not maintain that it is not due process of law within the meaning of the Constitution, they can not throw the least doubt on the constitutionality of this mode of procedure.

If this were a new question, possibly there might be room for argument. But from the first administration down to this day there has never been a day in which, on the statute-books of the United States, exactly this process to forfeit property for crime without first convicting the owner on indictment has not been prescribed. The law of 1799, among the first of the revenue laws, forfeited property brought in under fraudulent invoices, without proceeding against the individual personally; and all the revenue laws from that day to this enforce these provisions by forfeitures and proceedings in rem.

The navigation laws of the United States, from the earliest days of the republic, inflict forfeiture in the District Court on proceedings against the vessel for violation of those laws without prosecuting the owner, though liable to indictment. Who ever heard that a vessel could not be forfeited unless the master or owner were indicted, or until after they had been indicted? Our laws regulating trade with the Indians make it penal to carry ardent spirits among them, and they punish the persons guilty and forfeit the property by process in rem in the District Court. Is that unconstitutional?

The law for the suppression of the slave-trade makes the parties violating it guilty of piracy, and they are liable either to be hung or confined in the penitentiary, according to the grade of the of fense. But yet the vessels caught are always forfeited, whether owner or master be prosecuted or not. Was it ever heard that the person must be convicted of the crime before the vessel could be forfeited in the District Court? These things are of every-day practice, as every gentleman at all familiar with the ordinary administration of the laws of the United States knows. In a word, indictment and conviction of the person is not the only due process of law by which a person may be deprived of his property. The daily process of levying taxes proves that. And Congress has pleased to authorize confiscation without conviction, but in the time-honored forms of the early republic.

And another species of property about which gentlemen upon the other side of the House usually show more interest than about lands-property in negroes-affords a more striking illus tration. We have in that case the same principle of confiscating

property before conviction of the delinquent, settled by the laws of Maryland and of Virginia, adopted by Congress as the laws in the two counties of the District of Columbia, from the earliest days of the republic down to the day on which I am speaking. The law of Virginia goes as far back as the days of Jefferson. It prohibited the introduction of slaves into Virginia from any other State and from foreign countries; and while it prescribed the penalty on the party so introducing them, it also declared the slave free. The gentlemen from Maryland here know very well that was the law of Maryland down to within a few years, and, in some cases, it is so now. When Congress adopted the laws of Maryland and Virginia, both of those statutes were the laws of this district, and they were in force down to the time of the emancipation of slaves in this District.

Now, what was the ordinary process in these cases? I do not remember in my experience while practicing as a lawyer, either in Virginia or the District of Columbia or in Maryland, of an indictment or action for the fine or forfeiture against a party introducing negroes. It was the every-day practice when I came to the bar that negroes brought into that part of the District which was on the south of the Potomac River contrary to law, should apply to the court and bring a suit for their freedom; and it was in the ordinary form of an action for trespass, complaining that the master had illegally imprisoned them, and the judgment of the court was one cent damage against the master for the imprisonment. The question really involved was freedom or slavery. The law vested freedom; the court authenticated it. In other words, the operation of the law was that the act of bringing a negro across the line invested him with his freedom; that it deprived the master of his property, and invested the negro with the right to sue the man for the wrong committed by continuing to hold him. That has been adjudged again and again by the courts of Virginia and by the courts of Maryland; and though writs of error have more than once carried such cases in this District to the Supreme Court, that tribunal never dreamed that this was a forfeiture of property without due process of law. If gentlemen will take the trouble to run through the volumes of the Supreme Court Reports, they will find several cases; one so recent as 2 Howard, in which that form of proceeding was recognized as a competent mode in which to assert the right of freedom, which was a forfeiture of the master's right. The man who was a slave

on the other side of the line became a freeman by being brought this side of the line; his master was not indicted, nor was his freedom a consequence of the conviction of, nor of a judgment against his master, but he acquired his title to freedom by the act of the Congress of the United States, which inflicted forfeiture on his master for violating it.

