University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VI.

YAZOO AND JUDGE CHASE.

Congress met on November 5, 1804, a
month earlier than usual, and Randolph came
to Washington in the temper which his letter
to Gallatin indicates. He was irritable, nervous,
extravagant, and had doubtless many excuses
for being so. More jealous than ever of
executive influence, he seemed at last alive to
the mistakes he had made in straining party
principles; he began to lecture his followers
with the pragmatic air of a pedagogue, and
sought out occasions to worry them with small
discipline. As chairman of the Committee on
Ways and Means he reported against the remission
of duties on books intended for the use
of colleges and seminaries of learning, and his
report dogmatized thus: —

This was strict construction run riot; on
such principles it would not have been difficult
to prove that Congress could lay no imposts at
all, because, in the sense contended, no possible
impost could be uniform; one or another class
of people might always be exempt from its burden,
unless light, air, and water could be made
dutiable; but granting that Randolph was correct,
he might at least have consoled the petitioners
by telling them that a means of evading
the difficulty existed; that to obtain their
object they need only go to the President and
invoke the treaty-making power which brought
Louisiana, all its inhabitants and all their

property, real and personal, through the custom
house, made them all citizens, and gave
them special privileges of foreign trade, without
offence to the Constitution, or authority
from an act of Congress.

Two days after thus teaching the House its
business, Randolph, Nicholson, Macon, and the
whole body of strict constructionists undertook
to tell it that Congress could not embank or
bridge the Potomac, because Virginia and Maryland
had a right of navigation there, although
navigation might even be improved by the
change. These petty attempts to restrict a
power which had just been declared sufficient to
subvert, by a mere treaty, the existing status of
the Union, were vexatious and irritating. They
drove the northern democrats into silent rebellion.
The House allowed Randolph to say what
he liked, but paid no attention to his lectures,
and he harmed only his own cause. "Mere
metaphysical subtleties," said Mr. Jefferson
openly before a large company at his own
table; and he added: "they ought to have no
weight."

With Randolph in this state of incessant irritation,
it is easy to understand the excitable
temper with which he approached the Yazoo
claim when, on January 29, 1805, it made its
appearance before the House. At his coolest

moments the word Yazoo was to him what the
sight of a bodkin was to Sir Piercie Shafton;
but in his present condition of mind the effect
was beyond all measure violent. He took the
floor, and after speaking for a few minutes
with apparent self-control broke out into a
tirade such as the House had never yet heard
from him, or from any other man: —

After much more of this wild denunciation,
which should have been stopped by the Speaker
at once; after imputing to the House corrupt
motives and "public plunder" and "out-of-door
intrigues" under "exact discipline," he tried to
re-state his case and to argue upon it: but his
arguments were as wild as his invective, and he
always returned to the easier task of denunciation.
Gideon Granger, the Postmaster-General,
had very improperly undertaken to act as
agent of the claimants, and Randolph fell foul
of him with tremendous virulence: —

He felt it an outrage that he should be
obliged to fight such a battle. He raged like a
maniac because his party had gone off after
false leaders, and left him to prophesy destruction

and woe to the echoes of the chamber.
A party that had come to power only
four years ago, saying and believing that they
had created for the first time in man's history
a system of pure and democratic government,
under which corruption was impossible,
now forced their leader to devote his most
passionate energies to the task of convincing
them that the Postmaster-General, the master
of executive patronage, should not be a lobbyist
for private claimants on the floor of Congress.
These methods of influencing legislatures Randolph
had always charged on the federalists as
their own dishonest European practices, the
fruit of their monarchical theories; he was
genuinely tortured to find himself wrong, and
to see that his own followers had turned federalist.
He had the courage to tell them so: —

What Randolph thus said was to a great extent
true. The republican party, when in opposition,
set up an impossible standard of political
virtue, and now that they were in power found
that government could not be carried on as
they had pledged themselves to conduct it.
Randolph himself shared their inconsistencies.
He had talked and voted as his interests or
passions dictated, supporting the constitutionality
of the Louisiana purchase, intriguing for
war with Spain, inciting to war with England,
governing by military power the people of
New Orleans, without a thought of the precedents
he helped to establish; but he had the
merit of seeing others' mistakes if not his own.
He had the courage to proclaim the offences of
his party. This it was which gave him the
confidence and support of friends and constituents.

