Page:The Supreme Court in United States History vol 1.djvu/186

160 Courts.* The doctrine so upheld at once elicited a flood of political abuse from the partisans of the French cause; for since the passage of the neutrality laws, American citizens who sympathized with France had made a practice of evading these laws by swearing al- legiance to that country and taking French conmiissions to privateer against English and neutral conmierce*^ "This opinion/* a writer in the Aurora said, ** bends our necks under a foreign yoke. . . . We are not free, we are not an independent nation. ... It is an er- roneous and dangerous doctrine, unwarrantable, iniqui- tous and illegal. • . • The United States have no common law.*' A writer in the Virginia ArgtLS ad- dressed a letter to Ellsworth in which he said that : "The rights of man have been arraigned, the dignity of the American people insulted, and their Constitution pro- faned by your decision • • • as unprecedented in its nature as momentous in its consequences.'' He characterized the doctrine asserted, as a " revival of the anti-

^ Reported in full in Connecticut Cowrani, Sept. 80, 1799» and in many contempo- rary newspapers throu^out the United States ; see also 2 Cranch, 82, note ; Whear* ton's StaU TriaU, 652; HaWs American Law Journal, IV, 461. In A Di$$ertaUon on the Nature and Extent of the Juriediction of the CourU of the United Staiee (1821), by Peter S. Duponceau, 83, it is said : "This was, in respect of its application, a most unfortunate decision, and may be compared in its effects to the Sedition law. It wounded the feelings and opinions of the American people, by denying the right of expatriation and setting up the claim of perpetual allegiance. Thus a sound doctrine by being mixed with a doubtful, and, at any rate, an unpopular principle, made the nation afraid of the common law, which they thought turned their country into a prison and preventing them from migrating whithersoever they pleased."

' That Uie Court, however, was inclined to enforce the law against Great Britain as well as against France, and to restrain unneutral acts committed on our territory by either belligerent, may be seen from a case which has not hitherto been noted by legal historians. In 1799, the Spanish Consul at Charleston, So. Car., Don Diego Morphy, brought a suit in equity to restrain the British Consul, Benjamin Moody, from selling in the United States a Spanish ship, Nuestra Signora, brought here as a prize by a British warship. Chief Justice Ellsworth, sitting in the Federal Circuit Court ordered an injunction, saying : '*The selling of prizes is often very ensnaring, and insensibly draws in the citizens of a neutral State to depart from the observance of a strict neutrality, which b a reason why the neutral nation should be consulted. ... An attempt therefore to exercise it is incompatible with the sovereignty of the State**, and he held that such sale could not take place unless authorized by the President. Independent Chronide, June 6, 1799.