Resolved, That no attorney or lawyer ought to commence, prosecute or defend any action at law of any kind, for any of the said inhabitants of Queens County, who voted against sending deputies to the Convention as aforesaid, and such attorney or lawyer as shall countenance this revolution, are enemies to the American cause, and shall be treated accordingly.
What had they done? Simply voted against sending delegates to the convention, and yet the fathers not only put them out of the protection of law, but prohibited any lawyer from appearing in their behalf in a court. Democrats, don't you wish we had treated you that way during the war?
What more did they do? They ordered a company of troops from Connecticut, and two or three companies from New Jersey, to go into the State of New York, and take away from every person who had voted against sending deputies to the convention, all his arms, and if anybody refused to give up his arms, they put him in jail. Don't you wish you had lived then, my friend Democrat? Don't you wish you had prosecuted the war as our fathers prosecuted the Revolution?
I now want to show you how far they went in this direction. A man by the name of Sutton, who lived on Long Island, had been going around giving his constitutional opinions upon the war. They had him arrested, and went on to resolve that he should be taken from Philadelphia, pay the cost of transportation himself, be put in jail there, and while in jail should board himself. Wouldn't a Democrat have had a hard scramble for victuals if we had carried out that idea? Just see what outrageous and terrible things the fathers did. And why did they do it? Because they saw that in order to establish the liberties of America it was necessary they should take the Tory by the throat just as it was necessary for us to take rebels by the throat during the late war.
They had paper money in those days—shin-plasters—and some of the Democrats of those times had legal doubts about this paper currency. One of these Democrats, Thomas Harriott, was called before a Committee of Safety of New York, and there convicted of having refused to receive in payment the Continental bills. The committee of New York conceiving that he was a dangerous person, informed the Provincial Congress of the facts in the case, and inquired whether Congress thought he ought to go at large. Upon receipt of this information by Congress an order for the imprisonment of the offender was passed, as follows:
Resolved, That the General Committee of the city of New York be requested and authorized, and are hereby requested and authorized to direct that Thomas Harriott be committed to close jail in this city, there to remain until further orders of this Congress.—Amer. Archives, 4th series, vol. 6, P. i, 344.
And yet all that he had done was to refuse to take Continental money. He had simply given his opinion on the legal tender law, just as the Democrats of Indiana did in regard to greenbacks, and as a few circuit judges decided when they declared the Legal Tender Act unconstitutional. It would have been perfectly proper and right that they, every man of them, should be, like Thomas Harriott, "committed to close jail, there to remain until further orders."
Did our forefathers ever interfere with religion? Yes, they did with a preacher by the name of Daniels, because he would not pray for the American cause. He thought he could coax the Lord to beat us. They said to him, "You pray on our side, sir." He would not do it, and so they put him in jail and gave him work enough to pray himself out, and it took him some time to do it. They interfered with a lack of religion. They believed that a Tory or traitor in the pulpit was no better than anybody else. That is the way I have sometimes felt during the war. I have thought that I would like to see some of those white cravatted gentlemen "snaked" right out of the pulpits where they had dared to utter their treason, and set to playing checkers through a grated window.
It is not possible that our fathers ever interfered with the writ of habeas corpus, is it? Yes sir. Our fathers advocated the doctrine that the good of the people is the supreme law of the land. They also advocated the doctrine that in the midst of armies law falls to the ground; the doctrine that when a country is in war it is to be governed by the laws of war. They thought that laws were made for the protection of good citizens, for the punishment of citizens that were bad, when they were not too bad or too numerous; then they threw the law-book down while they took the cannon and whipped the badness out of them; that is the next step, when the stones you throw, and kind words, and grass have failed. They said, why did we not appeal to law? We did; but it did no good. A large portion of the people were up in arms in defiance of law, and there was only one way to put them down, and that was by force of arms; and whenever an appeal is made to force, that force is governed by the law of war.
The fathers suspended the writ in the case of a man who had committed an offence in the State of New York. They sent him to the State of Connecticut to be confined, just as men were sent from Indiana to Fort Lafayette. The attorneys came before the convention of New York to hear the matter inquired into, but the committee of the convention to whom the matter was referred refused to inquire into the original cause of commitment—a direct denial of the authority of the writ. The writ of habeas corpus merely brings the body before the judge that he may inquire why he is imprisoned. They refused to make any such inquiry. Their action was endorsed by the convention and the gentleman was sent to Connecticut and put in jail. They not only did these things in one instance, but in a thousand. They took men from Maryland and put them in prison in Pennsylvania, and they took men from Pennsylvania and confined them in Maryland, Whenever they thought the Tories were so thick at one point that the rascals might possibly be released, they took them somewhere else.