They believed in his honesty of purpose,
and pardoned all else.

The debate went on for several days with
increasing violence. Language unprecedented
was used. Randolph attacked Granger with
savage ferocity. He found the whole weight
of the administration, and especially the influence
of Mr. Madison, thrown into the scale
against him, and he struggled desperately
against it. Beaten by five votes on the division,
he still carried his point in preventing
actual legislation by this Congress, and stood
in the gap with a courage fairly to be called
heroic, had it not been to so great an extent
the irrational outcome of an undisciplined and
tyrannical temper. A true statesman, with
some concession and good management, might
perhaps have carried all his points, thus overawing
his party, reëstablishing his favorite
states' rights, and breaking in advance the
force of Marshall's law. Nay, it was not impossible
that by dexterity and steady persistence
he might shut up the Dartmouth College
case forever in gremio magistratus, or drive
the Chief Justice from the bench. Randolph
clutched with both hands at Marshall's throat,
but to be victor in such a contest he needed
Marshall's mind.

The Yazoo debate closed on Saturday, February

2, and on February 9 Randolph appeared
with his brother managers before the
Senate to open the impeachment of Judge
Chase. It was the weightiest moment of his
public life; for an instant he challenged a place
in history beside the masters of oratory and
power. Where all others, including Mr. Jefferson
himself, shrunk back, he stood forward,
while the object of his ambition, if gained, assured
him high rank among the great men of
his century.

The impeachment of Justice Chase is a landmark
in American history, because it was here
that the Jeffersonian republicans fought their
last aggressive battle, and, wavering under the
shock of defeat, broke into factions which slowly
abandoned the field and forgot their discipline.
That such a battle must one day be fought for the
control of the Judiciary was from the beginning
believed by most republicans who understood
their own principles. Without controlling the
Judiciary, the people could never govern themselves
in their own way; and although they
might, over and over again, in every form of
law and resolution, both state and national,
enact and proclaim that theirs was not a despotic
but a restricted government, which had
no right to exercise powers not delegated to it,
and over which they, as States, had absolute

control, it was none the less certain that Chief
Justice Marshall and his associates would disregard
their will, and would impose upon them
his own. The people were at the mercy of
their creatures. The Constitutions of England,
of Massachusetts, of Pennsylvania, authorized
the removal of an obnoxious judge on a mere
address of the legislature, but the Constitution
of the United States had so fenced and fortified
the Supreme Court that the legislature, the Executive,
the people themselves, could exercise
no control over it. A judge might make any
decision, violate any duty, trample on any right,
and if he took care to commit no indicatable offence
he was safe in office for life. On this license
the Constitution imposed only one check:
it said that all civil officers should be removed
from office "on impeachment for, and conviction
of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and
misdemeanors." This right of impeachment
was as yet undefined, and if stretched a little
beyond strict construction it might easily be
converted into something for which it had not
been intended; might even be made to serve
for the British removal of judges by address.
That, in order to do this, the strict constructionists
must strain the language of the Constitution
out of its true sense was evident, but
they had, without flinching, faced the same difficulty
in the Louisiana purchase. The actual
disregard of the Constitution would hardly be
so flagrant in regard to impeachment as it had
been in regard to the treaty-making power.

This suggestion was actually carried out by
the impeachment of Judge Pickering in 1803-4.
In this case twenty Senators had voted Judge
Pickering's removal from office on a simple hearing
of the case, without defence or even the appearance
of the accused by counsel. The final
vote had not declared Pickering guilty either
of high crimes or misdemeanors, but simply
"guilty as charged." The proceeding was a
mere inquest of office under a judicial form. In
the eyes of Randolph, Nicholson, Macon, Giles,
and the Virginian school in general, an impeachment
and a removal from office by this process
need imply no criminality; it was a declaration
by Congress that a judge held dangerous opinions,
which made it necessary for the public
safety that another man should be substituted
in his place. In their eyes the Senate was not
to be considered a court of justice, but simply
a part of the constitutional machine for making
appointments and removals.

