Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 29.djvu/93

 The Trials find Trial. <> Jtf'i-rxnii I )<iri*. 77

Preparatory to the motion to quash, on the ground set forth above, Mr. Ould filed in open court his own affidavit that on the 8th day of December, 1845, Mr. Davis, on taking his seat in the House of Representatives as a member from Mississippi, had taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. He then moved for a rule on the Attorney of the United States to show cause why the indictment should not be quashed.

On Thursday, the 3d day of December, 1868, the question arising under the rule were taken up in the Circuit Court of the United States, sitting at Richmond, with Judges Chase and Underwood on the bench, and the real and final trial of Mr. Davis began.

There was not as much pomp and ceremony, nor as much dra- matic effect as at the trial of Warren Hastings, nor has any such master of the art of word-painting as Macaulay ever described it. In some respects, however, the scenes were alike, despite the dif- ferences in the character of the prisoners and in the style of the crimes with which charged. In each case the prisoner at the bar was a man of high intelligence and strong will. Each had ruled an empire. Hastings had governed avast territory with many millions of population, and had added a continent to the crown of England. Davis had been the chosen leader of eleven commonwealths, com- bined under him into a constitutional government, which had set great armies and great captains in the field, and for four years, against desperate odds, and dependent solely on its own resources, had accomplished mighty deeds, won brilliant victories, and chal- lenged the admiration of the civilized world by its sturdy fortitude and by the heroic defense of what it regarded right.

The very indictment against Jefferson Davis was the catalogue of the great acts of a sovereign a sovereign who conspired with Lee, and Jackson, and with the Johnstons, with Stuart and Forrest and Kirby Smith, and Taylor and many another, to fight such battles as the two at Manassas, the seven at Richmond, the two at Fredericks- burg, and the bloody fields of Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Chan- cellorsville and Spotsylvania. -

Great publicists like Chase and O' Conor and Evarts knew that the law and the custom of nations did not look upon such deeds as those of a traitor, and that the world stood agast at the effort to thus debase the principles of international justice; but President Johnson and Judge Underwood, at a safe distance, would have read