Stephen Johnson Field

“ Our system of civil polity is not such a rickety and ill-jointed structure, that when one part is disturbed the whole is thrown into confusion and jostled to its foundation. The fact that rebellion existed in one portion of the country could not have the effect of superseding or suspending the laws and Constitution in a loyal portion widely separated from it. ”

“ If neither the order of the President nor the act of Congress could suspend, in a State where war was not actually waged, any of the guaranties of the Constitution intended for the protection of the plaintiff from unlawful arrest and imprisonment, neither could they shield the defendants from responsibility in disregarding them. Protection against the deprivation of liberty and property would be defeated if remedies for redress, where such deprivation was made, could be denied. ”

“ The defendants not only omitted this plain, imperative duty, but detained the plaintiff in prison, not with a view to punish him for the offence of which they suspected him to be guilty, but to coerce from him payment of money alleged to be due by him and others to a substitute broker. Where is the law or reason for allowing one, who by force holds another in confinement in order to extort the payment of money, to show in extenuation of his conduct that the man had been guilty of some offence against the law? ”

“ To enter a man's house by virtue of a nameless warrant, in order to procure evidence, is worse than the Spanish inquisition,-a law under which no Englishman would wish to live an hour; it was a most daring public attack made upon the liberty of the subject: I thought that the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Charta, Nullus liber homo capiatur et imprisonetur, etc., nec super eum ibimus, etc., nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terroe, etc., which is pointed against arbitrary power, was violated.'
I am clearly of opinion that the judgment of the court below should be affirmed. ”

“ The assertion that the power of the government to carry on the war and suppress the rebellion would have been crippled and its efficiency impaired if it could not have authorized the arrest of persons, and their detention without examination or trial, on suspicion of their complicity with the enemy, or of disloyal practices, rests upon no foundation whatever so far as Vermont was concerned. ”

“ It may be true that no one, whatever his station or occupation, can there interfere with or obstruct any of the measures deemed essential for the success of the army, without subjecting himself to immediate arrest and summary punishment. The ordinary laws of the land are there superseded by the laws of war. The jurisdiction of the civil magistrate is there suspended, and military authority and force are substituted. The success of the army is the controlling consideration, and to that every thing else is required to bend. ”

“ The clauses of that instrument which declare that no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold or liberties or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed, or be passed upon except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, and that justice shall not be sold, nor denied, nor delayed to any man, are considered by English jurists and statesmen to be sufficient to protect the personal liberty and property of every freeman from arbitrary imprisonment and arbitrary spoliation. ”

“ A claim to exemption from the restraints of the law is always made in support of arbitrary power whenever unforeseen exigencies arise in the affairs of government. It is inconvenient; it causes delay; it takes time to furnish to committing magistrates evidence which, in a country where personal liberty is valued and guarded by constitutional guaranties, would justify the detention of the suspected ”

“ They are founded upon the plain principle that no one can be allowed to undertake the punishment of wrong-doers according to his own notions; that the administration of punitive justice for all offences is confided by the law to certain public officers, and whoever assumes their functions without being authorized usurps the prerogative of sovereign power, and becomes himself amenable to punishment. ”

“ J. A. Dix:
"SIR,-I am told by one Daniel Beckwith, a deputy provost-marshal here, by whom I have been committed here on a charge (of which I am entirely innocent) of aiding or being privy to the escape of two substitutes who had received $800 paid them by one Stevens, and that you have ordered my imprisonment here till I pay the $800 and expenses.
"If I am guilty of aiding a soldier to desert, I ought to be punished, and I cannot see, sir, how (I say it respectfully) you have any right to order my imprisonment for any indefinite time without giving me an opportunity to prove my innocence. ”

“ Among other efforts, the plaintiff appealed by letter to General Dix, the commander of the department, to order him to be brought to trial, and to give him an opportunity to prove his innocence. But not trial was allowed him,-that right which belongs, or ought to belong, to every one, even the humblest in the land, was denied to him, a born citizen of the United States; and not until after the intercession, at Washington, of a member of Congress from Vermont in his behalf were any steps taken for his release. ”

“ The answer in all such cases should be that the law attaches the proper penalties to its violation, and appoints the ministers by whom those penalties are to be enforced; and whenever they can act, whoever usurps their authority and attempts to punish supposed offenders in any other mode than that provided by the law, is himself a criminal. ”

“ To secure that success, persons may be arrested and confined, and property taken and used or destroyed, at the command of the general, he being responsible only to his superiors for an abuse of his authority. His orders, from the very necessity of the case, there constitute legal justification for any action of his officers and men. ”

“ Whoever, therefore, favors their subversion or suspension, except when in the presence of actual invasion or insurrection the laws are silent, is consciously or unconsciously an enemy to the Republic. ”

“ And what is the excuse offered for this imprisonment and treatment; for justification there could be none in a country where there were constitutional guarantees against the invasion of personal liberty,-such as are found in the Constitution of Vermont and in the Constitution of the United States? ”

“ And the same writer, in his Constitutional History of England, mentions among the essential checks upon royal authority, established under Magna Charta as part of her Constitution, 'that no man could be committed to prison but by a legal warrant specifying his offence,' and that 'the officers and servants of the crown violating the personal liberty or other right of the subject might be sued in an action for damages, to be assessed by a jury, or in some cases were liable to criminal process ”

“ It may be necessary at times with respect to them, as it is necessary at times with respect to admitted principles of morality, to restate them, in order to rescue them from the forgetfulness caused by their universal admission. ”

“ These statutes, as is apparent on their face, extend only to acts done in compliance with express orders or proclamations of the President. They do not cover acts done by persons upon their own will and discretion, who may have been at the time in the service of the government, simply because they were under the general direction of the President as commander-in-chief. ”

“ No adequate statement of the case can be made which does not substantially embody the entire bill of exceptions.↑ The charge to the jury which the court was requested by the defendants to give was that the facts which their evidence tended to establish, if believed, 'constituted under the aforesaid acts of Congress a full and complete justification for each and both the defendants for the acts complained of. ”

“ For this, said the court, 'he is entitled to just damages, to be recompensed for his expenses, to be paid for the suffering to body and mind from confinement in a common cell in the State prison, for the disgrace, for the separation from his family at a time when it was very important that he should not be separated from them ”

“ That later in the same day the plaintiff being in much distress of mind and anxiety to return to his family, and thinking perhaps the money might be paid under protest, telegraphed to his father to come and bring $800, and sent word to Henry, by the messenger who took the despatch, requesting him not to report the case till his father arrived, which he expected would be on the following day. ”