In theory this view was very simple and reasonable;
in practice it met with difficulties.
The conviction of Pickering in March, 1804,
was carried by nineteen votes in a Senate of

thirty-four members, and, even after conviction,
only twenty senators voted for his removal.
Five administration senators absented themselves;
several others voted unwillingly, and
the immediate impeachment of Chase on the
very day of Pickering's conviction startled these
hesitating republicans, whose consciences were
already so heavy laden. Other difficulties were
still more certain. A summary vote of expulsion
from office, which was feasible enough in
the case of a friendless, absent, unknown, and
imbecile New Hampshire district judge, was out
of the question when a venerable justice of the
Supreme Court appeared at the bar of the Senate,
backed by a body-guard of the ablest lawyers
in America, who were considerably less
afraid of Congressmen than Congressmen of
them. There could be no summary process
here. There must be a regular, formal trial,
according to the rules and principles of law.
The Senate must be a court.

Cogent reasons, therefore, forced Randolph
at the outset to abandon his own theory of impeachment,
and, what was much more fatal, to
establish a precedent tending to break this
theory down. He began by accepting the whole
paraphernalia of the law, and by demanding the
conviction of Chase as a criminal. By thus admitting
that criminality of a deep nature alone

warranted the removal of a supreme judge,
Randolph's victory would have made impeachment
as useless as his defeat made it, for there
never sat on the Supreme Bench another judge
rash enough to imitate Chase by laying himself
open to such a charge. To restore its usefulness
he must have fought another battle under
great disadvantages.

Judge Chase's offences were serious. The
immediate cause of impeachment, his address to
the grand jury at Baltimore on the 2d May,
1803, proved that he was not a proper person
to be trusted with the interpretation of the
laws. In this address he said that those laws
were rapidly destroying all protection to property
and all security to personal liberty. "The
late alteration of the federal Judiciary," said
he, "by the abolition of the office of the sixteen
circuit judges, and the recent change in
our state Constitution by the establishing of
universal suffrage, and the further alteration
that is contemplated in our state Judiciary, if
adopted, will, in my judgment, take away all
security for property and personal liberty. The
independence of the national Judiciary is already
shaken to its foundations, and the virtue
of the people alone can restore it." That by
this reference to the virtue of the people he
meant to draw a contrast with the want of virtue

in their government was made clear by a
pointed insult to Mr. Jefferson: "The modern
doctrines by our late reformers, that all
men in a state of society are entitled to enjoy
equal liberty and equal rights, have brought
this mighty mischief upon us, and I fear that it
will rapidly progress until peace and order, freedom
and property, shall be destroyed." These
opinions were formidable, because they were
held by every member of the Supreme Court;
for they were the opinions of the federalist
party, whose leaders were at this moment, on
the same system of reasoning, preparing for a
dissolution of the Union.

There was gross absurdity in the idea that
the people who, by an immense majority, had
decided to carry on their government in one
way should be forced by one of their own servants
to turn about and go in the opposite direction;
and the indecorum was greater than
the absurdity, for if Judge Chase or any other
official held such doctrines, even though he were
right, he was bound not to insult officially the
people who employed him. On these grounds
Mr. Jefferson privately advised the impeachment,
and perhaps Randolph might have acted
more wisely had he followed Mr. Jefferson's
hint to rely on this article alone, which in the
end came nearer than any other to securing conviction.

In so cumbersome a procedure as that
of impeachment, it was peculiarly necessary to
narrow the field of dispute, to exclude doubtful
points of law, and avoid cumulative charges.

Randolph thought otherwise. Conscious that
he would meet with strong opposition in the
Senate, he determined to make his attack overwhelming
by proving criminality, even though
in doing it he gave up for the time his theory
that impeachment need imply no criminal offence;
and therefore, placing the real cause of
impeachment last in the order of his articles,
he threw into the foreground a long series of
charges, which concerned only questions of law.
Going back to the year 1800 and the famous
trials of Fries and Callender, he made out of
these materials no less than six complicated
articles, embracing numerous charges. Still
another article was framed to cover a complaint
founded on the judge's treatment of the
grand jury at Newcastle in the same year.
Thus these seven heads of impeachment, intended
as they were to support each other with
irresistible cumulative power, withdrew the
trial from the region of politics, and involved
it beyond extrication in the meshes of legal
methods and maxims. Bristling with difficult
points of pure law; turning on doubtful questions
of practice; involving a flat assumption

of numerous abstract propositions, they required
a categorical, off-hand decision on the rules of
evidence, the reciprocal rights and duties of
judge, counsel, and jury, the customs in different
courts and in different places, the legality
of bad manners, and the humanity of strict
law, only to prove that Justice Chase had been
actuated by corrupt and criminal motives, — for
it seemed at first to be conceded that no mere
error of judgment would warrant his conviction.

