suit, and as having "defrauded and betrayed him," he sued them for the collusion and frauds they had practiced to his prejudice, in Judge Watrous' court, and otherwise. This suit was commenced on the 1st of November, 1851; it was tried In May, 1853; and a verdict was rendered in favor of Mussina, by a jury of his countrymen, for the land claimed, or $214,000 in lieu thereof, and $25,000 as damages.

In January, 1854, a rule was taken at Galveston, Texas, upon Jacob Mussina, a citizen of Louisiana, and he was cited to appear before Judge Watrous at Galveston, to anstver for contempt of court in instituting the suit in New Orleans, in disobedience to the decree which he had rendered in the Cavazos case, although the fact was that the suit referred to was commenced two months before the rendition of the decree, which proceedings the House Judiciary Committee of the Thirty-fourth Congress have characterized in a deliberate, unanimous report, as " irregular, unjust, and illegal, and, taken in connection with the previous proceedings and rendition of the decree, oppressive and tyrannical." And this opinion was endorsed by a portion of the present Judiciary Committee in the House, from whose report I read the following expression of judgment: "It also seems clear, when the pleadings in the suit instituted by Mussina against Stillman, Belden, and Ailing, and Basse and Hord, in the fourth district