“If this matter be reported correctly as I have heard it during the last two or three days,—to my very great surprise,—if Judge Gwinnan be disqualified by reason of having before his incumbency fought a duel, then he never was a judge except de facto. As I understand it, only an officer de jure can be impeached for crimes committed in office.”
Forsey wanted to know if perjury in taking the official oath were not a crime committed in office.
Another member asked whether it was the commission of the crime itself which disqualified, or the conviction of the crime.
The gavel sounded, and the member who had the floor persisted.
“I take it that the House cannot prefer articles of impeachment against a private citizen who has unlawfully usurped an office. If he is removed at all, it should be by proceedings in the chancery court in the nature of a quo warranto.”
Mr. Kinsard rose, half leaning against his desk with a swaying negligence of posture, to call attention to the fact that anything in the nature of quo warranto wouldn’t begin to do. To have a little one-horse chancellor way up yonder in the seclusion of the mountains dump Judge Gwinnan out of his office would not serve the purpose. Could any man imagine that that proceeding, known merely to the members of the bar and the few intelligent citizens of that benighted district who took note of such matters, would satisfy such an animosity as the member from the floaterial district of Cherokee and Kildeer had avowed, with a cheek which might be contemplated only in astounded admiration? Would the infliction of that limited degradation glut the member’s ravening greed for revenge for his personal grudges? No! the member wished to disgrace Judge Gwinnan with all the publicity that even the attempt to impeach would entail—he designed that it should be canvassed throughout the length and breadth of the State. It should resound through the clarion columns of every newspaper. Every State in the Union should know that the Senate of Tennessee had organized as a court of impeachment, and the name of Gwinnan should be the synonym of contumely. Upon his word, he could hardly take in the vastness of the effrontery that emboldened the member to acknowledge, to proclaim to this House, his gross, his sordid personal motives, in attacking one of the most able, most respected, most diligent, most upright, of the State judiciary. He appealed to the higher feeling of the House. He begged that they would not be driven like so many sheep into an investigation which was in its very inception an insult, an outrage, and a scandal.
A member demanded from his seat if it were not an obligation imperatively imposed upon the House to inquire into such a rumor, for the purpose of ascertaining and eliciting the truth or falsehood it promulgated. Since such a rumor was abroad, it behooved Judge Gwinnan’s friends to advocate an investigation, for it was his only hope of vindication if he were maligned.
Harshaw, leaning forward, both arms on his desk, attentively listening, pursed up his red lips meditatively and nodded with abstracted affirmation, as if pondering the position. He gave no outward expression of gratulation, but he was quick to mark the accession of recruits to his ranks. He could command a stalwart and callous fortitude. He could receive without wincing, without anger, without shame, Kinsard’s jeers and thrusts, for the sake of the aroused antagonism which seemed the natural sequence of the young man’s insistent arguments.
“It specially becomes the House,” continued the member, “to countenance no leniency in regard to dueling and all that pertains to it, after the will of the people has been so unequivocally expressed in regard to the matter of the challenge, or what was so construed, upon this floor.”
The member was rebuked here for infringement of parliamentary usage in upbraiding, as it were, the previous actions of the House and interrupting the member who had the floor.