The articles of impeachment which Randolph
presented to the House on March 26, 1804, and
which were, he claimed, drawn up with his own
hand, rested wholly on the theory of Chase's
criminality; they contained no suggestion that
impeachment was a mere inquest of office. But
when Congress met again, and, on December
3, the subject came before the House, it was
noticed that two new articles, the fifth and
sixth, had been quietly interpolated, which
roused suspicion of a change in Randolph's plan.
No one could say that the original charges involved
any other victim than the one named in
them; they could not be tortured into an attack
on the court as a whole; but the two
new articles wore a threatening look. The fifth
charged that Judge Chase had issued a capias
against the body of Callender, whereas the law
of Virginia required a summons to appear at

the next court; it alleged no evil intent, as all
the other articles had done, and by thus making
a mere error impeachable it put the whole court
at the mercy of Congress. The sixth went farther.
Assuming that the statute required the
federal courts to follow in each State of the
Union the modes of process usual in that State,
this article impeached Judge Chase for having
held Callender to trial at the same term at which
he was indicted. Although the sixth, unlike the
fifth, article alleged that this act was done
"with intent to oppress," it was peculiarly
alarming, because one of the earliest decisions of
the Supreme Court had been directly contrary
to the doctrine that the United States courts
were bound to follow the modes of process
usual in the state courts, and there was not a
judge on the supreme bench whose practice in
this respect had not rendered him liable to impeachment
on the same charge. No one could
doubt that Randolph and his friends, seeing
how little their ultimate object would be advanced
by a conviction on the old charges, inserted
these new articles in order to correct
their mistake and to make a foundation for the
freer use of impeachment as a political weapon.

The behavior of Giles and his friends in the
Senate strengthened this suspicion. He made
no concealment of his theories, and labored

earnestly to prevent the Senate from calling
itself a court, or from exercising any functions
that belonged to a court of law. To some extent
he succeeded, but when at last he declared
that the Secretary had no right to administer
an oath, and that a magistrate must be called
in for the purpose; when he was led still further
to acknowledge that on his doctrine the Senate
itself had no right to issue writs, summonses,
and subpœnas, so that all the proceedings against
Judge Pickering had been unconstitutional and
his removal illegal, the Senate lost patience and
rebelled. From that moment the fate of Randolph
was sealed.

In all these transactions Giles and Randolph
acted in the closest alliance. Their idea of
impeachment was honestly held and openly
avowed; they did their utmost to force it on
their party, and it is clear that, except on such
a theory, Randolph was absurdly out of place
in trying to conduct a trial of such importance.
For an inquest of office, whatever such a proceeding
might be, he was perhaps as competent
as another; but that a Virginian planter, who
occasionally sat on a grand jury, should be vain
enough to suppose himself capable of arguing
the most perplexed questions of legal practice
was incredible; and when, in addition, he was
obliged to fling his glove in the faces of the best

lawyers in America, his rashness became laughable.
Even though he had all the resources of
his party in the House to draw upon, including
Joseph H. Nicholson and Cæsar A. Rodney,
both fair lawyers, yet at the bar before him he
saw not only Justice Chase, keen, vigorous, with
long experience and ample learning, but also, at
Chase's side, counsel such as neither Senate nor
House could command, at whose head, most formidable
of American advocates, was the rollicking,
witty, audacious Attorney-General of Maryland;
boon companion of Chase and the whole
bar; drunken, generous, slovenly, grand; bulldog
of federalism, as Mr. Jefferson called him;
shouting with a school-boy's fun at the idea
of tearing Randolph's indictment to pieces and
teaching the Virginian democrats some law, —
the notorious reprobate genius, Luther Martin.

