The Pleasure of communing, &c., HON. THEODORE H. MCCALEB, LL. D.

213

THE

NEW-ORLEANS BOOK.

THE BATTURE CASE.

BY HON. EDWARD LIVINGSTON, IN ANSWER TO THOMAS JEFFERSON.

"Ah! little knowest thou, who hast not tried,
What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent,
To pass long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with care,
To eat thy heart through comfortless despair;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone;
Unhappy wight! such hard fate doomed to try;
That fate God send unto mine enemy."-SPENSER.

WHEN a public functionary abuses his power by an act which bears on the community, his conduct excites attention, provokes popular resent

ment, and seldom fails to receive the punishment it merits. Should an individual be chosen for the victim, little sympathy is created for his sufferings, if the interest of all is supposed to be promoted by the ruin of one. The gloss of zeal for the public is therefore always spread over acts of oppression, and the people are sometimes made to consider that as a brilliant exertion of energy in their favor, which, when viewed in its true light, would be found a fatal blow to their rights.

In no government is this effect so easily produced as in a free republic-party spirit, inseparable from its existence, there aids the illusion, and a popular leader is allowed in many instances impunity, and sometimes rewarded with applause for acts that would make a tyrant tremble on his throne. This evil must exist in a degree; it is founded in the natural course of human passions— but in a wise and enlightened nation it will be restrained, and the consciousness that it must exist will make such a people more watchful to prevent its abuse. These reflections occur to one whose property, without trial or any of the forms of law, has been violently seized by the First Magistrate of the Union, who has hitherto vainly solicited an inquiry into his title, who has seen

the conduct of his oppressor excused or applauded, and who, in the book he is about to examine, finds an attempt openly to justify that conduct upon principles as dangerous as the act was illegal and unjust. This book relates to a case which has long been before the public, and purports to be the substance of instructions prepared by Thomas Jefferson, late President of the United States, for his counsel in a suit instituted by me against him. After a few years' earnest entreaty, I have at length obtained a statement of the reasons which induced him to take those violent and unconstitutional measures of which I have complained.

It would perhaps be deemed unreasonable to quarrel with Mr. Jefferson for the delay, when we reflect how necessary Mr. Moreau's Latin and Mr. Thierry's Greek, Poydras' elegant invective and his own Anglo-Saxon researches, were to excuse an act, for which, at the time he committed it, he had no one plausible reason to alledge. Such an act is certainly easier to perform than to justify, and Mr. Jefferson has been right in taking four years to consider what excuse he should give to the world for his conduct, and still more so in laying under contribution all writ ings, all languages, all laws, and in calling to his

aid all the popular prejudices which his own conduct had excited against me. He wanted all this, and more, to make a decent defence. But it was rather awkward to press into his service facts which it is confessed he did not know at the time, and something worse than awkward to impose on the public by false translations and garbled testimony. But we must excuse the late President. "His wish had rather been for a false investigation of the merits at the Bar, that the public might learn in that way that their servants had done nothing but what the laws had authorized and required them to do❞— "and precluded now from this mode of justification, he adopts that of publishing what was meant originally for the private eye of counsel." I give the words of the author here, lest in this extraordinary sentence I should be suspected of having misrepresented or misunderstood him. An individual holding a tract of land under one whose title has been acknowledged, and whose possession has been confirmed by a court of competent authori ty, is violently dispossessed by the orders of the President of the United States, without any of the forms of law and in violation of the most sacred provisions of the Constitution: the ruined sufferer seeks redress first by expostulation; he