Page:The Supreme Court in United States History vol 1.djvu/190

164 "I consider all the encroachments made on that (Consti- tution) heretofore as nothing, as mere retail stuflf compared with the wholesale doctrine, that there is a common law in force in the United States of which and of all the cases within its provisions, tlieir Courts have cognizance. It is complete consolidation. Ellsworth and Iredell have openly recognized it. Washington has squinted at it, and I have no doubt it has been de- cided to cram it down our throats.*' Writing to Ed- mund Randolph also, Jeflferson said that: **0f all the doctrines which have ever been broached by the Federal Government, the novel one, of the conmion law being in force and cognizable as an existing law in their Courts, is to me the most formidable. All their other assump- tions of un-given powers have been in the detail. The Bank Law, the Treaty Doctrine, the Sedition Act, the Alien Act, the undertaking to change the State laws of evidence by certain parts of the Stamp Act, etc., have been solitary, unconsequential, timid things, in comparison with the audacious, barefaced and sweeping pretension to a system of law for the United States, without the adoption of their Legislature, and so infi- nitely beyond their power to adopt. If this assumption be yielded to, the State Courts may be shut up.*' * While the alarm of the Anti-Federalists over this wide jurisdiction claimed by the United States Courts was grave, their indignation was even deeper over the administration of the detested Sedition Law by the

^To Gideon Granger* Jefferson wrote, Aug. 18, 1800: "And I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the State Governments and reduces us to a single consolidated government) it would become the most corrupt government on the earth." Jefferson, IX. See also letters of Aug. 18, 19, 1799, Oct. 29, 1799, June 12, 1817. James Monroe, writing to Breckenridge, expressed the hope that any opposition by the Judges to the sovereignty of the people such as "the application of the principles of the English common law to our Constitution", would be good cause for impeachment. Breokmridge Papers MSS, letter to Breckenridge, Jan. 18, 1802, infra, 229.