If the sight of these professional enemies
were not enough to disturb Randolph's self-confidence
as he rose to open the case under
their contemptuous eyes, the sight of the senate-chamber
might have done so without their aid.
In spite of all his party influence, Randolph
saw few men before him upon whose friendly
sympathy he could count. Hated by the northern
democrats, he saw the head and front of
northern democracy, Aaron Burr, presiding
over the court. The supreme bench, led by

Chief Justice Marshall, a man whom Randolph
deeply respected, was looking on with sympathies
which were certainly not with him.
Among southern senators, his closest associate
was Giles of Virginia, whom no man ever
trusted without regret. The thirty-four senators
consisted of eleven northern democrats, fourteen
democrats from the South, and nine federalists.
If from his own party Randolph could
expect little genuine regard, it is easy to conceive
the intensity of ill-will with which the
federalist senators listened to his argument.
Moderate men, like Bayard of Delaware, and
Dayton of New Jersey, had little patience with
him or his opinions, while the New England
senators regarded him with extreme antipathy
and contempt as hearty as that which he had so
freely showered on them and their friends. To
face the humor of Tracy, the senator from Connecticut,
was more trying than to defy the bitter
tongue of Timothy Pickering, which spared
not even his own personal and party friends, or
to ignore the presence of Pickering's colleague,
the "cub," who was "a greater bear than the
old one," and whose capacity for expressing contempt
was exceeded only by his right to feel it,
— Mr. J. Q. Adams of Massachusetts.

Before this unsympathetic band of critics, on
the 9th February, 1805, Randolph and his associates

appeared, and in a speech of about
one hour and a half, which by its unusual caution
proved that, if not cowed, he was at least
for once subdued by the occasion and the audience,
he unfolded to the Senate his articles
of impeachment. On no other occasion in Randolph's
life was he compelled to follow a long
and consecutive train of thought within the
narrow bounds of logical method, and his arguments
at this trial are therefore the only exact
test of his reasoning powers. His failure was
decided. From the point of view which lawyers
must take, his arguments, if arguments
they can be called, are not even third-rate;
they are the feeblest that were made in the
course of this long trial. He undertook to
speak as an authority upon the law, when he
knew no more law than his own overseer; naturally
given to making assertion stand for
proof, he asserted legal principles calculated to
make Luther Martin's eyes sparkle with delight.
From first to last he never rose above the atmosphere
of a court room. Avoiding all discussion
of impeachment as a theory, and leaving
unnoticed the political meaning of his eighth
article, he deliberately tangled his limbs in the
meshes of law, and offered himself a willing
victim to the beak and claws of the eagles who
were marking him for their sport.

To analyze such an address is useless. Not
even the warmest of his friends has ever thought
it a good example of his merits, and no one will
care to waste time in proving self-evident defects.
Nevertheless, the peroration has been
often quoted as a specimen of his more carefully
studied eloquence, and since this peroration
illustrates the best as well as the worst of
the speech it shall stand as a fair test of its
value.

These words closed the speech, and were
doubtless carefully considered, probably committed
to memory in advance, and intended to
produce a deep effect on the Senate; but they
will not bear analysis. In drawing the articles
of impeachment, Randolph had carefully
avoided the allegation that John Fries was "an
innocent man." The managers had no idea of
taking evidence in support of such a theory;
they preferred to avoid it, because they knew
that Fries was guilty, under aggravated circumstances,
of what the law called treason; that in
any case he must have been convicted; that
his counsel had thrown up their brief, against
Judge Chase's prayers, solely because they saw
no other ground on which to found an appeal
for executive pardon; and, finally, that Judge
Chase had made no mistake in his rulings. All
this was well known to Randolph, who would
certainly, in his articles of impeachment, have
alleged that Fries was innocent, had there been
the smallest possibility of proving it. With
what decent apology, then, could Randolph venture
upon so gross and evident a misstatement
of fact? What treatment could he expect from
Luther Martin?

