But a question of PROPERTY is involved as well as a question of liberty. “In suits at common law,” says the constitution, “where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved.”
Now, sir, in regard to this important clause in the fundamental law, I propose to demonstrate the three following propositions:—
First; the claim, made before a competent magistrate, for a “person held to service or labor,” is, in view of this constitutional provision, a “suit.”
Second; it is a “suit at common law.”
Third; it is a suit at common law “where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars.”
As a law term, the lexicographers define the word “suit” to mean “an action or process for the recovery of a right or claim; legal application to a court for justice; prosecution of right before any tribunal;—as a civil suit, a criminal suit, a suit in chancery.”
Blackstone says, “in England, the several suits, or remedial instruments of justice, are distinguished into three heads,—actions, personal, real, and mixed.”
“Suit” comes from “secta,” and secta from sequor; and the phrase “to bring suit,” denoted anciently, to bring secta,—followers, or witnesses, to prove the plaintiff’s demand. The scope of the word is now enlarged, so that it embraces the written forms by which an action is instituted, as well as the proof which sustains it.
We are not, however, confined to the authority of the dictionary. The supreme court, in the case of Cohens vs. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 407, where this very word “suit,” as it occurs in the constitution, was the subject of consideration, defined it as follows:—
“What is a suit? We understand it to be the prosecution, or pursuit, of some claim, demand, or request. In law language, it is the prosecution of some demand, in a court of justice. ‘The remedy for every species of wrong is,’ says Judge Blackstone, ‘the being put in possession of that right whereof the party injured is deprived.’ The instruments whereby this remedy is obtained, are a diversity of suits and actions, which are defined by the Mirror to be ‘the lawful demand of one’s right;’ or, as Bracton and Fleta express it, in the words of Justinian, ‘jus prosequendi in judicio quod alicui debetur,’—(the form of prosecuting in trial, or judgment, what is due to any one.) Blackstone then proceeds to describe every species of remedy by suit; and they are all cases where the party suing claims to obtain something to which it has a right.