Congress, during the administration of Mr. Jefferson, I think, in organizing the Territories of Louisiana and Mississippi, in like manner forbade the introduction of slaves from abroad, and freed them when introduced by the master. And if we are to be told that this was antique legislation, and not fit for the light of these modern days, I ask gentlemen to read the compromise measures of 1850, brought in by the illustrious Kentuckian, Henry Clay, and passed by a Congress which thought fondly they had averted the agony that we now writhe under; let them read the law forbidding the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, where the hand of Henry Clay traced the words of forfeiture—that if any slave should be brought into this District by its owner, contrary to the provisions of the act, he should thereupon become liberated and free.

Now that covers all the Confiscation Acts of the last Congress. It is wholly immaterial whether it relates to land or to personal property, whether you forfeit lands or negroes. The forfeiture of slaves would even meet the technical objection of the gentleman from Ohio, because formerly in Virginia, as every body knows, slaves were real estate, not personal estate, passing to the heirs, and not to the executors; and it is only of late years that they have been treated as personal estate, though in the widow's share of them the traces of their real character still remain visible. Now the question that is involved in the Confiscation Law is not whether attainder can work corruption of blood affecting the heirs; of course it can not; it is not whether attainder can operate forfeiture of lands descending after the death of the attainted person, nor whether an attainder is confined to carving a life estate by forfeiture out of a fee; that is not the question. The question is whether, by other process of law not connected with indictment of the person, not following upon attainder, the United States government can say that those who have been in arms against it shall forfeit their property, and that the tribunals of the country shall enforce it in rem; and this is settled by the traditional laws of the republic.

DRAFT AND COMMUTATION.-COLORED

TROOPS.

DURING the discussion of the "Conscription Bill" Mr. Davis opposed exemption from military service by payment of commutation-money, "except in favor of ministers of religion actually in charge of some congregation-of men having a wife or child dependent on them for support, and not having an income of twelve hundred dollars independent of their industry-of members of the religious society of Friends, or other religious denominations conscientiously opposed to bearing arms."

He also moved (February 10) to strike out from an amendment proposed so much as provided for the payment of three hundred dollars to the owner of any drafted slave, on the ground that if slaves were liable to military duty at all, they are so precisely as all who owe obedience to the laws are liable. To the objection that otherwise the government would be taking the property of the owner (in the labor of the slave) without compensation, he said:

"I beg pardon, sir. The son owes to the father labor, by the law of every State in the Union, as assuredly as the slave owes the master labor. We do not necessarily make the slave a freeman by taking him for a soldier. We may make provision that he shall be free thereafter. When the son is taken, when the apprentice is taken, somebody is taken who is quite as dear, quite as necessary, quite as valuable to the father and to the employer as when the slave is taken from the master. In other words, where the obligation of military service rests, the law pursues it, and insists upon it, leaving the burden of other losses to follow the necessities of the times."

Next day (February 11) Mr. Davis moved as an amendment "that the Secretary of War shall appoint a commission in each of the slave States represented in Congress, charged to award a just compensation to each loyal owner of any slave who may volunteer into the service of the United States, payable out of the commutationmoney received,” etc. In support thereof, he said:

"Mr. Chairman, I submit this amendment, not because I think it due at all to the owner of the slave, but because the President and the Secretary of War, in executing the law of 1862 allowing

the President to use and organize persons of African descent to suppress the rebellion, have seen fit to appoint a commission, which is now in session in Maryland, for the purpose of estimating the value of, and awarding reasonable compensation to the loyal owners of, slaves who may volunteer into the United States service under the law of 1862. That brings the volunteering of slaves into some sort of correspondence with the established policy of the government in paying bounties to volunteers, the difference being that in the case of the slave the bounty is paid to the master instead, on freeing his slave, whereas the bounty in the case of the white volunteer of course goes to himself.

"It is a very different thing to impose on the government, when it is driven to draft, the necessity of paying to every slaveowner a compensation for any slave that may be drafted. The poor man, whose son works for him on his ten acres, receives no compensation for that son when he is drafted into the service, while the wealthy slaveholder, who may have three or four hundred slaves alongside, is to receive a compensation of three hundred dollars for every one of his slaves who may be drafted. It is apparent that if the government has the right to draft slaves into the service, and if the government has the right to take the slave, it has the right to take him exactly as it takes the son, the father; or the brother of any citizen of the republic, with no more compensation and no less compensation for discharging the duty he owes to the country."