"The President of the United States, by a

well-timed act at once of justice and of mercy,
wrested the victim from his grasp." What
made the executive pardon an act of justice?
What proved it? What evidence did the
managers propose to offer on that head? None
whatever. President Adams pardoned Fries as
an act of mercy, rather than hang, for the first
time in the national history, a political criminal,
who had thrown himself, undefended, on
the court. Judge Chase then was to be held
guilty because President Adams had not hung
Fries. Curran is said to have claimed a verdict
from an Irish jury on the ground that his
only witness had been spirited away by the attorney
for the defence. Randolph claimed a
conviction on the ground that, had the President
not spirited away all excuse for complaint,
there might have been a grievance, although
none was alleged in the indictment. The whole
array of Chase's counsel must have joined in
broad laughter over this novel idea, as they
drank that night to the confusion of democratic
lawyers, and promised themselves a pleasure to
come.

Their pleasure came in due time. If any
student of American history, curious to test the
relative value of reputations, will read Randolph's
opening address, and then pass on to
the argument of Luther Martin, he will feel

the distance between show and strength, between
intellectual brightness and intellectual
power. Nothing can be finer in its way than
Martin's famous speech. Its rugged and sustained
force; its strong humor, audacity, and
dexterity; its even flow and simple choice of
language, free from rhetoric and affectations;
its close and compulsive grip of the law; its
good-natured contempt for the obstacles put
in its way, — all these signs of elemental vigor
were like the forces of nature, simple, direct,
fresh as winds and ocean, but they were opposite
qualities to those which Randolph displayed.
The contrast with Randolph's closing
address is much more striking; for whether
it were that the long excitement had broken
his strength, or that the arguments of Martin,
Harper, Hopkinson, and Key had shattered
his indictment and humiliated his pride, or
whether, in this painful effort to imitate legal
minds and logical methods, he at last flung
himself like a child on the ground, crushed by
the consciousness that his mind could not follow
out a fixed train of thought, could not support
the weight of this intellectual armor which
it had rashly put on, certain it is that Randolph
appeared in his closing speech more like a criminal
fearing sentence than like a tribune of the
people dragging a tyrant to his doom.

On February 27, 1805, he appeared before
the Senate to make this closing address. He
was ill and unprepared, although he had surely
been engaged on the subject long enough to
need little more preparation than a single night
of hard work. He no longer had the lash of
Luther Martin to fear, for his own word was
to be the last; while it was clear that, as the
case stood, conviction was more than doubtful,
and Randolph's own reputation and authority
could now be saved only by some serious
effort. In spite of all these motives for
exertion, he astonished the Senate by the desultory
and erratic style of his address. Soon
he broke down. He was forced to apologize:
he had lost, he said, his voluminous notes;
but it was only too evident that these could not
have helped him; it would have been quite in
character had he, in his disgust, flung his notes
into the fire, conscious that he was helpless to
deal with their mass of unmanageable matter.
With or without notes, no man of a clear mind
could possibly have run wild, as he now did.
This closing argument or harangue, great as
the occasion was, hardly rises to the level of
Randolph's ordinary stump-speeches: equally
weak in arrangement and reasoning, equally
inexact in statement and violent in denunciation,
it has fewer gleams of wit, fewer clever

illustrations, and none of those occasional flashes
of inspired prophecy which sometimes startled
hostile hearers into admiration. When Randolph
sat down he had betrayed his own weakness;
he was no longer dangerous, except to his
friends.

To reproduce or analyze an harangue like
this, of which Randolph himself was keenly
ashamed, would be unfair. He was honest in
acknowledging his failure, and it is useless to
prove what he was first to confess and proclaim.
The task, he said, was one for which
he felt himself "physically as well as morally
incompetent." "My weakness and want of
ability prevent me from urging my cause as I
could wish, but it is the last day of my sufferings
and of yours." Again and again he apologized
to the Senate for his incompetency in
a manner almost abject, as though he were
crushed under it. He did more: he pleaded
the fact in deprecation of criticism. The newspapers
of the time show how complete was
the impression of his failure; but among the
eye-witnesses of the scene was one who recorded
on the spot the effect made upon him by
Randolph and his speech. "On the reopening
of the court," wrote Mr. J. Q. Adams, "he
began a speech of about two hours and a half,
with as little relation to the subject-matter as

possible, — without order, connection, or argument;
consisting altogether of the most hackneyed
commonplaces of popular declamation,
mingled up with panegyrics and invectives
upon persons, with a few well-expressed ideas,
a few striking figures, much distortion of face
and contortion of body, tears, groans, and sobs,
with occasional pauses for recollection, and continual
complaints of having lost his notes. He
finished about half-past two. Mr. Harper then
made a very few observations on one of the
authorities he had produced, to which he replied
with some petulance."

Mr. Adams was certainly a warm partisan of
Judge Chase, but he made no such comments
on the speeches of other managers, and indeed
paid a small compliment to Rodney, who had
spoken the day before. His description of the
contents of Randolph's speech is accurate
enough to create confidence in his account of
its delivery, and it is only to be regretted that
he said nothing about that voice which Virginian
hearers were apt to think the most
melodious in the world.

On March 1 Randolph's defeat was at last
seen in all its overwhelming completeness.
When the senators came to a vote, only the
third, fourth, and eighth articles received even
a majority of their voices. The highest point

reached by the impeachers was in the vote of
19 to 15 on the eighth article, Mr. Jefferson's
peculiar property. Five democratic senators
from northern States and Gaillard of South
Carolina refused to follow Randolph's lead.
Worse than this, so thoroughly had Luther
Martin and his brother counsel broken into
atoms the suspicious fifth and sixth articles of
Randolph's indictment that not a single senator
sustained the one, and only four supported the
other, although Randolph's honor was at stake,
for Martin had openly charged him with having
misquoted the law of Virginia; "How this
hath happened is not for me to say," and no
defence was offered to the charge. Wrathful
beyond measure, Randolph and Nicholson hurried
back to the House of Representatives, and
on the spot moved that two new articles be
added to the Constitution. Randolph's amendment
declared that all judges should be removed
by the President on a joint address of both
Houses; while Nicholson proposed that senators
should be removable at any time by the legislatures
of their own States. These resolutions
were made the order of the day for the first
Monday in December, when Congress was to
meet. The same evening Mr. J. Q. Adams
made another curious entry in his diary. Informed
in society of what had taken place in
the House, he added, "I had some conversation
on the subject with Mr. Madison, who appeared
much diverted at the petulance of the
managers on their disappointment." Considering
the source from which the impeachment
sprang, Mr. Madison's diversion would perhaps
have seemed to be in better taste, had it been
less openly displayed.

This was the end of Judge Chase's impeachment,
a political mistake from its inception by
Mr. Jefferson down to its last agonies in Randolph's
closing address. As though every act
of Randolph's life, no matter what its motive
or its management, were fated to injure all that
he most regarded, and to advance every interest
he hated, so this impeachment made the
Supreme Court impregnable; for the first time
the Chief Justice could breathe freely. Not
only had Randolph proved impeachment to be
a clumsy and useless instrument as applied
to judicial officers, but he seemed reckless in
regard to the fate of his proposed constitutional
amendment, and was clearly more angry
with the Senate than with the court. As
though not satisfied with allowing Nicholson
to throw a gross insult in the very faces of
senators by an amendment to the Constitution
which branded them as false to their constituents,
Randolph would not allow the House to

appropriate money for any expenses of Judge
Chase's trial except such as should be certified
by himself, and in no case for the expenses
of witnesses for the defence. Whether he was
right or wrong in principle was a matter of
little consequence, for, in the temper of the
two Houses, the bill thus passed was a positive
insult to the Senate. Even Giles took up the
challenge, and declared that as he had drawn
the form of summons by which all the witnesses
had been commanded to attend, without
indicating on whose behalf they were called,
he could not admit that any distinction should
be made in paying them. The Senate unanimously
insisted on amending the bill, and Randolph
insisted with equal obstinacy that the
bill should not be amended. The two Houses
were thus driven into a quarrel and the bill
was lost. Randolph then, in flat contradiction
of every financial doctrine he had ever professed,
wished the House to pay his witnesses
out of the contingent fund, and was defeated
only by the withdrawal of the federalist members,
which left the House without a quorum
whenever the resolution was brought up. In
the midst of this mischievous confusion, the
session ended at half-past nine o'clock on the
evening of March 3, 1805, three days after
Chase's acquittal.